October 9, 2023

Yesteryear
One year ago today: October 9, 2022, I’d live in that.
Five years ago today: October 9, 2018, age 19 was my happiest.
Nine years ago today: October 9, 2014, a full day, scary.
Random years ago today: October 9, 2010, running a digital fever.

           A mad dash to the post office this morning only to find out they are closed for Columbus Day. Columbus who? Other people showed up same as me, now another days delay on a deadly deadline established last July 18, 2023. This is why I hate bureaucrats. Somebody I relied on who knows that deadline also let me down, but this is part of the system. I stopped at the Thrift, slammed a couple crossword puzzles to fume down, and bought a can of spackle. Don’t know what spackle is? It won’t sink, it won’t shrink and you can use the wonderful Internet to look it up.

           The failing is not the looking it up, but the attitude of XYZers that it is a substitute for knowledge. They blindly trust that what they find on-line is current, updated, and valid. It does no good to explain that’s why you asked them if the knew where the music store was. If they have to look it up, the answer is no. I have an unexpected day off with the library closed. I watched some on-line documentaries. There is a food crisis in Africa again. Put it in the ground and it grows, but they still manage shortages I watched one on tomatoes. Even though tomatoes grow perfectly in countries like Ghana, the Chinese and still able to ship canned tomatoes over there for even cheaper.

           This photo shows dead banana trees. Most North Americans recognize and eat only Cavendish bananas, without knowing they are sterile clones. That is, they have no seeds and are grown from cuttings. Being clones, they are all susceptible to the same diseases. Along comes TR4, or Panama Tropical Race 4, a fungus that can live for decades in the soil. First identified in Taiwan around 15 years ago, the rot spreads up through the stem of the banana tree and it is game over. This isn’t an appealing picture, but it shows a cross section of banana tree step with the virus showing as brown rings.
           I’m not an ice cream eater. Hence, I don’t know from brands and flavors. I recognize Ben & Jerrie’s from recent woketard mistakes, with flavors like “Empower-mint”. What I knew is their product has bigger chocolate chunks and so on. I found out to day why that is. One of the founders, Ben, has a really bad sense of smell. He could not taste weak flavor. Everything had to be overboard and when I used to eat ice-cream I did notice some went overboard with the artificial tastes.

           Having time, I looked closer at Ghana, it’s nearby Nigeria and mostly agricultural. The very infrastructure of Africa means cash crops are always risky business. I find most people don’t understand the implications of growing cash crops over the more traditional farmer who produces many of the things he needs. I know Ghana only because the capital, Accra, is a crossword staple and they have a town named Tamale. And Lake Volta, which we learned in grade-school was transforming the area into modernity. They never taught us who built the dam, but they forgot to cut down all the trees, so the flooded shores of the lake are generally not navigable.

           Next, another short video on the economy in Ghana. I know well the struggle when there is not basic infrastructure. My own experience is that I sacrificed the first half of my productive life to build the basic system I now have—something most people cannot be expected to do. They’d rather fake that infrastructure by living off credit cards and rely on government bail-outs. They don’t grasp that you can’t live like Europeans without a massive infrastructure that allows that system to operate. Since it was developed over centuries at untold cost, no amount of today’s foreign aid is going to make a lick of difference. Yep, cash crops in Africa.

           The dam produces electricity for export, the rest of the country that isn’t farming is fishing. That’s also scary, they predict by 2030, over 60% of fish for human consumption will come from fisheries and Ghana doesn’t have any. I continued on, studying more electronics. I’m reading material I cannot understand in any detail and I appreciate what goes on behind things like a character display. In electronics, that convenient display is the end product of a dozen technologies such ring counters, shift registers, ROM, decoders, and so on. I wondered at a diagram of the electronics needed to display one single character, dot by dot.
           It’s a marvel how electricity is directed to this use. A staggering number of things have to be going on to have this page display on my monitor. I think nothing of leaving them running overnight. Then I think of that diagram showing it not only does all this, it repeats 60 times per second.

Picture of the day.
King vulture, Puerto Rico.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           I’d report something exciting if I could. Best I can do is this box. This evening I worked past dark and put the draw latches on, nice brass finish. These have inflated from $1.69 last year to $4.79 today. And today’s announcement of oil shortages due to the Middle East war (which is hundreds of miles from the Saudi fields, and involves no nations from whom we buy oil, has commenced. It’s how the Democrat laundering works. Kickbacks from the companies that will now supply the oil at a much higher price.
           You can see the amber shellac on the ammo box. It let’s the lettering show through nicely. I wanted to build a divider, you know, the kind that you find in cardboard shipping boxes. Here’s my first attempt, I never built anything like this before. It was a lot of fun making it, I used the bandsaw to make the cutouts. As ever, the photos make the work look nicer than it really is. My plan is a removable tray that fits in this box, whose use has not yet been determined.

           Working in the shed until well after dark, it’s good practice in case the economy shuts down. The Democrats are playing the angle that citizens will be forced to keep buying gas no matter what the price. DC has not learned that at some point, people quit going along with it. We’ve already created an entire generation who just voted themselves $15 per hour but Washington isn’t getting it. My Internet connection is acting up again so I don’t have info on what happened in Israel, but it will be another low-tech surprise attack.
           What’s more, some aspects of A.I. seem to have predicted this attack a month ago. Makes sense, a religious holiday, a breach in the border defenses, and no plan to follow up if the initial attack is successful. What I’ve heard is Hamas used gliders to get an elite squad behind the border fences. Then they bulldozed open a corridor to let in 1,000 fighters who killed 700 Israelis and kidnapped hostages.

           Israel has cut off utilities to Gaza and called up 300,000 reservists—something that cannot continue very long. Their UN ambassador says the era of negotiating with savages is over. These are the same people telling Canada and USA that diversity is our strength. The Democrats are so broke, they released $6 billion in Iranian frozen oil assets, less ten percent for the big guy. They snuck that one through on 9/11 when nobody was there to vote against it. The report was buried at the back big media that those people who signed the documument denying the Russian disinformation source have all had their security clearances revoked. Mind you, I don’t know what that fully implies.

Last Laugh