One year ago today: August 13, 2021, Andy likes them ugly.
Five years ago today: August 13, 2017, another guitar false start.
(& an anniversary coincidence.)
Nine years ago today: August 13, 2013, working on the wagon.
Random years ago today: August 13, 2015, Proverbs, on women.
The middle of summer and we have another super-rat. It’s a Florida thing and until I fix the entire front of the house, there’s several ways they can get in. By super, I mean they won’t eat bait, they avoid traps, and have several escape routes. They won’t go near a spot another rat was caught, even years later. The trick is to get a new trap, handle it only with gloved hands, and place it along some far wall. This next trap is going in the attic. It’s vermin season. And that squirrel has learned exactly how long it takes me to get around the side of the house. Today, we go on anti-rodent patrol. It’s me or them.
Here’s a close-up of the experimental perches. They seal two of the feeding ports, but the birds don’t share this feeder. One at a time, that is. The balance [factors being balanced] is [that] much longer [sticks] than this, the squirrels can jump onto them to shake the seeds out. Any shorter and the cardinals can’t get purchase. These are solid enough I think to defeat the squirrels who will also chew the wood to get at the sunflower seeds. These are shelled, a cardinal favorite [luxury]. This is the central spot of the back yard.
I regularly empty the bird batch because small seeds get in there and ferment. This time I splashed some on me and what a horrid aroma. That will keep me moving until I can crawl in that shower. I’ve got the spot where the iron pipe is clogged isolated to a single stretch right where it is hardest to get at. You know those little wire cages for bird suet? I had two, one has just disappeared overnight. Okay, back to work.
There’s the peach tree in full bloom but not blossom. Some sources say late fall, so I’ll wait it out. It has the recommended watering, fertilizer, and bug spray fogger. There are noticeably fewer yellow leaves and they were carefully plucked away before this photo. I guess it is hard to see the tree, but it is dead center of the picture and is trimmed flat across the top just over the height of the fence pickets on the right. The peach leaves respond better to the anti-insect spray than the pistachio leaves.
Ominous, that’s the word used concerning Facebook’s turning over chat records to the police concerned a family in Nebraska. The crime doesn’t matter, it is the recording of private calls and the willingness of Facebook to obey a warrant that should properly be served on the family. True, it was dumb of the mother and daughter to discuss illegal things by phone, but that is not the concern here. Let’s see what worn-out themes are making millennial headlines today. There’s the cold fission claims, and the teen who build a car motor that runs for free, but my favorite is yet another study by experts who say the world can reach 100% renewable energy by 2050. It’s odd there is not a prize for the 1,000th repeat of such messages.
It’s already too late but warnings are appearing concerning A.I. The danger isn’t just that it isn’t real A.I., but that it is going the route of GPS. It's a crappy system programmed by idiots pushed beyond their mental capacity, but the system, not knowing any better, begins to rely on it. By the time disasters occur, the whole system is out of whack but too expensive to overhaul.
Chicken cabbage sculpture.
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Two new shelves, the yard is mowed, and the birdfeeders have the experimental new roost pegs. It stayed just under 90ºF so the whole neighborhood was out in the yards. That thirty-foot pile of limbs is around mostly done and the neighbors tell me that’s what previous residents here have been trying to do for twenty years and gave up. They don’t know I wasted my young life clearing land on a farm that never produced a crop. Talking with the other neighbor we may put down weed-killer that stops all growth for at least a couple of years. That’s where the barbed wire fence runs and nothing that grows there at all contributes to the betterment of the landscape.
Can you see the two shelves? They are the large one on the bottom, which is also at the correct height for desk work. And above it a smaller shelf more what you would call a ledge. There will eventually be several more ledges all around the inside. They await the availability of scrap lumber. I have a confession. When I was nine, there was an old shed across the back alley from where we lived. My brother and I broke in there and found it was full of boxes some family had stored. We found an original Monopoly game with wooden hotels and we stole it. we went through all the boxes looking for money, but we only found war medals. We stole those and buried them in our “time capsule”. I feel bad about it but we were just kids.
In the lower left pane is the computer screen. I’m re-watching that movie about Sharpe’s rifles for some reason. It’s Karaoke night and I might go downtown yet. The dusk in this picture shows it is past eight in the evening already. I rehearsed for an hour with the full setup. I will need more instrument cables and I must dig out that wireless mic. The regular headset constantly gets in the way with the guitar but not the bass. This rehearsal reminded me of the 35 years of accumulated mistakes I make on guitar and practice does not make me better. On guitar, this is, I’m afraid, the finished product.
At day’s end I thought to watch a documentary on the Webb telescope. Bad move. It was the PBS version. It is beyond disgusting, the video’s aim is not the telescope. In nearly an hour there is maybe ten minutes of what you want. The remainder is to push the narrative that women and ethnics did all the hard work. The few white men are designated by job title and qualification, where most of the women are called “team member”. It is also scripted so any negatives or failures are spoken by white men.
Worst is this old Spanish lady. She knows so many English figures of speech you know she was born here and speaks unaccented English. Have you heard comedians fake a Mexican accent? She spends every moment on camera pushing that immigrant accent and it is so phony. As always, this millennial hour of docutainment contains maybe ten minutes of worthwhile footage.
ADDENDUM
I had a laugh when the Isle of Wight made the news. A restaurant there has told vegans to screw off. It seems they got fed up with vegans coming in and demanding special dishes not on the menu. Good. Vegans are far too pushy most of the time. And to me, it is like religion or gender or ugly, they do not want equality, which they already have. They want the right to intrude on your space to do their thing. I’m reminded of when airplanes started catering special meals. I hated it. If you can’t eat regular food, that is your problem, but now airline tickets go up $10 because some asshole is on board. Serve him the kosher meal, but add the full cost to his ticket, not part of it to mine.
