Silicon Valley Redneck

Urgh?

Woke up this morning feeling like I'd had dinner at Schrödinger's - "an indeterminate time later, you'll be both hungry and not hungry."

Kind of an empty-stomach-but-no-appetite thing.  A modest-sized breakfast didn't help, nor did a cheeseburger at lunchtime.

Morning walkies was normal (about 5 miles in vaguely 1.8 hours including a farm stop on the return leg), but here it is not even noon and I'm persistently drowsy.

Probably some sort of metabolic thing.  Maybe I should re-align my diet or something.  That, and keep up regular morning walkies after having missed a week.

Out of touch

Apparently there's some new Avengers movie that involves outer space in some way?

Last I saw the Avengers, Steed and Tara were, indeed, headed for outer space in a home-made rocket ship, and Mother was just noting that they're unchaperoned up there.

So, er.  They're still in space?  And they must have been busy breeding, given how many Avengers there seem to be now.

Huh.  Leave 'em unattended for 50 years, and you never know what they'll get up to.

The candidates we deserve

Pinky and the Brain 2020.

It's the Babylon Bee, so you know it's true.

Oh, here's a fun quotation.

"Nobody but Americans should be able to decide America’s future."
- Hillary Clinton, The Washington Post, today

So, um.  What measures shall we take to keep foreign nationals from voting in our elections?  From contributing money to campaigns?  From buying influence via "speaking fees" or donations to "family foundations"?

Lunacy (monetary policy flavor)

Modern Monetary Theory seems to be all the rage these days.  A nation that can print money, can never run out of money!  It can just print more!  Print and spend, print and spend!

Wherefore I call this Carboniferous Monetary Theory.  As the feller said:

But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Understand: a government can print money, but it can't print wealth.  They're not the same thing at all.

Did I mention that I'm good at misinterpreting things?

A recent SMBC refers to a web site called "Porn Spoke".

Like... spoke(n) porn?  Dramatic readings of Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom, Lehrer's Tropic of Calculus, and suchlike?

No, I don't want to know if that's already a thing.

Is it summer already?

Got out for standard morning walkies, for the first time in a week.

Weather was on the cool side when I started.  By the time I finished, though, it was getting decidedly warm.  Weather.com says high of 89 in Palo Alto this afternoon; cooler the rest of the week.

Got to find time for a haircut, soonish.  This is definitely a winter mane I'm wearing.

Abbreviations

Keep encountering people with "NP" after their names.

Which, if my edumacation doesn't fail me, stands for Non-deterministic Polynomial.

Funny how there are so many people who haven't decided what to name their parrots, and feel the need to announce this with letters after their names.

Growf.

So my father set out to conquer the back jungle (or at least the grassy portions thereof) with his trusty Toro 12" Electric Trimmer.

Aaaand... ran out of string.  Where may we find strimmer line?  Home Despot, or, obviously, Amazon.  Amazon can get the exact product here by sometime-Tuesday.  Home Depot is immediate, but doesn't have the correct pre-spooled line in stock anywhere local.

Oh, well.  Off to Home Despot in search of some 0.065" nylon monofilament.  Which they don't exactly have.  In 0.065" caliber, they offer a couple of flavors of special, premium, edgy, shaped strimmer line.  So, buy a modest-sized roll of the fancy-ish stuff.

Wind what appears to be a suitable quantity onto the special dispenser spool.  Test: it runs briefly, then the line tangles and breaks inside the dispenser hub thingy.  Argh.

Back indoors.  Unwedge it.  Unwind it.  Rewind it, maintaining tension (not being as consistent as I'd like, what with Huckleberry and Southmoon acting as assistant tensioners, but whatever).  Try again.  Same again.

Back indoors.  Remove about half of the string, and rewind the remainder.  Now it's tricky to put it in the hub, as the line is excessively springy and wants to sproing out and thereby retract itself.  That having been dealt with... same failure mode in operation.

Conclusion: it's not possible to reload the dispenser spool by hand with line available from the local Home Despot, and have it work.  Not without some extra something-or-other, maybe heat treatment.

So I ordered a couple of spools from Amazon.  The weeds will go unwacked for a couple more days.

(Yeah, maybe I should have tried Yardbird.  But not late in the afternoon on Easter Sunday.  Yardbird, like Chick-fil-A, is closed Sundays anyway.)

Afterthought:  Maybe I should have tried winding the string onto the spool past a hairdryer, or, after winding it, taping it in place and sticking it in a warmish oven for a while?  But I suspect that the stuff is just intrinsically too springy, and basic limp monofilament is what's called for.

Update:  Amazon to the rescue!  The officially-correct preloaded spools arrived, and work.  The supplied line is indeed much less stiff than what Home Depot peddles.  But... I also note that the line that's been sitting on the spool since Sunday evening now seems like it might be better behaved; could be that putting the line on the spool and letting it sit out in warm weather for a couple of days improves matters (not tested, for now).

Now, just a doggone...

Bouncing from this article to the FEC's web site, I note:

Obama's Presidential campaign committee raised over $14 million, and spent nearly $16 million, in 2013 and 2014.

Why, in the name of all that's Constitutional, was the committee not disbanded in November of 2012?  At that point he was no longer eligible to run for another term, so what legitimate ongoing business could his Presidential campaign committee possibly have?

OK, yeah: paying the final invoices from the campaign.  Might slop over into the next year, I suppose.  That doesn't explain why it was still spending (and raising!) money in 2015-2016 and 2017-2018.

Weird morning

Usual early morning: wake up and let the cats out to the garage, then check the morning Internets.

Hear a commotion from the garage: all three critters are lined up at the main garage door, acting fierce!  Got one of the neighborhood cats cornered in the driveway, perhaps?  Anyway, it's on the other side of a sturdy door, so let them worry about it.

Later: shower time.  Don't get proper hot water.  Gradually drifts from tolerable-lukewarm to plain cold.  Oopsie?  Were the cats chasing a hot-water thief?  Did they scare away the Easter Bunny, and prevent him from making his annual hot-water delivery?  (Yes, the Easter Bunny is associated with hot water.  How do you think the eggs get boiled?)  Has the water heater just gone out (not a common event at the Interim Digs), or do we need to get it replaced this holiday morning?

Get minimally clean before the water gets totally freezy.  Dry off, get dressed, head out to the garage... before moving stuff out of the way to get to the utility closet, turn on the water at the utility sink.  Comes out properly hot.  Ergo, not a dead (nor even just resting) water heater.

OK, so back to the bathroom.  Now I get reasonably warm water.

I was starting to suspect this was a religious thing, but not sure if "our ancestors left Egypt in such a hurry that there was no hot water" or "giving up hot showers for Orthodox Lent".  But...

I dunno; maybe the cats were chasing a hot-water thief?  How else would the tank have been drained of hot water just before my shower time, when nobody else (aside from the cats) was awake around here?

Oh, well.  Time for breakfast.  We shall see what else goes wonky.

What you mean "we", modern man?

Over at Intellectual Takeout, Devin Foley asks:

Why Can't We Handle Silence?

Er.  Some of us handle silence (or at least quiet) just fine; noise (as in, auditory clutter) is the problem.

Apparently, though, Very Many People can't handle silence:

They string a clamorous Magic
To fence their souls from thought,

Which, yeah, I've known people like that.  Got to have the TV on at all times.  And a TV in every room, so as not to be away from it even for a moment.  As Ford Prefect had it:

If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working

Except, as it turns out, moving the lips isn't so important; it's having the senses constantly stimulated.  Sounds, sights, constantly changing images.  And, of course, the perpetual outrage-fodder.  Turn all that off, and you're left all alone with your thoughts.  Which is terrifying!  People who think, think of crazy stuff!  I mean, if you weren't kept in a thought-suppressed state all the time, you might just turn into a homicidal lunatic!  Best to keep the TV on, and just be normal.

... Maybe the difference is that some of us carry the words (and the music*, for that matter) in our own heads, and don't need them beamed in from outside?

* Would link to the Cosby thing about monsters, but I can't seem to find it.

Ingenuity

May be found in many things made prior to the Digital Age.

For example, the Sunbeam Radiant Control Toaster.  Truly amazing.  (A toaster with a fan site, yet!)

Back in the days before apps, and before throwing a microcontroller at the problem.

(If I were trying to emulate that behavior?  MCU, infrared pyrometer, and a motorized load/unload mechanism reminiscent of an Apple floppy drive.  And the result might cost less to manufacture, but a 50-year service life would be unlikely, and repair nigh-impossible.  Also, keeping the pyrometer clean might be an issue.)

More adventures in medical-land

Much on the calendar already.

To be scheduled, Real Soon Now: a PET scan.  That's more generic than a CAT scan, right?  I mean, you don't know if it'll be a LAB scan, a CORGI scan, or even an IGUANA scan...?

Oh, wait.  It's the thing that involves making the patient emit positrons, and seeing where he ends up.

Who, me confused?  And I'm not even the patient!

Whatabout

Coupla the NeverTrump types at NRO have remarks on the Muller Result: David French and Jonah Goldberg.

French is bothered (quite rightly so) about the lies and sleaze evident in the Trump camp.  But... suppose, just for a moment, that Team Clinton had been investigated for two years with such vigor?  Or, indeed, any Washington political organization?

Goldberg, meanwhile, notes:

But the story – familiar for some of us — on display in the Mueller report is that the president has been wildly out of his depth from the beginning on the most basic matters of governance.

As if Hillary wouldn't have been wildly out of her depth?  And... examine the public statements of the current field of contenders, and tell me with a straight face that any of them grasps the most basic matters of governance, U. S. of A. style.  Or even the most basic matters of arithmetic, or of logic.

Again: institutional problem.  Government has gotten far too big for its britches, and wields power with which no mortal can be trusted.  The President is expected to be a God-Emperor, wielding a magic scepter whereby he directs not only the global economy but the very forces of Nature themselves.  (Canute famously demonstrated his lack of control over the tides; how may the modern President escape blame for the weather?)  Voting in one of the other party's rascals won't help a bit; that party actually demands that the President have dictatorial powers, but that he be a member of their party so it'll all be fine.

As Insty says: Trump isn't the problem; he's a symptom.  And the problem isn't the man, but the office, as it's been transformed over the decades.