One year ago today: September 21, 2022, sifter anniversary coincidence.*
Five years ago today: September 21, 2018, hugely left-wing.
Nine years ago today: September 21, 2014, nobody to chum with.
Random years ago today: September 21, 2011, trapped home with “Stagecoach”.
What a glorious morning, has winter finally arrived? I fell asleep with the window open and it rained 1/2" overnight. The cardinals are up a dawn and another 18 houses have “fallen through” my filters in the Nashville area. All way out of my price range, but those are usually the first to spill onto a stagnant market. Get rid of the big ones in an effort to save the rest, we’ve seen it before. The coffee’s on and we’re looking at some real effort today on this place. Turns out I got 7-1/2 hours in today. Here is something you’ve likely never seen before. A home-made sifter.
Okay, Singapore, I appreciate the ratings, but can someone tell me what is going on. Two consecutive days in a row with identical metrics tells me something is afoot. I’m no genius writer and this blog is not an accurate reflection of American ethos, so we have an ulterior motive. By all means, keep up the clicks, but can anyone satisfy my curiosity? This month alone so far, over 80,000 readers have shown up. Somebody leave me a comment.
But the polls, even the most biased, show a commanding lead by pro-Trump factions. The media is portraying it as Republican, but it is Trump. The left themselves are responsible for creating such polarization because it was them that labeled anybody not extremely left as far-right nazis. Serious consequences lay ahead. Trump confirms he will visit with the auto unions at the identical hour as the political debates. This union did not support Trump, but there is increase support for unionization in general. The writer’s strike is a union and an excellent example of how the Internet has made the world flat again. The reason for the support and the strike is because workers are now instantly aware of the grossly huge salaries being paid to executives.
Liken it to professional sports. Fans were outraged at what athletes earn until they discovered what the sports networks were paying themselves and expecting the athletes to play practically for free. The corporations thus have nobody to blame but themselves.
The yard is a bit cleaner, I was busy until past noon. I framed a sifter and attached the sander, we shall see if the vibration works as well as shaking. Later, I mean, the glue is drying. My spline cutter did not work well, the base can wobble a bit and the fence tends to move by itself. Carry on, though, I moved some of the concrete blocks around the peach tree. Nice cloud cover kept it temperate and the yard is full of noisy birds. By the sound, there are a few bigger birds but I’ve only heard them
Separatist movement in Catalonia.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
The neighbor and I are going to try to take down the rotten old tree. A limb got torn off in a storm years before and killed the tree, which is being propped up by others but is dead and dangerous. We have a plan to pull it down toward the empty space in his back yard. He’s got winch but I’m miffed that I can’t find that massive coil of rope from Agt. R. It’s just nowhere to be found. Here is a demo of the new power sifter in action. I tested it on dry dirt, but the amount of dust made for unviewable video. So, here is outside near the red shed with soil that is damp enough to cling.
First, I’d make the hopper bigger so it would hold a heaping shovel at a time. I’d devise a carry handle. I’d figure some way to keep it steady when the barrel is empty, so it doesn’t tip over by itself. Add a power switch. The one on the tool works but it has to be picked up by the handle to turn it off. This is a hassle when the tool is running. The wire mesh is what was handy, it is slightly too coarse. Small screws and nails can slip though. Window screen is too fine a mesh, so keep an eye out for something suitable.
Here’s a view of the goodies from the sand inside the workshed. There’s my missing nibblers. It also finds shards of glass, just visible in the lower right. A lot of this is probably ancient junk, but not anything Civil War so far. The success with this power sifter is enough that I’m considering a larger model that will do yard cuttings. Below is a picture of the four candles, who remembers the Two Ronnies skit on that one. Fork handles?
Taking the evening off to read, I also watched a documentary on Tristan da Cunha, the island with only 240 or so inhabitants. Why have they not all become genetically defective? It turns out that since most settlers to the island come from such diverse backgrounds that that small population is enough to ensure biological diversity. It was annoying that almost ever video on youTube mentioned climate change.
People, climate change is a hoax. What sucks is the way the producers talk about this hoax as if it is a given fact and anyone who doesn’t drink the kool-aid is too dismal to get it. Irksome, people who do that. The first time I encountered this millennial XYZ annoyance was the AIDs scare, where they tried to pretend AIDs was just another disease like mumps or measles. Like COVID, we are stunned by how many of the bought into it--and react like they just informed us of the magnitude of the problem.
ADDENDUM
Y’day I squawked about paying $15 to mail a letter. Some say it is not the fault of the post office, they are a service that must pass on their true costs. Wrong, they are underwritten by the taxpayer and would have been bankrupt long ago for blindly refusing to keep up with the times. It was a government featherbedding operation by 1967, a civil service job. That place actually was viable until changes in the employee pension plan plunged it into hundreds of millions in unfunded liabilities.
The place expanded to 800,000 employees by 2000, when it was already evident that instant e-mail was letting them know people did not like the postal service. They’ve since trimmed a half-million slackers—why would I call them that. Because they kept justifying these huge hiring numbers by quoting the statistic of pieces handled per employee. The snag was everyone knew that OCR and automation was dealing with an ever increasing portion of the load.
We also know the post office is complicit with the huge volume of junk mail few people want, and also abuse of mailing lists, and other bulk mailings. And that since 1999, they have been data-logging all address and return address links with a drastic passion. They are snooping not just how much you mail, but to whom and when. Now they insist on full spelled out names on return addresses, the assholes. They probably can’t figure out why revenue is dropping, so help them.
How inefficient have they become? It’s as bad as the old phone company that vastly overcharged on long-distance to bail out their local operations. The post office manages to lose money on first-class mail due to employee bloat. By 2007, it was costing three times as much to mail a letter than the stamp. Did they dump the deadweight and pull up their socks? Nope, the began overcharging for packages, which is not the bulk of their business—and contrary to their reason to exist. Time to fire them all and start over.
There is a secondary payoff. It is these insane prices charged by the post office that allows other rip-off courier services to exist. FedEs and UPS would, if the post office would actually compete, be forced to lower their prices out of the stratosphere. No way does it cost $54 to send a single sheet of paper to Canada or Mexico.
Here’s a bit of trivia from the post office themselves. One item they are considering is postal banking. It’s a cover for the plan to give postal customers small loans. According to their own stats, the average payday loan is $380, but costs the user $520 to pay it back, a fee of $180. The post office says they can do it for less than $50. So yet another rip-off business (payday loans) is wiped out. BUT, I disagree because the post office has proven time and again they operate like a government department. Give them a loan business and they would royally screw that up as well, guaranteed.
*Anniversary coincidence: Today’s blog is written y’day. When it is posted today, my long-term readers know that the Yesteryear feature is a manual feature. After the bulk of the blog is posted, I go back and find the blog links. Today, I did not know exactly one year ago, I had sifted sand. Until I opened last year’s blog to paste the link, and scrolled down to check the formatting, I had no idea it was a year to the day. This freaky event is a strange yet somewhat regular occurrence in this blog. It defies the odds that it can be explained by anything subliminal.
