One year ago today: September 25, 2023, 5 years between gigs.
Five years ago today: September 25, 2019, except for work.
Nine years ago today: September 25, 2015, he sets the pace.
Random years ago today: September 25, 2010, Population: 202.
Silver has broken through $32, a traditional ceiling. The snag is that money is worth half of what I paid for the metal so long ago. But I know I’d start selling if it ever reached $100, which is probably my breakeven point. I’m reading a book on Florida history written by a real estate agent. Dead calm again today, folks, we are in the cone. Blog rules, I have to tell you about my rib cage, so I buried the report in today’s addendum, which you can avoid if you don’t like hearing such things. I know I didn’t when I was younger.
Another fail is EuroNews, which was an except on my filter. It’s gone woke, yet I kept it on for two more years. It now seems to be based in Qatar or something. Too many news outlets are accepting bribes to keep pushing the climate change hoax and now EuroNews is publishing nonsense about how slowing down commercial airplane flights will save the atmosphere. Enough is enough. Did someone mention weather? We’ve now had 36 hours of calmness, except for patches if swirling light winds. Are we going to get it or be bypassed. Either is okay by me, we are ready over here. Did I ever tell you about the clear sky thunderclaps we get?
It’s really a small cloud, small enough to be hidden by a tree branch. It’s an otherwise clear sky so you get zero warning. I think I mentioned the time after I just moved in here when it happened just as I turned on a light switch. Would have scared the pants off me had I been wearing any. I thought I’d activated the nuclear codes. Here’s the chain saw, my reminder to runi it a few minutes every month. Still works perfect but the blade needs sharpening real badly. Yes, the fuel mix is printed on the inside of the lid.
There are many styles of navigation. I chose the one I found easiest, called the Intercept method. It requires the Sight Reduction tables, in five volumes. I think I will buy only Volume 3, which covers 30° to 45° latitude, which would be most of the oceans to the east and west of the USA. Learn that first and I’m not that much interested in what happens further north than the 49th parallel. A simple explanation of how this works is that you first calculate where the Sun is at some fixed point in time, which you look up in a Nautical Almanac. This is my specialty.
This time is determined by when you take your sextant reading, stopwatch in hand. You measure the Sun (I can only do the Sun) at a certain angle above the horizon. Using simple sixth grade geometry, you could now draw a scale model circle around that fixed point, but don’t bother. You see, you could be anywhere on that circle but you will always have some idea of where you are. Draw only the part of the circle you need. This is where the Sight Reduction Table comes in. Before continuing, here are some of the prepared cans that used to hold Bourbon. Two are just primed grey, but the one on the right has a special no-slip speckled coating, which makes the can quite heavy. It is specifically for that 40:1 gas mix.
I may not buy the tables, since for practice, the sample tables in my old blue Almanac are fine. It depends on the price. I’d like to do a comparison with the air navigation tables because they are smaller books. Airplanes move so fast they need a better way to get position data and while none of the sources I have will say it, the air tables may be good enough for learning.
Up to now, I’ve just printed up the single page needed for any reading I took, but that requires a computer which requires electricity, etc. I’m learning to do this manually. None of this will be on the exam, so relax. The information from the Sight Reduction table is two figures and an offset. The figures are the direction you are from the Sun’s position and the reading you would get at the imaginary point if by chance you were right there. You aren’t except by chance. This offset is familiar to even beginning navigators, it lets you fine tune your readings because you are usually between whole degrees. That’s all, except that I found this to be a fascinating study for some ten years already.
Ford motors, Russia.
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She’s too fast for me to get a picture, but Grandma Red has been active in the yard since noon. She’s as plump and fat and well fed as can be, back there in birdie paradise. I have not attempted to tame they in any form, so she’s gone if I reach for the camera. The wind never picked up much but she knows there’s something pending. I went around the sheds and checked the hatches. Then crawled under the new shelf in the silo and put an extra bracket since there will be a computer on that table.
This got me walking past the cluttered work bench a number of times. By 6:00PM it was unlikely the storm will bother anybody here. Unless it takes a right angle turn sometime tomorrow, we’re fine—but Hermitage is in the center of the cone on Friday. I’ve not forgotten the time the power went out for a week. That’s the time the pets ate out of cans and I had to finish all the vegetarian food in the fridge before it went bad. I have not touched veggie burgers since that time, though I don’t dislike them. We get the arms of the hurricanes in the Gulf, so get ready for a few downpours.
The schools are closed tomorrow and Friday. Let’s set up an extra rehearsal. As quickly as I learn guitar stuff, I also forget it. I’m bowing to repeat requests and putting “Stand By Me” back on the list. It was classified as an overplayed standard on the reject list. It wins out because it is fun to play—and I play that passing minor note guitar players consistently miss or leave out.
Let’s settle in and read the news. Oooh, the Amish are supporting Trump and they are a decisive voting block in Pennsylvania. Keep an eye on this, the FDA made a big mistake going after the Amish food producers. In other State news, Missouri finally executed some guy who has been on Death Row since 1998. Convicted of murder for stabbing a woman 43 times during a burglary, I would have shrugged my newly flexible shoulders but noticed that the Innocent Project had gone to bat for him.
True, I don’t know the details of the case, but I have read “Actual Innocence” eleven years ago. I have a clue how DNA evidence works and when I hear of a murder that long ago, it tells me two things. We know early DNA gathering and testing was sloppy. One, lab technicians were paid by the conviction, and two, DNA testing was (and is) regularly used to set people up. This becomes especially an issue with these older cases, and I’ll explain why.
A guilty person in the past would not know about DNA. Therefore part of his cover story is likely to prove contradictory. During a trial, he would be asked standard questions that seem to have little bearing, but remember the courts have plenty of experience from using fingerprints the same manner. Don’t present the fingerprints directly. Instead, get the guy to tell just a small lie based what you know. Now you can use the small lie to generate bigger ones. Now do the same with DNA. Once he lies, then it does not matter how much more DNA proof you have. See how that works?
So the Innocent Project people can show up twenty years later with a ton of DNA proof, but if any part of it contradicts the story he gave, it’s game over. That’s what I figured happened here. The people parading around trying to stop the execution likely have no idea why the DNA testing did not set him free. Nor will they ever, since the court is not about to reveal their business secrets.
ADDENDUM
It’s enough to make me leery, my upper rib cage has become flexible again. The tradeoff is a constant deep dull pain in each area that “melts” (that’s the sensation), but it goes way to a mild pain. It’s a pain of recovery. For years I’ve learned to turn my whole upper torso to look to the sides. As of this morning I can look back over my shoulders again (with effort). I hope it is not the weather as some people experience. Even if so, I would have gotten some improvement before.
The healing is from my midsection upward to my shoulders, I can now easily feel the more fluid motions of my skeleton inside. Some minor cramps and clicking, but almost identical to the areas that Big Loretta used to work on. She did say the structure would hurt, which makes sense because she would have had to study that to move my arms. For clarity, I was not paralyzed. I could move my amps up and back if I used my free hand to push into that zone. What I could not do is make this motion voluntarily.
While this is sudden by comparison to my years of recover, it is not instant and I usually don’t notice a thing until I realize I’m moving again. Like y’day, to get up out of my desk chair, I managed to touch my hands together behind my back. That has not happened in ten years.
There is another point I’d like to clarify. People who know me long ago ask me why I did not get further in life being that I had such high marks in school. I agree, but high marks don’t pay the bills, and that is where I landed. At 21, 16-year-olds were picking me up hitchhiking to campus because I didn’t have bus fare. Certainly, I do believe if I had the option to continue in school, I would probably have done great things, maybe cure cancer. The rest is history. I finally did graduate, but by then I had a job I could not quit and I’d missed the demographic window, that is, I was ten years older than anyone else in my graduating class.
The next logical question has two answers. If I retired after only 14 years at my career job, why did I not still go on to cure cancer? First answer, because to get to that point, I had used up all my youthful energy that to go on that way was both unhealthy and selling out. The second answer is that the world made me work so hard to even get that far that down to this day I don’t feel I owe them anything, much less a miracle cure. If you are not rich by 40, I think a better plan is to take it easy before you become a system zombie. Over 49 and still working overtime? You’re a zombie.
