The Ultimate Answer to Kings

It makes me a little sad. I remember when Google was geeky cool. But you’re not allowed to rule the world, even if you promise to ‘not be evil.’

So there’s talk about how to “fire Google,” and probably Brad has the best take I’ve read so far on how to accomplish that. Relatively easy, except for the Youtube thing.

On a related topic, beware of those newfangled “app” thingies. Even the ones sold by Google Play. They’re watching you.

I do believe it was Google that taught us all the sad aphorism, “If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”

“How could you own a single flashlight?”

Going on two years ago I wrote a post called The Cult of the Flashlight that occasionally still comes back to haunt me. I am not renowned for my people skills, I’m prone to blurt and my only nod to tact is silence which often doesn’t work in conversation and never in blogging. This post was not…tactful. In fact I woke up the very next morning determined to write an immediate apology.

So anyway, while I’m blathering about people who keep score by how many high-end flashlights they own, they’re looking back with equally amused perplexity…

…and I got a comment last evening from the lady who actually wrote the documentation I mocked. Seems if you type “flashlight cult” into a search engine, you get that becoming-infamous post. Like, right up at the top. And flashlight hobbyists do like to talk about flashlights…

Fortunately they also seem to possess a sense of humor.

It has rained all afternoon. Nothing dramatic, no huge scary storms, just rain. And I decided, around 2:30, that I should take advantage of a lull in the showers to run over to Landlady’s place to tend her chickens, and then I was going to run 3 dozen eggs over to L’s and pick up my laundry. Sent L a text, telling her I was on my way.

Except I didn’t get far.

This is more usual for a Monsoon. Compared to the wild destructive floods of two weeks ago this is a more sedate affair. Probably the bed won’t be dug out in any challenging way, probably the crossings will be passable again by nightfall.

But it puts a stop to my antics for the rest of the evening.

A couple of months ago I wrote, “Please tell me he’s not going to be on the cover in a bustier.”

Nope. Expensive swimsuit.

Sincerely, it’s too late to worry about America “becoming” weird. If you want to cut your wang off and pretend you’re a woman, I won’t break your legs trying to prevent it. Your life, your problem. But don’t expect me to pretend it’s some great victory for human rights, okay? MLK wore a guy suit. Gandhi wore a dhoti and William Wallace presumably wore a kilt, but they weren’t cross-dressing. I honor what Bradley Manning did, but that doesn’t obligate me to look at Chelsea Manning in a lady’s swimsuit.

ETA: Because I just re-read what I wrote a few hours ago and I’m not sure it’s clear: There’s exercising the freedom to do what you will, and then there’s mental illness. It behooves individuals, as they go through their lives, to understand the difference. To my grief, since I really do honor what Bradley Manning did, I don’t think he has done so.

…because I was there. I wasn’t directly involved, I was in technician training, but I was there at a Ford product development facility where things got argued about. And the “consumer safety advocates” and the auto engineers and bureaucrats weren’t really arguing at all – they were talking past each other. The advocates were determined to make the car companies look like villains for not immediately agreeing to install small bombs in steering wheels, and the car companies were determined not to actually become villains – sued into insolvency by product liability attorneys – because they had agreed to install small bombs in steering wheels.

The advocates insisted that airbags were essential because people couldn’t be convinced to wear seatbelts. The car companies – who actually conducted crash tests – insisted that seatbelts were far more consistently useful in car crashes and that, while airbags might one day become useful supplements to seatbelts, they would never replace them and in any case the technology wasn’t ready. The very first airbag modules used compressed air to inflate the bag and most commonly didn’t serve any useful purpose at all. The ones the auto companies installed after the law making them mandatory in the mid-eighties used sodium azide and potassium nitrate “initiators*” that worked every time, often with tragic results. The advocates were right that airbags could and did reduce total fatalities caused by head and chest injuries. The auto companies were right that airbags would also cause fatalities from head and neck injuries, and that they’d get sued for it big-time.

All that was well over thirty years ago. The technology has moved on, the airbags have been painstakingly dialed-in to balance speed of inflation with violence of inflation – I don’t even know how they work anymore – and I don’t read many stories about them breaking the necks of small children any more. They have also proliferated to all sorts of places I predicted they wouldn’t go. But I was still there in the mid-eighties and saw it go down, and it’s still an interesting story to me.

Which is why I wasted nearly an hour reading this old account of the debate, from a 2001 article.

Wrong Turn – or, this is what happens when you put an epidemiologist in charge of traffic safety.
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*I was involved in writing some of the first public documentation for post-law airbag-equipped cars and certain words were absolutely forbidden. Airbags “inflate.” They do not “explode.” No part of them “detonates.” Even though the “initiator” was basically a blasting cap in a small bomb, no matter what the lawyerspeak said.

When a large batch of airbag modules was recalled and collected into a Dearborn warehouse, the precautions surrounding them before their dismantling would have convinced you that technicians – myself included – certainly treated them as if they were bombs. Because they were.

I just gave up on the day and started a movie when the phone rang. “There’s a UPS truck stuck in the wash crossing.”

Oh, shit. “OUR wash crossing?”

“Yup,”

You remember that big sinkhole I told you about – not really a sinkhole, to be pedantic, more of a washout. A big hole in the road, anyway. Well, Scott the Road Guy came and fixed it the very next day, but it was a mighty busy day and all he did was fill it with loose sand. He also gave the crossing itself a quick once-over with the grader, but I wouldn’t say he got it right. It’s really loose and I’ve been waiting for a 4X2 to get stuck for two weeks.

I wasn’t expecting a UPS truck. Only S&L live at the end of that road, and L wasn’t expecting a package.

So I drove the Jeep to the scene of the crime, thinking it would be a simple matter to tow him out but he’d buried it.

It took five people an hour and a half to dig that truck out of there, to the point where we could tow it out with a Jeep. And even then he was on the wrong side of the crossing, so D hooked his Jeep to it and towed the truck out after we filled in the ruts with shovels.

🙁 I need a new tow strap. Mine gave up the ghost.

And for all that – the driver was delivering an empty box, that wasn’t even needed. 🙂 Seriously: L got her satellite service changed, and Dish Network sent a box because she had to return some equipment, except the technicians had already taken the equipment back so the box was unneeded. It had all been settled days ago, I’m told, but of course the UPS driver didn’t know that and wouldn’t have cared. He was paid to deliver an empty box, he was by god going to deliver an empty box.

I guess technically it wasn’t the responsibility of any of us to get the kid’s truck out of the wash. But he was there doing service for a neighbor. And this time of the year, you really don’t want to break down in the wash. It’s been threatening to storm all afternoon.

Somebody at Yale got offended by a stylized blunderbuss on an old statue. So they fixed the statue.

Thank heaven some brave soul did that. A student or faculty member might have seen that, been triggered, and melted all over the sidewalk. Would have made a terrible mess.

…until Little Bear says the peanut butter jar is empty.

Overcast as hell and it starts to rain every time I go near a paint roller. So I looked around for some other little thing I could do, where it’s not a disaster if I get rained on while I’m doing it…

We had a discussion in comments about this not long ago; I’ve always had the habit of strapping the trailer’s tie-downs to the trailer walls so they’re handy. I could put them in the Jeep but there’s already so much permanent junk in the Jeep. But now weather and incidental damage (once a cow tried to eat one, and cleaning up after that was not great fun) has caused me to have to replace the straps, and I don’t want to have to do that again. Somebody suggested I bolt an ammo can to the trailer, and that made good sense. Happened I have an old ammo can not actually being used for ammo…

Until I actually tried to do it, my plan was to bolt the can to the trailer wall just over a fender. That way it wouldn’t bounce around and maybe fatigue the ammo can wall. But it turned out that the angle iron on the top of the wall made it impossible to open the lid when I put it there. Fortunately I learned that before I actually had things bolted down. It has to be down low so the lid can swing. I did figure out ahead of time that I had to tilt the top of the box away from the wall with washers to leave a gap for the inner edge of the lid.

It’s got 3/8″ bolts with big washers and lock nuts, so it should stay in place okay. If it doesn’t, then I’ll know that idea doesn’t work.

The Donald is well on his way to being a big disappointment to me. But he’d have to be a huge disappointment indeed not to maintain a place in my regard just because He Isn’t Hillary.

H/T to Kentucky.

Today was supposed to be a big painting day, and the big question I pondered as I lay awake before rising was “How the hell am I going to paint the top of the peak?” I did it two years ago with ladder and 6′ scaffold, and I still remember every minute. Your old Uncle Joel’s a little afraid of heights.

Why this not-exactly-secret issue didn’t stop me from building an 18′ tall cabin with extremely steep roof, which would surely require maintenance, I really can’t imagine. But I blame Google.

Anyway: I only owned one roller extension, and it’s only four feet long.

And that’s as high as I can possibly make it reach, holding it with the ends of my fingers.

And climbing as high on the ladder as I dared, you can see how high I succeeded in painting this morning.

Obviously I can do better than that. I mean, somebody painted it last time, right? Sure. That was me. Straighten out the ladder and I can get to the top of the cabin. Reaching out from the very shaky ladder. With no one around to keep me company while I lay dying. Yeah. Like I said. Lying awake in bed. Remember it from two years ago. Every minute.

So I’m buying paint this afternoon and it comes to me: I need to do this at least every other year. And every time I wish I had a long extendable pole. It’s not like that would be the only seasonal tool I own. A cheap one isn’t really very expensive.

It wasn’t in the budget, but I came home with one anyway. At full extension it’s really floppy, so I also bought a thick roller cover. And that means I should be able to paint the very scariest parts of the cabin without even using a ladder.

And look! There’s a story.

At publishing time, the Company had deployed its police force to arrest a citizen for googling, “How many genders are there?” shortly after firing an employee for questioning whether men and women were different. According to sources, both individuals were being sent to Google’s infamous Room 101 to be broken down and rebuilt.

Remember when “It’s a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual” was funny?

So this morning’s task was to get the front of the Lair all one color – at least its lower tier.

Got that much done.

Then I had to decide: Turn left, or go up? I was on a roll with the rig I was already using and didn’t want to spend half an hour fiddling with ladders, so I turned the corner. I figured I’d get the upper part as a separate job. But I didn’t get far.

Wow, the sun’s been rough on that paneling. I should have repainted it last year, instead I barely gave it a thought. I knew it was dried out and showing some cracking, but this side soaks up more paint than the new plywood did. Again; primer. Next time I’ll try to remember. But right now this is the paint I have. Or rather, had. That’s as far as my last gallon took me.

But you can see where I’m going with that color: Without being camouflaged as such, the Lair will blend with its surroundings better with this shade. Precisely why that goal interests me, I have no good answer. Comes with the lifestyle, I guess.

By complete serendipity this was a good day to use up the last of my paint. I’ve got a ride to town this afternoon, so things won’t come to a complete halt for a week.

I bought a new trap, because sometimes old traps stop attracting rats. I tried the ol’ tried and true peanut butter, I tried sunflower seeds. He ignored them both. I stopped setting the trap for a couple of nights, then tried bread scraps.

He couldn’t resist bread scraps.

I’ve been slacking off on construction the last couple of days, just piddling around, enjoying (wasting) the sunshine. But I can’t seal the addition against rats till I turn my attention to the floor. For the floor, I need the use of D&L’s workshop and D&L’s workshop is being industriously stuccoed and doesn’t need my disruption at the moment. So right now I’m putting up with the occasional rodent, and that’s bad. Rodents have never been a problem inside the Lair, but they’re creatures of scent trails and habit; once you’ve got’em it’s ten times harder to get rid of’em. I’ve killed three mice but I knew from the droppings that there was a rat. At least one.

…I would disband myself before allowing this to be done in my name. Organized religion has already had a great many evil things done in its name, but surely this is an atrocity too far…

Hillary Wants to Preach

Yup. I dunno – maybe she figures she can’t sell political influence for truckloads of money anymore, so she should switch to selling god?

Hillary Clinton wants to preach. That’s what she told Bill Shillady, her longtime pastor, at a recent photo shoot for his new book about the daily devotionals he sent her during the 2016 campaign. Scattered bits of reporting suggest that ministry has always been a secret dream of the two-time presidential candidate: Last fall, the former Newsweek editor Kenneth Woodward revealed that Clinton told him in 1994 that she thought “all the time” about becoming an ordained Methodist minister. She asked him not to write about it, though: “It will make me seem much too pious.”

Approach that link with caution, BTW, lest you pressure-test your gag reflex. The article is entirely unironic and reads like a campaign plant – it’s basically plugging yet another Hillary book, this one written by some preacher who is now claimed to be her long-time spiritual counselor. I didn’t know the Church of Satan used those.

Speaking of unpalatable swill hawked by untrustworthy TV preachers, here’s a two-year-old but still relevant fun fact about some expensive “survival food…”

Apocalypse Chow: We Tried Televangelist Jim Bakker’s ‘Survival Food’

If it’s the future, and the end of the world is nigh, it’s probably safe to assume that things are looking grim. If all you have to eat is the survivalist food you bought from televangelist Jim Bakker in 2015, then your situation may be considerably worse.

Shamelessly stolen from Unc, like he needs clicks from the likes of me.

…because of the fiduciary incompetence of his human. A cascading effect of my inadvertent attempt to spend the same money twice resulted in: A trip to the Happy Place to buy a crappy nylon holster, which resulted in missing my Monday Morning Water Run, which resulted in rationed gasoline for the Jeep, which resulted in LB standing beside a brand-new cliff rather than luxuriating in the Jeep’s shotgun seat as nature intended.

Lemme ‘splain.

A week ago Sunday I put in an Amazon order for a holster for my .22 pistol, along with a couple of other things. I had no idea how much money was in the bank, but it was more than enough for that.

The following Monday I bought a bunch of stuff at the hardware store, including very expensive paint. It emptied the bank account but I didn’t worry about it; surely that Amazon order had already cleared.

Well, it hadn’t. Amid a shower of nastygrams from Amazon, I was still short one needed holster. So yesterday I accepted an offered ride to the town about 35 miles away, which boasts a halfway decent gun shop. (I have always been perplexed at the paucity of gun shops in this very gun-friendly area.) Unfortunately that trip was scheduled for the afternoon, and D&L bumped the morning water run to the afternoon because they were using the cool morning to re-stucco their workshop. I had to choose, and I chose the holster which by this time I was practically obsessing over. I did consider the fact that all my jerry cans are empty, but dismissed it because the Jeep’s gas tank isn’t.

Alas, this gun shop is heavy on Blackhawk holsters, bags’o’nylon only slightly superior in my mind to Uncle Mike’s shit. I’d hesitate to show up at a militia meetup wearing one, but whatever. I’m no longer a tactical fashion plate, and it’s better than what I had.

But being without gasoline reserves, LB and I were going to have to stop throwing it around quite so much. At a minimum, it would do us no harm to do the morning chicken chores by shank’s mare.

Except for one brief visit with Landlady the day after the flood, I haven’t been in this part of the wash on foot since it got rearranged. And I’d forgotten that the path up the bank on her side of the wash isn’t there any more.

The place where it used to be also isn’t as easy to identify because there used to be a fence there, anchored with heavy timbers. And with one exception they’re not there anymore either.

In the fullness of time as the sand loosens back up we’ll wear another, slightly steeper path. The cattle are already being of some use in that regard. Maybe I should even hang a rope there; at the moment I have lots.

…and is therefore racist and islamophobic.

That having been said, the sheer inescapable ubiquity of the stupidity we’re all supposed to call goodthink makes this a very good world to retreat from.

Or in other words Oh Dear God Can’t You Please Drop It…

And just so you can’t say I didn’t warn you: The linked article isn’t really about the movie or the evacuation or even about blacks or muslims, who aren’t even mentioned until you scroll down a lot. It’s a sort of stream of consciousness column inch filler that’s entirely about the writer, who is clearly a very virtuous fellow*, and clicking that link will not edify you in any useful way. Also there’s an autoplay movie trailer.

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*Can I say “fellow” without committing badspeak?

🙂 Have you seen this?

Remember those republicans who went on and on for seven years about how Obamacare would doom the republic and lead to socialized “single payer” medicine and all the puppies would die, so we should all run out and vote republicans into office immediately so they could save the day, because they were all, singlemindedly, determined, to a man and woman, to the repeal of O’care and the restoration of truth, justice, and the American Way? I mean, they just couldn’t sleep at night, they were so passionate about the repeal of O’care.

And then they got into office – pretty much every office – and when people said, “Okay, now repeal Obamacare,” they all looked nervously around and muttered, “But, the law is the law.” Because now that they were in power, they couldn’t think of a single thing they wanted to change.

Yeah, those guys. Guess what they’re running on for the mid-terms?

Dig that crazy ominous narrator. Why, a fellow could almost get the idea that repubs think this is important. Unless he’d been awake at any point in the past couple of months.

This is just sad. This is a great country, and it deserves a far better class of dysfunctional kleptocratic losers to rule it than it currently has. We should start a pre-election draft in north Korea, or maybe Turkmenistan. Possibly the Saudis have some princes they could do without for a while.

Okay, so a week ago last Friday we had this truly absurd flash flood. And among the other damage it did…

It wrapped a big uprooted tree around my little cottonwood, then a mat of smaller plants, all of which served as a proper matrix for tons of dirt and stones. You couldn’t tell the poor tree even had a trunk.

That was nine days ago and I don’t know if the accumulated mess was harming the cottonwood but there wasn’t anything practical I could do while everything was so wet. Thankfully that’s the last time the wash ran, so things have dried out for the most part.

I went in with that little cordless chainsaw to see if I could rescue the tree. Continue reading →