One year ago today: October 12, 2024, Grady: shoot to kill.
Five years ago today: October 12, 2020, let there be light.
Nine years ago today: October 12, 2016, below my standards.
Random years ago today: October 12, 2012, Lance was wide-eyed.
Take my money. Japan is test a new drug that regrows human teeth. Not that it mattered this morning with my French toast. Double-dipped. Was it good? I crawled back in the sack until 1:00PM in the afternoon good. Grab another coffee and let’s see what the world is up to. The unemployed Kamela is having protester troubles at her bookselling events. The number of indicted Democrats grows, but we’ve seen no convictions yet. Some illegals in Virginia opened fire on the State Patrol. Trump just fired a fifth of the Department of Education.
That was a tale in itself. I got a few guffaws from the guitarists, like, ew, you are going to live in a trailer? But within months later, when even trailer prices had doubled, a secure and comfortable place to practice was a treat compared to the rents the paid and the rules they had to obey. The Hippies was actually the only person who had a place to rehearse and the landlord was always on his case for the volume. I remind you at this trailer, I had no neighbors 6 to 8 months of the year.
Nothing else today, so let’s look at the way Trump is operating. He seems to have learned the trick of never doing too much at once. Just enough at a time to not get anybody suspicious or riled up at once. Yep, dogging them with their own game. I’m still reading the novel “Icon” but it is outdated cold war material. If I was KGB, I’d presume everybody who stays in the most expensive hotel in town is a spy. The plot dates itself in other ways. From my upbringing I know twenty ways to tell if someone has been in my room while I was out.
In fact, I’ll tell you three of my favorites. One is to pinch a paper matchstick in the door jamb when you pull it closed. Another is to always pull your desk drawer back just a little after you close it. A favorite was known as “compassing”. Set something down facing a very exact angle if you know they are likely to pick it up. They never did find the good stuff, but I figure they must have worked in relays, with one standing upstairs to give warning if I doubled back. This is about the level of the spy work in “Icon”.
Mortgage defaults are on the rise. Car loan payments fails are at record levels. And I may be the only one around here prepared if the pension checks don’t come out in November. Actually, I would like to see that, since most everyone knows the shutdown this time is caused by the left. What many Americans don’t understand is how people with less power than the President can even do such things.
Here’s a link to remind us it is already winter in the northeast. A stray cow caused a two-mile traffic jam until a local farmer heard it on the radio, rode over on his horse, and roped the beast. Nobody is claiming the cow.
Do you know what jizya is? Muslims in the UK are pushing for a jizya, which is commanded in the Koran. It is a tax that others must pay for not being Muslim.
California see-through ballot.
(Punch hole allows handlers to see the black
voting mark without opening the envelope.)
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I learned why zebras are not domesticated. They only look like horses. They cannot be domesticated, only tamed. Even then, they bite anything they don’t like, such as human fingers. Even though they herd, the group has no family structure. There is no top stallion, which is important for group cohesiveness. Here’s our buddy from 1970, Mitch, holding up a mountain somewhere out west.
Once again, I find myself at an impasse—nobody I know has a clue. I’m interested in crypto because I’m planning ahead in case silver should trigger a panic. I have plans (spreadsheets) drawn up for every eventuality. What I don’t have is any knowledge how BitCoin (which I use as a generic term for all crypto) works at a practical level. 100% of the on-line info is has so far been useless on this count. Their focus is getting as much information out of you as possible before they tell you anything useful, something I have always despised. One should be able to get information without being tracked forever afterward.
An example of what I mean is the need for a “wallet”. I get it, some place to store the tokens where you can get at them easily, as in [ability to] trade with a button click. But open a wallet page and it wants to know if I want a Web 3 wallet, a prime wallet, a ledger wallet, or a chain wallet. How the hell would a beginner know that?
But, as always, if I do it, I will be wading into the unknown by myself yet again. I chose “Coinbase Wallet” because the name sounded okay, there’s some real high-tech savvy for you. But they would not tell me a thing unless I opened an account. Like I’m going to tell them my bank account number before I know what they are up to. Yet it says here the purpose of the wallet is so that I don’t need a Coinbase account, duh. It assures me I will have “self-custody” but doesn’t explain as opposed to what other kind.
Or how about security? Coinbase says their system “emphasizes” security, meaning there must be some other types that don’t. It says I should have this wallet if I want “full control” over my assets, indicating there is some form of partial control, I suppose. And, they say, only this will allow me to “explore the broader crypto spectrum”. There seems no way to put cash money into the crypto system. Ergo, no way to take cash out, either. Yep, I know 300 people ranging from GenX to Boomers, and not one of them has ever been any help in learning new Internet things. Silver was trading over $49.50 at midnight.
ADDENDUM
I’m not so busy, let’s do a star position. This is where I calculate the point on Earth directly under a chosen star, and find out something of the nearest inhabited spot, using the 2014 nautical almanac. It is 18:37:40 GMT, I’ll use the mean time and ignore the meridian passage. Aries is at 291°14.0’ and we’ll take the star Mirfak at 308°38.6’ and declination N49.54.6’, hoping to hit some land. The offset is 09°11.5’. This puts Mirfak and W600°83’, which is equal to 261°23’. Did you get that? Modular arithmetic, and just subtract 360° because that is also 0°.
Converted to Googletard, that is longitude -261.3680° and latitude 49.8736°, we put away the Almanac, don’t need it. We’ll use Maps.ie, and we got land but uh-oh, I see Cyrillic. We hit around 100 miles east of the Russian-Mongolian border. The skymap shows spots called Sharga and Burenhaan, but the nearest civilization appears to be Gandanhuryee, described as “an agglomeration of buildings where people live and work. It is 30°F with snow flurries.
Well, I’ll be, there is a tiny spot between Mongolia and Kazakhstan where the Russian and Chinese border runs for around 200 miles. It’s a barren wasteland nobody heard of, probably because they have not discovered oil there. This satellite view shows snow-capped mountains and harsh desert between. The city of Novosibirsk is deep in the Russian steppes, it seems quite modern, though the name is not the same as New Siberia, which is an island way up near Alaska.
The nearest accommodation is also in Russia, 390 miles away. Sporting 41 rooms, there is no cancellation fee. The Golubiye Yeli Hotel is “a five minute walk from the train station”. My conclusion for all of this is that down elevators should be rigged not to stop on the first floor, nomsayn?
