The Ultimate Answer to Kings

But I still think this is hilarious. A long-time reader sent me a link to an article about a line of ads pushing J-B Weld, a product I do actually keep around the Lair. He said ol’ Curmudgeonly Joel coulda been a star if only they’d cast me in the ads.

I replied that no, I really prefer to encourage people to throw away useful things. But the ads are funny anyway…

I am reminded of a recurring pro-Israel meme (and I don’t want to debate this because it’s all propaganda and I simply don’t know which side is more right or wrong) that refugee camps set up after the first Arab-Israeli war, full of what must certainly have been easily assimilated people, were arranged to become really awfully squalid and also permanent specifically because the surrounding states wanted a class of victims they could blame on Israel.

The tactic has become familiar in this country. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together can clearly see that “gun free zones” are useless in combating “gun violence,” because they’re guaranteed-safe shooting galleries for any incel* who wants his fifteen seconds of fame. But every time it happens, and doesn’t contain some unacceptable element like an armed individual defending a group, you can expect it to be plastered across the mediasphere like an asteroid strike. You can expect to see lots of planted Bloombergisms blaming the NRA and gun owners as if we were all chomping popcorn and giggling like Beavis. You can expect to be blamed for something that is demonstrably not your fault.

And now that we’ve been gifted with schoolkids who’ve learned it’s fun to run to the cameras like frickin’ trained monkeys and cry on cue, maybe we can expect the tactic to become more useful to the people spreading this bullshit.

What we won’t see is any widespread discussion of what seems to me the obvious question: Since “gun free zones” are so clearly useless for anything except creating helpless targets, why aren’t our beloved protectors abandoning them?

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Look that up. Like a train wreck, it’s fascinatingly ugly.

Go Carl!

Problems and Solutions

No doubt, you’ve heard all about how [background] checks have stopped sales to bad guys 2.5 million (or whatever number is being bandied about of late) times. The reality is that with a false positive rate of 94%, that’s actually 2.3 million innocent people whose Second Amendment rights were mistaken abridged. That’s why there have been so few prosecutions (I think 140-something was the last number I saw; not 140,000, not 1,400… 140. Nationwide.) coming from those millions of NICS denials. At last report, the DOJ still had a backlog of tens of thousands of denial challenges to process.

Prohibited folks intent upon committing crimes just bypass pesky PPYI inflicted on the innocent.

New gun control laws would target only the honest folks who aren’t committing the crimes. So such laws violate rights without even the lousy excuse of enhancing public safety.

So naturally the gun control crowd whines, “But we have a growing gun violence problem, and you aren’t offering any solutions.”

No, we don’t; and yes, I am.

Much linky got filtered out of that blockquote. Go RTWT, he’s on a roll.

I happened upon that bit of folk wisdom this morning during the first cup, and it sent my memory stumbling through some dark, cluttered rooms. Actually, sometimes it’s beneficial to meet your heroes. It can save you pain. But bring a stout stick.

I hung briefly with some Ann Arbor socialists in the very early seventies – and I do mean briefly. This was a year before I lost my leg, and I was just a feral kid: I often hitchhiked there to be near the cool guys, placard things and smoke weed on sidewalks in quicky “Free Sinclair” demonstrations – and to bum weed. I can’t recall the name of the band that replaced the MC5 after that band actually had a hit and suddenly discovered that socialism is bad when you’ve got a little money in your pocket (“Sellouts!”), but they were the house band of the White Panther Party (which was just in the process of changing its name to Rainbow People’s Party because they got tired of explaining over and over that they were really radical anti-racists, and anyway the Black Panthers objected and they had guns and liked to use them.) So, yeah. They were campus pinkos, and I was a dumb kid.

Ignorant, though. Not stupid. It cured me of a lot of naive assumptions and false information, turning my head around so fast my neck ached for a year. I was a joiner back then – I’d devote myself heart and soul to pretty much anybody who’d let me hang out and make me feel like I was a part of something; pretty much anything. But once I got close enough, well, I was just barely smart enough to know shitheels when I saw them.

I’ve never been around any truly famous people. Oh, I had heroes. Sure. But I never met them. The only two semi-famous people I ever met were Kye Michaelson, of whom you’ve only heard if you were ever into high-power rockets and I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a personal hero, and Claire Wolfe who definitely was. By the time I met Michaelson I was pushing 50 and old enough not to expect a superhero. I wasn’t prepared for a flat-out phony, though. That’s a long story.

Claire was a different matter. By the time we actually met we had corresponded enough that I knew she was the real deal and not just somebody pushing books. But I (and I think she) was disappointed to learn that in person we didn’t really like each other very much. At one point we were very close physical neighbors for about a year and a half and gradually got friendlier, but it was due to the fact that we were both older people with experience in making allowances. Nothing bad, just completely different sorts of people – even though our core beliefs could hardly have been more similar. And of course we’re both pretty extreme introverts, which probably didn’t help. Far from a phony, though. She walks the talk.

Anybody else ever have the good or bad fortune to meet a personal hero?

I have several pieces of good 3/4″ plywood, none very big, to use as decking for the new front porch. I have a non-negotiable width of 12′, and a depth to be determined – depending on what I can do laying out the pieces.

It’s not as weird as it sounds.

Big Brother brought up four pieces, which once held up his waterbed. We took them out of his SUV and stacked them in the woodshed last month, and I never really paid attention to their dimensions. At the time it didn’t matter: Those four would determine the porch size, full stop. But then the plan changed, and the porch needed to be 12′ wide. Would those four pieces serve as a basis for that?

They certainly will and then some. I had assumed without really thinking that they were four pieces of one 4X8 sheet, and that was far from the case. In a line they stretch well past 12′, which is good because half of one piece is separated and most of that should be discarded if possible.

I also have three scraps left over from Ian’s porch roof project…

…of varying width but each a full 8′ long. Even Innumerate Joel knows that 3X8=24, which is 2X12. So twice the narrowest scrap (16″) is 32″, plus the width of BB’s pieces which is just shy of 30″, gives me a very respectable 5′ 2″ deep porch. Unfortunately that would involve some weird bracing, because the seams don’t work out.

I’ll have five piers to work with, which means five braces between the piers and the cabin, which is perfect for the four 3′ pieces plus two 6′ pieces. So – let’s not go as wide as we possibly can: Let’s not use the narrowest piece of Ian scrap as the template for the long pieces. Let’s use the second narrowest piece. That’s 21″.

That makes the bracing situation simple and doable, with a porch depth of 4′ 3″ which is perfectly nice for a sittin’ and thinkin’ chair and a side table. Could be deeper, but what the hell? The deeper I make the porch, the bigger I have to make the inevitable porch roof in the fullness of time. And a sittin’ porch won’t really be a lot of use anyway until I do the roof – which will not be this year. All I really want is an area that will let me get to and from the front door without constant fear of falling and breaking bones.

So! That’s the plan.

There has been a sharp reduction in the number of cattle running around the Gulch. They’re not gone, just sharply reduced. Don’t know if he just moved them to better grazing, or if they’re on feed lots. Don’t care, as long as they’re not here.

And as always happens, when the livestock leave the wildlife returns.

ETA: Kent in comments is almost certainly correct that those two the IR caught are elk, not mulies. That would be the very first elk the game camera has captured!

Women and minority amputees hardest hit.

Yeah – okay, sorry. Too much time with NPR on the Jeep radio. Hey, I’ve been painting a lot. It’s either talk radio or beer.

I’ve been replenishing my stump socks and assorted prosthesis-related textile products a little at a time, about once a month. So far my biggest purchase has been just on the sunny side of $100 so I’m not keeping amputeestore.com in business or anything, but since I’ve recently become a regular customer I do seem to have also become a favorite of whatever bot handles their spam. And so now I have access to articles about prosthetics, often hawking products I never knew existed.

Okay: My current prosthesis turned 20 either this year or last, I can’t quite recall, and was old-fashioned even then. It was around then that styles in prosthetic design took a sharp turn away from the “make it look like a meat leg” aesthetic and you started seeing pictures of veterans walking around on titanium pegs and runners with bizarre feet that kinda made them look like these guys – and while they were probably a big technical improvement in terms of mobility, it just wasn’t me. I got my first leg in the early seventies, and to me a prosthesis that looked like a pitifully bad imitation of a human leg was what a prosthesis was supposed to look like. So when the guy asked me “exo or endo,” I went with what I was used to. This was a big tactical error. I didn’t know I’d be keeping that leg for what’s starting to look like the rest of my life, and I didn’t know everybody was just going to stop making replacement parts for that style of leg as the industry cheerfully romped off in the direction of “Let’s make them all look like erector sets.”

To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t even aware there was that much of an industry. I had kind of gotten the impression – not really based on any hard evidence – that prosthetics was a shrinking if not dying field. Think about it – they used to whack off arms and legs for all sorts of things. Fifty years ago there wasn’t anything the least bit unusual about running into an amputee. But improvements in cancer treatments and orthopedic surgery seemed to be moving away from that.

Maybe it was the use of unarmored Humvees in the Forever War that turned that trend around, I don’t know. But as I said, around the time this leg was made I started seeing ads for some strange, unfinished-looking legs and that’s just the way things have been for 20 years or more. And that seems to have spawned a whole market in odd devices, primarily feet.

In 2008 my own leg was re-jiggered to accept a much newer style of foot…

Call me a wuss, but after 45+ years this still kinda creeps me out.

Top Reasons You Need to Use the Correct Foot Bumper or Wedge

If this has been your experience, then odds are, you may have the incorrect foot bumper or need a wedge added or removed. Read on, because we are going to be showing you the top reasons why you need to use a correct foot bumper or wedge, why it is so important and what you should expect. But before that, for those who are new to this whole prosthetic thing, let’s go into what a foot bumper and wedge is.

That last bit is just a teeny bit insulting. I’m definitely not ‘new to this whole prosthetic thing,” but it’s clear I haven’t been keeping up. Because the next illustration shows me something I’ve never seen before, or even close to what I’ve ever seen before.

The only similarity between that and what I’ve been using for ten years is the foot-shaped object that covers it like a sock. That’s not even the terminator foot they were trying to sell me a week or two ago. I don’t know what that is, but I know it needs bumpers and wedges.

They also sell wedges for my style of foot…

…but that is presented in the article as so last decade.

And I guess where I’m going with this is that, while I’m happy people are still tinkering with the technology, and in my experience at least some of it is true improvement, does all this style-as-progress mean there are just a lot more amputees out there than I perceived? I wonder how many of these folks are getting their extremities blown off? Because I can tell you from similar personal experience, that blows.

(and something something lack of common sense – no, no, strike that – reasonable control of gun violence. And throw in something about how Melania hates diversity. And puppies. Yeah. Hoi polloi love puppies.)

(ahem) Where was I? Oh yeah! I’m putting on my Haybale Bucking Joel face again today because the feed store is still having trouble selling hay that doesn’t upset D&L’s snowflake horses’ delicate tumsie-wumsies, or some damn thing. They’re returning eighteen bales this morning, and while 18 bales is barely enough to work up a good sweat they’re also bringing home 18 (to 24) replacement bales, so I know where I’m getting my exercise this morning.

The afternoons have been consistently, er, breezy. So we’re all doing our work in the mornings and then hiding from the breeze all afternoon. I met one of my farther neighbors at the hardware store during the Monday morning water run – he lives up on a mesa so the breeze really cuts into his lifestyle – while also consistently tearing important pieces off his house. He was carrying a gallon of linseed oil – I can’t explain, you’d have to meet the guy yourself – and saying he was working on a new mantra to keep himself going: “It’s May, it’s always windy in May. There’s no point losing your temper about wind in May.” I asked if it was helping. He just trudged to his truck.

So that’s what we’re doing today. Schlepping hay over and over, and then hiding from the breeze.

When BB was here last month he subsidized this season’s paint. I got a big five-gallon pail of pretty much the right shade of green, but it seems more glossy than I expect in a semi-gloss.

Or maybe that’s just because the previous coat had much of a year to lose its shine, I dunno.

Anyway, I’m happy to report that with the exception of that one high bit over the addition, which I’ll definitely get to, the Secret Lair has an all-around new coat of paint.

And now I’m moving on to the first bit of real construction – the Secret Lair is getting a real front porch!

That’s right, you heard it here first. Plans for the Real Porch have progressed in stages, and were never driven by any idea of mine. Frankly, I had plans to pour a slab at the rear and construct some real rear stairs, but nothing like a front porch was on my original plan for this building season. No – Big Brother first coerced me into building a proper – and no doubt safer – utilitarian porch, and even brought sufficient 3/4″ exterior plywood for the deck. Then last weekend Landlady, upon hearing of the plan, insisted that the porch must be – and I believe I’m using her exact word here – “cute.”

“Cute,” according to Landlady’s definition, contains two specific and non-negotiable elements. It must cover the entire front of the (main part of the) cabin, and it must have a proper railing. I always planned a railing, that’s what I meant above by safer. But upon having my notion of a railing explained and demonstrated – basically what I did for the loft railing, which is some 1-by capping 4X4s – she made clear that that would not pass any criterion for cuteness. I believe we’re actually talking about railings that have known the gentle caress of a lathe at some point in their existence. Not at all clear on how much that costs or how I’m paying for it, but in case of financial failure I can always default to the original railing scheme.

At one point she actually pouted, I swear it’s true. I drew a bright red Obamean line at Victorian gingerbread, and she affected insult and claimed she had never suggested such a thing.

So anyway…

I had all the materials I needed for Porch, Front, Secret Lair, Mk. I. Not so much for Mk. II. But she gave me permission (with no written authorization of which I’m aware, but if Ian reads this and takes exception he should see her about it) to raid some large scraps from Ian’s porch roof project of last year, and between that and what Big Brother brought me there really is enough material for decking. I’ve got lots of salvaged linear lumber, and I sincerely hope enough 4X4 for the uprights. All I lacked that I can’t scrounge for myself was two more of those concrete pier thingies, and she has promised to bring me two on her next visit, which is scheduled for weekend after next.

So the next project is to start laying out the Secret Lair’s new – cute – porch.

And he shares my notions of how to treat unwelcome visitors. Must confess he’s better at it.

Enjoy.

You might recall that last month, while BB was here, we installed a 12-volt ceiling fan in the Lair’s bedroom. Problem was I’d pulled a simple duplex for the ceiling box, and the fan came with an electronic controller that was made to go into a wall switch box but required six wires. Ouch, and no way to pull more wire that didn’t involve demolishing lots of brand-new drywall.

We ended up kludging up something distinctly peculiar…

…and while it is possible to adjust that controller without actually reaching through spinning blades, it’s about that hard. You have to hold the blade to keep it from spinning, reach to the wall and switch on the fan, click the controller button in what you hope is the right direction, then let go of the blade (before the controller times out) and see if you clicked the button the right way. Repeat until you more-or-less accidentally find the speed/direction you wanted. It wouldn’t actually be a big problem if you only had to do that once, since I’m most likely to set the fan at one speed and leave it there all summer But every time you turn the power off the controller defaults to full speed. Shit.

BB said he thought the same fan came with a remote control. The last thing I ever thought the Lair would start collecting was remote controls, but even ol’ Luddite Joel has to admit that that would solve the problem. So today I got a message from Big Brother, saying…

I ordered you that wireless DC ceiling fan controller, and can’t help but notice that it looks exactly like the one we already installed, (except for the remote). Could we be lucky enough for that remote to work with the controller you already have up there? I wouldn’t bet serious money either way, but we won’t know until you try. Worse case, it’s a 6-wire job to swap controllers. Either way, you will be left with a “Plan B” ceiling fan controller.

So all in all it’s good to have a brother who enjoys tinkering with electrical gadgets, is all I’m saying.

Because I need one of these real bad.

I believe I’ve actually seen this around here*.

h/t to JDZ

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*this statement is a lie.

I have to go feed chickens, then paint for a while. I thought, as I finished breakfast, “I’ll do almost anything to postpone that. What’s happening on the Internet?”

And then I saw this bit of petulant bigotry…

Report: Costco Stores Reject Gun Store’s Donation to Children’s Miracle Network

Costco stores in Citrus Heights, and Roseville, California, allegedly rejected a $500 donation for the Children’s Miracle Network because the donation came from a gun store.

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The donation came from the Sacramento Black Rifle (SBR) gun store. SBR “generously gives to the Children’s Miracle Network via the wholesale retailer” and “they get a banner in the store” in return. But this year’s donation to the Citrus Heights Costco was allegedly returned and the SBR banner was removed.

Y’know what? Screw it. Going out and painting things green on this pretty Spring day sounds a helluva lot better than sitting inside and reading this shit over and over. I don’t know how you guys even live out there, most days.

…get your useful idiots to repeat the lie so often that most anybody uninvested in the actual facts will naturally assume it must be true.

Then come up with a simple “art exhibit,” protesting the “fact” you made up.

Activists mock US gun culture with Chicago ‘gun-sharing’ dock

“When you rent a bike it’s easy. It’s easy to just rent a gun and it’s easy to kill a person with it,” a 12-year-old tourist is quoted as saying, in this adoring “news” article. Sure. Everybody knows that.

Sweartagod, I’m going to go out and buy an AR15 just to be a dick.

A quick search failed to turn up a clearer picture of this billboard, part of the exhibit, which repeats the old lie “explaining” why all Chicago’s draconian gun laws have failed to keep it from being one of the most dangerous places in the western world. The reason, in case you didn’t know, is Indiana.

That’s right. I’m not making anything up. It’s Indiana’s fault. If Indiana – and of course all the other American states – had gun laws as horrible as Chicago’s, our biggest problem would be our inability to escape hearing “Kumbaya” everywhere we go. Yup. Damned Indiana.

This doesn’t explain the fact that there are already laws preventing Illinois residents from legally buying guns in Indiana. It doesn’t explain why there’s so little “gun violence” in Indiana compared to Chicago. Just shut up and listen to your betters. The Brady Center said it, and you know they wouldn’t lie.

More than ten thousand times a day.

I’ve left the game camera in a place where interesting things happen, but not very often. So since 5/11, this is as good as it gets…

Really wondered what I was going to find when I visited the Big Chickenhouse this morning. I imagined all the incumbent hens welcoming the newcomers, inviting them to tea, sharing memorable egg photos. Maybe a nice Tupperware party to help them get settled…

No – I’m not quite that inexperienced. I just hoped there was no blood.

And in fact the three were pretty much exactly where I suspected they would be…

Yeah. But then I got busy hauling scary new stuff inside, spreading straw, drilling and screwing stuff – activity guaranteed to convince even the most antisocial hen that a mutual threat does exist. Far less than halfway through my commotion, they might not have been best mates but they were certainly all out in the chicken yard together.

Now there’s twice the pellet storage capacity, if nothing else.

Since the flock is officially changing ownership, with Neighbor L taking over monthly subsidies and therefore management decisions from Landlady – I figured I’d better give the shelves their annual scrape. This batch of hens decided to roost up there, so they get six inches deep in shit pretty much moments after I clean them off. I put in the nesting box from the Fortress coop – it has two, but they only ever used one of them. And I set up a second feeder and waterer.

Should work out fine.

The four hens in the Fortress of Attitude did something other hens at the Lair have done in the past: They sorted out one of their number for persecution and violence for no apparent reason, though they’ve always previously gotten along fine. What always ends up happening is that the persecuted hen hides in the coop and basically starves herself half to death, and if I let it go too far the other chickens will work on finishing the job. The persecuted hen always turns out to be one that wasn’t laying eggs anyway, so Sunday after Landlady left I took her out of the coop and butchered her for the freezer. Haven’t done that in over a year.

The incident settled my mind on something I’ve been procrastinating over: I originally set up two chicken flocks for redundancy, because I fully expected some variety of predator to outwit me at some point. But it’s been going on six years and that never happened. So why even have two flocks? The chickens always seem to do better with a bigger flock in larger quarters, and the Fortress would make a damned good dog kennel should the situation with LB deteriorate as he ages.

Last night after they had a nice chance to settle, I went inside and collected the three remaining hens into a cage and drove them to the Big Chickenhouse, where they’ll have to work out their place in the flock’s (literal) pecking order but at least it’ll be three of them and not just one lonely hen. After all this time I’ve pretty much given up learning anything about chicken psychology that would allow me to confidently predict their behavior, but I can’t imagine that three re-introduced hens won’t be safer than one alone.

My morning is getting off to kind of a leisurely start, but after breakfast and a walky I’ll hitch up the Jeep trailer and move their pellet barrel, hay bale and other accouterments to their new home. Then as the mood strikes me I’ll clean out the deep litter and work on re-purposing the coop for a dog house, for either Old LB or a theoretical replacement dog.

…bring May flowers. 🙂

Women and children of color hardest hit.

No, I can’t really back that up. Just haven’t had my coffee yet and I’m anticipating the Monday headlines.

Regular readers are familiar with this…

That’s my indoor meter for DC voltage, installed in late 2014 after years of wishing for one. Big Brother made it. It’s a huge help but was never quite perfectly adequate because (of course) I miswired it. It shows the circuit voltage, which is only an approximation of battery voltage which is what I really care about. Plus I always kind of wished it was a four-digit display rather than 3. Then last winter I re-jiggered the batteries so that I have two separate banks, a two-battery bank for the DC circuit and a four-battery bank powering the inverter, and things got too complex and my single meter really wasn’t all that informative anymore.

I’m fixing those things with Indoor Volt Meter Mk. II:

Which I made yesterday out of parts that came in this weekend’s care package dump. It has two four-digit displays, and will be powered with two separate lines – yet to be trenched and laid – directly from the batteries so it’ll show true battery voltage.

The actual trenching is one of the list of projects for this building season and won’t happen tomorrow, but I thought I’d go ahead and build the thing since I finally had all the parts.

The old one won’t be wasted, it’ll end up on the powershed wall with some alligator clips on its leads. That’ll free up the cheap multimeter I currently have in there, just for battery-checking duties. I do kind of obsess over what my batteries are up to.