One year ago today: August 30, 2024, 38 years.
Five years ago today: August 30, 2020, brunch at the Peabody.
Nine years ago today: August 30, 2016, first official day here.
Random years ago today: August 30, 2023, one shot, one kill.
How do I know you’ve never seen anything like this before? You tell me. Like my computer shop, the back room at the tube shop was full of stuff people brought in when they could not or would not go to a pawn shop. The tube place was no different and they acquired this, this, well, I don’t know what it is. I’ll describe it and you decide. It is a small statue with an alarm clock.
It’s from the 1880, probably, and in good working order. The statue has a place to insert a match, When the alarm rings, the statue’s arm swings upward and strikes the match, holding it up like a torch. You cannot make this shit up. It proved hard to video, so here is a continuous loop showing the operation. Watch close.
Sticker shock, normally associated with appliance price tags and car lots, zapped me. I walked into Staples to price out some more coin envelopes. Prices on everything I would use has tripled. I would not spend $9 on a notebook. But let’s look at coin envelopes.
I’ve worked several jobs where on payday, you could opt to have the office clerk cash your paycheck, handing you the bills and the coins in a small envelope. It stands to reason there would always be less than a dollar’s worth in the pack, so these days it would cost more than that to get a clerk involved. So I figured the coin envelopes should not cost more that a penny each. Wrong, try 12.8ȼ each, call it 13ȼ apiece. Damn, forget that. From the way I hear things are like out there, most people would rather have the 13ȼ.
Hmmm, according to this on-line source, I am not checking my e-mail in the mornings. I am prioritizing my inter-project management agenda. I want a raise. Oh, and the Federal Reserve broad who said she would not step down after being fired by Trump. She’s history.
On-line filters are a neglected art. Like security, I felt they should have been mandated from the start. Advertisers hate filters and some of the worst haters are religious fanatics who feel they have a right to make you listen. So I’m amused at the large amount of material that appears on my feeds lately. Is something up? Let’s just say I’ve met too many people who found God on the same day they realized they were useless, boring shitheads. What’s this, a message from Wal*Mart? Close, it’s a warning to check anything you buy by the pound at Wal*mart on the aisle scale against the register scale.
What’s this? Incoming. We have a tube sale. Let’s see if we have a day off. Nope, just a generic power amp tube. But my cut is $9.55, so that’s a coffee downtown if I want later. Interesting, the buyer is a shop. They buy tubes and his order says to contact him if you have bulk tubes for sale. What good timing. Wait, there is an alert message. Aha, he wants both tubes I have left. I’m on it—that’s a definite $19+ bucks in my pocket and I may go to the movies.
Intercession City, Florida. Ever heard of it? Actually, I have. That’s where this package is going and it is an industrial park on the old Highway to Kissimmee. I’ve been past it, the only store I’ve seen is a Circle K. Tell you what, I don’t have to mail this package until Monday, so let’s take a drive and see. Not all the way there, but maybe over to Bartow anyway, say hello to a few folks, buy some fancier than usual food. Maybe for the birds as well, there is a Tractor Supply over there. Or how about some fancier food for the doggies this month at the pound? There’s an idea.
Yep, I got as far as the Wal*mart and spend the $19 on a new pair of sandals. Even if you don’t care for them, Florida will make a sandal person out of you. The difference, to me at least, is sandals don’t need that bothersome rib goes between your toes like flip-flops. The full price increases hava caught up with Wal*mart. Specifically, food has doubled. I was the only customer in the lineup not paying with food stamps. The couple across from me, two Mexicans, bought $900 with an EBT card, looking as if this is how America works. By looking at them, neither has worked in twenty years.
I’ve coined a new word. Up to now, I’ve said the problems caused by unannounced closures was being “millennialized”. It’s a small part of a larger problem and how you read these horror stories of people finding things like Apple Dollars and Reward Points are taken in real cash off their credit cards. So, to make the term more descriptive, I have decided on “genxed”. I thought of “genexed” but that is subject to misinterpretation. My plan is from here on when you get shafted by Internet smooth talkers and intentionally bad working, you’ve been genxed.
Clouds over Lake Michigan.
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Keeping consistent, the stroll around the shop for groceries has me tired enough for a siesta. I’ve learned to tell the younger female cardinal by her sharper chirp. I’d thought to move the feeders further apart, but they learned to share just fine. We have four species and most come in from the NE glide path. There is different food in each feeder and two of the species rotate their diet. The mister and dripper are at opposite ends of the approach and I can tell which birds by the order they prefer.
I built one box that forced me to finally develop a method for fitting top and bottom panels. Up to now, most are hand fitted, making it the new bottleneck. A template won’t work due to the varying width of “half-inch” pallet wood. The afternoon also gave me a reminder lots of my stuff is getting old. Most of what I got is what was affordable at the time and I knew nothing of shopping for tools. The only top-notch item I would vouch for is my coffee-maker.
Here is the test box, not pretending to be slick. This is the pallet wood from a couple days back. You are looking for several things. One of course is the general fit and design which I feel is a great improvement. Even though it is not used in this unit, the panel slot can be seen all around the upper inner rim, again, a very good fit. As this is a butt joint build, you can see part of the slot exposed at the lower left corner. This box is destined for two tests, as follows.
You see the bottom panel, a smooth and reasonably good-looking fit. I need to streamline that step, it took another hour and four wrong cuts. But learned to quit measuring the pieces and hold them right to the box ends and mark the cuts. Next, this is the design (but not this box) to be tested with the hinge mortise jig. It is possible to see the thickness of these box sides is greater than the half inch standard.
This won’t need extra work as the hinges face the exterior of the box with the hinge pins exposed. What I don’t know is if it is better to cut the mortises before or after. The videos show a door, which is heavy and stable compared to even my biggest boxes. As a backup plan, I’m leaving two overhangs so if the cuts are made first, I can clamp them solid.
Taking and planning all these box measurements took hours. There was nothing worth watching on the overhead except politics. I view the whole political scenario as stagnant the past three months, except that there is an undercurrent in Trump’s favor. There’s every chance that is his strategy, he’s lon since figured out the other side relies on disinformation. DC is a good example, where the people on the streets are praising the new quietness and safety, especially the older neighborhoods.
I’ll make a prediction that amalgamates earlier observations plus the current events. I think Trump is about to discover the police and military will follow his wishes without any hint of issuing commands or declaring martial law. This is not their inherent goodness, but they see the writing on the wall. Next, the Democrats, now unquestionably the bad guys, were fighting the last war, and expecting a frontal attack against their dug-in Deep State. Trump’s too smart for that.
The surprise mid-term census excluding illegals, the cancellation of race-based redistricting (gerrymandering), and a stubborn insistence on opposing Trump even when slams their own images, is adding up. If they don’t smarten up, Trump will soon be his own political party with a super-majority in the House, Senate, and Supreme Court. The left should have played fair when they had the chance. This could happen as soon as those mid-terms.
Later, much later, I zipped over to the club to find Wilford on duty himself and swamped. I’m not saying the club was packed because of country music, just that the number of cowboy hats in the room is a prime indicator. In the course of tidying up the shed, I found the old beer caddy from Tennessee and took it along. An instant hit with the bar bunnies who were all loaded by the time I arrived. The oldest ugliest one in the place took after me. I found a quiet corner but the Karaoke was third-rate making it hard to concentrate.
His following consisted of his wife, her sister, and her three single girlfriends. Sketching out the changes to the caddy was more fun than any of the women present, and there were two tablesful of them. The sharp change back to people music has already taken hold; it would be nice to have something neighborhood again.
ADDENDUM
Has youTube ever gone downhill. Flooded with low-effort A.I.simulations. No really new videos any more. Misleading titles, mostly the same old. The technology allows even the most unskilled and uneducated to make videos, and sadly they too often do. Sometimes, you run across blantant idiocy. If you learn anything, it’s from correcting the mistakes. This generation has no monopoly. Did you know on Gilligan’s Island, Denver almost died because they used real quicksand. (They later switched to oatmeal.) Speaking of trivia, the professor was a real professor who came up with many of the inventions used on the set. The studio later donated his drawings to the Smithsonian who confirmed 60% of them would have actually worked.
I hear the rumor how the Feds can get DNA samples from licked envelopes. Just I never bothered to find out if it was true. That’s because I first heard this story around 1998 and before that DNA was not an issue. Other than science labs, nobody had test equipment. But that changed around 1998 when the test was used to finger Thomas Jefferson for fathering six slave children. Now I am not going to go over my life as a teen and then some, but the last thing I need is a paternity event and since that day, I have taken precautions against DNA. The tests never consider cause, only effect.
So regardless of accuracy, to this day one thing I do not do is lick envelopes. Oddly, from various standpoints, this has become a good idea anyway. Does anyone know? Has anyone ever been jailed over licking an envelope in this way? Then I see a statistic that the most common height to be killed in the artillery corps between 1943 and 1973 is 5-foot-10. I found the answer, the US pack howitzer. It was a compact design firing a 75mm shell, but light enough to be towed with the forward combat units. The user manual specified the minimum crew height was 5-foot-10. Many soldiers who sought to avoid front-line service opted for the artillery.
Instead, they were assigned to these field pieces which were used right behind the advancing infantry to take on bunkers, nests, and strongpoints. Once the enemy got over the shock of heavy artillery hitting them almost instantly, they learned to snipe at the crews—which also lead to a lot of mule deaths.
