These colors STOP in the middle of grocery aisles to talk on the cell phone.
These colors use the REMOTE to change channels.
These colors WALK to the refrigerator.
Hi readers. I saw a fresh new bumper sticker in the grocery store parking lot lately. Seemed to me it was okay, as far as it went. But a person needs more bumper stickers to cover the subject, or a bigger one.
Old Jules
Posted in 2013
Tagged culture, Education, environment, Human Behavior, lifestyle, miscellaneous, musings, politics, Reflections
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
I’ve been noticing something in myself over the years that I suspect is fairly widespread, but doesn’t get discussed much. I have an idea it’s a sensitive subject with older men. I first noticed it in myself with an unexpected, irrational difficulty breathing and something akin to panic in situations I wouldn’t have been bothered by in the past.
I’ve done a little spelunking, gone into more abandoned mines than I could count and always got a thrill, a surge of enjoyment doing it. But late in the 1990s Mel and I were looking over a couple of mine shafts from the 1800s, one at the ruins of Golden, New Mexico and another near Magdalena. The first was the vertical shaft at Golden.
We carried all the right equipment up there, went prepared to go down the shaft 100 feet without any particular risk. Mel was troubled by claustrophobia he’d acquired going into some tunnels in Vietnam, so I was elected to go down that shaft to collect some samples.
But as I lowered myself down that shaft I hadn’t descended thirty feet before all I wanted was to get the hell out of there. I couldn’t breathe. The prospect of going deeper into that hole quickly became a non-option. I stayed on a ledge of rock trying to calm myself and get control enough to go deeper, but after a while it was obvious this was no longer a pleasure trip.
Mel taunted and heckled me about it the entire remainder of the jaunt, and I thought about it constantly, trying to understand what had happened. Completely unlike anything I’d ever experienced.
There’s another vertical shaft near Magdalena we’d both fallen in love with and I definitely was determined to go down it. I was sure I’d be able to if I worked and thought about what had happened at Golden enough. But a couple of months later the attempt resulted in an identical failure.
It was easy not to think about it during the years afterward, and I didn’t. But a while back I found I experienced something too similar to be much different when I was working on the Toyota RV, crawling around under it. Same thing, near panic, difficulty breathing, an irrational need just to get the hell out from under there.
I’ve talked about this with some other old guys lately and have been surprised by their admissions they’ve experienced exactly the same thing, mainly in tight spaces. When I described it they knew exactly what I was talking about, and they’d also never experienced anything akin to it when they were younger.
I don’t know what’s going on with all this, but seems to me if anyone has any guts anymore it ought to be old men. This doesn’t bode well at all.
Old Jules
Posted in Adventure
Tagged environment, Human Behavior, humor, Life, lifestyle, Nature, philosophy, psychology, senior citizens, survival
The sun’s magnetic field is about to flip
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/05aug_fieldflip/
Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
Praying up Old Sol this morning He brought up a sensitive issue we’re all going to have to try to work with. Hurting the feelings of Old Sol might not be wise at this stage of the game.
Old Sol: Now that you’re finally recognizing that the United States is My Chosen People instead of that bunch of imposters over in the Middle East there are a couple of things we ought to get straight.
Me: I’m pretty much up for anything. Is this a good time for you?
Old Sol: It’s okay. I’ve got a little time right now. Later on I’ll have My people call your people to hammer out the details.
Me: So what’s on your mind?
Old Sol: Well, it’s about this Old Sol thing, and about He. That’s been okay for the past eleven years, but it’s about to change. It won’t be long before I’m a She instead of a He.
Me: Hmmmm. It’s going to take some getting used to. I suppose we can work it in somehow. We’ve changed all kinds of other things during the past generation.
Old Sol: Actually it’s not just the He and She thing. There’s more to it. A male doesn’t mind being called old. But I’m about to be female gender, and having My Chosen People throwing around the word ‘Old’ probably won’t be the best way of keeping things straight and level.
Me: Wow. I hadn’t thought about that.
Old Sol: That’s the reason I’m bringing it up. Old Lady Sun, Mama Sun, Mama Sol, none of those would be prudent under the circumstances. Allowances can be made for slips using He because human habits are just not easy to change. But flippancy could cause some anger.
Me: Sheeze. Okay. I’ll have my people call your people.
Old Jules
Posted in 2013, America, Astronomy, Science, Spirituality
Tagged culture, environment, Events, Human Behavior, humor, Life, lifestyle, NASA, philosophy, polar reversal, psychology, science, society, sociology, solar magnetic field
2013 Tooth Fairy with Radioactivity Sniffer Dog
Hi readers.
If you’re like me you probably wonder why the Tooth Fairy changed so much since we were kids. It was the Baby Tooth Survey did it. Here’s what happened:
When the Commandant of the National Tooth Fairy Regiment died of cancer in 1963 a lot of traitorous whining wimps in Missouri started crying about the fact the US Government was dropping hydrogen bombs on itself to pre-emptively protect itself in case someone else should drop nukes on Nevada and New Mexico.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Tooth_Survey
The Baby Tooth Survey was initiated by the Greater St. Louis Citizens’ Committee for Nuclear Information in conjunction with Saint Louis University and the Washington University School of Dental Medicine as a means of determining the effects of nuclear fallout in the human anatomy by examining the levels of radioactive material absorbed into the deciduous teeth of children.
Founded by the husband and wife team of physicians Eric and Louise Reiss, along with other scientists such as Barry Commoner, the research focused on detecting the presence of strontium-90, a cancer-causing radioactive isotope created by the more than 400 atomic tests conducted above ground that is absorbed from water and dairy products into the bones and teeth given its chemical similarity to calcium. The team sent collection forms to schools in the St. Louis, Missouri area, hoping to gather 50,000 teeth each year.[1] Ultimately, the project collected over 300,000 teeth from children of various ages before the project was ended in 1970.
Preliminary results published by the team in the November 24, 1961, edition of the journal Science showed that levels of strontium 90 in children had risen steadily in children born in the 1950s, with those born later showing the most increased levels.[2] The results of a more comprehensive study of the elements found in the teeth collected showed that children born after 1963 had levels of strontium 90 in their baby teeth that was 50 times higher than that found in children born before the advent of large-scale atomic testing. The findings helped convince U.S. President John F. Kennedy to sign the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the United Kingdom and Soviet Union, which ended the above-ground nuclear weapons testing that placed the greatest amounts of nuclear fallout into the atmosphere.[3]
After that things seemed to settle down okay for a while. Then came Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl. Tooth Fairies were dying off like flies. Gums rotting away, skin peeling off them like overcoats.
Fact is, we almost lost the whole kaboodle of Tooth Fairies when the Japanese started dumping all the radioactivity they could scrape together and sending it into the atmosphere headed for Alaska, California, Washington and Oregon. Pumping water hotter than a two-dollar pistol into the Pacific Ocean.
Tooth Fairy recruitment programs went to zilch. Finding new Tooth Fairies to replace the ones getting the blind staggers was tougher than the Mother Church trying to find women willing to be nuns.
Luckily, the US Military and the National Academy of Multi-Layered Police Forces, comprising about half the US population, came to the rescue. Provided pistols to be held to the temples of potential Tooth Fairies who were trying to take French leave from the job. But to compensate, providing body armor and radioactivity sniffing dogs to help the ones still able bodied enough to slip into a bedroom at night and reach under a pillow for a tooth stay alive longer.
Saved again by the police and the US military and mercenary forces.
Old Jules
Posted in 2013, America, Animals, Current Issues, Education, Government, History, Human Behavior, Police, Science, US Army
Tagged baby teeth, Chernobyl, culture, dental, Education, environment, Health, History, Human Behavior, humor, Japan nuclear, military, nuclear, politics, psychology, science, society, sociology, technology, teeth, Tooth Fairy, tooth survey, US Army
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope
Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
During the 1950s wisdom used to bunch itself up and spread itself around at the local barber shops. That’s where I first learned God was going to destroy us the way He did the Tower of Babel and for the same reasons. The USSR had just put Sputnik 1 into orbit. Too damned high in the sky to be tolerated by God.
That barber shop was also where I first learned all this uproar about radiation was a damned Communist lie intended to scare everyone out of their wits. The proof of it was just around the corner of the square at the shoe store. They had a machine over there where you could put your foot in and they’d shine radiation on it so’s you could look right through your shoes at the bones of your feet.
Anyone dying from it? Anyone getting sick? Heck no!
That shoe store had it all over J.C. Penny Company because of that machine. We kids would go in there and they’d let us look at our feet anytime we wanted to. And when shoes were to be bought the salesman could look through the viewer on one side, mama look through it on the other, and the kid through the third. The salesman could then point with the pointer that the shoe wasn’t squeezing the toes, or was, etc. Everyone loved that machine.
But government interference ruined it, same as it ruins everything else. They made them take that machine out of there so nobody could look at his feet anymore.
Here’s what the sissie fuddyduddies say was the reason:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope
“Although most of the dose was directed at the feet, a substantial amount would scatter or leak in all directions. Shielding materials were sometimes displaced to improve image quality, to make the machine lighter, or out of carelessness, and this aggravated the leakage. The resulting whole-body dose may have been hazardous to the salesmen, who were chronically exposed, and to children, who are about twice as radiosensitive as adults.[7] Monitoring of American salespersons found dose rates at pelvis height of up to 95 R/week, with an average of 7.1 R/week.[5] (Up to ~50 mSv/yr, avg ~3.7 mSv/yr effective dose)[5] A 2007 paper suggested that even higher doses of 0.5 Sv/yr were plausible.[8] The most widely accepted model of radiation-induced cancer posits that the incidence of cancers due to ionizing radiation increases linearly with effective (i.e. whole-body) dose at a rate of 5.5% per Sv.[9]
“Years or decades may elapse between radiation exposure and a related occurrence of cancer, and no follow-up studies of customers can be performed for lack of records. Without such an epidemiological study, it is impossible to conclude whether this machine actually caused any harm to customers.[5] Three shoe salespersons have been identified with rare conditions that might be associated with their chronic occupational exposure: a severe radiation burn requiring amputation in 1950,[10] a case of dermatitis with ulceration in 1957,[11] and a case of basal cell carcinoma of the sole in 2004.[8]”
Those guys sharing their wisdom at the barber shops are mostly all dead now. I’m guessing if a person wants to get smart in Portales he has to go to a hair stylist. Can’t help wondering what they’re talking about in those places.
Old Jules
Posted in 1950's, America, Government, History, Human Behavior, Nature, Portales, Science, Senior Citizens
Tagged cancer, carcinoma, culture, Education, environment, Health, History, Human Behavior, humor, Nature, radiation, science, shoe fitting xray, society, sociology, sputnik, technology, xray
Hi readers. I’m reblogging this because the original writing of it was a direct consequence of the events described in the previous post. J
I wrote this when I lived in Socorro, New Mexico, but I’d guess it’s as timely and germane today as it was then.
It’s sad, but they have to migrate: there’s no good water in the Rio Grande anymore. It’s all sewage passed downstream from Albuquerque and other towns.
This was almost home to them. Their ancestors arrived with the first cattle drives from Texas in the 1880s. But finally they’ve had enough. Lemming-like they’ve decided as one to return home, Lone Star Ticks to the Lone Star State, same as those invading Confederate Texas humans had to finally stagger and stumble home when things took a turn for the worst..
This far south they’ve just begun to gather; just started to come out from under the grassleaves, the treebark, stragglers still coming out of the brush. The main migration gathering is further north in the Isleta lands…
View original post 722 more words
Posted in 1990's, Adventure, America, Animals, Gambling, Government, Human Behavior, Nature, Police, Texas
Tagged culture, Education, environment, humor, immigration, Life, lifestyle, lone star ticks, Nature, New Mexico, rio grande, seed ticks, survival
Hi readers. I don’t know whether you’ve heard about this yet, or not, so I’ll fill you in.
The creatures on Zeta Trianguli Australis, HR3384, HR1925, Beta Trianguli Australis, 85 Pegasi, and Rho¹ Cancri are all really pissed off about how this Vietnam war just goes on and on. They’re all around 40 light years away, so the news on earth is a bit slow reaching them, but that ain’t their problem. That’s the problem created by earth scientists with their dumbass speed limits on radio and light waves.
Fact is, they’ve got creatures taking to the streets rioting about that war. Religious types setting themselves afire in protest. National Guardsmen on Pegasi who support the war even fired laser rifles at a bunch of college kids.
But that ain’t the worst of it. On Zeta Trianguli they’re all stirred up about President Richard Nixon and all the stuff he’s doing to get re-elected. Heck, they want the President of the US impeached!
What’s so terrible about it all is that creatures on some nearer locations are getting exercised about the Iran hostage crisis, thinking Jimmy Carter needs to do something about it. And down the road a little way they’re celebrating Ronald Reagan getting elected.
A bit closer in, those monster-looking creatures aren’t anywhere nearly so happy though, as the ones still dancing in the streets about Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down de-regulation policies and his proposals to sell off all the National Forests and BLM lands to real estate developers. Busting up the Air Traffic Controller Union.
No, those closer garden-slug-things with 16 eyes already went through that and it’s old news. For them it’s Bill Clinton using the CIA to bring hard drugs into a Federal airstrip in Arkansas, getting into all manner of real estate fraud scandals, and messing up the clothing of some White House clerk-typist.
There are insectoids fairly put out by that second Bush. And even though they’re fairly up-to-date, the intelligent grapevines on Alpha Centauri are fairly hacked about the wossname, BLM oil spill and this guy in the White House now.
I think you can see how this thing amounts to a crisis, and how the only people who can deal with it are the same people who created it. Scientists. Getting laws passed about how fast light and radio waves can travel.
That’s going to have to be changed. Get everyone singing from the same songbook.
But while we’re at it we probably ought to end the Vietnam War and get Tricky Dixon out of the White House.
Old Jules
Posted in Astronomy, History, Human Behavior, Science
Tagged Astronomy, culture, economy, Education, environment, History, Human Behavior, humor, Nature, psychology, science, society
Hi readers. Thanks for the visit.
Every five-year-old knows you can create an electromagnetic field by wrapping a copper coil around a soft-iron rod and introducing a current. But along about my 67th-or-so tip around the sun I began wondering what would happen if you wrapped a copper rod with a soft-iron wire and introduced a permanent magnet to the wire. Surely, I figured, it would create a field of some sort, not necessarily an electric one, but something.
I tripped around the web trying to find out what people have found it does, didn’t find anything. Asked my more smart-alec friends, and they only shrugged.
Finally I decided if I want to know, I’d have to try it hands-on.
The front part of the rod is as described. The back part with the larger coil is iron, more likely steel wire with an anodized copper coating. Figured to try it both ways, the anamagnetic coating on the copper coated wire allowing it to simulate ‘insulation’ between the wraps of wire.
Well, friends and neighbors, I don’t know what all that damned thing does. Though I’m getting some fair indications of a couple of unlikely things it seems to do. Along with it seeming to attract one-hell-of-a-lot of a particular kind of bug.
But their ain’t any point for me to make any claims about it one way or the t’other. Some of you already know so much you’d already know it doesn’t do what it seems to. And others wouldn’t, but would know it doesn’t put any food on the table.
So instead of me telling you what I think it does, I’m going to suggest if you’re interested you give it a try. And listen really carefully with your eyes, ears, and complete attention to what goes on around you when you do it.
Meanwhile, this damned thing’s going with me, where ever I might go for a while. Hasn’t entirely satisfied me I know everything I want to know about it.
Old Jules
Posted in 2013, Adventure, America, Nature, Redneck Repairs, RedneckRepairs, Science, Senior Citizens, White Trash Repairs
Tagged culture, Education, environment, Life, lifestyle, Nature, science, society, sociology, technology
“Yes, Sensei?”
Old Jules
Posted in 2013, Adventure, America, Nature, Outdoors, Photo of the Day, Spirituality
Tagged culture, environment, Human Behavior, humor, Life, lifestyle, Nature, psychology, society, sociology
Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
When I got out of the Army, summer 1964, I had a lot of ideas about my bright future. Shopped around the Portales area for a while and found a quarter-section cotton farm I thought briefly I’d buy and become a starving-to-death farmer, which fell through. Worked meanwhile, for Abe Ribble at his cement operation, and applied for the Peace Corps, knowing I wouldn’t hear from them for several months.
I was hanging out with a number of other young guys who were at loose ends, drinking coffee and walking around town, sitting on benches around the courthouse trying to figure out the meaning of life. Going out with a waitress out at the truckstop when she got off work at midnight. A young woman with goals, and confidence that no matter what a man might want for himself, she could mold him into something more to her liking. Once she got him nailed down on all the corners.
The World Fair was going on in New York that year. I could feel the walls of Portales trying to close in on me, and the guys I’d been spending spare time with were mostly thinking of themselves as beatniks, to the extend a person could be a beatnik in Portales. A slight beard and a beret went a long way in that direction. Sketchpad and a piece of charcoal, or a lot of free-verse poems jotted on cafe napkins were the tools.
So another aspiring beatnik, Stan Sexton, and I, decided to hitch to beatnik heaven. Check out the World Fair. Visit a couple of New Yorker weekend beatniks who went to Eastern New Mexico University, but were home in Westchester that summer.
I’ve told elsewhere on this blog about that summer, about sleeping on the Brooklyn Bridge, about catching the freight-train out late-August, jail in Rochester, and eventually hitching, driving the school bus to California, etc. About all those would-be beatnik women and the “Eh? YOU don’t believe in free love?” pickup line that always worked.
When I was accepted for Peace Corps Training and headed out of New York I had no idea I was seeing the dying gasp of the Beatnik phase everywhere. That a year later everyone who was anyone would be Hippy. That Greenwich Village would be replaced by San Francisco as the center of ‘what’s happening in America’. Kids would be burning their draft-cards and taking acid trips. Doing ‘Love-ins’ in the park.
By the time I got back to Portales to spend my time waiting for the Peace Corps India X training to begin in Hawaii the world had begun a sea-change, though it didn’t know it.
But at least some of the pressure was off in Portales. The waitress had found someone else with better prospects for a bright future. Cotton farmer, he turned out to be, if I remember correctly.
Old Jules
Posted in 2013, America, History, hitch hiking, Human Behavior, New Mexico, NM, Peace Corps, Portales, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Spirituality, Trains, Transportation
Tagged Beatniks, culture, environment, Events, Free Love, Greenwich Village, Hippies, History, Human Behavior, Life, lifestyle, miscellaneous, musings, New Mexico, New York, Peace Corps, personal, Portales, random, Reflections, Relationships, San Francisco, society, thoughts, World's Fair
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/
So Far From Heaven 