One year ago today: April 26, 2021, impossible is included.
Five years ago today: April 26, 2017, yet it happens.
Nine years ago today: April 26, 2013, grinding walnuts.
Random years ago today: April 26, 2004, from my desk calendar.
I’m going to get the west wall of the silo ready for reinforcing. It’s the last wall that is two-foot on center and I’ve been putting it off. Enough, time to get going even if I don’t feel up to it. Am I tempting fate? This will be my first deliberate step over the boundary since early 2011. If you don’t hear from me, you’ll know. I quickly discover I don’t have the three required 2x3” studs, which makes for a run downtown. Hmm, $4.50 each, but I scored some pallet lumber on the way, included two sixteen foot 1x4, which the laundry deck has needed for facia a while now.
This spectacular picture of gulls and pelicans was received from Alaine a while ago. It was misfiled and now gets top billing. There are some slight enhancements, I’ll let you look again and see if you can tell. No, because you have not seen the original, so I’ll describe them and you tell me if I have developed the artist’s eye, at least to my own satisfaction. The original had too much sky, the horizon is now properly placed using the rule of thirds. Same with the vanishing point, but with a slight quirk. If I’m correct, you thought the birds were in the center of the photo and they are not. Just the biggest bird is near.
To achieve this, I cropped the photo from the sides so the vanishing point is shifted to the left, see that? The 15% “extra” left side expanse of water then compensates for the “busier” right side which shows the bridge at Punta Gorda. Also removed were a couple of pylon “stumps” which contributed little. Alaine has an eye for proportion which takes easily to this treatment. Did you know many of the best potted plants in my yard originate from her landscaping. For those who like technicality, it is not the horizon at “eye level”, but the invisible boundary between the water and that band of clouds in the background.
One sign of aging for me were this upset over Twitter. These woketards are half insane or more. The Twitter board of directors are clowns, just a bunch of ethic quota hirees and some yes-men by what I see. But I did not spot the significance until now. To me, Twitter was a cult of liberals, the smallest of the big techs, not that much to follow. Twitter’s been around for fifteen years and I don’t know anyone who uses it. Yet what I saw today reveals fanatics who must live on-line. Their take on everything is warped.
Another sign was an episode of America’s Got Talent that got through when I forgot to disable autoplay. You may ask how that could tell my age. Easy, there was a guy doing impressions and he had the audience rolling. I can’t write it off to my not watching television because at any given time that medium only supports so many and this guy was blasting through them by the dozen. I did not recognize a single personality or catch on to half the queer jokes.
Instead, I took a look at Retalk, a new site that is slightly right of center in that it discourages leftoids. Slightly right to leftoids means they will scream “nazi”, but I saw no violence or threats. It is more like a wordy Gab and Gab has done a fine job of self-purging the whack jobs that show up trying to attack it like they other sites. But the block feature of Gab means they quickly isolate themselves and drop away.
Retalk, take a look. There was one article comparing Republican and Democrat vegetarians. It struck me because it would have instantly been banned on Twitter. A Republican vegetarian doesn’t eat meat. A Democrat vegetarians wants to have all meat banned from everybody.
Northeast Newfoundland, Canada.
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A wonderful day and I missed most of it. I did get the underground pipe to the birdbath installed and working, only to meet a surprise problem. The piping works fine, I’m used to that but the part where you screw on the hose attachments, are too shallow. They are designed for a different type of female attachment. The ones with my misters and drippers have to be screwed on far enough to seat the washers. These only go on far enough so the collar hits the faucet stem. I’ll work it out. Think of it this way. To seat, the piece has to screw on ¾” and the piece it fits onto only allows for 1/2”. Fun.
This shows the open west side of the silo, and some of the supplies are visible. This is a prime example of a project that must be finished same day. That stockpile is worth $10,800 if things go bad, and the amount of shelf space will be increased 60% in a few days. The structure is now the equivalent of 2x6” studs at 16 inches on-center, except now it will break only in pieces rather than snap from a sharp blow, say from a tree limb.
My lack of headway this month has offset the budget, so we have unspent money, something you don’t normally tell strangers. That’s fine here, because it will be gone by the time you read this tomorrow. One of the gadgets I picked up for a couple bucks is called “Pogoplug”, saying share everything even without a computer. Huh? It has no manual, meaning guess of all the kazillions of manuals on-line, which one will be unavailable. It’s a me vs millennial clash thing. Yes, I’m aware if you snoop on this street, there will be a half dozen fake open networks at any given time, all with misleading displays. There are Democrats about, you know.
ADDENDUM
Here’s a good one, women are “under-represented” in classical literature. Here is your classic manufactured inequality. A couple of researchers with unpronounceable names use A.I. to scan historical literature and noticed there are four times as many male characters. This is a raw head-count that allows for no externalities. If this “intelligence” is a little too “artificial” for you, that’s understandable. It is from Viterbi. What’s that?
Viterbi is one of those sad anomalies that pass, in our troubled times, for a university. Predictably from California (USC) it was established to restore memories to Alzheimer’s patients on the presumption they had anything worth remembering. We anticipate that, given enough funding of course, Viterbi may next discover there are more men than women driving on the freeway after midnight.
What are those tongue-twisting names? Akarsh Nagaraj and Mayank Kejriwal, Sounds far eastern to me, but let me tell you something. I’ve lived over there a short while and all this makes sense to me. In their way of thinking, western society is a morass of stupidity to be exploited in this manner. Over there, males are represented probably a hundred to one, but in their mind-set, this is not an issue. Only in free countries can you go to a university with a prestigious name and “discover” such things and not be considered a laughing stock.
To be fair, Nagaraj and Kejriwal do mention something that contradicts their premise a bit. If you give an equal number of men and women the task of writing, women are far more likely to write about themselves, and far, far more likely to portray themselves as the main character. It’s all about me, folks.
[Author's note: Nag & Kej did not write the A.I. procedure uses in this "study", evidenced in the fine print where they admit they could not distinguish the gender of pronouns like "they". Duh. Then again, an inability to "distinguish gender" could be a condition of enrollment at Viterbi, for all we know.]
