One year ago today: August 24, 2022, consistently humorless.
Five years ago today: August 24, 2018, seven years.
Nine years ago today: August 24, 2014, nobody showed.
Random years ago today: August 24, 2007, I liked that Taurus.
The New York Times says elections are bad for democracy and that Americans vote too much. And in Florida a team of undercover cops posing as drug buyers got busted by undercover cops posing as drug dealers. Still no source to view the Trump-Tucker interview but the reports are that the event had 164 million views in the first 12 hours. It’s all over for the Establishment unless they pull a fast one. Could I interest you in any papayas? Your order is ready. Breakfast today was papaya smoothies. With coconut milk, ginger, and turbinado.
Copper electric wire. I bought another fifty feet. It was locked in a cage so I asked the clerk what gives. Somebody stole 2,000 feet. The price is around $1 a foot so I had to ask how they managed that. I mean, the 1,000 foot rolls weigh hundreds of pounds. It went like so, and they have the guy recorded on security camera. He wheels over one of the store carts and levers two thousand-foot rolls. Then he pulls the stickers off and reaches up to the higher shelves and takes two stickers off the fifty foot rolls. Slaps them on the bigger rolls and out the self-checkout.
The hillbilly’s girlfriend was around looking for him. Sorry lady, if he’s not in his attic, he’s in the slammer. I think he’s over in Frostproof, all I know is he had to get a ride and it was not me. Keep your name off as many lists as you can any more, and the KCA list is a bad one. (Or whatever they call it now, the “Known Criminal Associate”.)
Use the captions, the German they talk is so old I can’t even follow the names. Here’s a video on the Zulu wars, for those who think the Whites “stole” the land from the natives. Zulus are from the Congo, not the Zambesi. They are blood-thirsty savages who tried to kill all the Boer out of race hatred. The video is neat, how the Boers planned to take on the Zulus, 464 against 16,000. And they kicked Zulu arse. I had been looking for the river called “Blood River” and turns out it is the Ncome. Blood River is the Boer name because of the Zulu blood turning it red.
The remarkable event in the battle, where half the Zulus died but no Boer, was a cannon shot. The Zulus put their 16 commanders on a hilltop 2 km away as the biggest Boer cannon had a range of 1.5 km. The Boer put the cannon up on some rocks and doubled the powder charge. It wrecked the cannon, the only time it was fired. And killed all 16 Zulus. The Boer had loaded the cannon with stones and bits of metal. Your poor-man’s shotgun.
This was 50 or so years before Isandlwana, so I’ll bet the British thought advances in rifles could deal with any number of Zulus. It’s weird to read the accounts of Blood River, where the Zulus kept trying the tactic of overwheming the enemy. Instead each Boer volley of around 460 rounds killed 400 Zulus. There were three British farmers who helped hold the Boer horses who describe how the Zulus got just up to spear-throwing distance and the whole front row would get mowed down time and again.
Before we leave the topic for the day, don’t underestimate the wiring chore. This is not the same as slapping an extra duplex outlet on the end of a run. This is two duplex outlets and a light switch, where the switch had to be wired “last” so it would not switch the outlets. The photo shows the 14 separate connections needed, not including the overhead light socket, which I wired in at the same time. For unknown causes, this otherwise light-duty work knocked me half out with fatigue. Probably age.
Container ship crankshaft.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
I zonked out until 5:00PM. If you see any pictures, maybe I got motivated. What little energy I had is sapped in this heat, 94°F today. I’m down a quart of peach tea, but there’s plenty of papaya, help yourself. Impossible as it seems, it’s the kind of tired of having eaten a huge Thanksgiving meal, which has not happened except once in the past twenty years—and that one was vegetarian. Ah, there’s a picture now, a zero-beer fire. I got out there but the three-hour snooze did not perk me up. So it was mostly yard scraps.
Once I finished dancing, I settled down, still tired but amazingly wide awake, yessiree. Here is the ancient Argus 1610, the one they sent when I asked for the 1600. This had many quirks, the worst of which was a rubberized finish mean to be no-slip. In actuality, it gave the camera a gooey feel and left a slighly oily residue on your palms. There was some battery corrosion so I have it soaking in WD40 for a bit. This camera held the standard 26 pictures of the film roll predecessors and was my first usage of the jpeg format. I quickly learned to prefer jpegs for consistency.
The Argus got bad reviews for this low capacity, but 26 pictures is quite a lot if you know what you are doing. I do have a lot of unpublished photos from those days. The pictures and the blogs have to be matched up by reading the blog, then scanning to see if there are any photos. Inefficient as hell, but probably normal for anyone who kept a journal before blogs came along. This photo shows what looks like tarnish, but I had coated the clammy parts of the camera with fingernail polish to make it feel better, polish that the club used to buy in bulk to coat components. So that is faded sparkle.
ADDENDUM
Trump’s social views on Twitter alone are over 200 million by now. He is unstoppable and the media are in a panic. The fake indictments “flopped” so the backup plan is to scream that Trump was responsible for J6. But too many people have heard the riot was staged. I say since Trump has already won the election, there are drastic measures on the horizon. The D-party has a new scare-word. “Tripledemic.”
