Category Archives: Communication

Wyffie Mysteries, Trailer Possibilities and Nomad Farmers

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

Some matters, I’m finding, my mind believes it’s better if I don’t know and refuses to assimilate and process.  I’ve been hearing for years about fast Internet and more recently how a person can just pull his car up in front of someplace in town, turn on the computer and have fast Internet.  I just took things to be that simple without going into it further.

But I’ve been doing a lot of reading the archives of the Cheaprliving Forum, http://www.cheaprvlivingforum.com/, asking a few questions, and discovering a lot without having to ask questions.

For instance, I’ve quickly ridded myself of the popup camper notion by asking one question about it, getting two helpful answers, realizing it was an abysmally lousy option.

I’ve got this laptop computer here and it’s got things on wires to plug into the USB port on the comp.   I’d assumed I could drive into town, plug one of these into the laptop and whatever it is takes a person online with wifie happens.  Now I’m finding these pre-date Wyfie and are for some other kind of fast Internet the world outgrew and left behind while I was sleeping under a tree. 

I’ve read on the forum what’s being said about their ways of connecting to wifi and the special antennae they use, all manner of doodads to amplify them.  And I don’t understand a word of it.  Don’t have a clue what it is I’m going to need to do to be able to get online.

One of the problems is that despite the CheapRLiving moniker, I gather most of these members are, either rich, or rich enough to be able to afford to go out and buy things they want.  So when they talk about solutions they’re actually talking about cavalierly forking out a $100 bill, or several of them, and calling it a solution.

Today I’m going to town for groceries and I’m going to try to find someone who’ll tell me in simple terms what I need to park my truck outside the library and go on line.  Then I’m going on Yahoo Fredericksburg Freecycle and Yahoo Kerrville Freecycle groups and find out if someone’s got one collecting dust in a closet they’d sooner hand off to someone who’d use it.

Then, if that doesn’t work, at least I’ll have a list of the things I need to get it done.  Probably find something on Ebay.

Not much interest coming on the Nomad Farmer thing.  Only two folks expressed a firm interest and one an interest for a couple of weeks.  But it’s early times yet.  Maybe late-winter or early spring some people will be wondering what to do with themselves next summer.

Or maybe I’ll just have to settle for heading for Santa Fe and take in an opera.

Old Jules

TimeWarp Jokes

Being a person left behind by the passage of time probably leaves me out of sync with understandable concepts of humor.  Or maybe mine was always too oblique to find the intended targets.  Maybe that’s why Playboy never bought any of my limericks.

Fact is, I still occasionally chuckle over two jokes I first heard half-century ago.

1]  A guy walked into a blacksmith shop where the blacksmith was pounding out horseshoes, the one he was working on glowing orange.  While he waited, the customer noticed a horseshoe that had cooled just enough so’s it was no longer glowing.  He picked it up and immediately flang it at the wall.

Blacksmith looked up grinning.  “That wasn’t hot, was it?”

No.  It just doesn’t take me long to look at a horseshoe.”

2]  Guy sticks his head into a barbershop.  “Bob Peters here?”

Barber frowns.  “Nooo. We just cut hair here.”

Old Jules

The TimeWarpVille Saga – Other Local Attractions – Food – Corn – Rain and Wireless Phoneless

As good as Barbeque’s likely to get

The locals I talked to all seemed to agree Lum’s is either the best barbeque in town, or tasty enough to balance the high cost of Cooper’s, down the road.  I’ve eaten there three times now, found them to be clean, friendly, and surrounded by an ambiance unusual enough to be almost distracting.  Good food, Lum’s. 

As I finished my meal an older guy with a cane walked past my table.  He sported a hip-holster with a Glock, ready for action.  If I’d finished earlier, and if I’d arrived in town heeled, I’d have waited for him outside and shouted, “Fill your hand you SOB!”

Then he could have shot me down, gazed sadly at my bullet-riddled corpse and muttered, “Just another young tough trying to build a reputation.”

It would have provided a great denouement.

This could be a lot more important than you imagine

There’s corn here to be had.

A worthy cause that gives no offense except to those [such as myself] who don’t even like to be told what kind of day to have.

Too small for Clark Kent

A futuristic wireless, cordless, phoneless booth.

We middle-of-the-roaders try to be there for one another

And a bull trotting along the centerline blocking the highway for a mile or more.  I took him to be another, spiritual kinfolk to myself, called to serve on the Big Jury, and headed home unrequited.

Old Jules

Institutionalized Crisis, Illusion and Hate Management

Hi readers.  Thanks for the visit.

I dunno.  It seems to me we’ve been had fairly badly, and we cooperated every step of the way, loving getting our buttons pushed.  It probably began during the Vietnam War.  Maybe further back than that.  But when US National Guardsmen opened fire on protesting students [who might have been threatening them with injury, but certainly not their lives] at Kent State University it seems a turning point, to me.

LBJ and Nixon both loved their military adventure in Vietnam and both spent their terms in office doing everything in their power to polarize opinions about it, to stifle dissent by encouraging and inciting supporters for the war.  Kent State was the first major manifestation of the one side enforcing their views with gunfire directed at the other.

A few years later during the latter years of the Carter Administration it’s been clearly established that the Reagan Campaign lackeys bargained with Iran to keep the Embassy hostage crisis going until after the election.  Kept the daily news full of it.  And bargained with the promise of weaponry that eventually became the Iran/Contra debacle.

Then came the War on Drugs because Reagan [whom I’d voted for] decided there was a drug crisis in the US, started the ball rolling for billions to be spent on new layers of law enforcement, prisons to fill up, a welfare program for lawyers, judges, cops, and private prisons invented to hold the perpetrators of victimless crimes.  Buzzillions of bucks spent to prevent traffic in drugs still available even in prisons, on any street corner in a major city.

Ah.  Then a new crisis.  Militia!  So scary Bill Clinton’s attorney general was sending federal troops to burn down and roast a hundred-or-so religious fanatics in Waco, sneaking up on Danny Weaver’s family at Ruby Ridge killing his teenage son, his wife and her baby.  And various other such.  Because the fear tactic for polarizing the population was that those silly-assed militia might take over this country, might overthrow the entire giant military establishment.

Then came 9/11 and it was Muslims we needed to hate, ‘terrorists’ we needed to spend billions to keep from potentially thousands of dollars worth of damage.  While still keeping up the long-failed War on Drugs.  More layers of law enforcement.  Homeland Security.  Fear and moneymoneymoneymoney.  A new war in Iraq.  Afghanistan.  Moneymoneymoneymoney.

So now we’re down to pretending two identical political parties are at war with one another, got both sides believing the world’s going to end if the other wins the next election.

What fools we mortals be!

Old Jules

Philosophy by Limerick – Billboard Confession Booth

The woe-gunning sloganning wienies
So frightened of commies and greenies
Would sell their own grannies
And illegal nannies
To hear themselves venting their spleenies.

Old Jules

Stick’em Up

My favorite manip of one of Jeanne’s art pieces

Hi readers.

The email forwards are telling me you fine, upstanding citizens are giving serious thought to electing a vice-king who’s committed to robbing me of the only financial resource I’ve got:  my Social Security pension check.  Paid in by me longer than most of you’ve been alive, by me and matched by those paying me.

Hokay.  For myself, I honestly don’t give much of a damn.  I’ve lived long enough and hard enough to be confident I can survive as long as I need to.  It ain’t a big deal in that regard.

But I’ve got four cats here depending on me to buy food for them.  Cats I value higher than I value the lives of the multitudes of folks who are venal enough, stingy enough, or indifferent enough to tacitly or actively select candidates who don’t give a damn about my cats.

All over this country there are people in similar circumstances, probably placing a higher value on the continuation of their own lives than I do, depending on those SS checks monthly to pay the rent, the mortgage, buy food for themselves.  People who paid in, and their employers paid in on the promise there’d be an eventual return when the cows all came home.

Those people grew up in a different time with an entirely different set of values than exist today.  They aren’t as accustomed being pushed around and bullied as the folks who’d help rob them might wish.

I don’t know how they’ll react if you rob them.  I don’t even know how I’ll personally react.  But I will tell you this:

Back me into a corner and take away my livelihood, force me to kill my cats as an alternative to having them starve, and a different man will come out the other end.  A man who has not a damned thing to lose other than his life, which there probably ain’t a lot left of anyway.

So do whatever you damned well please, vote in whatever greedy animal you wish to do your robbing chores.  But keep in mind there’s a piece of the population out there you’re deliberately and calculatedly choosing to back into corners without gaining a damned thing for yourselves except smug satisfaction.

And the folks you plan on doing it to are tougher than you, smarter than you, potentially one-hell-of-a-lot meaner than you, and almost certainly won’t take kindly to being mugged.

You don’t have the imagination to care, but life has a way of providing what the imagination doesn’t supply.

Old Jules

Nothing’s Impossible in a Representative Democracy

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

I don’t pay much attention to politics, but it’s truly a temptation I’m going to have to consciously resist this year.  Watching an illusion vanish happens so rarely it might be a crowd pleaser.  Barnham and Bailey coming to town sort of thing.

The magnetic field is in the pure curiosity of just who-the-hell’s going to bother voting.  And for whom.  With Kennedy/Johnson it was the graveyards in south Texas carried them into office when live voters weren’t getting the job done.   This time the graveyard residents might be undecided.

Political parties used to try for voting blocks.  Teachers.  Unions [hardhats one way, the rest, the other].  Hispanics.  Blacks.  Senior citizens.  Young voters.  Businessmen.  Law and Order folk.  Anti-this, Anti-that, pro-this, pro-that.  But now that’s all gone into the grader-ditch of political strategy. 

Not much doubt the ethnic blocks are going to find themselves lacking in enthusiasm after the past few years of diatribes and hate rhetoric without a word being said to neutralize it.  Unions?  Hell, unions are history and both parties have done everything in their power to make it so.  Small businessmen and tradesmen being killed by Chinese competition for a decade?  Old folks having their Social Security pensions threatened with ‘entitlement’ slogans?

The WE OFFER NOTHING, BUT THEY’RE WORSE! approach to electioneering is something new, maybe exciting.

Maybe it’s time to find a vacant FEMA bunker, unplug the communications gear and pretend everything already happened.  Whatever that might be.

Old Jules

Philosophy by Limerick – One Heartbeat Away

Venerated equally by rednecks and aristocrats

Caligula, Julius or Nero
Take your pick. He’s an unlikely hero.
Far better E. Gantry
Or phony philantry
Or maybe just bring back old Spiro.

Old Jules

Philosophy by Limerick – The Talk Radio Host

The trailer-parks listens and smiles
Echo his simplistic beguiles.
While those up on Wall Street
Applauded his drumbeat
Koch Brothers just sponsored his wiles.

Old Jules

Calamari Gumbo Over Saffron Rice

Hi readers.  Grocery stores always make my mouth water, but I actually got started thinking about calamari at the tire store.  Wandered over to the Chici Pizza Buffet, Senior Special $5, while I waited for them to mount and balance my new tire.  Thought an uncomfortable amount of pizza might rid my mind of calamari.

Went to the AutoZone for brake pads, found a pair for $10 and change, mind still in orbit around calamari.  Bent down for a look under the car to check out the oil leak as a precaution.  Going up the hill the lower clearance because of the donut sized spare caused a rock to puncture the oil pan, so I was keeping an eye on it.

That oil pan leak’s going to be a blessing until I can lift the car and whittle a wooden plug to stick in the hole.  Keeps me from having to change the oil.  I’ll just add oil, top it off as it goes down.  Voila.  Automatic oil change constant.

Anyway, went to the HEB and bought a few essentials, actually went by the fish department to have a look at the calamari, thinking actually seeing it might help rid my mind of it.  But it didn’t.

Meanwhile, I was over on the isle for bread and tortillas and a guy with a hand-carry basket walked up pretending he didn’t know his wife as she studied a shelf, took a big chuck roast out of his hand carry basket and stuck it in her backpack.  Looked me right in the eye.  Snake eyes.

His wife, kid in her shopping cart, edged to get around me.

“Hey man!  Let me show you something!  You like to barbeque?”

He gave me a what-the-hell look while I reached inside her backpack and took out the roast.  “See this crap?”  I held the roast out to him.  “Shoplifting meat is a felony in Texas.  They’ll barbeque her if they catch her.”

Asshole!”  He mumbled and turned back toward the meat section.

You going to stick around and take care of the kid, hotshot?”  I stayed on his heels.  “While she’s doing time you going to change the diapers?”

He ignored me, kept walking.

Screw it.

I cashed out and headed home.  Still thinking about calamari.  Calamari over saffron rice.  When I arrived I checked the freezer, but there wasn’t any calamari in there.  Must have used the last of it sometime before Y2K.  And I’ve been trying to cut down on my saffron intake.  Since around Y2K, as I recall.  Coincidence Coordinator thing.

Old Jules