The Ultimate Answer to Kings

Before the first eye surgery I had to come in for a “physical examination” which turned out to involve a questionnaire (to which all the answers were “no”) and a blood pressure check. I was deeply annoyed at the requirement to travel all that way to repeat the farce this time. No, to my knowledge I STILL don’t have cancer, diabetes or any allergies.

The other thing that gets me about this process is that I seem to meet with somebody new every single time, and nobody will just read the records from the last time, so I keep answering the same stupid questions over and over. But in this case, for some reason it was an actual doctor who did an actual physical examination. Verdict? “You’re the healthiest person I’ll see today.”

He seemed to find it remarkable that at it’ll-be-sixty-next-month I don’t have any outstanding health problems or allergies, all my teeth, and – I’m actually quoting – “the heart rate and blood pressure of a serial killer.”

Which is funny, because when I lived in Socal I used to get scary blood pressure spikes, and the place drove me so nuts I occasionally considered becoming a serial killer.

I’m off to an eye appointment preparatory to Monday’s appointment to get the second eyeball sculpted. Back when I’m back.

Until then, please remember to never, never do this:

He said it. I believe it. That settles it.

All you doubters better shut up now, or don’t blame me when you end up against the wall.

Gun Safety Lesson Ends Tragically When Oakland County Man Shoots Himself in the Head

The victim reportedly held three handguns to his head and pulled the trigger, explaining that firearms are safe when they’re not loaded. A fatal bullet was discharged from the third gun.
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He reportedly had been drinking all the day.
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Undersheriff Michael McCabe told the Oakland Press that the situation was “pretty unique.”

“I have never heard of anyone testing out the safety of a gun by pointing at their head and pulling the trigger,” he said.

Note for future reference: Chamber-checking does not involve anything pointed at your head. Also, if the person conducting a “gun safety lesson” starts pointing guns at people, it’s time to leave.

H/T to jc2K.

Neighbors H and L got together to go riding yesterday, and for some reason it seemed a good idea to ride through the wash past the Lair. Ghost thought this was a good idea, too. Normally he keeps his distance, just stands off and barks. It works out fine with H’s mare Belle, because Belle is about as excitable as a Bentley. She is not impressed by dogs.

But alas H’s new ride Avalon has turned out not to be as well-trained as advertised. She’s spooky as hell, and if Ghost can get a rise out of a horse he is not able to resist the fun. I was late to the scene of the accident because of course horses and dogs are faster than one-legged old men and so I was always showing up where they’d already been. I could hear H yelling at Ghost, but didn’t make contact for almost ten minutes. Every time he’d make one of his tie-fighter attack runs Avalon would turn to face him and indicate a strong desire to get the rider off her back, which wasn’t making it much of a fun ride for H. I finally got him under control and kept him there till they were out of range.

She’s got as much right to use the wash as I do, but this is where Ghost lives and he is going to defend his territory. Not his fault if he enjoys it. There are plenty of other places for H to ride and she usually does, but I’m not interested in this becoming a source of friction – and absolutely don’t want to be the cause of her getting thrown and hurt – so I’m going to suggest that she call me next time and give me a heads-up so I can keep the boys confined.

No, seriously.

Senators Alarmed by Alleged CIA Spying

Senators on Wednesday expressed alarm at explosive allegations that the CIA might have spied on their computers to keep tabs on their controversial review of Bush-era “enhanced interrogation” techniques.
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Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) confirmed Wednesday that the CIA inspector general was investigating accusations that the covert agency had peered into the panel’s computers. But she didn’t comment on reports that the investigator has referred the matter to the Justice Department.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.), an ex officio member of the Intelligence panel, said the charge of spying is “extremely serious.”

“There are laws against intruding and tampering, hacking into, accessing computers without permission. And that law applies to everybody,” he said.

Whew! (wipes eyes) Good one, Senator Levin. Now please tell us the one about “public service” again.

What the good senator means, of course, is that there are laws against intruding and tampering, hacking into, accessing senators’ computers without permission. And that prohibition applies to everybody. In short, the U.S. Senate has finally found a surveillance target it doesn’t like.

In a just world, this would be really entertaining. But I give it at least a 60% chance the good senators will be J. Edgar Hoover’ed into silence.

We’re approaching that blessed time of year when the woodstove becomes just another thing I need to dust.

And it occurred to me while I was cleaning up yesterday that I had a whole great box-full of paper and cardboard for tinder, elaborately prepared and unused since sometime around the holidays.

It’s shameful for a guy who makes a game of how many fires he can get from a single match to admit, but I’ve gone all suburban-y. I spent 24 whole bucks on commercial fire-starters this winter. That’s more than enough to fill a propane bottle.

I bowed to nobody in the ritual-like intricacy of my fire-laying technique. Paper in rolled cardboard under juniper bark under slivered wood under split kindling, carefully tended with incantations for warming the iron and getting the logwood crackling: It actually worked first try about 80% of the time. Of course sometimes it just went up in a whoosh like unto a conflagration and freaked me right the hell out, because regular TUAK readers know Uncle Joel is paranoid about chimney fires.

One day while in the big town about fifty miles away for one of those eye appointments, I was in the hardware section of Wal-Mart and saw these pressed-sawdust fire-starters. And I stood there shamefully staring at those things like a kid in the porno aisle of a video store, because the ones I’d settled on cost more than eight bux a box and who would do that, right? That’s more than two gallons of gasoline, almost three gallons of propane, or almost four pounds of stewmeat. 32 gallons of drinking water. Eight bucks is a lot of money to spend on a luxury like fire-starters, especially when I spent all frickin’ summer gathering tinder. It’s just stupid. Pass it by.

And I looked to my left, and I looked to my right, and I brought a box of the stupid things to the register. I was a little ashamed for D&L to see me with them, even though I happen to know they use’em. Free thinkers, are D&L. Ain’t nobody’s business, and all that.

And then when that box was almost gone I bought two more, because two is one and one is a cliché, and I’ve still got that second one in the powershed.

Makes for a much neater kindling box, I do confess.

Way to go, Larken.

Oh, and Josie.

What Happens If Russia Refuses to Fly U.S. Astronauts?

Of the many things I didn’t see coming in the sixties, two items near the top of the list would have been:

a) NASA forgets how to build heavy-lift spacecraft, so

b) It relies on the Russians for all that.

Nope, though my faith in NASA as the future of spaceflight started to slide somewhere around Skylab, I definitely didn’t anticipate that. Even years after I started calling NASA the Federal Spaceflight Prevention Administration, I did not predict that they’d actually stop being able to launch manned spacecraft.

But here’s my shot at answering the question in the headline: Nothing happens. At least, not to the U.S. The federal government will stop pretending to have a manned space program. From now until the ISS breaks up and lands on Milwaukee, the Soviets sorry, the Russians will sell cut-rate rides to Belgians and Chinese with an occasional joyride to an American billionaire just to rub it in.

SpaceX and others not in the M/I C will have their funding pulled and go under in a blaze of lawsuits. Boeing, Lockheed and others will pull subsidies until the fall of the dollar and beyond. The American space program will consist of military satellite shots, which will continue to go quite well until the unintended consequences of the public school forced monopoly kick in and nobody in the continental US can count past 10. Or less, if they’ve lost a finger or two.

RussoDisney will build a huge new amusement park over the still-smoldering ruins of Milwaukee. Kim Jong Three will ceremonially open the park by launching a missile at a big yellow ribbon across the park entrance. It will miss and devastate an elementary school in Charlevoix. Strongly-worded letters will be exchanged.

Meanwhile, deep in an underground bunker somewhere in the American Southwest High Desert, the future takes shape…

The stupid! It’s gonna blow, Cap’n!

I’m gonna start my own activism group, just so I can call it Dads Demand You Go Away And Leave Them Alone. Has a ring to it, don’t you think?

H/T to Miguel.

Why would we ever get upset about people who want to take our stuff? If we leave them alone, they’ll leave us alone. Right?

At the first sign that someone has an illegal weapon , they should be immediately tried and imprisoned. These are the people we must be worried and concerned about — the ones who need to keep their ownership secret.

Oh. Not right. I encounter a guy like this I stop worrying that I might be paranoid, and ask myself if I’m being paranoid enough. (And BTW, that’s a lovely self-reinforcing loop you’re building for yourself there, buddy.)

H/T to Doug Rink.

I don’t get the logic of people who abuse gun owners as inbred, violent tool-worshipping hicks, because they claim to be afraid of them. Really, it can’t be said too often:

Landlady has one of those dogs with far more energy than sense. Tiring her out so that people can sleep through the night is a definite requirement, but she’s a townie dog without a job to do, y’know? Sometimes when she comes out here Landlady’ll actually make her get out of the car and chase it for a couple of miles, but you can’t do that in the city. Going for walks isn’t enough, dog parks aren’t enough, so Landlady thought ‘why not have her tow my bicycle?’

Turns out that’s actually a thing.

I’d be tempted to try this with LB, but I already tried a motorized bicycle and the dirt roads shook it (and me) to pieces. Plus when you hit the soft sand of the wash crossings on a bike, dramatic and unfortunate things happen. I’ll bet LB would dig it on pavement, though.

Which doesn’t even begin to describe how long this nonsense has been going on. Common Core? Bah. I remember getting propagandized by the government back when I was in public school. What else do you imagine it’s for?

After reviewing this assignment, one mother stated, “I went to elementary school in Poland during communism. This is exactly what I was forced to learn.”

To be fair, I thought the requirement to “write a paragraph describing the thought crimes of members of your family” was a little over the top. But then I remember trying to help my hopelessly perplexed daughter with her homework, and suddenly remembering some very important dad stuff that needed immediate attention in the garage, so I’m no angel. Hey, they’re from the government and they’re ever so much smarter than we are. Who else could be better suited to raise our kids, huh?

…and reader AS comes through.

Putin (and friend) playing make-believe dressup:

“What do you want to do when you grow up, Vlady?”

“I vant to dress funny, rule world.”

“Me, too! We have so much in common, let’s be friends.”

…a Photoshop of Vladimir Putin dressed as Kaiser Wilhelm. What’s wrong with you people?

LA LA LA I DIDN’T SAY NUTTIN’…

…Except to say there’s a reason soldiers don’t like to shoot their rifles at night. It directs the incoming fire.

But ours would not be the first politicians to learn that what goes around can indeed come around, and the lack of a uniform (or of proximity to a battlefield, for that matter) does not put you off-limits.

My left leg gets bragging rights as the “bad” one because it’s right off at the calf. That makes the right leg the “good” one in spite of several knee surgeries that took years to heal even in my immortal twenties. Then there’s that left wrist, about which the less said the better except it’s still there and still works, which is better than one doctor predicted.

That might be what had me up at an hour where I’m usually snoring. Sure, the forecast called for rain but when is it ever right? Got out of the sack, strapped on my leg and went down the ladder to appease the boys, who saw no reason I shouldn’t tend their (urgent! right now!) sudden unanimous need to go outside. The older I get, the less I like wet weather.

A look at the thermometer, and sonuvagun it’s mid-forties out there! I stepped out into a just-beginning drizzle, which reminded me I’d left washing on the line. No, I hadn’t believed the forecast but there was time to salvage the sitch. I stuck my little pocket flash in my mouth and headed out to the clothesline between the junipers.

By the time I had the laundry in hand LB was clamoring to come inside. I called Ghost back from where he was giving the perimeter its first morning bark, went up the stairs, dumped the laundry on the desk and turned to find LB had (of course) snagged his cable on the porch and needed rescue.

Usually if I’m going to take a header on the stairs, it’s LB’s fault somehow but in this case he was nowhere near me. Continue reading →

No, you kids stop laughing. This is before your time, I know, but in the olden days we children sat spellbound around our fires as the elders told us wondrous tales of a fabulous “scientific method” through which wise men would bring progress and enlightenment to our world.

The idea – and I’m working from memory here, because of course nobody tells such tales anymore – is that in the olden days scientists didn’t just decide what they wanted people to believe and then think up statistics to support those conclusions, the way they do now. Rather they formed “hypotheses,” which they then attempted to support or disprove with actual “evidence.”

It sounded really good and sold a lot of white lab coats, but in the end the scientists learned the same thing their predecessors the shamans and soothsayers could have told them: Our masters don’t pay for righteous uncertainty. They already know what they want the truth to be, and unless you want to explore all those exciting opportunities in ditch-digging you’ll discover it for them.

And so they do. And they do, and they do, and no matter how widely the ‘settled science’ wanders from observable fact, they’ll keep right on howling it.

Just how much more crime can we expect? Using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s warming projections, Ranson calculated that from 2010 to 2099, climate change will “cause” an additional “22,000 murders, 180,000 cases of rape, 1.2 million aggravated assaults, 2.3 million simple assaults, 260,000 robberies, 1.3 million burglaries, 2.2 million cases of larceny, and 580,000 cases of vehicle theft” in the United States.

The boys and I just struggled back from Landlady’s ridge, on our daily visit to her chickens. It’s been unusually windy today, and by that I mean there’s basically no loose dirt left on the ridgetops. My little hollow doesn’t get the wind as bad, obviously, but that means it swirls around in a crazy and unpredictable manner, often dumping fistfuls of that dirt it got from the ridgetops right on me. Temp’s nice, though. I know I’ll pay for saying this, but winter acts like it’s basically over. In February? Yeah, I’ll pay for that. I should delete it.

I got the battery back in Ian’s tractor this morning before the wind got really bad, and after much cranking to clear air out of the fuel lines the engine started and ran as if there’d never been a problem.

I have no clue why it does this. Everything on the engine except the starter is mechanical. I can’t imagine how it can have an intermittent fuel problem, but it really does. The tank is clean, the filter is clear, and this morning it ran beautifully. I know nothing’s fixed, but if it behaves like it did the last two times it did this to me there will be a few hours of good running time. Which means it’s good to go for hole-digging around Ian’s place.

A couple of days ago I broke something I’ve carried with me for decades, and I still has a sad. Continue reading →