Month: August 2026

Or, since I am reading fantasy novels these days (only one, but it’s relatively recent and top-of-mind), I could alternately title this The Undead Orchard of Nogglestead’s Revenge.

So I hit a stump two weeks ago, which bent the baffle on my mowing deck and one of the blades. It was the second stump I hit in recent weeks.

As it has become drier here in the Ozarks, which happens every August and September and sometimes even July, one of the mowings will turn the grass brown for the season no matter how much rain we get thereafter. So I’ve been delaying the cuttings. Which means a month or so back, I hit the more solid of the peach tree stumps in the front yard.

When a couple of pre-existing young maples lining the driveway were gutted by poor pruning leading to splits, I cut the maples down and replaced them with peach trees many years ago. I said that every year we learn a new way for peach trees to not produce: If the temperature drops to -10 degrees in the winter, they won’t blossom; a warm spell in early spring can cause them to blossom only to be deflowered by a cold snap later; if peaches grow, Japanese beetles come around. The one year when all the conditions were right, we got some very small peaches. Once. Well, I tried to properly prune one of the trees, and it died. The other one beside the driveway died as well, so it probably wasn’t me (and the one in the middle of the yard is half dead). Last year, I cut the two dead ones down for kindling (“You know what I grow in my orchard? Firewood.” is also a common quip).

So, as I said, a month or so ago, the penultimate mowing, I went over the more solid of the stumps in the front yard. The smaller I hit once or twice already and cut it below blade height, but I was still going around the big one. I’d meant to get out there with a pick/mattock to chop it up a bit, but I had not. So the mower grabbed the stump and pulled it out, trapping it under the mower deck. I tried circling the edge of the driveway to pull it out (perhaps damaging the mower deck in the process), but I had to jack the mower up almost a foot to work the new bit of kindling (big enough that maybe it’ll be a main feature although misshapen log) through the blades and then out the discharge.

This ultimate mowing, I had no more trouble with fruit tree stumps out front, but I hit the stump of the apple tree which toppled, but did not die, in a derecho in 2019. It had kinda lie in the back yard for those five years, sprouting some branches growing straight up but no blossoms. So I finally cut it down with a bow saw this winter, after the peach trees out front (it still lies atop the wood pile to be cut down to logs and broken into kindling). I’ve managed to mow around it all summer, but knicked it in the penultimate mowing and grabbed a hold of it this time, pulling much of its stump out. But the deck continued to make noise, so I brought it to the blacktop to check for something stuck under it, and I managed to cut my hand twice on the baffle discovering that the blade was hitting it.

Although my brother has now indicated this is an “easy fix” involving changing a bolt on the mower and hitting the baffle with a hammer a couple of times, I’ve already sent to mower to the local (and fairly close) shop to have them check the front wheels (the tires have trouble holding pressure, so I wonder if the wheels themselves are damaged and cannot make a good seal with the tubeless tires) and to adjust the steering bars so they do not overlap (a quick fix I could have made with spacers or by bending the bars, but my uncertainty and lack of historic success with small engines and equipment left me uneager to try).

And: It’s been two? almost three? weeks, and the grass has continued to grow. Scratch that: Some of the grass and other flora has continued to grow seedheads which make everything look untidy (except for the brown front grass, which I cut before I disabled the mower).

Ah, what to do? Last time we had an acquaintance starting out his lawn business do the deed, he charged us $300. Not eager to take on that expense, we demurred.

I have the small push mower that I used in Old Trees in the shed, where it’s sat for almost 20 years. I could try to clean the carb and replace the spark plug, I reckon. I think the fuel line might have been cracked as well. As I’m not sure about the availability of the parts locally and because I’m not very good with small engines, I’ve put this off as well. Perhaps that would be a good project for me to do sometime to, you know, get better with small engines. And maybe get my tiller started again. Ha, ha!

I also have a reel mower which was dull and had dry-rotting tires when I got it. Not likely given the state of the meadow.

So: I have taken the line trimmer to part of the interior back yard. I got about 20% of it with a round of battery charges. I think I will continue this course of action until I’m done with it or until the main mower comes back. The result is uneven but better than its overgrown state, and by pre-cutting, when I get the mower back, it will mulch this part of the yard better and not choke out. The rest of the yard? I might have to overlap the cut portion a bunch so that the uncut portion does not choke out the mower.

And, ah, have I used that extra space in the garage for other projects in the interim? Oh, but no. The last couple of weeks I have fallen back into the bad habit of sitting at my desk too much to too little end. And even writing long-winded blog posts count as an end.

Oh, the humanity. At least the cuts on my fingertip and palm have stopped bleeding and stopped hurting.

One of the things I unboxed from my closet last week, along with some DVDs, videocassettes, and books, was a videocassette cleaner.

For you damned kids, it’s basically a videocassette, except instead of a ribbon, it’s got a bit of a cloth attached to the reels, and you put a little rubbing alcohol on it and run it through your videocassette player (let’s be honest, they’re all VCPs these days; not a lot of R’ing being done). In theory, it will wipe any gunk off of the heads that read the information from the tape. I’m not sure if they really did anything, but in the 1980s, youngling, we were studious caretakers of our cassette players, both video and audio.

You know, I see these from time to time at estate sales, but it’s not something I would buy. Now I own one, I guess. Several years ago, I thought it worth sticking it in a box addressed to myself.

But, do I dare? And do I dare? The videocassette player does not seem to have much trouble with videocassettes. Well, some are degraded, but some are not.

So I will probably keep this in my back pocket until I experience difficulty that I think might be explained by dirty heads. Until then, where should I keep it? In the unwatched videos cabinet? In the cabinet with the tech stack? Ah! The closed cabinet with the extra video game systems in it. Perfect!

Every day last week, different “companies” have posted basically the same job every day slightly different:

The job descriptions are the same, basically:

Continue reading “It’s Not Hard To Spot The Grift” →

I did not go to the book signing at ABC Books yesterday; instead, the family went to the Crane Broiler Fest in Crane, Missouri, which has become somewhat of a family tradition.

But on Friday, I went looking for an audio course to listen to after An Introduction to Greek Philosophy. I have two boxes of audio courses and audio books on the floor in the closet (and some stacked atop them), and I had two boxes of books and things winnowed from my mother-in-law’s library and collection when she moved out of her house, what, four years ago? We culled the books for things we might want when we boxed them at her house, and then we went through them again after bringing those boxes home, and I ended up with two. Which have been in my closet for several years.

As I was digging around, I realized that the top box was half books and half videos. My book saling has been very measured this year; we have not made it to any one of the four Christian County library book sales, and it looks as though we will not make the autumn Springfield-Greene County Library book sale either. So I’ve made a little room on the bookshelves, and I’d trimmed the overflow on the video cabinets, so I unboxed one of the two boxes.

I did not take a photo of it to enumerate what she gave me, but the videos are a preponderance of historical dramas and romances/romantic comedies. So when I get around to rewatching Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (or Kenneth Branagh’s anything, but not Much Ado About Nothing which I read in 2024), know that it’s from this haul. Also, because this has pushed the overflow onto a second cabinet, you’ll probably see movie reports about them first (but not necessarily soon). The books are some contemporary (which means late 20th century and beyond) fiction, textbookish English and literature treatments (she was an English teacher, after all), and some poetry.

What’s more striking, though, is what was in the box and that I have bought in the interim. Skipping Christmas by John Grisham, which I bought in 2025 after watching the movie version, Christmas with the Kranks in 2023, and the DVD of Leathernecks which I bought and watched in 2023. Well, I guess I really did want them after all.

So that means I only have the three boxes remaining on the floor. “Clean office closet” has been on my Goal-Task-Chore (available on the Apple App Store and Microsoft Store) for months. I kinda started around the end of the last school year when I discovered I had a box of two-pocket folders, so I vowed to cull old school supplies to offer to the Lutheran school (which also explains the partial box of school supplies that has remained on my office floor since May).

Ah, the office closet. I don’t really go into it that often. It’s an archive of old Role-Playing Games, technology and certification books from the turn of the century (when I was at the community college studying tech, I came across a listing on Ebay for thirty networking books for $100, someone cleaning out what his employer had bought him, perhaps, and I got it–and then ended up not working in networking or hardware support), older computer magazines, bric-a-brac electronics, a couple of guitar and laptop cases, some batting from my crafting days (where I only used a little batting), several camera tripods, and various envelopes.

And the blocker: My old notepads and notebooks. I have given some thought to discarding those; it’s clear that no university will want the archival papers of the successful poet. I’ve often carried a pocket notebook or the leather binder with its pads and jotted down drafts of poems in them. I have been shredding drafts of my poems recently after I have completed them, but shredding the old stuff seems a little…. Permanent. Maybe I should wait until we get our fireplace repaired so that I can throw them into the fire like a proper literateur. Maybe I’ll also throw in the marked-up copies of John Donnelly’s Gold which I had tech people I know review twenty years ago right after I finished it, or the copy of Marquette Minus One, my first completed attempt at a novel (1 of 2 completed attempts, by the way), marked up as a trade by my college crush as exchange for a theatre ticket for one of The Norman Conquests (not a date! she insisted). They were in the closet until I moved them to the store room. Ah, there are boxes and file cabinets worth of material in there I could discard before leaving it to my heirs.

But I haven’t made that decision yet, and so I’m in a bit of a holding pattern on cleaning the closet. Gentle reader, visit Polymarket or Kalshi to predict whether I finish cleaning my garage or my office closet.

Regardless, I have three things for the Free Book cart this morning: Leatherheads, Skipping Christmas, and a paperback copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Not sure why I preserved this; I have a simlar paperback copy of my own and the leatherbound More than Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from the turn of the century. Since I do not think my boys will be interested, I’ll put it out for anyone who might be, or for the church official who removes non-theological books from the cart.

For some reason, Facebook thinks I’m a big vintage toy fan and feeds me a steady diet of people’s purchases mentioned in groups to which I do not subscribe:

Flash was my first G.I. Joe figure; my father’s then-girlfriend, later-wife bought it for me. When they were dating and first married, she got us several toys to, I guess, endear us to her or whatever. Once her son was born, though, we became the other who needed to be put down in favor of her issue. Probably didn’t help that this time coincided with our moving to Missouri and only coming to Wisconsin for a couple of weeks in the summer, and we were pretty off the hook when we did.

I might even still have it, albeit in pieces (and he’s probably missing his thumb). I don’t see it on the post from eight years ago when I finally let my boys play with the G.I. Joes.

He was a soldier. With a laser rifle. C’mon, man, that was cool. And it predates the cartoon, where they all had lasers somehow.

MfBJN, 2012: A Brief Dissertation On Where To Shoot An Evil Reanimated Skeleton

Forget zombie kitsch; that’s been covered ad nauseum on the Internet. What weapons to use on them, what specialty kitsch rounds to buy for your gun to shoot them, zombie targets for the shooting range, et cetera and et cetera. Have you reached nauseum yet? I have.

One important bit of useful information remains unexplored, however. I have not seen anyone cover on the Internet how to shoot a reanimated evil skeleton, and believe me, I have researched uncountable hours for the answer (uncountable, in this case, because the number is zero, and anyone who tells you you can count to zero is either a higher mathematician or someone about to pitch you zombie and/or bacon-related products. In a word: insane).

So I’ve done some musing, as one would expect I do given the name of this blog, and I’ve decided the following.

Now with people and, presumably with zombies, (I don’t care for zombie kitsch, so I have done only slightly more research on zombies than on reanimated skeletons, which means I watched Night of the Living Dead twenty-five years ago and Evil Dead this last Valentine’s Day), one shoots for center mass. Well, no, scratch that; in zombie films, I guess the head is the key based on some commercials for zombie movies I’ve seen.

However, with a skeleton, there is no center mass to aim for. The trunk of the body is just a bunch of ribs and a tiny little spine running up the middle. When Zhrotor the Destroyer summons his dragonscale-seeded armies to ravage the land, are you going to trust you’re going to hit that little sliver of bones? Let’s face it, if you hit a rib, you’re probably not even going to annoy the skeleton.

Of course, you can shoot for the head as movie-based zombie hunters do, but you have to be really close, really still, and/or really dependent upon special effects to hit that target.

You could shoot for the clavicle or sternum, I suppose, but a clavicle shot is just going to partially incapacitate the clackety-clacking doom marching on you. I suppose it’s better to deal with a skeleton whose sword and sword arm are lying on the ground than a skeleton still bearing arms, but you can do better.

Friends of mine among the living, I urge you to do what I do: Aim for the pelvis.

Shooting News Weekly, 2026: Shot Placement: Is the Pelvic Girdle Really the Best Self-Defense Solution?

One could wonder if the Internet got the idea from my post, which was passed around in geek quarters back when people linked to MfBJN. Maybe not;

(Link via Instapundit who linked here a couple of times back when blogs were a thing.)

The Polaris detached from the pool wall last week. The Polaris is a pool cleaning “robot” which is not really a robot, but a changing water pressure system that stirs up detritus from the bottom of the pool and sometimes catches larger things in an attached mesh bag. Some years, I spend a lot of time on reattaching the Polaris–sometimes, the water pressure causes one of the nuts holding the line (hose) to the housing or its various joints. This time, though, it was not a matter of simple detachment at the quick-release attachment which had been a bit of a recurring problem until I re-trimmed the hose and tightened its nut with a pliers instead of finger-tight. A nut had actually cracked and was no longer usable.

Well, that’s a trip to the pool store unless I have one in the pool parts bin in the garage. I’ve collected a number of bits out there because I cannot throw anything away. I have a bit of hose that’s petrified now. The old skimmer basket which is cracked, kept because I can envision a time when we’re skint and the cracked, replaced skimmer basket is our only option. And, to my delight, an extra hose nut in official Polaris packaging which probably means it cost $20 on a trip to the pool store in a past summer. Good thinking, me. Just in case I would need one, and I did.

Though, to be honest, that’s not much of a gamble. I might have mentioned that Nogglestead is overdue on a number of major maintenance due to its owner’s poor fiscal decisions (mostly, overphilanthropy when flush). But, strangely, we’ve taken care of the pool. A couple of new liners at a couple thousand per. A couple new pump motors and secondary Polaris pump motors. We even got a solar cover to keep the pool water warmer earlier and later which we used only the year we bought it because it’s a lot of work to deploy it, and in the first couple of years (and a decade), we didn’t use the pool that much (and, now, we open it early and keep it open later and I get into it for a cold water dunk / cryotherapy). We’ve been told that the newer models of the Polaris are not as good as the old ones, so we’re likely to keep cobbling this one together as long as we can. So buying a couple commodity spare parts for it makes sense.

But other times, I’ve gotten burned buying spares for appliances we have replaced.

Ah, gentle reader, I have mentioned many times how often I had to fix my dryer(s). We had commodity Maytag/Whirlpool washers, mostly under the hood the same units, and I was forever replacing wheels whose ball bearings seized up, slipping belts, or bad fuses/thermometers on them. They were not even electronic dryers, dammit, but the lubricant on the wheels or the bearings were trash. I ended up having a kit on hand so I wouldn’t have to wait for an order to be able to keep the multi-load daily laundry running. And when we got the postless Samsung washing machine, which sat on shocks and if one of the shocks went bad, the washing machine was useless. After replacing them once, I ordered an extra set on hand for the next time since the Internet informed me it happened pretty often. But as it happened, a seal at the bottom failed and the repairman sent to me by a lead generation service proposed a fix that cost more than a new washing machine. As a result, we have a matched set (bought at two different times when each unit failed me for the last time), and we have parts for machines we will never own again.

I’ve also mentioned that I have had to replace the heating element on the forty-year-old wall-mounted oven a couple of times (jeez, just this January?) and have had trouble with them arriving bent or broken. I want to say earlier this year I also ordered a spare, and it arrived bent, so I sent it back and did not order another spare. I mean, we can’t replace the oven without renovating the whole kitchen because it’s a small oven built into the wall, and they don’t make ovens that size any more). So we’ll have to ride it until we absolutely cannot any more. But, eesh, I’ve not been happy with the heating elements I have ordered from Amazon.

So buying spares really does seem like a bad idea in these cases. Parts I don’t have on hand fail, and I end up replacing the unit.

The one exception I have is for our family room television. It’s a rear projector kind which uses a giant, expensive lamp. The lamp on our twenty-one-year-old television has failed twice, and the last time it did, I ordered a second lamp because I figured that in a decade from then when it failed again, the part might not be available. So it’s gathering dust in a cabinet in the storeroom. Hopefully, if I need it, someday, it will work. But history has proven that’s not often the case–something else will fail, and we’ll end up with a modern telescreen of some sort.

Meanwhile, my garage collects these spare parts, and I’m not sure what to do with them. They’re new, so I hate to pitch them. They have fallen out of the return window by many years. Perhaps if I get into listing things on Ebay again, I’ll give them a try there. Or, more likely, leave them for my estate sale.

So I had a job interview yesterday, the first in…. Well, I would say “months,” but I did have a “record yourself talking to an ‘AI'” thing last week which was almost like a job interview, but not really. One of the things on the job posting was “Comfortable pushing back, including with senior engineers, when a process or PR isn’t ready to ship.”

The best story I have for this comes from my days at the digital marketing agency almost 20 years ago. The client’s product, secondnature™ brand dog litter, was going to be featured on Good Morning America, so the agency hired a consultant to optimize the Flash presentation/video. The consultant was auto-didacting Flash as she went, or she was trying to, but it came down to an all-nighter the night before the product appeared on a network television news show. My role was basically waiting all night for something to test, and her role was to say, “I’ve almost got it now, it’ll be ready soon.” So I undoubtedly watched a couple episodes of the early The Simpsons seasons on the eMac and stretched out on the floor for a nap with the volume turned up on the PC speakers so I would hopefully hear the instant messanger ding. Around daybreak, before air time, she delivered…. Something. Something not better than we already had. So I vetoed it. And the agency, presumably, ate the cost of that failed effort (the agency, as it happened, ate a lot of costs of failed efforts both while I was there and after).

It’s a good story, but: I would have probably had to explain what Flash was.

I mean, HTML 5 did not come around until 2008. Before that, it was Macromedia (later Adobe) Flash, a browser plugin that handled video and rich applications. Because neither Microsoft Silverlight (a johnny-come-lately) nor Java applets (write once, run anywhere, riiiiiight) did it quite as well. It eventually became a rich attack vector, though, and HTML 5 with its new tags killed it.

Ah, gentle reader. I said yesterday:

But too often the ATSes and other parts of the over-the-transom job application/hiring process these days, again, winnow on arbitrary measures and don’t allow for perspective and context. And, boy, mister, after almost thirty years in computers (more if you count programming Commodores and Apples), do I have context and perspective.

I’ve been around long enough that I know the problems that newer technologies and processes are trying to solve. Git and distributed version control systems? Developers were tired of finding files locked in Visual Source Safe–so, have pull requests and merge conflicts actually made things better? Dunno–that’s just how we do it now and come up with ever more creative and time-consuming ways to fix the new problems. (Aside: You know, some job postings still mention that the applicant should be familiar with source control systems and include Subversion aka SVN which was a 20-year-old proto Git. I cannot imagine anyone is still using Subversion, but I guess one never knows.) People tired of frames and table-based layouts created Cascading Style Sheets and now the widget-based responsive design front-ends which rely on hard-to-nest blocks of code whose methods change seemingly every release of the framework, and…. Okay, frontend stuff is not my passion.

But that perspective is not valued, old man. What companies want is for employees to do it the current way the bestest.

I know, I know; when I complete a job application in an Application Tracking System (ATS), I click a checkbox that says “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help me, God” or the slightly less enforceable equivalent that indicates the company will discard my application if its employees discover a falsehood. Ha! I am ahead of the curve, as they discard my applications far before anyone actually looks at them.

But I must confess to you, gentle reader, I sometimes (often) select values that are not truthful, often very early in the process.

Workday, one ATS, makes you create an account with a password (do I save the password? Hell, no; otherwise, I would have several hundred saved Workday passwords in my password manager for accounts into which I will never log in again–and if I do find myself applying, a year or two later, to the same company, I will use the Forgot Password feature and set another strong password I will not seek to remember naturally or artificially). On the second step, your “Profile,” it asks for phone number, address, and whatnot.

And: It often asks “How did you hear about this job?” followed by a drop-down list or nested selector control that has social media sites, job boards, in-person events, and so on. And often not an “Other” to select.

I conduct Google searches on several job boards every day, so I often find jobs hosted in the Workday ATS this way. But it doesn’t let me explain this. So I have to select another value for this required field. I often select Indeed, LinkedIn, or the Corporate Website (which, I guess, is the closest to it). The field is required, and it does not let me select or enter the true answer.

It’s the same with Greenhouse, which has a type-ahead selector for Location (city).

Ah, gentle reader, I live in unincorporated Greene County. I do not live in a city or a town. The zip code resolves to Brookline (or Brookline Station). But the city of Battlefield ends at my farm road, so I am right across the street from Battlefield, Missouri, so I select that one. And if I type my full address, I use Brookline as the city/town (although the zip code covers Battlefield, so one could get mail addressed to Battlefield, MO 65619). So immediately, they can see that difference and think, “Is this guy for real or is he a North Korean who doesn’t know United States geography?”

Not to mention that the Locate me link will probably resolve to Kansas City, Jackson County, or wherever Starlink says I am today.

But too often the ATSes and other parts of the over-the-transom job application/hiring process these days, again, winnow on arbitrary measures and don’t allow for perspective and context. And, boy, mister, after almost thirty years in computers (more if you count programming Commodores and Apples), do I have context and perspective.