The Ultimate Answer to Kings

A parable on the minimum wage.

Gatorade punished for dissing water in video game

The settlement stems from the company’s free and award-winning mobile game “Bolt!” which came out in 2012 but is no longer listed in the iTunes store.

In the game, the fastest man alive, sprinter Usain Bolt, picks up gold coins as he races across the screen. He runs faster and gains fuel if he hits a Gatorade icon, but he slows down and loses fuel if he hits a water droplet.
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The complaint alleges that Gatorade violated California consumer protection laws by making misleading statements about water, according to [California attorney general Xavier] Becerra’s office.
“Making misleading statements is a violation of California law. But making misleading statements aimed at our children is beyond unlawful,” Becerra said in a statement. “It’s morally wrong and a betrayal of trust.

It took three nights, but my buddy in the woodpile finally fell for it.

The rat ignored the trap the first night.

The second night I found the trap tripped and the bread but not the peanut butter gone. I suspect a bird.

By the third night, my traumatized friend was relaxing and/or getting hungry.

Okay, technically I don’t know that it’s the same rat. They don’t wear nametags and it’s not like there’s a shortage. But I can dream. Phase 3 complete.

Not that I spend a lot of time reading news on your mag, GQ, but thanks for playing.

They’ve probably still got the body. They could hang it by the neck or something, I suppose, but…

The bad news is that this person holds a high position in the American government.

The good news? Oh…um…he won’t be in government forever?

Hell, now I feel all bad about not using much fossil fuel. What if I’m assaulted?

Oh yeah! That’s right.

h/t to Big Brother

I could think of a few things to add, plus (I hate going here but it’s been on my mind) those guys look awfully white for modern tastes. But why gild the lily? I could endorse it as is.

h/t

So listen to what you’re told and not what you see on the news, I guess.

I’m sorry. Really. I know and have internalized that as a white person I am guilty of racism and cannot ever claim to have racism wielded against me. But how is this ad not racist?

Why the *&^% does everything have to be about race? Do these people not realize that they’re actually driving a lot of white folks to think of themselves as a racial group – one that’s under attack?

I wrote a post about a slasher on a NYC subway, who repeatedly stabbed a guy while two of NYPD’s finest watched from the motorman’s compartment where they had locked themselves. When the guy getting stabbed finally successfully defended himself, the cops came out, arrested the slasher, and left the victim to bleed all over the train car. Really happened. Also really happened: The cops were hailed as heroes for the arrest.

Here’s an update!

My burn barrels blaze brightly with the debris of the epic but hardly record-breaking rat’s nest formed where I’d foolishly left a whole bunch of lumber for – well – years. Finally got down to the real culprit…

This pallet of juniper chunks I just couldn’t bring myself to drag back out to the boonies, even though these days I burn very little juniper. Nice and seasoned now, I’ll bet. In fact I kept the more straight-grained chunks, for they will surely be easy to split.

I was down to the pallet when I finally encountered the rat responsible for the morning’s fun. It went streaking out from under the pallet and…straight to the new woodshed with which it has become so familiar recently.

But that’s a job for Phase 3.

Got’er nice and cleaned up. Except for all that lumber, and the majority of the juniper chunks that are pretty much impossible to split or I’d have split them years ago…

That’s Phase 2, which commences right after lunch.

What’s Phase 3, you ask? Easy one. They’re easier to kill after they’ve been displaced. I wouldn’t bet a lot, because they’ve disappointed me in the past, but still I’d bet I have a body by the morning.

…some packrats must fall. And I try to stay relaxed about that but there is one rule. You break it at your literal peril…

Don’t Steal My Stuff.

Okay, some backstory. Ever since the Great Siding Adventure of 2015 there’s been a stack of plywood and other sheet stock on a couple of pallets in the yard beside the driveway. Its contents have waxed and waned over the past couple of years depending on the project, but until the addition was complete there was no point pretending any intention to remove it entirely. Yes of course there was a big packrat nest under it. I knew that. Packrats love building nests in pallets, which is why I no longer have big piles of pallets near the cabin. I moved them off to a remote location where they’d stop bothering me.

See, the big problem with packrats isn’t so much that they build big messy nests. The problem is that they build the nests out of MY STUFF.

So as this summer’s building projects wound down, I upended the remaining flat stock on those two pallets to sort through it. I had one last little project, re-flooring the powershed, and then I could haul that stuff away and turn my attention to cutting up firewood. Last week I loaded the last plywood scraps and the pallets into the Jeep trailer and when I did, I uncovered this…

That’s an impressive multi-level rat condo by anybody’s standards. This new nest only got started when I upended the flat stock, it wasn’t there a month ago. But they’ve clearly been working in it very busily since. It had to go, but I was in no special hurry. It’s based on a pallet containing a whole bunch of juniper snags that I was going to cut up for Landlady’s firewood “one of these days.” No of course I never got around to it but it was never a problem before now. Now it’s a problem. But again there didn’t seem any special urgency about the project, just something else I could chip away at over the winter. Until this morning.

This morning I came outside and saw this… Continue reading →

I don’t happen to hate white people in general, for the record. I can think of a couple of white people whose obituaries I would take some satisfaction in reading, but not because they’re white or any other particular color.

So what is it with lefties and their fascination/hatred for white people?

can’t wait for November 4th when millions of antifa supersoldiers will behead all white parents and small business owners in the town square

— Tom Bloke (@21logician) October 30, 2017

Probably the reference to ‘millions of supersoldiers,’ obvious hyperbole even by antifa standards, is supposed to label this as a joke. But if I were to “joke” something similar, changing “white parents and small business owners” to something like “DC politicians and bureaucrats,” I’d have armored cars in my front yard.

So what makes these idiots so special, is all I’m asking.

I am absolutely not making this up.

WASHINGTON (WMAL) — Plans to erect a statue of former DC Mayor Marion Barry outside the Wilson Building are moving forward.

This week, the City Council was briefed by Arthur Espinoza, the executive director of the DC Commission of the Arts and Humanities at a public hearing about the statue.

While the DC Council has yet to approve the statue, the eight foot clay model has already been sent to the foundry where a mold will be created.

Vince Gray, the councilmember for Ward 7 and former Mayor of DC, said he expects the council vote to be unanimous in favor of installing the statue. “It’s the right thing to do,” Gray said.

Oookay…

It’s a good thing I had a pocketful of money when I woke this morning, because I sure don’t now.
But I do have full bottles of liquid refreshment. One of these propane bottles has been waiting empty since early summer.

Also! Swear I’m gonna get the tools I need for woodcutting all updated and sorted out just in time for…next year’s woodcutting maybe, I dunno.

I had an ancient Milwaukee Sawzall I literally scrounged from an abandoned RV, and it was the bee’s knees for cutting up pallets – except there was something wrong internally and it got so hot that even with gloves you couldn’t use it more than five or ten minutes or it would really scorch your hands. Plus swapping out blades was torture.

Big Brother sent me a cordless B&D saw last year and it’s great for light work, like trimming bushes from the road or doing yard work, but only a few hours into pallet-cutting and you could tell it was suffering. Plus the batteries take forever to recharge. Right idea but the tool was too light-duty. But I like the saw and use it for a lot of different stuff, so rather than beat it to death on hardwood pallets I emptied my wallet this morning to acquire…

This bigger, heavier recip saw. (In a way, Big Brother bought this one too.) Hopefully it’ll stand up to the work better, and then I can use the B&D for yard work because at 10 amps, I don’t really think the Lair’s inverter will run this one. (Ed note: Actually for some reason it will. Don’t ask me. Math is hard.) Of course I can use a corded saw because of the new Honda generator, which is doing fine running the chop saw.

And I finally remembered to take the hose off the new bedroom’s furnace and put it in the Jeep, because that allowed me to do the second-to-last thing needed before the addition is officially closed to the outside…

The heater came with a rubber gas hose suitable for a barbecue, which I was not comfortable using so close to the firebox. I bought a black iron pipe that would have worked perfectly to get the plumbing outside, but lining up furnace and the hole in the floor proved beyond my meager skills. So I hooked the furnace up and tested it with the rubber hose but never intended to run it that way. Then of course October came and went and I kept forgetting to bring the hose to the hardware so I could get a more suitable flexible pipe with matching fittings. Till I did that, I couldn’t plug up the hole in my floor.

But now at last I remembered that chore, so I’ll expend some filler and caulk this afternoon and that will be done. Yesterday I fixed the floor under the addition’s back door so it would stay flat under traffic, and now I can cut a piece of hardwood for a threshold and the last required pre-winter addition chore will be Officially Done!

Then I can turn my mind to fripperies, like…

Yeah, like that’s gonna happen soon. I’ve already stopped seeing what the light fixtures even look like. I’ll put up the undershelf LED bed light Big Brother sent me (as soon as I figure out where the HELL I hid it) because wattage, but other than that I’m about done with lights.

Probably the next trick will be building the sliding door between the main cabin and addition, because until I do that the new overnight furnace won’t do much more than heat up the loft. In which I no longer sleep.

With the assistance – and, er, frequent encouragement – of a friend of the blog, TUAK now has a Patreon account!

TUAK readers have been very generous to old Uncle Joel over the years, and I tell myself this isn’t really me asking for more. This is just an alternative that’s available to anybody who feels like it. With the exception of one bit of hardware that I’ve been wanting to try that will hopefully lead to a recurring blog topic, it won’t really make any difference in content or frequency.

The link is at the top of the sidebar, if you care to visit. Just click on the logo. Thanks for all your help.

So this morning I got this much wood cut into stove lengths. Added to what I did day before yesterday, total for the week is probably in the neighborhood of 3/4 trailerload. Not to goal, but screw it. The nice thing about my situation is that my employer can’t fire me.

I’ve waited to bring any wood to Landlady’s place until she decided how she wanted to store it. For the present, her storage has been reduced to a Sterilite tub on the porch. So I filled that…

…and then I came home and stacked the rest in the woodshed. And here’s where we stand on the “fill the woodshed” project…

So we’ll get there a little slower than planned.

Thing about stacking cut-up pallets: There’s a lot more thin wood than with scrap lumber, so numerically it takes a lot more billets to make a whole tier. You can see that by looking at the full tier (scrap lumber) behind the new partial one (cut-up pallets) and you see I’m gonna have to cut up a lot of pallets to complete a 4X6 tier. So I’m not too worried about it.

…from last year or the year before. “Don’t buy firestarters, cut your own from those firelogs people who use their fireplaces twice a year buy.”

It seemed like a pretty good idea, and last winter I actually purchased a firelog for the purpose. Never got around to cutting it up for firestarters before today, though.

First impression: I’m not sure a chopsaw is the right tool for the purpose, because it made a horrible mess. Think I might have been better off with a hacksaw at the workbench. But I did slice it up,…

And then I brought it home, and after stacking firewood I tried to break off a neat chunk (turns out it’s very brittle)…

…and lit it on fire, which only proved it’s flammable. Which we sort of already knew.

Turns out that little chunk does burn for several minutes, though.

Not very enthusiastically, but it does burn a good long time. So I guess we’ll see what good it is as a firestarter.

Turns out the Guardian was only screwing with my head.

Death of Queensland’s largest crocodile in 30 years could spark violent power grab

And right away I’m thinking, okay, in what way does a dead crocodile send bureaucrats and/or politicians on a violent power frenzy, right? Somebody shot the croc and now they’re droning the few remaining private-sector gun owners? The croc attacked somebody and now they’re fighting over who will ban water? Violence against whom, exactly? Because if a bunch of government bigwigs started a feud among themselves with guns and a body count, that would be worth watching. You could stream it on Netflix or something and set up your carriage. “Battle of the Queensland MPs!” It’d be like minting money.

My imagination soared: This is Queensland, which – as everyone knows* – is in Australia. So perhaps the violence won’t involve uncouth American innovations like guns, but iocane powder! Yes, or knives, or aboriginal weapons. I could sit back at this moment and lose myself in warm visions of pompous solons attempting to have at each other with atlatls and absurdly long darts…

But no. I had to go read the actual article.

A massive saltwater crocodile – said to be one of the biggest ever seen in Queensland – has been found shot dead and experts fear its demise could lead to other crocodiles becoming more aggressive as young males fight for supremacy.

Oh, the crocodiles may become violent. Well. Where’s the fun in that?

Grumble…

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*Yeah, I looked it up. Get off my lawn.

I received an email from a commenter yesterday, which I reproduce in its entirety…

Joel:

Is it my imagination or is the site becoming one long “let’s all tell Joel what/when/how/why/where to do stuff”?

I mean, the occasional tip or suggestion is perhaps appreciated, but lately it seems to be “competition piling-on”.

And I apologize for my part therein.

Best,

[REDACTED]

And as much as I appreciate the thought, I have to disagree. Fact is, I love all the discussion and suggestions and even the occasional polite dispute. In fact I said to a neighbor just the other day that the percentage of genuinely useful suggestions is surprisingly high.

Let me take you back, back through the foggy mists of time to May 2017, when my Season of Construction was only beginning. I put poles in the ground for a new woodshed, and didn’t get them right.

Okay, I was tired and maybe a little dehydrated and not thinking straight. I’d have come up with the solution to the problem my earlier carelessness caused eventually, and maybe even before doing something destructive. But if you read the comments in that post, you’ll recall that readers led me directly to the solution, which was very simple to implement. I don’t depend on such suggestions, I’m on my own here. But when they come, I do read them respectfully. And sometimes they contain the solution to a real problem – or at least a better solution than the one I’m busily using to screw up my life.

I don’t deny that sometimes suggestions get a little, er, basic. I don’t need to be told that fire is hot and ice is cold, we’ve got lots of both. I was a dealership mechanic, for god’s sake – I know that engines need fuel and air and fire and compression. But readers don’t necessarily know my background, so I’m not offended by suggestions that seem to assume Uncle Joel fell out of his mama just last Tuesday. There’s lots of things I don’t know. Lots of things. On some subjects, really basic things.

So, all in all, the comments are a major reason I keep doing this blog. I love the comments, appreciate the suggestions, and wish they came from a bigger pool of commenters. You lurkers, don’t be afraid to chime in when you see Uncle Joel running toward that brick wall.

Thanks to all. You guys are awesome.

Spent all yesterday afternoon nursing a stomach ache and sitting on the throne, and didn’t accomplish one blessed thing. Woke this morning feeling both better and rather rushed – I have a lot of little things to do before settling in for winter and they’re not getting done. So yesterday was supposed to be firewood and bread: I accomplished about half the pallet-dismantling I’d hoped and flaked out on baking entirely. Today I’m gonna forget the firewood, though the days continue sunny, cool and beautiful, bake bread this morning and do some interior tweaks this afternoon.

At least that’s the plan.

Two hours with that cordless reciprocating saw, and this is all I accomplished…

And I don’t think that saw is going to be with me a long time. It’s not behaving well.

I have three of these cordless B&D tools now. I’ve been super happy with the 3/8″ drill/driver, surprised at how well the chainsaw works, and starting to think that this recip saw is coming apart inside on only its second season. Not sure what the problem is, but I was disappointed at the result of this morning’s work.

And now I have to bake bread, because I was also displeased when I woke to half a loaf of moldy bread. Again.

Grumble.