Category Archives: Country Life

The Devil Take the Hindmost Religion of Human Progress

 

The Lone Psychiatrist Rides Again

 

So,” says I to Mr. Hydrox, my second-in-command.  “Just what-the-hell do we think we’re doing?”

“Who?” Hydrox explains.

“Us.  You.  Me.  Niaid, Shiva, Tabby.  The Great Speckled Bird and the hens.  It’s coming on Christmas.  Why aren’t we gearing up?  Going on buying sprees?  Getting into the spirit of things?”

Christmas where the desert went and why

 

Hmmm,” Hydrox frowns, scratching behind his ear.  “You’re thinking of what?  Maybe buying a few miles of lights and stringing them up?   Finding some ways of burning up some more kilowatt hours without warming the cabin, pumping water, creating anything, putting food on the table or adding anything necessary to things around here at all?”

I pulls at the suspenders to my insulated coveralls, stalling for time.  “Well, yeah.  Everyone else does it.  Remember when we lived in Placitas and the whole town got drunk and walked around the village singing?  Don’t you miss that?”

I hated it,” Scrooge McHydrox mutters.  “So did the other cats.  Christmas.  Halloween.  Easter.  But especially Christmas.  Kids buzzing around the roads on new motorcycles trying to run one another over.  Garbage piled up around the pickup containers.  You humans are a mystery to me.  Can’t think of enough things to buy and throw away. 

“But all the while yapyap yapping about how hard times are.  Yap yapping about the cost of just staying alive.  You humans don’t even know how to eat a pound of meat that didn’t come in half-pound of plastic.”

This raised my hackles a bit.  “We’re smart.  We’re on top of things.  Every one of those empty cat food cans in that barrel over there are a sign of human progress and intelligence.  Someone somewhere dug that ore out of the ground.  Someone else smelted it and rolled it down into sheets to make into cans to hold meat someone else grew and killed and butchered so you can have a full belly.

“You eat better than the people who did all that work.  You cats eat better than the progeny of the people of the people I buy it from are likely to.”

Hydrox glared at me in a way I like to think of as put-in-his-place.  “Yeah.  And who’s responsible for all that?”

“Human progress,” I replied proudly.  “The religion of I-Got-Mine.”

Old Jules

  

 

 
 
 

Blind Chickens, Talking Diamonds and Greedy Galaxies

I’m aware some of you readers keep chickens.  If you’re having problems with blindness among them you might be interested in joining http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Free_Ranging_Chickens/ where there’s an interesting discussion going on about the problem.  This was the beginning post for the thread:

Blind Rooster
Posted: Sat Dec 3, 2011 5:47 am (PST)
Just wondering if anyone has had any experience with this. Monday afternoon, I noticed two hens on the wrong side of the fence, so went to retrieve them, and find the rest of their little band. Found all but one rooster. Couldn’t find him in any of the “regular” places, but they do have lots of room to roam. Figured I’d check again before bedtime, as he’s usually the first one in. Didn’t show up. Put everyone else in, and went hunting, for feathers if nothing else:(. Well, I found him by the fence, but inside. Just sitting there. He let me pick him up without protest, but he’s always been laid-back. Still, I knew something was wrong. Put him in a different coop, with shelves instead of bar roosts. The next day he was down on the floor, walking around, but bumping into the screening for the duck section, and sitting in corners/nests. Realized his vision was at least partially gone. Blocked him in, and started antibiotics, since I had no idea what else to do. That night he was back up on the shelf, so he must have some vision, I guess. Wasn’t eating or drinking that I could see, just walked over everything. Brought him into the Hospital Unit (a carrier in my bathrooom :). He began to drink, and finally eat. He crows (oh, swell) but his cue seems to be noise rather than light. Put him outside yesterday (in a big crate) afternoon for some sun, but he just sat there. Some of the other chickens did come scratch around him, but he seemed oblivious.
His eyes look odd, not whiteish, but the center (behind the cornea and inside the iris, where it should be black) looks “solid”, if that makes any sense.

Any thoughts?

Free_Ranging_Chickens@yahoogroups.com

Meanwhile, you readers involved in clandestine, extra-marital relationships might be well-advised to remove your diamond jewelry before checking into some seedy motel. 

In the quantum world, diamonds can communicate with each other

December 2, 2011 By Joel N. Shurkin

The vibrational states of two spatially separated, millimeter-sized diamonds are entangled at room temperature by scattering a pair of strong pump pulses (green). The generated motional entanglement is verified by observing nonclassical correlations in the inelastically scattered light. Credit: Dr. Lee and colleagues, Image Copyright Science|AAAS  http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-quantum-world-diamonds.html

Elsewhere in the news, the 99% movement has suffered a disturbing setback with the discovery we live in a greedy galaxy, gobbling up smaller galaxies.  http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-beast-tails.html

Barred Spiral Milky Way. Illustration Credit: R. Hurt (SSC), JPL-Caltech, NASA

The Milky Way galaxy continues to devour its small neighbouring dwarf galaxies and the evidence is spread out across the sky.

Government and Wall Street Cray computers working on the problem tentatively estimate the 99 percenters are actually 0.000000000000001 percenters galaxy-wide.  Political and financial-industry hired-guns are working three shifts to prepare television documentaries and PR campaigns to assist in correcting the error.

In a related story, multi-national corporations and Wall Street banks have hired a team of astrophysicists and astronomers to study black holes in an effort to develop more thorough strategies and techniques to solidify and expand their holdings.  Additionally, the illustration on the right suggests black holes might also provide improved methods in the use of pepper-spray.

“An optical image of the sky showing the location of the black hole, Cygnus X-1. (Right) An artist’s conception of the black hole system, showing the black hole drawing material towards it from a massive, blue companion star. This material forms a disk and jets that emit radiation. Credit: Optical: DSS; Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

“Black holes are among the most amazing and bizarre predictions of Einstein’s theory of gravity. A black hole is thought to be point-like in dimension, but it is surrounded by an imaginary surface, or “edge,” of finite size (its “event horizon”) within which anything that ventures becomes lost forever to the rest of the universe.”  http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-black-hole-unmasked.html

The overall optimism derived from these stories was something I wanted to share with you readers to lift whatever waning spirits you might experiencing his crisp, rainy morning.

Old Jules

A Poem as Lovely as a Tree – An Oak Ponders Oak-Wilt

 

Possibly  this one would choose something by Arthur Rimbaud,

“True, the new era is nothing if not harsh.

“For I can say that I have gained a victory; the gnashing of teeth, the hissing of hellfire, the stinking sighs subside. All my monstrous memories are fading. My last longings depart, – jealousy of beggars, bandits, friends of death, all those that the world passed by. – Damned souls, if I were to take vengance!

“One must be absolutely modern.

“Never mind hymns of thanksgiving: hold on to a step once taken. A hard night! Dried blood smokes on my face, and nothing lies behind me but that repulsive little tree!… The battle for the soul is as brutal as the battles of men; but the sight of justice is the pleasure of God alone.

“Yet this is the watch by night. Let us all accept new strength, and real tenderness. And at dawn, armed with glowing patience, we will enter the cities of glory.”  From ‘Farewell’ by Arthur Rimbaud

Or Baudelaire:

“— Enjoyment fortifies desire.
Desire, old tree fertilized by pleasure,
While your bark grows thick and hardens,
Your branches strive to get closer to the sun!

“Will you always grow, tall tree more hardy
Than the cypress? — However, we have carefully
Gathered a few sketches for your greedy album,
Brothers who think lovely all that comes from afar!”

From ‘Flowers of Evil’, ‘The Voyage’,  by Charles Baudelaire

Or Edgar Allen Poe:

The breeze—the breath of God—is still—
And the mist upon the hill,
Shadowy—shadowy—yet unbroken,
Is a symbol and a token—
How it hangs upon the trees,
A mystery of mysteries!

From ‘Spirits of the Dead’, by Edgar Allen Poe

My own saga with Oak Wilt and this particular tree is sung in these past posts:

Oak Wilt, Firewood and Sawmilling

For Want of a Nail – Something Worth Knowing Chainsaw-wise

Outsmarted by a Dead Tree

I’d written about possibly trying to salvage some of it for sawmilling, but that’s not in the cards:

The interior of the trunk is riddled by cracks caused by the rapid shrinkage.

Oak Wilt came on it fast from the roots.  By the time anything showed topside the tree was evidently already dead. 

Arthur Rimbaud, Charlie Baudelaire and E.A. Poe should have put their heads together and written something immortal about how to get the rest of it down.  The job has the potential for being right there in the target zone for their kind of writing.  It’s going to be a booger-bear any way I cut it.

Old Jules

Everything else being equal I think I favor pines:

 

All that tree-stuff hanging up there leads me to think our songsters are too humanocentric about hanging trees.

 

December 2, 2011 – Good Prospect for Nothing Happening

Looks as though everything’s going to be okay.  Human beings have been doing a pretty good job of wrapping things up, getting things that needed doing out of the way so’s it’s going to be a quiet one.

Here and there all over the planet the people assigned to keep Old Sol happy, praying Him up mornings and praying him down evenings seem to have gotten the situation well in hand for now.  Not much danger of anything falling on our heads out of the sky or jumping up out of the earth to surprise anyone.

The Emergency Box that’s caused so much trouble in the past is now securely locked away from the kinds of people who’ve been sneaking around doing monkey-tricks with it.  In the US the government’s been cooperating in a world-wide effort to quiet things down. 

One of the things they decided to do that might help is shut gradually down the US Post Office, which ought to give a strong shove in the right direction away from anything more happening.  And not a moment too soon, either.

Those people have been creating headaches for the citizenry all the way back to Ben Franklin.  If it wasn’t electric bills it was jury-duty summons postcards, registered-return-receipt letters from people trying to make things happen and shiny envelopes telling us we won a sweepstake.  Or delivering some magazine about golf, or pictures of houses and kitchens and clothes.  No end to it.

Generally speaking the newspapers all over the place telling people what happened somewhere are getting their comeuppance, too.  All those little daily and weekly papers struggling to tell people who died and what the local rich people are doing with their private lives are sinking into the woodwork.  Good riddance, says I. 

Especially the part about jury-duty summons post cards and electric bills.

That Emergency Box might find itself completely detached and rusting away if we can keep at it.  Without juries they’ll be able to just lock people up who need it without all the fanfare.

Everything’s going to be okay today provided nobody went to sleep at the wheel while praying up Old Sol.

Old Jules

Outsmarted by a Dead Tree

Tree Numero Uno didn’t agree to my offer to let it go down without a fight.  The trunk broke but the uppidy part refused to answer the demands of modern physics.

I’m not the sort of man to sit still for anything defying science and gravity.

I got my digging bar and proceeded to put forward reasoned arguments as to why that tree needed to obey the law.

The top part of the trunk moved over on the stump every time I applied pressure to the bar.

I cut the trunk at an angle so the trunk couldn’t slip back this way when it fell and get in the way of the path I was leaving to get the cut wood out.  But now, by cunning Communist refusal to do what’s right there are several tons of potential energy trapped in the upper trunk.  If I use the bar to pry it further this way that upper trunk’s going to snap out of there like a catapult and knock the bejesus out of everything downrange.

But if I leave it standing it’s going to pick its own time to come down.  And it’s already demonstrated a lousy set of values and ideals enough create a suspicion I’ll be under it when it does.

Maybe I was actually supposed to go to Kerrville today.

Old Jules

4:04 PM edit:  I got it down, but with more style and panache than I consider tasteful under the circumstances.  No broken bones, no serious injuries, nothing destroyed I can’t live without.  On the other hand, there’s still a lot more tree left propped up on dead branches 10-15 feet in the air, so there might be another dance left in the old dame yet.  Jules

Sunday Morning November 27, 2011 Musings

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 Jules

Old Sol and Songs of Innocence and Experience – William Blake

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:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Old Jules

Middle of Nowhere Odds and Ends November 23, 2011

Old Sol’s got a Hitler mustache:

Spaceweather.com

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?”

Feral Hog Plague

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:

Mexico to cull 50,000 wild boars from US invasion

http://tinyurl.com/7qrtwng

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.

Old Jules

RAZ Auction and an Aborted Escape Route

Yesterday Gale and Kay were away on another craft fair and I had access to Little Red, so I decided to trip into Harper for the farm/livestock auction.

The pickings were fairly slim because fewer people showed for it than I’ve ever seen at that auction.  But things were going dirt cheap as a result.

Cheap, I should have said, by comparison with the usual fare.  On a normal third Saturday someone falls in love with this sort of thing and is willing to hock the family jewels to carry it home.

But yesterday even jewels of this sort were going for a couple of bucks:

You’d think the seat and steering wheel on this would be worth someone hauling home at those prices.

A few items did draw bids a bit higher.

This compressor that might work went for around $15.

Plenty of antlers of all description but I wasn’t sure what Gale could use or I’d have stayed around to bid on some of the lots.

The poultry barn only had a few dozen birds, none I found a compelling need for.  The livestock weren’t out in force.  A few bighorn sheep, four starving longhorns, a few ibex, maybe a wildebeest I didn’t get a look at, and a horse headed for the dogfood factory.

I could have left after one quick swing around except for this:

I’d been nosing around for different living arrangements [also here Pack Goats for the Elderly and a Youngish Hermit and here Thursday morning meanderings].  I had a lot of reservations about this domicile.  That’s particle-board it’s constructed of, the frame looked to be for something a lot lighter, the door’s so narrow I had to turn my shoulders sidewise to go inside.

It was set up for propane and water at some time, but mostly everything except the wiring and hoses were removed.  That bottom-middle vent, when opened, looks directly inside through a stripped cabinet that evidently once held a sink.

This rear window would have to be removed to get anything wider than the door inside.  It doesn’t open.  And I couldn’t help wondering why there had been a deliberate removal of the tail lights.  No evidence of a license tag ever having been on it.

Those two vents open directly into the trailer underneath the two seats at the front, which would be a problem on the road in inclement weather.

But even knowing it was going to require a lot of work, beginning with protecting that particle board, it was a possible.  This winter would be a lot warmer living in there, and that’s a factor to warp judgement to a degree.  And having something that would provide a mobile escape route if I need one, a lot easier than anything I’d come across thus far lent itself to a decision to bid if the competition wasn’t strong.

I figured it might go for $300, which I could cover.  I decided I couldn’t go more than $500, and even that would squeeze things a bit uncomfortably.  When the bidding came it went to my $475, long pause and someone bid $500.  I turned to walk away, then spur of the moment raised my arm for $525.  And the bidding stopped.

I’d just bought the damned thing.

I went to the office to pay for it, forked over the money and the young lady was filling out the paperwork when the older lady behind her chimed in.  “He told you about not being able to get a trailer title for it didn’t he?”

“Hmmm.  No.”

Her face curled into a snarl.  “That SOB!  He was supposed to announce that before he auctioned it.  You can’t take it onto the road.  You can’t get a title for the highway.”

This caused me to have to back up and try my hand at rapid thinking.  Not my long suite.

After a pause, both of them staring at me, “Do you still want it?”

“Um.  I guess not.”

She counted my money back to me, I handed them the keys and went back outdoors to re-organize my life.

Nothing much had changed while I went from one package of my immediate future back to the one I began the day with.  The world was still waiting for Godot.

But while I went about the task of getting my mind back unshuffled I watched this dog make a statement about the whole event, laying a line of cable between me and all that potential future I’d just stuck my toe into, then pulled it back out.

Old Jules