Category: Life

UFC legend Randy Couture airlifted to burn center after frightening NHRA practice crash

I just saw him in two Expendables movies (The Expendables 2 and The Expendables 3). And I didn’t know who he was.

Maybe the MfBJN curse, wherein authors and actors whom I have recently seen or read die, is mutating to only injury. One can hope!

Some countries celebrate this holiday on different days.

Some recent arrivals to Britain celebrate it everyday in Britain.

Also known as “Adventures in Camping in Your Own Home.”

We had a storm come through on Sunday afternoon with straight ahead winds of up to 80 miles an hour. Wider than the derecho that took down our electric drop and toppled an apple tree which I have not yet had the heart to cut down because it’s still alive, although not thriving. We watched the winds bend the trees, and my wife said the house was shaking, although I did not feel that. She and my youngest continued to watch it, and I went back to my desk, and out went the lights.

We’re kind of used to short outages, and we had one for a couple of hours a couple years back, but this one was different.

City Utilities working to restore power to Springfield after damaging storm

(We’re not on City Utilities; we have an electric co-op.)

Earlier this year, a strong set of storms knocked out power to places in the northern reaches of the area for a week, and so I thought this time might be different. And it was. It turns out to have been 42 hours, two nights and a day and a half, without power. Of course, we did not know that then.

So our little camping-at-home adventure began.

How did we do?

Well, we had plenty of drinking water laid in (as we’re on a well, when we do not have electricity, we do not have running water, either). We had to ration flushes, which left the house smelling a bit like a gas station.

We had plenty of food, and we went out to eat a couple or three times.

We had a great opportunity to change the water filters–which is generally not a pain, but it had been a while–as we drained all water in the lines to flush toilets.

We had a great opportunity to defrost our freezer. We’ve not gotten it low enough on contents that we could put it in our other freezers for a couple of hours on a summer day. Instead, we got the chance to give the contents of our warming refrigerator to a friend with a large family who could always use extra comestibles–which includes a full gallon of milk and 24-pack of eggs fresh from Sam’s Club. And we took meat and whatnot from our warming freezer to the food bank this morning where they passed it out immediately to customers. And now we have a fresh and clean freezer. Just think that if we had defrosted it sometime in the responsible past, it might not have held until the day the food bank was open.

I read a little in the evenings by lantern light. We didn’t use candles–we have plenty of little LED lanterns that provide plenty of light for reading or writing. I carried a flashlight in my pocket because Nogglestead is dark at night; interior rooms where we live and the corridor mostly lack windows, and the nights were moonless. I remember spending the night we bought the home here, and I remember it as having been very dark indeed. We must have had the electricity turned on the next day–even on dark nights, ambient light from our security lights outside make it pretty easy to move about, but the last two days I’ve had a flashlight in my pocket.

On Monday, we went and helped a friend who had limbs of her maple tree across a driveway. After a quick bath in the pool, I went to the gym. Then, the youngest and I went to lunch and then to Relics for gift shopping. On each trip out, we hoped to return to lights beside the garage doors, but no such luck.

So, for me, it was a vacation. I work from home, and all of my work stuff is in my office. I could have schlepped to a coffee shop and plugged in a laptop and turned on my phone’s hotspot (which rapidly drains my battery, so I’d have to jack in the phone, too). But I had nothing that pressing, and I wanted to wait to see if the power would come on any minute now.

How did the rest of the family do? Well, they became a bit restive as they did on our trip to Big Cedar this year. They complained about the power being out a lot. The oldest went out several times and kept busy, but the youngest is very electronics oriented, so he would run his phone out of energy and be at a loss. My beautiful wife got restive at spots, mostly at bedtime when the household temperature was 80 degrees or so. She did get a chance to work off-site, which got her into air conditioning and allowed her to bring a bounty of power banks home.

Power came back this morning as we were on our way to the food bank, and when we came home, it took time to put things back together. I’d left the water off so that I could make sure the filter housings weren’t dripping, so I got them going, we got the washing machine and dishwasher spinning, we got the freezer out for an official defrosting (and not just leaking onto the floor behind the wet bar), and I got back to work.

So some lessons learned: We might consider getting some rain barrels. They would help with watering plants in the dry part of summer and offer toilet flushing when the power is out. We’re not considering a generator as our need for it is yet unproven–we’ve lost power for probably fifty or sixty hours total since we’ve lived here, and that’s been almost sixteen years. But if we start to see decline in power reliability, we’ll reconsider.

Also, I recently questioned whether declining quality of public works led to street problems. Do I think that declining electrical infrastructure might be a factor in the recent outages? Perhaps. I mean, there are more lines going more places, and they can’t be arsed to bury them, but: From our drives around the area after both storms, it was clear that a lot of trees completely blew over. That is, when caught in the wind, the trees just toppled, leaving bunched root balls exposed. And in the case of our friend, it was a maple tree that split, and they are notorious for that–but they grow fast, so they’re popular with builders and subdivision developers. So I cannot help but wonder if these problems are caused by non-native trees planted in development which are not suited to break deeply into the clay soil in these parts, and now the trees are reaching an age and height where they are more prone to toppling.

But I can’t be arsed to find out.

So look forward to resumption of regular book and movie reports and other twee asides.

Or even the list price of $7.44 million. Castle-equipped Scottish island lists for the first time in 80 years — and it’s accessible only by boat or helicopter:

An entire private island off Scotland’s rugged west coast — complete with a ruined castle, a working farm and a cluster of off-grid holiday cottages — is hitting the market for the first time in nearly 80 years.

Shuna, a 1,100-acre island in the Inner Hebrides, is being offered for about $7.44 million, marking the end of an era for a family that has stewarded it since World War II.

The Gully family has owned the island since 1945, when Viscountess Selby, reeling from the war’s aftermath, walked into a London estate agency and inquired — somewhat famously — if they had “any islands on the books.”

Of course, it’s over there, so it would cost a lot for everything even before the cost of having it supplied by boat comes into play, and you aren’t allowed legally to have what you need to defend it.

But it looks like it would be an interesting purchase nevertheless, especially with several rental cottages on the island to let.

Ah, but I am reaching the point in my career that I’m starting to doubt whether I will become wealthy from working for a startup especially since I am not chasing the AI bandwagon.

Of course, I thought the Internet would not be big either, so take my counsel for what you paid for it.

At the Ace of Spades weekly book thread, Perfesser Squirrel reports on going to a library book sale.

And buying 12 books.

Last time I went to a library book sale, I got 26 books, an audio book, four or five magazines, a stack of videos, and a stack of records.

Next Saturday, I’m going to the Clever branch of the Christian County Library for its annual book sale. If I only come away with 12 books, it probably means there were only twelve books left. I mean, it will be $3 bag day. Last year, I got 36 books into two bags. My first job as a grocery bagger continues to save me money.

But Perfessor Squirrel, who claims to work at a university, is a rookie. One does not get to the next level of book ownership at 12 a week.

I mentioned ten years ago that I was thinking about letting my then young sons read a box of banged-up comic books that came from my youth.

I mean, I had some comics from my youth that were in pretty good shape which I bagged up and put into long, then short boxes. But I also had some that were banged up, were missing covers, or were sold to me after being remaindered–the price and issue number removed and returned to the publisher for refund, but the then unsaleable books packaged into poly bags and sold in bunches for the cost conscious ten year old comic consumer. Some of the comics were old Harvey comics which came from my mother’s youth, when her aunt had a box of comics for my aunts to read when they came to visit.

Not long after that post, I did end up letting them have access to those comics, and some time thereafter, they disappeared into the bedroom that they shared at the time.

This week, my youngest was supposed to be cleaning his room, but he ended up in his brother’s room and reclaimed the comics in a different box and returned them to me.

In the intervening decade, some comics have been added from things I’ve bought them, and some have been destroyed by children’s negligence.

But I’ve sorted through them. I’ve got a stack of books which have intact covers which, even though they’re very low grade, I might bag and put into the short boxes and add to the comic book spreadsheet. I’ve got a larger stack of comic books which are missing their covers but look to be narratively intact which I am thinking I will put into a bin for my grandchildren when (if) I have some and they’re old enough. And I’ve got a… well, pile of bits and pieces of comic books which I thought I would recycle, but heaven forfend! Of course, I cannot get rid of anything, so I’ve saved it for découpage projects I never get around to.

But, of course, I have to read the books in stacks one and two again myself first.

I might have mentioned that I’ve predeterminedly named our next two kittens Jack Dawkins, the Artful Dodger, and Oliver Twist (even though they won’t be the kittens pictured in that post).

However: At our church picnic this weekend, we had a trivia “night” in the afternoon (which we, the North Side Mind Flayers, won, of course, but as I explained to my youngest, “We don’t gloat; we just win.”). One of the categories was Entertainment, and as I am the court jester (and not much of the court answerer these days), I said, “Existentialism? I AM ON IT!” Ah, but we never have a Philosophy category (although we always have a Disney category, which we won somehow, and a Sports category, where we held our own after many years of humiliation on it).

But, in the gag, suddenly, the next kitten name came to me (well, suddenly, today): Meowsault, L’Étranger.

You might laugh now and say, “Ah, but Brian J., you’re topped up on cats these days.”

So it might be.

But when I was thinking about getting a cat thirty years ago, I favored the name Machiavelli which I thought I would shorten to “Mach.” Now, I know him as Nico.

And I later quipped that “Meow’Dib” would be a good name for a cat…. And here we are.

So perhaps in a decade or so we will be onto Dodge, Twist, Meowsault, and maybe some of the Lovecraftian cat names.

Kim du Toit pointed to a PJMedia story covering something I read about perhaps elsewhere last week: Cargo Ship Carrying 3,000 Vehicles, Including 800 EVs, Burning Out of Control Off the Coast of Alaska

One of the Ace of Spades HQ co-bloggers–I think it’s Buck Throckmorton–regularly publishes stories not only arguing that EVs are a business boondoggle but also dangerous, and he highlights stories of cargo ships catching fire and parking garages catching fire and what a calamity these isolated instances are.

And then I, of course, remember the Israeli pager escapade (Operation Grim Beeper), where the Israelis had spent a decade or so infiltrating walkie-talkies laden with explosives and then pagers laden with explosives into its enemy’s communications network and then set them off to best effect. With but mere explosives.

Now: Look around you at the number of lithium-ion rechargeable batteries in your house or in your garage. Laptops. Power tools. Rechargeable gadgets. How many of those batteries were made in a nation whose interests run counter to our nation’s? What would happen if they had a trigger circuit that caused an overload and all of them, nationwide, burst into flames?

We were discussing this a bit on the way to the church picnic yesterday. Also, in the event of an imminent attack, would it be preferable for protective EMP detonations to only fry all electronics nationwide without damn near every building burning down as well?

Oh, the things I think about when not reading lurid paperbacks for escape.

UPDATE: It is Buck Throckmorton, and he posted about this drifting inferno this morning after my post appeared.

A “unpaid toll” scam text came in yesterday:

You know, it has been several weeks since I last pointed out that Missouri does not have a Department of Motor Vehicles. Nor toll booths.

The “North Missouri” statutes indicates that the Philippines-numbered scammer has not done much research into the continental United States. But, really, how much effort do you want to put into a broadcast like this?

Earlier this week, Wirecutter shared this meme:

I’ve been saying it since at least 2018.

Scandinavian Teens Circa 1965:

But look at them. They look so much older than that. I figure they’ve got these things going for them to make them look older:

* They’re dressed like adults, unlike twenty year olds from today.
* They’re dressed like our grandparents looked (or your great grandparents if you’re under 20) in old photographs.
* They’re Europeans, who tend to look older than Americans anyway.
* Also, they’re not twenty year olds from today, who tend to look younger than their counterparts ha’centuries ago. This is not just dress (See the first bullet point above), but also in skin and general health. Better nutrition, I guess.

They Don’t Look So Young, But… (2021):

Those girls are, what, two years older than my oldest? But they look so much older. Partially probably because it’s black and white and partially because they’re wearing the clothing that my mother wore in some of her pictures, and my mother was old to me when I was young and my mother was younger than I am.

But, wait, look closely at the faces.

Ah, yes, now I can see teenagers in those old people clothes.

A Family Photo From The Paper’s Archives, Or Something Else? (2022):

It’s not actually a family photo; it is a picture of winners of the electrical co-operative’s essay winners.

Which probably means that they’re in high school.

The photo is undated, but I’m guessing early 1960s.

But none of my posts summed it up as succinctly as the meme. Although it looks as though it might have had an additional filter applied with the updated hair style.

Now, about the updated hair style: That’s pretty undated, ainna? Unless you’re a hair dresser or are really, really attuned to hair (i.e., you’re a certain type of woman), that hair style could just about be from anywhere past the late 1970s, ainna? I mean, not the tip of the spearmint of fashion, but you could imagine a woman wearing it anywhere in the last fifty years, ainna? It’s not the big hair of the 1980s, but not every girl wore that. Styles have kind of blurred and come around again in a way that they really didn’t from the 1960s. Heck, even the male mushroom head short on the sides and mop on top from the late 1990s came around a couple years ago–my son wore his hair that way for a while before deciding on a proper curl ‘fro which could have also come from the era.

What’s my point? I guess the meme reflects what I’ve said before. I dunno. I just have to waste a lot of words on it because I pay myself by the word and because longer posts cost money-losing AI companies more to train their LLMs on my copyrighted material. And if I’m not getting paid for it, I’m going to make them pay for it.

They’re called carpenter jeans, and I get them a waist size up because I need the pocket space.

Although if I ever saw actual modern kickin’ jeans, I might give them a try.

We were scheduled to stay at Big Cedar Lodge for a week. But after three nights and two days, we decided to leave. Why? Well it wasn’t just one thing but a collection. Continue reading “Brian J.: Vacation Quitter” →

Wilder writes about AI in Robot Brains and Breakouts and burnishes my job prospects:

Computer Science majors now have the highest unemployment rates of recent grads. English poetry majors have better job prospects. I guess “learn to code” can be replaced with “learn to think about an ode”.

I’d feel better about that if writing poetry paid money (that one science fiction poem aside). I actually have a couple pieces appearing next month, but they paid nothing, not even contributors’ copies since it’s an online journal.

But I’ll be helping to train the next generation of LLMs, so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice. If only the poems weren’t about having a death wish.

So whilst the pastor was delivering a sermon about city and country mindsets based on a reading in Revelation, my mind wandered afield instead of hanging on every word, and….

Hey, that’s my godson as the acolyte. We don’t actually see him that often these days–they are a split Lutheran/Baptist family, and although the kids are going through the Lutheran confirmation program, they mostly attend the Baptist church. I hope he’s doing well in his moral instruction as our souls are linked in the accounting, or so I think. Maybe that’s only Catholics or something.

At any rate, he needs some direction from the pastor; he looks like he wants to take the candle lighter back to the rectory instead of putting it in the holder so he can snuff the candles after service. And ever since reading a treatise on knife fighting last month, I’ve been giving thought to what things would be handy in the event of a bad guy with a knife. And the candle holder, assuming it’s solid brass, would be handy.

But how would you wield it? It’s maybe 36″ long, so it’s a bit long for a kama:

And it’s a little short for a halberd:

Maybe like a gaffing hook?

Of course, all of these have a point instead of a snuffing bell.

To be honest, I’d probably flip it and grip it by that and for a better grip and just treat it like a stick since my dojo trains stickfighting a lot. It used to teach gun and knife defense, but the best defense against a knife is distance (run away). Or I would use it like a short halberd, poking with the lighting end and trying to grab at the knife hand with the curve.

It’s all academic, though, since I’m never on the altar, and, fortunately, nobody shows up at service brandishing a knife.

But I am thinking about affecting a jaunty walking stick with a heavy handle.