April 2, 2021

Yesteryear
One year ago today: April 2, 2020, Auvoria Prime, hmmm.
Five years ago today: April 2, 2016, when stewardesses were single.
Nine years ago today: April 2, 2012, dried fish & dates.
Random years ago today: April 2, 2005, pipes, okay?

           I was first in line at the repair shop, only to discover the real cause of the A/C clutch rotor failure. It was the radiator fan drawing too much current, the type of indirect cause and effect you get on these “new” motors where so many components are shared. This places me $160 over budget so that means no new windshield until June. Routine repairs are a rarity in Florida, where most people just keep a car going until it craters. That is why so many of them get ticketed for no insurance. Operating things in that fashion is significantly more expensive in the long run.

           I’m also first to admit these days blog pictures and events have tapered off to new time slows. Still, I’m not taking full blame for that. Except for people desperate to pay their back bills, things in this once-mighty country have braked to a near crawl. While most people did not lose their jobs, most American operational profits are based on the last percentage of people who came in the door. That is what has disappeared. Top photo this morning is this tarp. I’ve gotten them thicker and thicker until now we’ll see if 9mm will stand up to the Florida wind.
           For the test drive, I toured Lake Alfred, an area I really don’t know that’s just twenty or so miles away. They have a museum, which I visited and chatted with a lady who reminds of people I know back west. Like so many older people you meet in this area, they have no idea how isolated and far out of touch they are, the last generation of computer dinosaurs. There is an abnormal cold spell keeping people inside. The museum had a lot of strange orchard devices, like one for testing fruit acid content.

           That reminds me of the fruit calipers Agt. R found on March 2, 2017. It had an odd gauge marked down one side which did not make sense. Today I found the answer. It is the number of fruit that would fit inside a standard size box. So the 200 we looked at meant 200 oranges of that size fit in an “orchard crate”. This link is not the correct picture, the item we looked at had a sizing hole, similar to the smaller cards used for drill bits.
           Once more, this minor level of activity got to me, so it was home for coffee and a siesta, which gave time to go over the books. The impact of gas costs with the van is terrific. Half again and more of the station wagon, March was $347. However, this is partially due to the van being used more. You can pull over and have a nap any time without crawling over the seats, a game-changer at my age. Plus the extra trip to Miami, each return journey costs $120, or nearly double tine station wagon. It’s hard to tell how much of the rest is due to inflation. But it is making quite a difference on the items where I can make comparisons. Like lumber.

Picture of the day.
Steel playing cards.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
           Biscuit joiners. Kind of a specialty item with mixed reviews on true effectiveness, but I found one on sale. It’s $50 for something that retails for $212. It’s missing the small blade but Porter & Cable is a known brand. If it is there tomorrow morning, I’ll buy it. This is the device made popular by how-to cable shows and is mainly useful for making wide boards out of narrow ones. The last thing I need right now is another distraction, but what else can you do in this cold weather? Like I said, if it is still there tomorrow. Here’s a pic, it looks barely used. Like most tools, you’ll never fit it back in the plastic case it came with.

           For my break, which I dare not miss nowadays, I finally watched “Mars Attacks!”, the spoof on H. G. Wells. It’s famous for cameo roles by a lot of big names in Hollywood. Big to some, I mean. I had a hard time matching up actors to names like Tom Jones, Lukas Haas, and Natalie Portman. But I had no trouble finding Christina Applegate.

           I found an Australian documentary on Tobruk, yet another of those vital spots, we are told, that is so crucial to the western democracies and, like most Pacific islands of the same importance, few can find them on a map. The material is one-sided and doesn’t shed any new light. The English knew they had Rommel outnumbered and built him into a big, bad enemy so their ultimate victory would seem larger. But like Trump, the guy just would not go along with things. In the end, they won by attrition. What was worse, the documentary has the new embedded ads that you can’t bypass, so I listened to shills making excuses for Biden’s failed policies.
Worst was the restaurant dork, blaming the shutdowns on the virus. It was the government, not the flu, that shut you down. On he goes about how “we” have to make sacrifices, it’s all about keeping the virus in every newscast to make sure people don’t focus on what is really going on. The climate change money-grab, the infrastructure rebuild using resources the 1% own, the exporting of jobs, and the oncoming new wars, to name a few.

           So next I watched another documentary on the Italians in the Second World War, which was also useless propaganda. Like they were some major power that the Allies had untold difficulties defeating. They were a hopeless rabble with feathers on their hats, trained for the parade ground. Even their so-called modern tanks and airplanes were built mostly for show. Yet, I found the video amusing because much the same tactics are today being employed by the Democrats and mainstream media to turn a couple dozen brazen rioters in the Capitol into an “armed insurrection”.
           The video keeps referring to the “loss” of hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers. Yeah, that is the proportion that retreated and surrendered. We’ve seen what happened whenever British soldiers came up against anything but savages with spears, yet even the Brits were able to push these feckless Italians back with nothing but armored cars and a few thousand Australians who seemed to not mind wandering about the open desert for a few weeks at a time.
ADDENDUM
           I’ll tell you who sucks. That arbitrator that awarded the blind lady $1 million because she claimed Uber drivers would not let her in their cars. Why that is wrong is the entire affair was worded to never actually say there was any connection between why they refused her service and that she was blind—but that’s what that judge determined. The reality is her seeing-eye dog is a problem of some kind and they didn’t want that or any animals in their cars. They are independent contractors with the right to refuse service to anyone, except over certain race and gender issues. Which were clearly not the case here. Blind people get Uber rides every day without incident. Note, $800,000 of the award was in legal fees.

           That arbitrator needs to be taken out of circulation. The argument was that Uber “failed” to train its drivers not to discriminate about having animals in their cars. Obviously and plainly there is something about that guide dog that we are not being told. One driver pulled over “in a dangerous area” and demanded she get out of his car. Taxi drivers don’t do that except for a very good reason—and it is doubtful these drivers knew each other. Other drivers falsely told her they had arrived just to get her and the dog out of their cars. She is being kicked out of cars in a hurry after she gets in, so something is screwy about what we are being told. Tell us all the facts, ABC, or quit calling yourselves a news service.
           This is a picture of the padlock on the big shed. I mean, why not? It’s a good picture, too.

           Or how about the professor who was fired for refusing to address students by other pronouns than male or female? Again, it’s all about control, these meaningless nobodies think they can change the world by forcing people to pretend stuff. Pretend you like queers, pretend you like illegals, pretend you like ethnics, it’s all the same to them because they are power tripping. It’s the only time in their useless lives they’ve had any power and they are drunk on it. They can make you wear a mask, how they love the moment.
           Or how about the DRM controls on your computer? These millennials are so lame, like people are not going to notice that the message your browser can’t play the movie can always play the advertisements. It works like so. HTML5 was introduced as an improvement to earlier versions, yet there were no significant changes to the script. It was slipped in to be compatible with Widevine, a Google product that uses DRM to enforce their rights to control your computer. The purpose of HTML5 is to encode video that can only be decoded if you agree to enable what is known as a Content Decryption Module (CDM) on your computer.
           Why don’t I like it? Because CDM also allows remote parties to monitor what you watch and in quite some detail and report back to headquarters. We are told it is to “protect content” but it is to prevent the copying of streaming media. From there it was a small step to also prevent you from watching it. And the next step is to prevent, well, you millennials will find out.

           Last, brace for another round of robocalls. The bad guys got some suckhole ruling that robocalls are only annoying if the phone numbers are randomly or sequentially “generated”. If you program a device to contain every possible phone number in memory, a very easy thing to do, then the numbers are not being generated, thus it is not a robocall. America is has been repopulated by this brand of AOL starting in 1991.
Last Laugh