The Ultimate Answer to Kings

…oh, wait. Are there any Visigoths left?

This sounded so silly, and the source from which I saw it this morning is so sketchy, that I spent a few minutes following rabbit holes to see if I could find a primary – or at least respectable – source. It appears to have originated on Facebook, so take it for what it’s worth. It’s still funny…

Muslim leader wants Spanish King to apologise for defeating Islam in 1492

The Ishbilia mosque has published a post on Facebook under the name of the Islamic Community itself and its president, Yihad Sarasua, in expressing “the sentiments among Spanish Muslims and those who for certain reasons, reside in Spain, for the lack of conciliation between the Crown and the heirs of the Andalusian legacy.”
“Sir, being the King of Spain, I believe that the historical moment has arrived to carry out the recognition of the vileness, plunder, displacement and murders carried out by orders of the Catholic kings and their most direct collaborators, which culminated with the surrender of Granada and the breach of everything subscribed to the Muslim community”, reads the letter.

Point of information: Didn’t the Muslims invade the Iberian peninsula first? And didn’t they rule there for, like, 800 years of constant warfare before finally being driven out? The counterbalancing reparations would be awesome to behold, especially since I believe the originally aggrieved parties are essentially extinct…

Once upon a time, way back when I was a real person, I had a 35mm camera body and a bunch of half-decent lenses and a casual, half-assed desire to learn landscape photography.

This was way before digital photography meant cameras got so expensive you needed to be a lot more than casual to pursue such things. And anyway I was never any good. There’s quite an art to it…

Not just composition but in juggling technicalities: How do you capture depth? I never came close to getting it right. And anyway, “casual half-assed desire” isn’t the same as talent or even ambition – both of which I completely lacked. If there’s an artistic “type,” I ain’t it.

But on lovely crystalline mornings like this I can picture myself trying to climb peaks with a tripod and a big-ass view camera and a trunkful of glass slides like Ansel frickin’ Adams, looking for that perfect angle and that one perfect moment of light…

Yeah, no. I ain’t got it. 🙂 And it’s for sure there’s only so much you can do taking snapshots with a telephone…

Oh, no. Oh, God, I’ve stumbled into the next target for my daily political 2-minute hate sessions. I KEEP SAYING I’M GOING TO STOP DOING THIS! But…

I suppose it was inevitable. The newest endless prez campaign has begun – or rather is ramping up, since it effectively began in November of 2016. But this (forgive me) feckless broad isn’t even running – yet – so I have no hope she’ll flame out and go away before the conventions. She’s just going to keep doing this to me…

So yeah. Now “we’re” going to “innovate cow grain” so as to regulate cow farts out of existence. The wonders of totalitarianism: There’s literally nothing it can’t promise to do! At least she has backed off on her demands for bovine extinction*.

And get a load of this “town hall” setting! Was there ever a more blatant long-form infomercial? This clip is literally the only part of it I’ve seen, so if I voted I could lay claim to “low-information voter” – not that I’d expect to find a lot of actual information in that travesty.

I’m doomed. It’s gonna be a long campaign.

I’m going for a walk. Maybe I’ll shoot something…

ETA: I meant to add this: Yesterday I stumbled on to a silly and rather chilling movie from 1968, and damned if AOC’s performance in that clip above doesn’t remind me EXACTLY of a character from Wild in the Streets! In which the voting age is lowered to 14, and the first result that hits congress is exactly, precisely like AOC except blonde and a little more obviously stoned.

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*I mean, yeah, I’m always happiest when cows aren’t wandering around half-wild near me. But I’ve never seriously called for their extinction. This silly twit has probably never seen a cow, and yet sees no problem with demanding that they just be eliminated!

And it’s getting worse by the hour: When the wind gets this way there are disadvantages to being downwind of all that sand. So I’m probably going to go visit the chickens one last time and then spend the afternoon petting Torso Boy while reading a book. But it started so promisingly…

After my long morning walkie I hauled the generator out of the powershed and fired it up…

You might recall that I had to pull the Honda out of mothballs in early January to help some neighbors who got stranded in the snow. That time it was really hard to start, presumably because I should have let the oil warm up indoors first. But this morning it started right up and is ready for another work season.

And it’s going to have its chance…

The patched-together porch floor has been an okay stopgap but it hasn’t lasted as well as hoped. I had to screw down a couple of popped-up corners this morning. Fortunately Big Brother wants to come for another visit to help me finish the porch – it’ll get a roof in time for the sunny solstice! And hopefully a more durable 2X6 floor, though that’s secondary. Looks like I’ll be ordering components soon!

And this morning I decided to do something kind of optimistic…

I put the woodstove to bed and got the long wall into summer mode. All the leftover firewood went back to the shed and I’ve hauled out the dog bed Terrapod sent a few months ago. I don’t know if Laddie will consent to use it but he might: He gets upset with me if I spend too much time with my back to the world playing on the ‘pooter, and might prefer to have a bed in the main room. That’s the theory, anyway.

Emptying the ash pail at the pit beside the wash turned out to be kind of a mistake because the wind had already come up: I probably should have put that off till early morning. But it didn’t make too much of a mess and there’s no way there’s still live coals. There was only a day’s accumulation of ash and I haven’t used the stove in over a week.

And now I guess I’d best go out in the wind to check on chickens…

“Mind your language.”

Yes, it’s that time of year again. That time that all Ruger Mark Whatever owners dread more than being invited by your wife to go see a screening of Dead Poet’s Society. It’s absolutely time to stop putting off cleaning your .22 pistol. Continue reading →

Okay, so my sick girl was still alive this morning, but still obviously very sick. I’m surprised she hung on as long as she did, because normally when a hen puts her face to the wall she’s dead within a day. But she wasn’t getting better and clearly wasn’t going to get better, so I spread a bunch of sunflower seeds out in the chicken yard and shooed all the hens that would go out there to enjoy. Then I shot the sick one in the head with my 22/45.

I figure brain destruction must be the surest, quickest and most humane way to turn a chicken* off but visually it’s spectacular, even upsetting the first few times until you’re used to it. Like when you decap them, the body goes nuts until it runs out of blood pressure or whatever. So she flopped around for a while, ending up near the outside door where I trapped the body between my feet until it ran down. Didn’t want her flopping out into the yard where I’d put all the other hens so they didn’t have to watch, right? Guess I should have taken her outside entirely.

I picked up the body and took it out to a box in the Jeep so I could toss it into the boonies on my way home. Went inside to finish my chicken chores, and…

“Blood! Delicious blood! Get it while you can!”

Yeah, they were all broken up…

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*Works the same way with rabbits. A headshot makes them flop all over the place even when they have to be dead as rocks.

…but I didn’t promise to stop entirely. Bullets vs. belly laughs, you know…

One of the RIRs is dying, and if she made it through the night I have to finish her off this morning. So I have that to look forward to.

And while that’s not really funny in any way, I found this joke yesterday and don’t know when I’ll have another chance to use it…

(rimshot)

Yup, it has been in the seventies for three straight days. Yesterday it brushed 80^o briefly!

And you know what that means, boys and girls…

That’s right! The pear tree, the single survivor of our five-year-ago experiment in fruit trees, blooms prematurely! No doubt just in time for the next night-time frost to kill all the buds, stunt the tree, and ensure no slightest possibility of fruit for another year!

All is right with my world.

Seriously, it is. I never expected any fruit from that tree, it’s been tried over and over. But I like having it there. And the weather this week is simply wonderful: Neither cold nor hot, hardly any wind, even the sun is muted with a high haze. I’ve been out cutting roadside brush just to be outdoors – and I’m going out to do it again after lunch. Winter is over, and life is good.

h/t to EP.

It’s like divine retribution or something, it’s so virulently contagious. Jacinda Ardern goes into a bathhouse with Justin Trudeau for just a few minutes and the next thing you know a bunch of Canadians who never hurt anybody are being summarily disarmed.

Ottawa under pressure to tighten gun laws after swift action in New Zealand

New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has won praise from gun control advocates around the world for her fast work in tabling new firearms restrictions following the Christchurch mosque massacre. Now, Ottawa is under heavy pressure to follow her lead.

New Zealand’s sweeping ban on so-called “military-style” semiautomatic firearms has prompted Canadian activists to redouble their efforts to pressure the federal government to further tighten the law here. They’re calling on the Trudeau Liberals to first pass what they see as the relatively timid reforms included in Bill C-71 before moving on to more controversial changes — such as a handgun ban.

“The government of New Zealand has swiftly and responsibly responded to the atrocities … by almost immediately committing to ban the type of weapons that facilitate such extreme violence,” said gun control advocate Nathalie Provost, a survivor of the 1989 gun massacre at École Polytechnique in Montreal that claimed the lives of 14 women.

“Yet here in Canada, blah blah blahdeblahblah guns bad!”

h/t to Wendy

A couple of antler-less bulls…

And a putty tat!

Your Patreon bucks at work. 100# cracked corn, 50# layer pellets. 15 gallons gasoline, 14 gallons propane, 9 gallons drinking water.

And a frozen pizza. No bourbon. Wouldn’t have fit in the Jeep. 🙂

“This is what real action to stop gun violence looks like!” gushed ol’ Bernie as a foreign head of state apparently banned all further gun violence with a wave of her majestic scepter. Bernie thought that was a fine idea, and saw no reason at all anyone would object to what he seems to consider an obvious and common-sense approach to lawmaking.

Except Landlady noticed a factor that sailed right over my head at the time…

“Bernie Sanders wants to put absolute power in the hands of…Donald Trump? I’m glad to see they’re getting along better.”

Landlady came up yesterday evening, and to my surprise announced that she had care packages! I wasn’t expecting anything at all, since the two packages I knew about missed the deadline. By hours, because Uncle Murphy is a dick. Won’t be another for a month.

But care packages there were! Continue reading →

Last year Big Brother bought me a reconditioned MacBook Air. It is … I believe it’s the fourth laptop computer I’ve owned in the past fifteen years or so and the closest to a new one I’ve ever owned. Laptops are handy for cramped spaces and they’re less power-intensive than desktops but the fact that none of my former laptops had functioning batteries never bothered me because I never took them anywhere. Why would I? I never go anywhere. At least nowhere that requires a computer.

But this morning my equipment left me high and dry when it tried to update the iPhone’s operating system just when the cabin’s cellular signal and Uncle Murphy played me a dirty trick. The phone failed to “synch,” whatever that means, and while the phone still seemed to work fine I could no longer use it to connect the Mac to the internet.

Every time I rebooted the Mac it tried to update the phone. And it failed every time. I was getting a little hot under the collar: If it were just a problem with the phone I’d stick the thing in my pocket and climb to the top of the ridge. But I can’t take my desk up th…(red face)…

I had to move a bunch of water bottles to the Big Chickenhouse sometime today anyway.

Any typos in this post should be attributed to the fact that I’m clumsily holding the ‘pooter on my lap in the Jeep’s driver seat. It’s working again.

Yeah, I know “take on the NRA” is just worship-words for the rubes. Hell, you do too – you probably have drinks with your local NRA lobbyist after “work,” don’t you?

But forget the NRA. It’s the gunowners you have to worry about. As some other old fool said many years ago…

“Banning” requires no physical action at all, and is quite simple to do. Even Clinton managed it. If you mean confiscation, well, there you’ve got a problem.

Have you noticed, Bernie, that every time one of your comrades makes a play to take the guns away, AR sales go up? Do you think those people are buying those guns so they’ll have something expensive to turn in when you send the goons around to collect’em? Really?

Picture this, now, Bernie – people who have trouble just keeping a roof over their heads suddenly get a hard-on for a spendy black rifle every time you or Barry or Nancy wave the red shirt and declare you’re gonna ban’em: Why is that, do you think?

This isn’t frickin’ New Zealand, Bernie. This is America. We’re descended from bootleggers, smugglers and gun-toting traitors, and before you got hold of the college campuses we wrote songs about it. Not everybody here went to college, Bernie, and not everybody who goes to college buys the bullshit. Do you really think this is going to end well?

Hell, who am I trying to kid? You’re a commie – after all the blood-soaked history of world communism you’re still a commie. You probably do think this will end well.

Oh! Yeah, baby…

I confess to my shame that I was never any good at all at long-range precision shooting – I’ve had a couple of rifles that were more competent than I ever was but never found access to training for one reason or another mostly having to do with cluelessness. But a real “send it” rifle video with my coffee can still get me started in the morning – even though my bashed-in rotator cuffs and glaucoma-dimmed eyes give me the excuse I need to not have to pretend I could use it if I had it.