Silicon Valley Redneck

Meanwhile, up North

That rain that came and went from the forecast the last couple of days, without putting in much of an appearance here?

Seems it clobbered parts of Kentucky real good.

Yikes.

There's something to be said for living on high ground.  I mean, aside from the views.

And a river getting 19 feet above its normal level?  That's more than the safety margin I'd insist on, were we planning to live beside a river.  That's not "you should have known better than to build there"; that's "how the heck did that happen?"

Having the right tool matters.

In some cases, a table saw would be mighty handy, but I haven't acquired one yet.  That's on the "workshop tools" list.

Back in February of 2020, between truck acquisition and lockdown, I did some shopping for largish items.  One thing on the list: a bloody great sliding compound miter saw (a Hercules item from Horror Fright; it was getting good reviews, and was quite the deal with a coupon).

Why did I need such a big saw?  I didn't know, but it was the nearest I could realistically get to the radial arm saws I vaguely remember from a bygone era (the one in the high-school stagecraft workshop, that I wasn't allowed to use, and the one a neighbor had in his garage, that I also wasn't allowed to use).

I found immediate use for it in cutting up 2x4s and smaller things.

Yesterday... well, I found myself wanting to make an angled cut of around 15° right smack dab through the geometric center of a 13½" wide strip of OSB.  Could cut it with the beat-up old circular saw, trying to keep it straight.  Or... what's the widest, reasonably thin material the miter saw can handle?  Looks to be 14".

Strip quickly bisected, in a nice neat straight line, at a preset 15° angle.

Yeah, that saw was a good buy.

Maybe consider the meanings of words?

Methinks I read, a couple of days back, that some government-economic official, fairly high up, said that we're not in a recession so much as a transition.

This was presumably meant to be vaguely reassuring.  But....

A recession is a temporary slowdown, from which the economy (and society) is expected to recover eventually.

A transition, well, that kinda hints at a permanent change, doesn't it?  Like, economic shrinkage will continue indefinitely, and maybe eventually settle into a new normal?  The sort of new normal, perhaps, that is desired by the Great and Wise, who flit about in private jets among their mansions and resorts and global conferences while telling the rest of us that we'll just have to make do with less, because The Future Of The Planet Is At Stake?

I am not reassured.

Normalizing the abnormal

Looking at the long list of things Our Betters tell us Must Not Be Normalized... patriotism, working for a living, combovers, and such... and looking at the list of things we're being told Must Not Be Questioned, plus the list of things that are creeping into "let's not be too hasty to condemn this" territory....

The past few years, we've been told that the idea the the world is run by a cabal of pædophiles is crazy talk.  Now, thanks to virtual schooling, people's complete lack of sense regarding what to post on public fora, and the reaction to recent legislation in Florida, we find that public-school teachers have been aggressively bringing their sexuality into the classroom, and we're being told that the teacher's sexual proclivities are an essential part of the third-grade curriculum.

Also: after decades of emphasis that most gays are not pædophiles, we're suddenly told that "groomer" is an anti-LGBTIQMOUSE slur.  Hello?  Does the latest-edition pride flag have a stripe for kiddy-diddlers?

So, yeah: if the world were, just for the sake of argument, being run by a cabal of pædophiles... how exactly would the message be different?

And now the NYT is suggesting that cannibalism has its time and place, and maybe the time and place are Real Soon Now and Right Here.  Is there something behind this?  Break out the tinfoil!  I've been suggesting that the Overclass has (or believes it has, or believes its pet quacks are working on) an immortality treatment that requires an ongoing supply of aborted fetuses.  But surely that calls for early-term fetuses; why the push for abortion up to (and perhaps beyond) the moment of birth?  Mmmm, nothing like a roast late-term fetus with an apple in its mouth!

Or (this is, mind you, not an exclusive or) are they prepping us for Soylent Green?

And is it 2022 or 2023 that's officially World Holodomor Year?

Afterthoughts:

1. After the first atrocity, the rest are free.

2. Song:

3. Anyone else remember when female impersonators were a burlesque act and not a special type of literally-women-only-better?  Or when a child who pointed out that the king had no clothes was a heroic truth-teller?

A: Ohboyohboyohboy!!!!

Q: Do chickens like squash innards?

Chicken response to something unusual placed in their cage: sneak up, peck it, retreat hastily, see how it reacts.

Chicken response to a small dish of squash seeds & scoopings: FOOOOOOD!  Everybody pile on!  Grab while the grabbin's good!

Ever more things turn out to go in the chicken slop bucket, not in the compost.  Well, it all becomes compost in the end.

Once they go outdoors, they'll be needing at least one giant stainless-steel doggie dish for scraps and such.

(No, they still can't haz cheeseburger.)

Who the dini?

Puddle of something liquidy, perhaps oily, on the garage floor.  And on the bottom shelf of the rack where I store various lubricants, rest preventers, cutting fluids, and the like.

Move everything off that part of the shelf and onto a sheet of cardboard from the recycle pile.  Partway through, start wiping the bottoms of the containers and inspecting for obvious leakage.

Haven't yet identified which liquid has the Houdinious nature, but I'm beginning to suspect it's the Enco synthetic lubricoolant, purchased sometime in the mid-1990s, back when Enco was still a thing.  Anyway, it's something pale-yellowish, oilyish, and not very volatile (so not n-heptane, butane, Bra-Kleen*, nor any of those).

Taking a post-cleanup break now.  Almost time to head back out, return the definitely-not-leaking containers to the shelf, and carefully inspect the rest.  Anything still suspect can be placed on a clean sheet of cardboard to see where the liquid appears.

Update:  There being no Butler™ brand products on that shelf, I had to examine the remaining suspects carefully.  And, guess who dunnit?  The nearly-new jug of Evapo-Rust, that's who!  A corner of the bottom is dented, and the dent has a crease, and the crease has a crack, and the crack has a seep.  Wasn't happening a couple of weeks ago, and that jug had been mostly sitting there for a few months.  Guess the dent could have happened any time, and the seep gradually developed.  Have to decant the contents into a non-leaky jug, and label accordingly.

 

* Kryten finds this particularly vexing: "I have to iron each container separately!"

Your morning dose of tinfoil

Methinks I mentioned, maybe last year, the Globalists' grand plan for remaking the map of North America in the next couple of decades, herding the entire population into a few metro areas and turning most of the continent into a giant nature reserve from which all but members of the Overclass and a few of their faithful retainers would be excluded?

And how this looked like a plan to reenact the Trail of Tears, only with 100 million or so heavily-armed and pissed-off Indians who'd seen this movie before?

Well.

It'd be so much easier if the population were culled and weakened, wouldn't it?  Like, if the Four Horsemen had a bit of a romp first?

And then I look at the Lysenko-worthy agricultural policies being decreed in Sri Lanka, and the Netherlands, and Canada, and I think: what if the short-term plan is a global Holodomor?

Looking at the policies cropping up globally, apparently imposed by the Great Unelected Powers of Europe, what criteria could one apply to distinguish between weaponized Famine and any other form of madness?

"When you starves with a tiger, the tiger starves last." - Pogo, or one of his friends

"Not that our lord did without, for his men took all that they found." - Bob Esty, "Worms of the Earth"

Brain not yet operational.

Spotted a video title:

How Not to do Spins Joseph Johnson

I somehow read that as Josephson Junction, and was trying to remember whether spin was somehow involved in how those work (not something I ever grokked to begin with).

Then I thought it must be something to do with ice skating.

Then... oh.  Looking at the name of the channel, and the thumbnail image, it's gotta be related to airplanes.  Which, yeah, can be spun in various ways, some more recoverable than others.

Maybe I should try to wake up properly before making any important decisions or operating power tools.

 

... Speaking of operating power tools, Joy has come to the conclusion that the supply of actual skilled tradesmen has evaporated almost entirely the past few years; hire a general contractor, landscaper, or whatnot, and he'll try to round up a team of minimally-trained (and minimally-supervised) Spanish-speaking workers to labor in the hot sun for low pay, because that's how it's done.  The guys who had actual skills have mostly retired, died, and/or moved to Fiji or someplace.  So, looks like we gotta build the dock / fishing pier ourselves, probably in a rather minimalist sort of way (and without such niceties as the concrete pilings that were part of the original plan; it'll be pressure-treated 4x4s, and they won't last anything like forever).

Tool shopping list expands: gas-powered fencepost auger, M18 circular saw and maybe a couple of other things along that line, and likely some other stuff.  With the miraculous new instant fencepost concrete, I don't actually need a baby cement mixer - the stuff just gets dumped in dry, and water added.

 

Update:  Looks like the dock / pier thing should be somewhere between 30 and 40 feet long.  Might make it 36 feet.  We want to get pretty well out from shore, into water deep enough to launch anything it's reasonable to operate on a ¾-acre pond and tolerably close for dropping a fishing line into the deep end.  Gotta work up a materials list, and of course some approximation of a design.

Garden go boom.

The garden is spotty indeed, as I've noted before - mainly because of inadequate weed control in early spring.

The parts that have outrun the weeds, though... I was just down there in search of peas (got a few) and cantaloupes (got three ripe ones, and it looks like a dozen or so will be ripening in the coming week).

Also got a fair bunch of long beans, though those are in a "not doing so well" zone, with weeds, an insufficiently supported trellis, and, now, a massive vine incursion from the squash patch.

I didn't do much tomato-picking.  That should be attended to.  Looks like we've got at least 10 pounds of cherry tomatoes ripe, and lots of various larger varieties.  I gotta start dropping produce bags on neighbors' doorsteps.

Somewhere along the line, I need to figure out how buckwheat gets harvested.  Those plants are mighty busy, and I assume a lot of those flowers will become seeds soon.

I haven't seen any soybeans yet, but the plants are looking very prosperous indeed. I should probably have left more space between rows (being as how I have plenty of room for spacing things out).

The onion patch is a complete disaster area.  I guess I should dig it up and see if there are any harvestable onions under all the grass & assorted weedery.  Next year: dig a pit, cover with a few inches of nice sterile guaranteed-no-weeds planting soil, and plant in that, mulching soon afterward.  (Same with carrots, but make sure there's a goodly amount of loose, non-rocky native soil beneath.)

Meanwhile, Whether Underpants plays games with one.  In the last few hours, the forecast for tonight has gone from "a little rain more likely than not" to "almost certainly between 1 and 2 inches, most of it in a 1-hour window" to "certainly between 2 and 3 inches, most of it in a 1-hour window" to, most recently, "a modest fraction of an inch of rain fairly likely."

My, what an alarming headline

At The Atlantic or something, spotted in the feed on my phone, link unclicked:

America is Running Out of 'COVID Virgins'

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, whatever shall we do?

... Wait.  What happens if we run out?  Does the COVID become wrathful and wreak terrible vengeance upon our society?  Or does it fly away to bother someone else?

No more will our number ever grow small
We'll simply make sure there's no virgins at all

An Observation regarding the Ærodynamics of Straw and of the Human Body

Straw, as has commonly been observed, has a characteristic ærodynamic property: it bloweth whither the Wind taketh it.

It thus cometh to pass, that the Distribution of Straw, when dispensed in varying and turbulent Conditions of Wind, may be unpredictable.

It has also been commonly observed, that one should not Do Stuff into the Wind, for sundry values of Stuff, lest the Wind return the Favour.

Accordingly, one might (finding it prudent to distribute a quantity of Straw upon the recently tilled and sown Ground prior to the arrival of Rain) stand at the upwind portion of the Area to be thus bestrewn, with one's Back to the oncoming Wind, and so to cast the Straw to be carried away from one, fancying that the Straw would follow the prevailing Direction of the Wind.

One would be wrong.

The Wake Turbulence of a human body createth a local Region of considerable Chaos and of unpredictable Back-Flow, and the Straw, lacking sufficient Mass and Impetus to carry it clear of this Region, may well be carried back unto the Face of him who casts it.

And, verily, Straw down the Shirt is a most itchful Vexation.

Such a lame headline

Here:

[Celebrity] survives head-on collision with motorcyclist

Said celebrity turns out to have been driving an Oldsmobile at the time.

Surviving a collision with a motorcyclist when one is enclosed in a car somehow doesn't seem especially newsworthy.  I mean, unless the car in question is a Reliant Robin.

Of inflation, recession, and Gresham

There's another element to the recession-inflation dynamic, unremarked by orthodox economists of whatever school.

Gresham's Law tells us that bad money drives good money out of circulation.

Historically, "good money" has meant things like gold coins.

In reality, though... good money is any store of value that can't have the value inflated out of it.  When things get really bad, a can of beans is good money - it's worth a meal, regardless of the dollar price of an ounce of gold.  (It's not good money in one sense, though: at some point, either it gets opened and the contents eaten, or it goes bad from overly-long storage.  Money-type money, as Sir Pterry neatly explained, can be spent over and over again by many people.)

In inflationary times, people with money are going to be snapping up goods, and paying for services, that they anticipate needing or wanting and that are likely to be even more expensive in the future - spending their increasingly-bad money on things they perceive as good investments.  This drives demand up, even as (if conditions are as they are now) a recession is driving supply down.

Now, there's an expression for ya.

Spotted here:

she’s as authentic as a Chinese guitar

Which... yeah, I kinda see what the writer means, but I promptly think of this.  On account, ya, see, of a book what was written by a friend of my mother.  This'n.  Wait, what?  Used copies may possibly be found for $75?  I wonder if my copy is still around....

Continuing stuff

Sprayed BT on various vulnerable vegetation this morning.  Also pulled some nasty big weeds.  Nasty big poisonous weeds: the particularly large and aggressive ones, I'm reminded, are jimson weed, chock fulla alkaloids.

Ran the mini-tiller once again over the dinosaur-pen area, in preparation for once more distributing clover seeds (and probably a layer straw, plus maybe some grass seeds of some sort between dirt and straw).

And, filled up various red & yellow cans plus a white truck.  Fuel storage is now at capacity... until next time I run the mower.

Whoooo!

Back to DIY matters.

Dug two suitably deep holes, and assembled and planted the gate frame / doorway for the dinosaur pen.  (Joy gave the gate itself a coat of sealer last night).

It's pretty much ready for wire now, though I'd prefer to get some other stuff done before applying wire (it being easier to maneuver things between T-posts than through a doorway).

It's humid out there.  And getting hot and sunny.

Current forecast shows rain returning Monday afternoon and then sticking around for quite a while, so I think we'd better get a bunch of outdoors stuff done this weekend.

Right now: cooling off, rehydration, and lunch.  Later, aside from all the stuff I need to be doing around here, I think I'd better load the empty gas cans into the truck, go fill them up, and also stop by Tractor Supply for an intermediate-sized chicken feeder, a couple more big bags of hen chow, and maybe one or two of those decently-priced bushes I noticed yesterday (the ones that were decidedly too big to bring home in the Prius).

Strange values of "making sense"

Spotted here:

The American government’s standard racial and ethnic categories make a certain amount of sense.

Yeah, right up until you try to apply them to an actual group of people.

When Cyras was acquired by Ciena, we all suddenly had to know our racial classifications, because apparently Ciena was under some gummint mandate to track employment by race.

A dark-skinned Dwarf and a tall, pale-skinned Elf were lumped together under the same racial classification, "Asian", which covers a huge number of people who don't look anything alike and have no cultural similarities other than drinking tea, which characteristic they share with the English.  Go figure.

An engineer who, by appearance and lifestyle was whiter'n me, turned out to be not white but Hispanic.  (Well, he was from Mexico, but from one of the upper-class families, so basically a purebred expatriate Spaniard.)

An Arab complained about being classified as white; seems the last place he'd worked, people clearly hadn't regarded him as white.

And we had various professional-class immigrants of African ancestry, who presumably shared a racial classification with a very out-of-place Affirmative Action hire who worked in the mailroom for a week and then wasn't around any more.

Racial handles are somewhat useful as shorthand when describing people's appearance.  The current official classifications, and the trend to racial essentialism, are every bit as bogus as the racial classifications of a century ago when "Catholic" was a race.

Er... connection?

Headline, via Insty:

Food Expiration Dates Aren't Based on Science. Here's What You Can Do Instead

Yeah, pretty much true.  But the article itself starts off with:

Florida's outbreak of listeria has so far led to at least one death, 22 hospitalizations and an ice cream recall since January.

Er, hello?  What does listeria have to do with expiration dates?  Listeria doesn't appear by spontaneous generation when food has been sitting around too long.

Reading on:

One industry group, the Food Marketing Institute and Grocery Manufacturers Association, suggests that its members mark food "best if used by" to indicate how long the food is safe to eat, and "use by" to indicate when food becomes unsafe.

Kinda screwy, if true.  I always assumed "best if used by" meant it might start to taste funny (stale, rancid, etc.) around that time - a quality thing, not a safety thing.  And what's the distinction between how long the food is safe and when food becomes unsafe?

Much of the article seems wonky.  I dunno how much is wonky writing, how much is wonky editing, and how much is reporting on wonky policies.

Background-priority plumbing stuff

We finally got around to summoning a plumber to find and fix the leak under the master-bathroom shower stall, which had been an issue for a couple of weeks, plus a drippy faucet and sluggish drain in the kitchen, which had been issues for many months.

This all could have been DIY stuff, but I hadn't been getting around to it, and my body doesn't like working in awkward positions nowadays.

Anyway.

Shower leak: no problem.  Demonstrated, found, fixed.

Drippy faucet: the plumber wasn't too sure about the identity of the faucet.  I'd earlier acquired a pair of valve core cartridges for a Delta faucet that looked similar, but he wasn't finding any Delta markings on the faucet.  He tried anyway.  Turns out I did have the right parts, and he managed to replace the cold valve (which turned out not to be the leaky side, go figure), but the handle/cover on the hot valve was just not coming off with any reasonable amount of force.  Looks like we may end up replacing the faucet (which would also resolve the problem with the sprayer not working right, and no replacement of the correct style and finish being available).  It's a slow drip, so not exactly a panic.

Sluggish drain: he disassembled the rather peculiar drain, and found a wing nut (which Joy had lost), a plastic straw (must be from the previous owners), and rather a lot of ick.  Some cleaning later, it's running better.  Looks like it needs more hot water, and maybe an occasional dose of ick remover.

So, one problem solved, one improved, and one not fixed.  Such is life.  Joy will be looking at new kitchen faucets.  Either of us could install a new faucet, if sufficiently motivated (after all, we were doing that stuff back in 2018).

Stainless aircraft cable identifies as white PLA.

Wait, isn't the PLA Red, kinda by definition?

OK, rewind.

Out to the garden in the oppressive humidity (as in, heavy fog) but not so much heat yet.

Drive the last three T-posts for the dinosaur pen.

Next step... well, there's the gate frame to be put up, but that waits a little while.  I think that's a tomorrow thing, when the ground has had a chance to dry out a little.  This morning is very muddy indeed; something to do with 1.88" of rain yesterday morning and very humid conditions since.

So, time to do the wire across the top to support the anti-pterodactyl netting.  Fetch the roll of small-caliber stainless-steel cable, the crimper, a couple of crimp ferrules, an S-hook, and a turnbuckle (eye one end, hook the other).  Remove the zip-ties that hold the roll together.

Crimp a loop in one end of the cable, feed it through the eye atop one pole, and commence pulling.

Oops.

Spend the next hour or so untangling enough of the cable to get the job done.  Then pull it through, secure at both ends, and tension.

And what to do with the rest of this mess?  Well, do I have some sort of empty spool around here?

Indeed I do!  I used up a spool of white PLA last month, and saved the empty spool because you just never know.

More time untangling the remaining cable, then wind it onto the spool, dirt, grass, moisture, and all.  How stainless is it?  Tune in a couple of months hence!

Today, more work on the dinosaur hut.  Tomorrow, the gate.  Real Soon Now, wire on everything (probably after the hut is in place, because it'll be easier that way).  Top netting comes after wire.  And, gotta plant clover and grass and some bushes for shade, now that the weeds seem to be adequately subdued (another pass with the tiller awaits drier soil conditions).