When I got booted out of Peace Corps training at Hilo, Hawaii in December, 1964, I dropped off the plane back to the mainland at Honolulu. I went to work in the Hilton Hawaiian Village Hotel Makahiki Restaurant for a while as a bussboy while deciding what to do next.
I was the only Haole working at the Makahike. All the other bussboys were Filipino and the waitresses, managers were all Orientals. The bussboys all worked for minimum wage and a percentage of tips, which still left things marginal as a means of survival.
But I soon discovered the bussboys all had an edge. On my first day, maybe first hour working there I went into the back carrying a huge tray full of dirty dishes and food left behind by the eaters. I’d no sooner gotten out of sight of the customers before the head bussboy grabbed me by the arm, put the tray down and began screaming at me. Moving dishes and pointing at leftover food items I’d mixed, spilled water over, made no effort to keep separate from others.
“Garbage! You made it garbage Haole bastard!”
It turned out all the bussboys kept discarded food separate and put it on a table in the back each time they unloaded from the customer service area. Then, anytime one of us had a brief break in customer demand up front, we’d go to the table and gobble a half-eaten steak, papaya, anything suiting our fancy.
During the time I worked there I ate well. I’m not certain I’ve ever eaten better, more consistently, even during times of affluence.
In the post Could you choose to live on the street? I described a man I knew as a youngster who dropped out of being president of a bank to live under a bridge. I suspect one of the ways he survived involved carrying what I did at the Makahiki a step further.
Every year I wonder about these pictures of Scrooge and others wearing pointee nightcaps. It’s a subject dear to my heart because I became an aficionado of sleeping hats when I used to do my slumbering outdoors a lot.
The function of a nightcap is to keep a person from losing his body heat through his exposed scalp and hair. Besides doing that it needs to stay on the head while you toss and turn. Those pointed hats do none of that.
I’ve tried a lot of different types of sleeping caps through the years and found it’s not easy to find one that satisfies all the minimum criteria:
This one’s sheepskin and I’ve used it for 30 years when the weather’s cold enough. But it’s stiff and doesn’t stay on all that well because one of the straps for tying under the chin broke off sometime way back there and I haven’t gotten around to fixing it. The temperature has to be not-too-warm or it becomes a cranial sweat lodge and not-too-cold because it doesn’t provide any protection to the exposed part of the neck.
A balaclava solves some of that, but it’s only one layer thick, somewhat expensive, and tends to wear out at the chin. When the ambient temperature gets down around freezing it needs some help.
They make those fleece caps for women and I find them in thrift stores for a buck frequently. When I find them, I buy them and wear them a lot, outdoors, indoors and as sleeping caps when the weather’s cold, but not cold enough for something more extreme.
During this last cold snap when the water froze inside the house I came up with this, and I like it a lot. It’s a fleece blanket folded four times lengthwise, wrapped around the head and tucked into/zipped in to the fleece vest. It stays in place and is warmer than anything I’ve ever found. It’s tempting to drag out the scissors, needle and thread and cut it down to a four-layer balaclava, but I hate to mess up that fleece blanket. The “don’t fix it if it ain’t broke” school of winter headgear might apply here.
When the weather’s cool but not cold, the stocking cap is a seductive option, even though they don’t ride out the night well. I keep a stack of a dozen of them on the bookshelf above the bed so I can reach up and find one for a quick reload without turning on the light. Same concept as a fresh clip of ammo for a rifle near at hand.
Pointee hats are talk. As Tuco observed in The Good, Bad and Ugly, “When you’re going to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.”
WordPress is behaving as though it gets paid by the hour this morning. Everything’s taking forever to load. Besides, the blog never gets much traffic Fridays anyway. So I’m going to try the patience of those of you who do visit by indulging in a post I promised my friend Rich in North Carolina and a couple of others I’d put up.
I’ve got a goodly bit on the plate elsewhere today and mightn’t be around the cabin much, but if WordPress goes on salary and I’m back I might put something else up later.
Some of you expressed an interest.
Then there’s this:
Sunsounds run through different frequencies and filters
Black hole – NASA – The comments are worth reading for a smile – Guy wants to know why the camera doesn’t get sucked into the black hole.
Then there’s this:
The Spitzer telescope examination of the galactic center
“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.”
It’s about forty miles south of the Zuni Rez, almost in AZ.
There’s a ghost town you can barely see in the pic…. used to be a considerable community down in there when it was private land, from the mid-1800s until the 1950s, evaporating salt from the huge concrete beds. Most of the buildings are still intact, though they’re going away rapidly.
Today it belongs to the Zuni tribe, one section of land, but it’s not in the national trust as part of the Rez. Tribes have been acquiring a lot of land from casino monies and other ways during the past decades, making the lands acquired ‘tribal’, but not Rez, which puts them into an interestingly ambiguous position insofar as road maintenance and county taxes.
Salt Lake was acquired as a piece of a lawsuit against the US government involving an airplane with a hydrogen bomb aboard that crashed on the Rez, with first responders being Zunis, but which the feds didn’t bother telling them about the bomb, leaving emergency workers exposed to hazardous materials without knowing it. The tribe got a few million out of that, which they used to purchase 60k acres of land to the south of the Rez, but Salt Lake was thrown in as a bonus.
Salt Lake’s a sacred place for the Zunis, home of Salt Mother. If you are willing to risk hopping the fence and wandering around down there ….. it’s a volcano crater with a hollow secondary plug you can climb, then a spiral trail leading back down inside … that’s where most of the rituals for Salt Mother are held… but all over that section you’ll pass over various religious items from recent times you’d be well advised to leave untouched.
Salt Lake used to be the place all the warring tribes got their salt throughout history. A place where a constant truce between enemy tribes existed.
It’s also part of what the power companies would love to strip mine. The great percentage of the desert surrounding it, from north of Springerville, and Saint Johns, Arizona is government land with shallow coal deposits comparatively inexpensive to ‘recover’. They’ve already converted the desert on the Arizona side to a wasteland. Still desert, but more in the moonscape vein than the usual, regular arid country mode.
The people in El Paso and Phoenix need electricity so they can fire up their hair dryers every morning, and keep their homes refrigerated. Those places have climates uncomfortable to the human skin most of the time and they’d rather savage a few million acres of country they’ve never visited and never will than suffer a few degrees of discomfort and use a towel to dry their hair.
Which the Zuni believe would thoroughly piss off Salt Mother, with considerable resulting pain for the Zunis, and all the rest of us.
They might be right.
The Zuni and a few commie-pinko-obstructionist greenie environmentalists are the only people who give a damn, and the other desert-dwellers in the area would welcome the jobs helping ravage the country around them would bring to the area. The last time I looked the Zuni tribe was burning up a lot of tribal money trying to stop the mine expansion into New Mexico. The prospects didn’t appear promising because the New Mexico government, the feds, and the mining interests were stacked up singing songs of human progress and greater good.
Heck, it’s been a few years now. Maybe they’re already mining it. Probably easier to ask someone in Phoenix or El Paso whether the hair dryer worked this morning and if it did, assume that desert has gone to the moon.
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.
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
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
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.
ERUPTING FILAMENT: Today, with little warning, a magnetic filament rapidly erupted on the sun. Between 10:30 and 11:30 UT, observers in Europe watched tendrils of hot plasma rocket away from the sun’s NW limb. Debris from the explosion is not expected to hit Earth. Images: #1, #2, #3.
Astrophysicists aren’t certain what he was shooting at, but several noted deer season recently opened. Others speculate Alpha Centauri was throwing bottles or tin-cans in the air for him.
With no flares of significance in days, the sun is strangely quiet. Nevertheless, the view remains dynamic. Rogerio Marcon of Campinas, Brasil, took this picture of the local starscape on Dec. 2nd. Using a telescope tuned to the red glow of solar hydrogen, Marco captured 20 billion sq. km of seething plasma and magnetic filaments; also included in the field is the dark core of sunspot 1364 (lower right). It doesn’t look very quiet. NOAA forecasters estimate a 30% chance of M-class solar flares in the next 24 hours. http://spaceweather.com/
Some astrophysicists noted 20 billion sq. km of seething plasma and magnetic filaments could be considered a middling lot, everything else being equal.
PHD candidates from UC Berkeley and MIT have gone on record with a theory there’s some kind of celebration going on up there. NASA space cadets believe otherwise, but refuse to elaborate except to darkly hint Old Sol’s expressing his displeasure about agency budget cuts.
Israel and the CIA aren’t saying what’s causing it, but are planning airstrikes on unnamed Central Asian targets in retaliation.
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:
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.
Good morning to you readers. I’m obliged you came by for a visit and read. I went to sleep last night with the thought on my mind to try a run into Kerrville today. I figured I’d wander around in the AutoZone store for a while to see if I could locate some Chinese engineered tool designed to outsmart Japanese mechanical engineers.
But it turned out to be one of those nights when a lot goes on. A high wind rose for a while and started dropping dead tree branches, I assume it was, with a lot of fanfare and drama, on things probably didn’t need any trees falling on them. I recently got that fuel-line bulb replacement for the chainsaw For Want of a Nail – Something Worth Knowing Chainsaw-wise and at that point my middle of the night thinking changed my plans for the day.
Seemed everything was stacking up for me to spend the day bringing down dead oaks and cutting firewood. I settled back to sleep peacefully dreaming of a fire in the woodstove and a few layers less clothing on my agingly fragile bod.
Daylight was still a long way off when I was awakened by a ruckus on the front porch I interpreted as the cats telegraphing me there was a coon out there bothering them, so I got the .22 and the spotlight and went out to unravel whatever was happening. Turned out it was the invader-cat crosswise with Hydrox, second-in-command around here.
I adopted my mean-evil-ugly persona, put down the .22 and started yelling and waving my arms around to break up the spitting growling party, then chased the invader-cat off the porch and across the meadow keeping it lit up in the spotlight. Hydrox was playing point-man, but chasing with no intention of catching. The invader-cat has me figured out, I reckons, and kept turning around hoping I’d say something friendly and we could come to an agreement, adding a cat to the local population.
But that ain’t going to happen. You can’t stop a man who knows he’s right and keeps coming. Hydrox and I chased that cat clean into the woods to the east, me breathing steam and gutsy language.
When I got back to the porch with Hydrox the other three were waiting and demanded a prayer-meeting. They all saw me put down that .22 and interpreted it as an ominous sign I might be sneaking around wondering if we couldn’t fit another cat into the equation. The consensus was that we can’t.
So one of the jobs today is puzzling out how to get the invader-cat into the live-trap and deliver it to one of the herd of wildlife-rescue women springing up like weeds all over the Texas Hill Country.
It looks like a pretty good cat and I’ve got to tip my hat to the fact it’s awfully well groomed for a stray. But it’s a long way from anyone likely to be grooming it. Just the fact it’s survived out in the woods a while, though, has me thinking it mightn’t be easy to lure into the live trap.
Anyway, after daybreak I went out for a perusal of whatever damage the trees might have accomplished and found things are normal, though one’s a lot nearer the ground than it was yesterday. It’s foggy, cold and feels like rain. Maybe I’ll cut wood, and maybe I won’t.
But what I originally intended to tell you this morning was that last night I came across a blog where someone’s discovered an identical replication in nature between a beetle and a parasite duplicating the relationship between government and high-finance interests, multi-national corporations, almost every facet of human organizational structure. I think it might be where we learned how to do all the stuff we do.
Instead of studying cats, chickens, deer and other critters to puzzle out what’s going on with us humans I think I need me one-each of those beetles and parasites. I’ll keep you updated on whether I find one.
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……
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 