Confession #1: I’m in almost daily communication with the team of Toyota mechanical engineers who designed the 1991 Toyota 4-Runner and the Japanese Toyota assembly plant worker who tightened the starter-bolts on the one parked across the meadow jacked up and partly dissassembled.
Those men don’t need to have a command of the English language to be laughing and giving one another the high-five while saying: “Hahaha you Yankee pig! You’ll never get that starter off! Hahahaha! We nailed your young ass good!”
Although that bolt head is the ‘easy’ one, this American can’t get to it with any wrench yet invented for a straight-on shot. The mechanical engineers made sure of that. But the guy working in the assembly plant lacked sufficient confidence some can-do American wouldn’t come up with a way to put a wrench on it, so he torqued it down with a cheater-bar, thinks I.
Trying to get it loose repeatedly already has the grim prospect looming that I’m going to round off that head. If that happens I might as well take a cutting torch to the whole shebang and use it for a new chicken house.
The engineers did their job and the assembly-line worker did his. Now where did I leave that right-angle cutter and 300 foot extension cord?
But they had a backup plan. I’ve been talking about the easy one. This one I can’t even get into a position to see, but I think that might be it, back where I have to stick the camera in to try to get a view of it. I can’t think of a single way I’ll ever get a wrench anywhere near it.
Confession #2: I am the stupidest person you’ll ever encounter writing a blog on the Internet. The proof is enshrined here: The Communist Toyota 4-Runner. “But there it is. Hot diggedy damn!” “Easy! Easy money!” “Man, people pay good money to get to do a job as easy as this one’s going to be.”
This was written before I realized the rats are just a diversion and Chinese containerized cargo-boxes are the real invaders.
“Trouble!” says you. “What trouble?”
“The Ruskies went home a decade ago,” You say. “Berlin wall came down and no one even remembers it. The Germans are all running around hugging one another worrying about mad cows and leaving everyone else alone.
“We kicked the holy bejesus out of Samdam Hoooosane and his royal guards,” you say, “And might do it again if he doesn’t behave,” you say, “And we’re all safe and sound here in the land of milk and honey…..Ain’t gonna war no more,” you say, “Except the occasional invasion of a minor third rate Middle Eastern or Balkan country,” you say…..”All safe and sound, swords into plowshares, all that.”
And you really believe that, do you?
Well, if you believe that, you’d better prepare yourself for a shock down to your carefully manicured and polished toenails……’cause the real challenge is still out there, the real challenge is happening right there in your back yard even as we speak, in your attic, in the sewer under your squeaky clean porcelain commode; in the trees behind your quiet complacent little hidey hole you’ve made for yourself to stick your soft American head into.
You kept your guard up all those years because one of the Marx brothers talked about lulling the West into a false sense of security, and of course he was right. Of course he was.
Only the time-skid was slower than anticipated and all the Marx brothers died.
Yeah, Groucho and Harpo sleep with the fishes, but it’s still going on.
The fifth column is here, now, at work near you, near your home.
“Rats.” I say.
“Rats?” You say.
Yeah. Rattus Rattus, the good American rat, the roof rat, is the only real American who knows, and he ain’t saying much.
Old Rattus Rattus suffers silently in his simple Christian American way; fighting quietly for his homeland with American know-how. Sure, it sounds silly and pointy headed, Rattus Rattus, but that’s his damned name, same as yours is Homo Sexian or some such thing.
Rattus Rattus struggles without complaint for his tiny children, while slowly, the habitat and other lousy habits, recede every year. You ought to know by the name; Rattus Norvegicus, the Norwegian rat, the dreaded wharf rat: the foreign rat the communist pinko athiest moslem heathen yellowjapaneseinvader super rat of the future is bullying him back.
While you sleep there in your complacent soft pillowland, it’s going on outside and up in your attic, in the streets, the alleys, the sewerplants, the amber grainfields, the feedlots, the silos, Rattus Rattus battles for you against the silent invaders. Rattus Rattus draws his lines in the sand, digs his little burrows, fortifies, and retreats as the highly mechanized divisions of Norwegian rats advance, house by house, burrow by burrow……Every year the Rattus Rattus line moves inward a few miles, seven miles in along the whole perimeter.
Yeah. There are bulges, enclaves of encirclement. Enclaves of resistance, but Norvegicus takes no prisoners, spares no one. And you sleep silently, peacefully while your own good American rats are diminished, you who gutsylike bomb the bejesus out of other commie pinko foreign middleastern terrorist muslim and Balkans, sleep while your own brother-rats in your own back yard die without your help.
And what do you think, you sleeping bastards, will happen when the final conquest is complete? Do you think you will be left alone, when the last fighters have all fought on your behalf, when the silent armies of Rattus Rattus are all destroyed, all the food for ravens scattered on the battlefields of America? Don’t bet on it. The sound of scratching in the ceiling, inside the walls has barely begun.
Time to join the battle, fellow Americans, time to get out the cyanide, the 1080, the pellet guns and the mousetraps, time to stock up on cheese, and warfrin, and time to prepare for the big battle for America in the American way. Time to begin the manufacture of tiny tanks, (maybe Tonka and some of those can help) and artillery pieces, and scatterguns and nervegas and miniaturized nuclear weapons…..time to join in the real battle for America here at home.
If you aren’t with us, you are against us, behind enemy lines, already under the areas controlled by the foreign devils, and you won’t be spared, unless you form an underground, a fifth column of your own…..
They’ve already got all the other countries, the other continents, and as has happened so often in history, America stands alone against them, a tiny host of good American rats, behind the scenes, fighting against all odds for you, to the end……
And that doesn’t even touch on the imported fire ants killing our domestic fireants, the imported Africanized bees killing our good American queen bees and selfishly taking over the hives, the Russian Thistles (tumbleweeds) cluttering up our prairies, the imported hares (jackrabbits), the English Sparrows (that battle’s already lost), the tamaracs (salt cedars stealing our precious water for their foreign interests), and the imported fruitflies…….it’s all there, all in black and white, been written down, so it’s true …..a multi-pronged attack against all that’s good in America…..while you sleep…….
And now the foreign weathermen, the Canadians and Mexicans, are predicting our weather, keeping the good stuff for themselves……
In case you’re one of those people who hasn’t been staring at the sun, here’s a brief update before I tell you about an interesting tidbit in my life: Finding myself a character in a ‘memoir’ [actually a novel] written by my step-brother published as non-fiction. But important things first:
As you can see, the south pole stuff’s maintaining itself, still doing what it was doing when I last mentioned it.
Here’s today.
Still something going on down there, but the grandstanding is still north of the equator.
Strangeness
SINUOUS SUNSPOTS: A line of sunspots stretching across the sun’s northern hemisphere appears to be an independent sequence of dark cores. A telescope tuned to the red glow of solar hydrogen, however, reveals something different. The sunspots are connected by sinuous filaments of magnetism:
“These sunspots writhe and squirm energetically as they rotate away from us!” says John Nassr, who took the picture on Nov. 28th from his backyard observatory in Baguio, the Philippines.
The connections suggest an interesting possibility. While each sunspot individually poses little threat for strong solar flares, an instability in one could start a chain reaction involving all, leading to a widespread eruption. Readers with solar telescopes are encouraged to monitor developments.
I could write a lot about this but none of it would necessarily be true, so I’m doing my best not to have an opinion while keeping my foot in the door for afterward saying “I told you so,” if I can get by with it.
Okay. Now for the main thrust of this post. Before beginning the post I visited the Bobby Jack Nelson Forum on Amazon to see what was being said about him: http://tinyurl.com/7zj2la3
A while back I got an email on an old email address I rarely check anymore from a lady who wanted to discuss my step-brother, Bobby Jack Nelson. She explained he’d offed himself in a nursing home in San Saba, Texas, and that she’d had a long-term relationship with him.
But Bob had told her a lot of things she’d begun to think were lies. She just wanted to bounce some of them off me because she knew he and I had associated considerably during the 1980s and early 1990s when he was writing Keepers – A Memoir. http://tinyurl.com/d82tcsk.
To be honest the whole thing qualified as strange enough to keep life worth living. Bob and I saw quite a bit of one another during those years, and I knew he was writing a novel about, among other things, his childhood in Portales, New Mexico. I considered him a friend.
But one day in the late-1990s [as soon as the novel had been accepted by a publishing house, I later discovered] while I was living in Socorro, New Mexico, I got a call from Bob. He didn’t mention the novel, but he said he was going off to South America and wouldn’t be returning to the US, so I wouldn’t be hearing any more from him.
I got reports from various mutual acquaintances they’d seen him in Texas here and there, so I figured he just wanted to break off our association, which was puzzling, but okay by me. Then I got a call from a Dallas reporter asking what I thought of the book, which I hadn’t been aware was published.
Naturally, I bought and read a copy. Suddenly it was clear to me why the reporter had called me, but also why Bob had suddenly taken a powder. My first reaction to reading it would have been to trip up to that mountain town he was staying in while writing it and beat hell out of him.
I was honestly dumbfounded the man could bring himself to publish such a pack of lies as non-fiction. But a person would have had to have been there, or remembered what he’d said back earlier had happened, to recognize there was barely a grain of truth in any of it.
Gradually I cooled down and just forgot about Bob until the lady contacted me to tell me he was dead, and how he’d died.
We exchanged a lot of emails over several months, and it was a journey of mutual discovery. But the discoveries came in the form of Bob being an even worse liar than I’d have thought possible knowing already he was an accomplished liar. And for her, not knowing he was a liar at all, I suppose it provided her some closure to find the man she loved, somewhat idolized, was in awe of, was not the person she’d believed him to be.
Oddly enough, I think Bob tried to warn me a number of times about himself. Several times he told me over the years that he was a liar, but I didn’t grasp the extent of what he was saying. Other times he told me he wasn’t what I thought he was, and I shrugged that off, too.
But what came as a shock to me, first with the book, and later with what the lady told me, was that Bob absolutely despised me. That, I’d have never guessed during the years I wasted pieces of my life associating with him in what seemed a mutually warm, friendly relationship.
In the old days it was about taxes and heaping the payoff of the national debt on farmers who made whiskey out of their corn. In 1790, it was considered an abomination and the farmers rebelled. Abraham Washington or George Lincoln, I think it was, sent troops and eventually the Whiskey Rebellion became a footnote in history.
The song was ended but the melody lingered on.
Miss Marcy doesn’t quite fit the theme, but it involves whiskey stills, illicit sex, murder, dancing, adultery and other dirty stuff, and it’s a good song. I’d be remiss leaving it out.
The Night Chicago Died isn’t precisely historically accurate, but it’s the only song comes to mind encapsulating what Prohibition led to: Gangsters, cops and bystanders being gunned down, speakeasy whiskey nights, corruption, and a lot of richer cops, politicans and gangsters with nobody else better or worse for it except prison guards, more lawyers, judges and cops. Sound familiar?
Even into the 1960s illegal whiskey still brought a smile and tacit approval from a population unaffected by the tiny wars still going on between back-woods whiskey-makers and ‘reveneurs’. Not to be mistaken for Jack Daniels or Johnny Walker. Nobody was getting killed over in the Jack Daniels plant.
Roger Miller’s classic’s just another example the general public attitude as opposed to the governmental enforcement apparatus tactics.
The US Government isn’t a fast learner. They were already controlling and taxing whiskey. They’d have saved more treasure than anyone can imagine it they’d taken that approach to dealing with cocaine. The substance abuse happened, the machinery of justice cranked up to deal with it, the prisons filled, and the taxpayers paid, paid, paid without taking it off the streets. Nor even out of the prisons.
Much the same song, different stanza for the poppy derivative family.
But whiskey and illicit drugs weren’t enough. The only obvious place the government was successful collecting taxes across the board was on tobacco.
But even a lot of whiskey drinkers and cocaine snorters didn’t like smokers. Gradually smokers were eased over there with prostitutes when it came to hammering them out of existence.
I’ve included a lot of different versions of this next song because we’ve needed a lot of jails for the people who get crosswise with moral superiority, barrels full of money, cops, politicians, judges and people who just like to know people they don’t agree with are in jail.
I’ve had to leave prostitutes and prisons for women full of them out of this because nobody cares enough about them to write a song.
Old Sol’s finally recovering some dignity, getting some of the southern hemisphere melodrama behind him. He’s spun around about 90 degrees and you can still see some of it lower right near the horizon. But all-in-all he appears to be getting back to the business at hand.
Nobody’s sure what the business at hand is, there’s a nice little solar breeze flowing out of that coronal-hole complex mid-south, leading us the way a hunter leads a goose he’s trying to shoot down. It ought to reach us around the 29th of November. Interesting stuff happening down at the south pole. Remember where you heard it first.
I went up to turn out Kay’s chickens just before daybreak and kicked up a herd of about 20 wild turkeys, which we haven’t seen on this property in a goodly while. But the country’s filled with hunters now, and there was some shooting not-too-far from the property lines yesterday. They’re skittish critters and might have decided this side of the fences is safer, everything else being equal.
I swung into Kerrville yesterday to finally pick up that primer-bulb for the chainsaw and get chain and bar oil. In the AutoZone store I noticed a couple of things I think might actually be worth buying as new tools after studying them a while. One is a ratchet with 1/4 inch drive on one side and 3/8 inch drive on the other. It has a comparatively short handle and a break just where the ratchet handle ends with a swivel on it to allow the handle to be bent allowing access to communistly personal space invaded places.
The other was a set of two box-end wrenches with ratcheting heads covering 8mm, 10mm, 12mm, 13mm, 14mm, 17mm, 18mm and 19mm. If someone had told me yesterday morning I’d buy some new tools if I went to town they’d have lost intellectual standing in my eyes.
But looking at these I’m figuring I’m a pretty smart puppy.
Afterthought: Jeanne found a discarded copy of Chancellorsville, by Edward J. Stackpole and sent it to me for my birthday. I’m up to my elbows in it, finding it particularly interesting because the Stackpole generation of Civil War historians have such different perspectives about so many facets of what went on in that war. He goes into loving detail about Hooker’s history, his behaviors throughout his career, his relationships with Lincoln and his various commanders and particularly with Burnside. I’d never read that scandalous self-aggrandizing report he sent in about Antietam before now. I’d also never encountered Grant’s “I consider Hooker a dangerous man,” appraisal of him.
If I’d been driving my own truck I’d have had Chancellorsville propped up on the steering-wheel reading it on the drive to and from Kerrville, is how seductive I’m finding the tome.
Old Sol coughed up a pretty good hairball yesterday. You can see a nice video of it here: http://spaceweather.com/ He’s evidently still got some internal issues to deal with, as well.
Astrophysicists speculate one of the planets might have sassed him, but renaissance theologians believe it’s something to do with counting tiny beings dancing on the head of a pin.
The attempted partial Solar eclipse in Antarctica was evidently successful and went without incident.
Down here at the Center of the Universe it’s stacking up to be a pretty good day. I’m thinking I might get the starter replaced on the 4-Runner and finally know whether that’s why it won’t crank.
I’ve promised the chickens they’ll have some Purina Cat Food soaked in the juice off some Elgin Sausage I’m having for lunch. The felines are settling for a can of Special Dinner.
All’s well here in the Center of the Universe.
Tipping my hat to the literati and music lovers among you readers I’m offering this today:
I was actually planning to use the Greg Brown version of this, but couldn’t find it. The cats and chickens are unanimous in thinking the Brown version is better but they agreed this one will do while Brown’s off hiding from the law or whatever he’s doing these days:
Someone spang found this blog searching for “lowlifes on welfare“.
I’m thinking it must have been Google analyzing this pic I posted describing how a person could get spiffed up to go to town by shaving with sheep shears instead of a razor: Shaving with sheep shears.
Well, heck! I hate to see someone come here and find only half of what he was looking for. I’m just hoping the emphasis was on finding a lowlife instead of finding someone on welfare.
On the other hand, I have a suspicion a person who’d do a search using that particular phrase probably would define the Social Security I paid into five decades and some change and draw now qualifies as welfare. So maybe he went away having gotten his moneys worth. Riding the Bread Line
Brought to mind one of my favorite quotes from the bard. Hamlet’s immortal summing up just about said it all, but when they set it music for the musical ‘Hair’ I’ve always thought it might be considered an improvement in some contexts. Enough irony there so’s a magnet would pick it up.
The fog’s gotten so thick outdoors I can barely see across the front porch.
There’s a heavy fog hanging over the valley this morning and it’s full of deer moving around ghost-like hoping for a shot at some chicken-feed.
Big news among the cats and chickens: There’s a stray cat hanging around here, might be feral, or mightn’t. The cats are fairly upset by it, though after watching it a few days I think it might be a pretty good cat. Haven’t decided what to do about it yet. I can’t count higher than four when it comes to cats, and I’ve already got four firmly in place.
I’d been having a lot of problems with MS EXCEL overloading the RAM on any machine here because of the file size I’m prone to work with.
I emailed Ed Hurst [Do What’s Right]a couple of weeks ago and asked whether he knew of a piece of spreadsheet software that would do most of what EXCEL would do without all the bells and whistles clogging up the works. In a short while he sent me a link to Libra downloads. The download was a lot larger than I could handle on a dialup, so my friend Rich in NC, downloaded it to a CD for me and mailed it to me.
I’m still learning how to use it, but it appears to be able to do what I need doing as well as doing it without demanding a National Defense Department supply of RAM.
Thanks Ed and Rich. I’m obliged to both of you.
The Dell Optiplex 745 I bought for $50 in a thrift store to replace this gradually dying machine I go on line with has turned out to be a hermit. It didn’t come with an internal modem, and it refuses to recognize the external modem I use for this machine. Works okay otherwise, but I wasn’t needing a machine for offline work. I’ve already got one of those I do most of the math and whatnot on, so this one’s just a box sitting there twiddling its un-powered thumbs wondering why it doesn’t have a monitor, keyboard, mouse nor nuthun to allow it a closer look at the Universe.
Worked on the Toyota some yesterday without getting it standing on its hind legs howling to be turned loose on the world. Didn’t get the starter off, but got my hands greasy enough to think I might as well have. Probably more on that today if the weather cooperates.
Maybe something else later if anything happens and I don’t get lost in the fog.
Old Jules
“You ask me why I drive a ’56 souped-up Ford Deluxe with high-compression heads and overdrive?”
One thing that happens when you get a group of country people hanging around without a lot going on involves a mysterious sorting and filtering process. Small groups of strangers with similar interests are drawn into intense exchanges of arcane esoterica.
Saturday a few old guys including me got talking about chickens, coons, skunks and feral hogs none of us would have ever learned if we hadn’t been to the auction.
The wild hogs seem to be concentrated, we found, in some locations and absent in others. A guy from a few miles east of town seems to have the worst problem of any in the group, and despite the fact he’s killed a hundred hogs this year he says it hasn’t made a dent in the population.
He’s devised an ingenious trap with several interior rooms the hogs can get into but can’t get out, allowing him to capture a dozen at a time. He kills them in the traps and drags them down to a remote corner of the property with the previous hauls.
That guy knew some hog catching tricks I’ll probably use here next time they come in here or up and Gale’s tearing things up. He uses boxes of Jello as bait. Says they can’t resist it and they’ll choose going into a trap after Jello over breaking into a feed bin or tearing the walls off a storage shed for chicken feed.
But everyone agreed the hog population in Central Texas is out of control something awful.
Then, this morning, my old bud Rich sent me a link to this Yahoo News story:
Mexican officials have unveiled plans to slaughter some 50,000 wild boars that have crossed the border from the United States and now threaten agriculture in Mexico.
The Ministry of Environment in Chihauha state said some 1,500 hectares (3,700 acres) of farmland in the border town of Ojinaga have been affected by the large number of feral pigs that have come from Presidio County, Texas.
“We must get rid of these European wild boars because they sleep overnight on US soil during the day and cross over to the Mexican side to feed,” Ignacio Legarreta, a state official, told local media.
The boars of European origin, which were imported to Texas as pets and then replicated in the wild, have caused serious damage to the flora and fauna of the area, officials said.
“They have reproduced to reach more than 50,000 animals that threaten the area,” said Legarreta.
The authorities intend to use cages with food inside to trap the animals.
But back at the auction. I asked whether any of them had ever tried bringing the hogs in and selling them at auction. None had, and at first everyone’s reaction was a guffaw. Nobody likes getting close to a critter capable of ripping you in two and eating you. Probably the auction folks wouldn’t take them despite the fact they handle a lot of dangerous animals.
But then someone mentioned there’s a place in Ingram always advertising they want to buy swine on the hoof. Sausage place, one thought. Which got us thinking how a person might build a trap on a trailer so’s to not have to deal with them more than dragging the trailer to Ingram, letting them inspect them and kill them in the trap, drag them out, weigh them, and pay up.
I allowed if I’d considered that and thought of it earlier this year I’d be a lot better off financially today than I am. There was a lot of muttering and thinking going on among all of us before the conversation changed to coons.
I mentioned the double helix nebula in a post a couple of days ago: The Sky’s Too Jam-Packed These Days. Some of you weren’t familiar with it. In fact I didn’t know about it until a couple or three months ago. Here’s a bit more about it:
The double helix nebula:
The spots are infrared-luminous stars, mostly red giants and red supergiants. Many other stars are present in this region, but are too dim to appear even in this sensitive infrared image. The double helix nebula is approximately 300 light-years from the enormous black hole at the center of the Milky Way. (The Earth is more than 25,000 light-years from the black hole at the galactic center.)
This false-color image was taken by the Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer (MIPS). Date 15 March 2005(2005-03-15)
That double-helix pattern in the gas is perpendicular to the galactic plane. It’s mainly interesting by what it implies. Problem is, nobody’s actually sure what it implies.
Aside from my humble self. And I’m not saying nuthun.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 