Category: Life

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.

My cousin posted this on Facebook, an invitation to an event where she teaches yoga:

The philosophy of the Gita is that it’s your duty to go out there and slaughter your friends and family in war.

Man, if the yoga moms are gearing themselves up, something’s coming.

Likely because every time my beautiful wife puts Garlic Powder on the list, I mistakenly grab another jar of Garlic Salt.

The grocery store is not helping.

Garlic Powder is on sale, but both rows in its slot are faced with Garlic Salt. And the one (1) jar of Garlic Powder is slotted where the Garlic Salt goes.

Ah, well. The three jars of Garlic Salt in the spice cabinet at home means it easier to find one when cooking. As I’ve started roasting potatoes with a variety of spices, I’ve picked up some more exotic flavorings (rosemary, dill, marjoram) that I didn’t think we had, but my wife has said we do. Oh, now I find them.

So I’m seeding my spice cabinet with duplicates to make sure I can locate one when I need it.

Now, the next trick is to use them before they lose their flavor.

A couple of years ago, when I was still driving my youngest to youth group (before he could drive himself), I would get to the church to pick him up a little early (as is my wont for all things). This particular summer evening, I had the windows down, and I was listening to the birds and the wind in the trees and just soaking in the ambience of the quiet Sunday evening in the neighborhood. When the youth group came out, one of the young ladies in the cohort said, “What is he doing?” referring to me, just sitting there with my automobile off and no device in my hand.

The New York Post reprints a Fortune piece based on a podcast at the 31 Flavors last night, so I guess it’s pretty serious: The new rawdogging? Workers are ‘barebacking’ on their way to the office — and fellow commuters are furious:

Curiously dubbed “barebacking,” the NSFW-sounding practice involves forgoing all tech and either gazing into space or — even worse — making repeated, awkward eye contact with other passengers like some kind of subterranean serial killer, Fortune reported.

Podcaster Curtis Morton, who coined the term, recently slammed straphangers who engage in the questionable practice in a TikTok video with 100,000 views.

“You’ve commuted enough times,” the Brit, who cohosts the “Behind The Screens” podcast, ranted in the clip. “Why are you sitting there without a phone, without a book, just looking at me, looking at what’s going on? Just do something!”

As I’m able to sit and enjoy my rich interior monologue without reading a book or scrolling through meaningless Internet drivel (like this blog post!) for long periods of time, I’m a bit of an outlier even amongst these Gen-Z-Discoverers. And since that night, I’ve wondered if it indeed makes people uncomfortable.

I guess so, for Gen-Z people who need something to rant about on obscure TikToks anyway.

But when I commuted on mass transit for hours a day, in my college years, I didn’t have devices, and I did not focus on books, especially college textbooks. The neighborhoods I went through required that you keep your attention on your surroundings.

I got a new computer over the weekend.

My old PC was only five years old, and it is probably adequate, but it’s had a whine somewhere within, and I was reluctant to tear it apart to find it. I actually did at the beginning of 2024; my employer provided an annual $200 stipend for office supplies, so I opened it up and gave it a listen and thought it was the power supply fan, so I replaced the power supply. But that was not it. Audio playback was starting to fade in and out as well, and it was laden with cruft–basically, in the five years I’d had it, I had installed all sorts of frameworks, servers, and databases that left behind detritus when uninstalled–so it was taking 30 minutes to come to the desktop after a reboot. So I decided it was time.

I am about to disappoint you, gentle reader, but I did not build my own rig. Continue reading “A Big Iron On My Desk” →

After picking up a number of DVDs at an estate sale recently, I popped this film in first because it’s been in the news recently (last November I posted because some media outlets call retard/retarded “the R-word”).

You know, I think my beautiful wife and I saw this film in the theater, but that would have had to have been on a date night since we had two very young children when this film came out, so maybe we saw it on cable? More likely the theater. There was a time when we would go to a new Ben Stiller film as a matter of course, but this might have been the turning point in that. Not only because we stopped going to movies as frequently once we had kids, but also because Stiller and his crew lost a little something. Or we aged out.

This film is about a group of five actors making a Vietnam War movie: Stiller plays an action movie star who is losing his box-office appeal; Robert Downey, Jr., plays an Australian method actor who undergoes John Howard Griffith treatment so he can play a black man; Jack Black plays an drug addict known for low-brow comedies; some geeky-looking guy plays the actor playing the geeky-looking guy; and some guy plays a rap/hip hop artist trying to break into movies whilst promoting his energy drink and snacks. The shoot, on location, is in trouble, so the author of the book upon which the film is based suggests some cinéma vérité by dropping the actors in the jungle with a vague plan of the goals in the script and to really get into character. After a speech about the goals, the director steps on a landmine and is vaporized. So the actors try to get to point A and then rendezvous with the chopper on their own. Unbeknownst to them, they’re in the area of a drug processing camp with real bad guys afoot.

So the main gags are Ben Stiller is earnest but not too bright; Downey is too enmeshed in his role, leading to conflict with the hip-hop artist; Jack Black is Jack Black; the efforts of Stiller’s shallow agent to get him a Tivo on location as specified in his contract; and Tom Cruise not looking like Tom Cruise as the profane studio head.

So too much of the humor is a bit of inside baseball in the movie making business to really make the film funny. It’s amusing in spots, but not Stiller and his group in their primes. Still, er, I have the film on DVD now and can watch it again in 20 years if the mood again strikes me (and the DVDs don’t decay–so far, so good).

in my post this weekend about the potential for buying CDs, DVDs, and VHSes for a buck and selling them at a profit: VHS, cassettes find new life at NYC event as hundreds of analogue enthusiasts are ‘fed up with streaming services’

Cassette sales have surged 440% in the last decade, per NPR, and VHS stores are on the rise — from Blockbuster’s return in the UK to the opening of VHS stores from Maryland to California.

“I think it’s a lot more appealing to the people to do that now than ever before,” said Aaron Hamel, co-owner of Night Owl Video, a VHS and DVD store that opened in Williamsburg this year. “I saw the record resurgence, and I feel like physical media for movies is sort of the same environment [vinyl] was 20 years ago.”

At the NYC Tape Fair, Night Owl Video’s VHS sales included a copy of David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man” and “Love Camp 7,” which Hamel describes as a “Nazi exploitation movie from the 70s.”

Stores selling physical media will last at least as long as self-serve frozen yogurt shops.

The church at the end of our farm road was having its annual(?) sale, and since I scored a couple records up there two years ago, I wanted to go. So I shanghaied my youngest, who became excited at the thought of maybe finding some collectible coins or trading cards cheap, and thought we would hit that sale and an estate sale whose sign I’d seen on Friday.

As it turns out, he was eager to stop at other sales, and a subdivision close to the estate sale was having its annual(?) subdivision sale which promised a number of sales in close proximity, and so we hit a number.

I mostly got videos.

I picked up two books at the church sale and one at the estate sale:

• You Can Teach Yourself Country Guitar since I’m collecting these books but am not using them to learn the guitar I bought seven years ago.
• Feasting: A Celebration of Food In Art, an art monograph centered on still lives with food.
• Business French: An Intermediate Course for my beautiful wife who has been taking Duolingo lessons for, what, two years now?

I also picked up three CDs. Well, four, as one is a two disc set:

• Christmas Party by She and Him wherein “She” is Zoey Deschanel. I’ll raise a glass to Charles Hill when I listen to it which will be before Christmas.
• Jazz for the Quiet Times, a two disc (as I mentioned) compilation of lesser-known (or unknown) jazz artists.
• The Great American Soundbook II: As TIme Goes By by Rod Stewart. And the time has indeed gone by since this CD was new.

And, oh, the videos. The estate sale, which was really a downsizing sale (so I heard), had enough of a set spread across three different rooms that I wondered if the homeowner had not owned a video store. I got a number of titles that I’ve been looking for elsewhere, such as Vintage Stock in February.

• A couple of older Jackie Chan titles: Shaolin Wooden Men and Who Am I?
• The second, third, and fourth Rambo titles.
• Major League, which I sought specifically in February.
• The Cowboy Way with Woody Harrelson and Kiefer Sutherland; I might have seen part of this at some point as I might remember the end of it, but I don’t think I’ve seen the whole thing.
• VisionQuest whose name I remembered anyway.
• The Crow, which I’ve seen a time or two but did not have on physical media–it’s one that my beautiful wife has said “We don’t have that?” Now we do.
• Tropic Thunder which we saw in the theaters but have not seen since.
• A couple of old monster movies, Godzilla versus Mothra and Rodan. To go with the one already on the top of the cabinet which I’ve avoided since I bought it a couple years ago.
• The Expendables 2 since I just watched the first one two years ago.
• Kung Pow: The Legend of the Fist which we watched a long time ago. I am pretty sure I have seen it since that 2016 post–hopefully, I rented it and did not get a second copy.

At the rate I’m going, that’s movie watching for a decade to come.

But the whole stack set me back about twenty-five dollars.

Which makes me wonder if I could make a go of hoovering up old DVDs, videos, and CDs for a dollar or less per and getting a booth at an antique mall and listing them for a couple of dollars each. I might have mentioned that some of the booths devoted to DVDs are charging five dollars and up for DVDs. So if I got them for a dollar each + cleaned the libraries out on bag day….

Well, I will perhaps leave that to my son. Who was eager to go to garage sales, but did not find anything for himself. We stopped at a Walmart Neightborhood Market, and he bought a $40 Pokemon box, and he was ready to be done for the day. But he has not ruled out doing them in the future, so maybe I am back to being a peddler like I was 25 years ago.

UPDATE: Originally, I said I’d bought the first three Rambo movies because I thought maybe they’d retitled First Blood into Rambo to retcon the numbering (First Blood is the first, First Blood II: Rambo is the second, and Rambo III being the third). However, I’d forgotten that the much later fourth was simply Rambo which is the one I picked up here. So I’ll have to think about picking up First Blood if I want to binge them in order.

Brian J. !=

But I do have a little callus on the inside of my right thumb’s knuckle from holding the safety switch on power tools.

Not circular saws, though. Mostly the little battery-powered weed trimmer which got its first work of the season today.

The callus made it through the winter, though, without subsiding so the little bit of sawing that I might have done might have helped.