Author Archives: Old Jules

Mandatory Liability Insurance and the School Bus

Posted on June 28, 2012 | 4 comments

Neglected to mention, for anyone interested, I talked to the insurance folk about mandatory liability insurance should the bus jump into my life.  Turns out every one of those seats is a potential injured passenger with an axe to grind.  Insuring it with the seats intact is out of the question.

But my insurance carrier doesn’t insure school busses converted to RVs, or whatever rhymes with an RV this would become if I do what I’d planned doing with it.  The lady would have to search out a special insurance company to provide coverage, and while it would be cheaper than a bus, cheap is relative.

Her wild guess without having chased it down is that a year of insurance on it will be in a range I’d consider outside mine.

If the guy who has it drifts down into something I’d be willing and able to meet, getting tags on it will be costly, insurance probably worse, rendering it a yoke around my neck I couldn’t reasonably expect to carry.

I asked the I Ching what it thought about the matter and the hexagram it gave was ‘Dangerous Depths’, with changing lines advising caution.

Which, of course, I am.  Cautious, I mean.  Dangerous depths don’t bother me but I like to keep my altitude below me, as opposed to above me.

Everything else being equal.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2012, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Survival, Texas, Transportation, Trucks

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Suppression of Public Discussion of How Damned Hot It Is

Posted on June 28, 2012 | 12 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

I went to town a few days ago to get the stolen car covered by liability insurance, and when I returned the Great Speckled Bird was defunct.  Evidently decided it was better to take his chances on ending up in a factory farm for chickens next lifetime than put up with more of Old Sol’s blessings during this one.

Naturally his passing stirred things up considerably here.  The bachelor roosters were promoted to full-fledged hen-chasers and released to free range daily, sleep with the flock, nights.  But it’s also caused an undercurrent of rumors.  Whisperings and quiet cluckings nights when the doers can’t be identified and prosecuted.  Claims that it wasn’t just the heat offed TGSB, but radioactive fallout. 

It’s partly my own fault.  One of the felines was probably sneaking a look when I was reading trivia such as the article below:

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/5/prweb9498292.htm

Gen. Stubblebine’s prognosis is dire: “When the highly radioactive Spent Fuel Rods are exposed to air, there will be massive explosions releasing many times the amount or radiation released thus far. Bizarrely, they are stored three stories above ground in open concrete storage pools. Whether through evaporation of the water in the pools, or due to the inevitable further collapse of the structure, there is a severe risk. United States public health authorities agree that tens of thousands of North Americans have already died from the Fukushima calamity. When the final cataclysm occurs, sooner rather than later, the whole Northern Hemisphere is at risk of becoming largely uninhabitable.

“. . . The US Government’s statistics document an excess death rate of 20,000 US residents, mostly healthy infants, in the first 9 months following the multiple nuclear events at Fukushima. . As a humanitarian, strategist, intelligence analyst, father and grandfather, General Bert understands that doing nothing is, quite simply, not an option.

“. . . The lack of information is, however, a matter of State policy in Japan where it is now a felony offense to discuss negative aspects of either nuclear power or the Fukushima situation in particular.”

Old General Bert’s correct, the cats, chickens and I all agree.  Doing nothing is not an option.  But as Commander in Chief around here, I’m not aware of a damned thing I can do, nor of anything the cats and chickens can do to influence whether the Northern Hemisphere becomes largely uninhabitable.

Any more than we can do anything about this heat wave, except hunker down and try to think of ways to not follow TGSB into the next incarnation.  And maybe try to find something useful to occupy ourselves despite the standing 8-count we’re all trying to function in.

For starters, I’m declaring martial law within the hearing-radius of the cabin and henhouse.  Japan, at least, can be accused of doing something, even though not a damned thing can be done.  I’m taking a page from Japan’s book and making it a criminal offence for any item of poultry, feline, or human being here to say, “Damn it’s hot.”  Or, “Reckon how radioactive it is today?”

Old Jules

12 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Animals, Chickens, Country Life, Current Issues, Free-ranging-chickens, Government, Human Behavior, Politics, Science, Survival, Texas

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Roswell – 1947

Posted on June 25, 2012 | 13 comments

Just so’s to clear up my own position regarding the ‘Roswell Incident’.

After I read Witness To Roswell I came away convinced all those interviews had put the ball into the other end of the court insofar as what happened back then and who needed to carry the burden of proof.  I carried that line of thought around a few years, including the time of the visit with Loretta.

But my second-thoughts about whether I’d trust the book began when, maybe a year ago, I began getting emails from one of the authors of the book.  I’m not certain what it was about his emails cause me to experience a growing body of mistrust, suspicion and dislike, but something did.  My gut feel left me thinking I wouldn’t trust the guy far enough to want to step on him barefooted.

So, I’m back where I was from the beginning.  I have no idea what happened out on wossname’s ranch in 1947, other than what Loretta said about it during our conversation.  And I quite honestly don’t think it much matters in the overall scheme of things, what happened, what anyone believes happened, nuthun.

Nuthun at all.  I couldn’t care less whether there are aliens zipping around this planet, time travellers, government flying machines, new world order robots, Roswellcrucians, ghosts, phantoms, vampires, or just bored people making things up.

Old Jules

13 Comments

Posted in 1940's, UFOs

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Blushes, Apologies and Corrections Regarding Loretta Proctor et al

Posted on June 25, 2012 | 5 comments

About the post a longish whle back: 

An Afternoon with Aunt Loretta (Proctor)- Roswell, 1947 and UFO and Certainties About What Isn’t

I posted a whatchallit, vignette, I suppose, about a visit with Kay’s aunt [I thought], Loretta Proctor.  Evidently I made a lot of foolish errors, for which I apologize.  Here are a series of comments correcting my errors from Veda Proctor.

Hope this clears everything up sufficiently.  I lost track of most family relationships in my own life a long while back and probably don’t attach enough importance to the specifics where they apply to others, is the only excuse I can give.

Veda Proctor:

Jules-just to say, Anonymous has the facts, word for word. Kay is the niece of Ellis Hodge, Mama’s (or as you know her, “Aunt Loretta”) second husband. This is being written by Veda, the daughter that Loretta lives with to this day. I was the one you talked with when you came up with Kay and Gale. Dee was Mama’s third son, not a step son. Timothy is Dee’s son. Don’t know where that all came from. We don’t even call him Timothy. And I don’t think anything ever traumatized Dee. He would never talk about it much, because to a 7 year old, “it was just a bunch of junk”. It really did not impress him at all. He never saw the second sight at all. He never had any piece of it that he kept hidden away, there was one person, deceased many years ago, that she suspected would have some of it, if anyone did. Dee never ducked an interview, he would tell anyone who asked the same thing that he told us. “To a 7 year old, it was just a bunch of junk”. Our family has only been in the area for 95 years, so we pretty much knew who every one was even remotely close. Never heard of Wright, never had a neighbor named Thomas Edington, and Truman Spencer lived over 30 miles away. Travel in those days was difficult, to say the least, so not sure how his daughter managed to get to the site. Mama would have never referred to Dee as a spoiled brat. Until the military came out, the only way anyone got to the site was horseback. So there was not a lot of people knew about it. This article has people from all over the world hunting “hidden relics” that do not exist. That makes me slightly uncomfortable. Anyone who wants to hear what Mama had to say should stick with the basic interview that was posted and can be found by anyone doing a search on Loretta Proctor on their computer. That one has had nothing added, and nothing taken from it. Thank you. And again, I am not anonymous, I am VEDA.
Submitted on 2012/06/25 at 10:21 AM
It dawned on me that Kay is a niece to Lorettas second husband but I stand firm on the names and step situation, And No Metal Was Kept. Also Trumans grandsons were born over 20 years after the crash, Mac Brazels family lived in Tularosa not Las Cruces.

sorry to bother you again but I misunderstood the relationship to Truman. His daughter if she was even born at that time would have had to ride horseback over 30 miles as the crow flies to get to the crash site. I noticed on Vedas response she put the last name SPENCER. That family ranched between WHITE OAks and Carrizozo and the family you referred to ranched close to hiway 285 at least 30 miles from the crash site. I know about the PROCTOR family and that part of the world as I am from that part of the world. There were some EDINGTONS with connections to that area but coming from a family that lived there for years no one knew a THOMAS.

Thanks, Anonymous, for the clarification on the man with the first name of Truman. I immediately think of the ones near Carrizozo, MY MISTAKE!!! Anyone out there, PLEASE do NOT start contacting this family, as trying to get fact from fiction is tough enough, when people, (me included) do not proof read, and inadvertently call a wrong name, much less try to locate something that is not there, in the first place!! Again, you are absolutely, and totally correct in this reply you have made. VEDA

5 Comments

Posted in 1940's, UFOs

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RC Royal Crown Cola and Tom’s Toasted Peanuts

Posted on June 24, 2012 | 10 comments

Despite the fact of Asians having become so much more intelligent, better educated, industrious, innovative, inventive and economically responsible than westerners during the last half-century, a few things are still out there they’ll never catch up on.  One of those is RC Royal Crown Cola with a bag of Tom’s Toasted Peanuts or Planter’s Peanuts floating in it.

A couple of other things they’ll never surpass us on include the kind of Italian food you’ll get down at the Fongoul Restaurant, Mexican food New Mexico style with green such as you’ll get at Cojone’s Mexican Cafe, and those fantastic Greek sandwiches I can’t recall the name of.  Guido? 

You’d have to have peeked into the kitchens of a few Chinese restaurants during your lifetime to know that, though all other Asians have it figured out, the Chinese got left behind about 10,000 years ago in matters of basic food sanitation.  If you eat in Chinese food joints much there’s a middling good chance you’ve eaten something that’s already been through a Chinese digestive tract, introduced to the food when he clipped his toenails into the egg drop soup.

That’s the reason Chinese restaurants use all that MSG, even though they know it will probably give you a stroke one of these days.  Covers up the taste of other things got in there, either by accident, or design.

I don’t claim to understand why it’s so.  Koreans, Japanese, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Thai, they’re all probably more concientious about food sanitation in their restaurants than the average westerner.  But the Chinese restaurant that isn’t feeding customers cockroaches, toenails and spit is by far the exception, rather than the rule.

I’ve heard the matter discussed among health department inspectors more times than I can remember [none of whom would dare eat Chinese without having gone over the food preparation area before-hand].

Maybe they’re still trying to get even with Christian missionaries for the Taiping rebellion and figure everyone else qualifies as collateral damage.

Old Jules

10 Comments

Posted in 2012, America

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Uppidy Modern Human Beings

Posted on June 24, 2012 | 1 comment

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

21st Century human beings, and those of us left over from the 20th tend to get fairly uppidy and smarty pants about all the people we managed to slaughter during the 20th Century.  That, and how many we’re likely to off inadvertently here pretty soon [what with the Japanese sewer plants spewing radioactivity into next week’s cat food and whatnot].  We think we were special and innovative with WWI, WWII, the Gulags, Cambodia, Viagra – er, Biafra, the German camps, the Rape of Nanking and other incidentals perpetrated by the Japanese Empire, the pre-WWII French death camps in the Carib for their felons and political problems, Mexican revolutions, Great Cultural Revolution in China.

Mostly fairly piddly stuff compared do what a lot of our ancestors pulled off.  About the time we Americans were bragging about how many people got slaughtered at Gettysburg, in China they were actually doing it up right with the Taiping rebellion.  Bloodiest civil war in the history of humanity and until WWII took the trophy for killing more people than any war of any kind.  100,000 people slaughtered in a single day in the battle of Nanking.

A government clerk named Hung got hold of a Christian Missionary tract in the 1850s,  “Good Words to Admonish the Age“, understood it and decided he was the brother of Jesus.  Set about establishing a new heaven on earth with one-hell-of-a-lot fewer people in it, none of whom didn’t believe he was the brother of Jesus.  Came damned close to succeeding, too, insofar as the Manchu Empire was concerned.

Then there was Queen Ranavalona I of Madagascar, decided she didn’t like people who didn’t belong to her own tribe, killed off two-three million of them during the 1840s.  Survivors dressed up like Europeans, did opera, ate with the right forks and spoons.  But honestly didn’t like Europeans, either.  Butchered or enslaved any of them they could catch.  On second thought, didn’t like anyone else, either.  Gave them mostly the same treatment when they could catch them.

Keep in mind there were a lot fewer people available to be offed in those days, and a million was a lot, compared to the 20th Century where it dwindled down and got piddly.

Just because you’ve got a television where you can hear about it and keep count with a computer doesn’t mean you’re any better at it than your great-granddad.  Considering the tools he had to work with, he was better at it than you.

Old Jules

1 Comment

Posted in 2012, History, Human Behavior, Survival

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Loaded With Extras

Posted on June 23, 2012 | 11 comments

I take the view the only really necessary parts on a vehicle are:

  1. Engine and drive train,
  2. wheels of some description
  3. Steering device
  4. Throttle
  5. Someplace to sit or stand.

This car is loaded with extra parts.  For instance, notice that hood with all the paint on it and the little hump.  That hump was caused sometime when something flew off the engine and instead of heading off somewhere the driver wouldn’t have to deal with it, bounced it back into the engine compartment.

Paint is a definite useless extra, and the hood doesn’t do anything except make it more difficult to get to the engine.  Same as that windshield.  Just something else to break.  If the car didn’t have a windshield it wouldn’t need windshield wipers forever wearing out.

Look at all that expensive, useless crap they hang on those cars.  Bumper.  Mirrors, lights.  Just more stuff to go wrong or get knocked off.  Something covering the radiator.

More useless paint, little signs hung all over the place, hubcaps.  Reflectors.

All that stuff on the tires to wear out.  If they’d just wrap the hubs with electrical tap they’d never go flat.  Or make them out of solid rubber so’s a person could wear them all the way down to the axles, or at least the hubs.

Look at all this junk!  Tail lights.  Some kind of weird handle across the trunk.  More little signs.  A back window.  A tail pipe!  A dadgummed tail pipe hanging out there to catch on rocks and deadfall trees.  But most of this extra stuff will take care of itself over time just getting in and out of here. 

Luckily, the brakes are fairly spongy so’s I won’t have to trouble myself with them long.  If I need to stop planned, I’ll just shut down the engine.  Or emergencies, put it into reverse, or parking gear.  Or run it into something heavy.

Old Jules

11 Comments

Posted in Transportation

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Unplanned Protrusions

Posted on June 23, 2012 | 15 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

A person with his ear to the ground listening for possibilities and interference from the Coincidence Coordinators can find himself in unexpected places, which I did.  Yesterday.

Had to go into town for groceries and animal necessities, but I’d been watching that bus for about six weeks.  Thought it might be time to begin feeling around in the head of the man who owns it. 

We were sitting in the car lot office circling the issue, nobody putting a toe in the water when a Lincoln pulled up in front and a guy got out, shouting, “I put serious stuff up my nose!”  He was shouting it non-verbally, but body language communicates sufficiently sometimes.

He jitterbugged into the office – it was clear he and the owner knew one another – and pointed across the lot to an older model American somewhat small car. 

Tweaker talking a mile a minute:  I’ve got checks out I need to beat to the bank with cash.  Would you buy that car from me for $1400 cash right now?

Owner:  No.

Tweaker:  $1300?

Owner:  No.

This progress worked its way down $100 at a time to $400, the owner nodding negative.  The tweaker paused.  “No?”

Owner:  NO.  I’ve got a cash flow problem here.  When I sold you that car I’d taken it on a trade in.

Tweaker turns to me:  Would you buy it?:

Me:  No.  That ain’t my kind of car.

Tweaker:  Huh.  I guess I’d better try to sell it to someone else then.  I’ll get my stuff out of it.

Tweaker goes out to the Chevi, takes a lot of stuff out of the back seat and carries it over to the Lincoln.  Meanwhile, I’m thinking.

Me to owner:  Would it be any problem for you if I bought that car from him?

Owner:  He bought it from me.  I don’t have anything to do with it now.

So, I got to the car about the same time as the tweaker returned to it, asked him about it.  Keep in mind, he’d talked to me in the office a few minutes earlier, asked if I’d buy it for $400.

Tweaker:  Would you buy it for $1400.

Me, scowling:  No

Tweaker:  $1300?

Me:  No.  Do you remember me?  I was in there with you and him a few minutes ago.

Tweaker:  Sure.  Would you give me $1200?

Me:  No.

We worked our way back down, me assuring him I honestly wasn’t certain I was interested at any price.  So we went over it, looking at everything, listening to the engine, driving it around the parking lot.

Tweaker:  Are you going to buy it?

Me:  You only got down to $600.  We aren’t down to talking about it yet.

Tweaker:  But you haven’t made any offer.

Me:  I’ll give you $400 lock stock and barrel.  No sales tax, no nothing else.

Tweaker:  That’s just the amount I was hoping for.

Turned out the papers from him buying it hadn’t come back from DVM yet, so I sent him off to get whatever was needed to sign it over to me and he left, saying he’d be back there at 2:00 pm.  I went off to a couple of thrift shops and returned at 2:00.  He was nowhere to be seen, so I hung around chewing the fat with the car lot owner until he arrived back and we did the motions of transferring things him jittering and jotting, talking incoherently.  We had a blank form and he signed it, wrote out a bill of sale on a piece of notebook paper.  Barely readable.

The story should have ended there, me coming back here to get Gale to haul me to town to pick it up.  But the tweaker had a lot of dances and fast peter-piper-picked-a-pail-of-pickle-peppers left in him he needed to get out.  Asked me if he should give me $100 back on the car.  No idea why.

Me:  No.  We’re okay. 

Eventually I nudged him friendly out to the Lincoln so he could go take care of the bank.  Went back inside the office shaking my head, made arrangements to leave it in the lot a few hours, or until this morning so’s I could come pick it up.  We all shook our heads at one another, shrugged, shook our heads some more and I was on the road home.

Gale was ecstatic, knowing he won’t be loaning me Little Red anymore for my necessaries.

Me, I’m just tickled the Coincidence Coordinators are so much smarter than me.  When the time comes I’ve figured out I don’t need it I’m comfortable I won’t lose money on it, provided it still runs.  But even as junk I won’t lose much if it comes to that.

Old Jules

15 Comments

Posted in 2012, Texas, Transportation

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Tough realities

Posted on June 22, 2012 | 8 comments

Good morning readers.  During a thunder storm passed over here a few nights ago I was pondering this experience most people think of as a lifetime.  Specifically, this one of mine and where it appears to be from where I’m viewing it.  Lowest common denominators, that sort of thing.

Maybe it was one of those lightning bolts came through the roof and dropped a cargo in my head.  But it came to me in a flash of uninvited insight that if a person wants to decrease the volume or surface area of a cone or cylinder in any significant way, it’s the radius, not the height he’s going to have to change.

My first thought was it’s a lousy piece of news, but it isn’t news.  It’s been there all along.  I just didn’t happen to focus my attention on it.  Can’t possibly be lousy news if it was there all the time.

Old Jules

8 Comments

Posted in 2012

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Keeping the Sacrifices Hidden – Straw Men, Trojan Horses and Pick-Pockets

Posted on June 20, 2012 | 19 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

I’ve been pondering this strange dearth of political bumper-stickers, which seems to me to be unprecedented for a year of national elections.  Particularly contests over who’s to be king.  Maybe it’s just the fact it doesn’t matter anymore.  The scrapings of US production so far gone what’s left isn’t worth stealing. 

But maybe there’s another factor at work.

One of the big let-downs of the post WWII era for kings, king-makers, wannabe kings and king-makers, war profiteers, and economic shell-game artists, was the citizenry.  They were stupid, but not as stupid as they needed to be to satisfy the hopes and expectations of those who needed their [preferably active, but at leat tacit] consent to be gang raped.

By the end of the Vietnam War it became obvious that, aside from a few mindless flag-wavers and a re-definition of the word ‘patriot’, most of the citizenry wouldn’t support long-duration undeclared wars, for instance.  Even when the body-bags only contained volunteers.  Even when the sacrifices were disguised in exponential growth of national debt.

Frustrating, tricky business.  Constantly having to dream up Wars on Poverty, Wars on Drugs, Wars on Terrorism to keep them from  noticing their pocketbooks and jobs were going away.  Convincing them  the reason was undocumented workers, non-Christian religious fanatics, and the folks who couldn’t find jobs.

Maybe there’s just a growing realization within the population that it’s already been robbed of everything of value, that it allowed itself to be surrounded with cops, mercenaries, a huge prison system, sophisticated weaponry, and personal debt it can never repay.

And not a single name they could put on a bumper sticker who isn’t a part of what did it, will continue doing it.

Maybe they’re finally just saying, “To hell with it.  They can kill me, but they can’t eat me.”  At least not until someone discovers a way for politicians, bankers, multi-national chief executives, and dynastic wealthy to live longer by ‘donated’ body parts of the citizenry as a means of collecting personal debts or paying off national ones.

Old Jules

19 Comments

Posted in 2012, Government, Human Behavior, Liars, Military, Police, Politics

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