Someone spang found this blog searching for “lowlifes on welfare“.
I’m thinking it must have been Google analyzing this pic I posted describing how a person could get spiffed up to go to town by shaving with sheep shears instead of a razor: Shaving with sheep shears.
Well, heck! I hate to see someone come here and find only half of what he was looking for. I’m just hoping the emphasis was on finding a lowlife instead of finding someone on welfare.
On the other hand, I have a suspicion a person who’d do a search using that particular phrase probably would define the Social Security I paid into five decades and some change and draw now qualifies as welfare. So maybe he went away having gotten his moneys worth. Riding the Bread Line
Brought to mind one of my favorite quotes from the bard. Hamlet’s immortal summing up just about said it all, but when they set it music for the musical ‘Hair’ I’ve always thought it might be considered an improvement in some contexts. Enough irony there so’s a magnet would pick it up.
The fog’s gotten so thick outdoors I can barely see across the front porch.
There’s a heavy fog hanging over the valley this morning and it’s full of deer moving around ghost-like hoping for a shot at some chicken-feed.
Big news among the cats and chickens: There’s a stray cat hanging around here, might be feral, or mightn’t. The cats are fairly upset by it, though after watching it a few days I think it might be a pretty good cat. Haven’t decided what to do about it yet. I can’t count higher than four when it comes to cats, and I’ve already got four firmly in place.
I’d been having a lot of problems with MS EXCEL overloading the RAM on any machine here because of the file size I’m prone to work with.
I emailed Ed Hurst [Do What’s Right]a couple of weeks ago and asked whether he knew of a piece of spreadsheet software that would do most of what EXCEL would do without all the bells and whistles clogging up the works. In a short while he sent me a link to Libra downloads. The download was a lot larger than I could handle on a dialup, so my friend Rich in NC, downloaded it to a CD for me and mailed it to me.
I’m still learning how to use it, but it appears to be able to do what I need doing as well as doing it without demanding a National Defense Department supply of RAM.
Thanks Ed and Rich. I’m obliged to both of you.
The Dell Optiplex 745 I bought for $50 in a thrift store to replace this gradually dying machine I go on line with has turned out to be a hermit. It didn’t come with an internal modem, and it refuses to recognize the external modem I use for this machine. Works okay otherwise, but I wasn’t needing a machine for offline work. I’ve already got one of those I do most of the math and whatnot on, so this one’s just a box sitting there twiddling its un-powered thumbs wondering why it doesn’t have a monitor, keyboard, mouse nor nuthun to allow it a closer look at the Universe.
Worked on the Toyota some yesterday without getting it standing on its hind legs howling to be turned loose on the world. Didn’t get the starter off, but got my hands greasy enough to think I might as well have. Probably more on that today if the weather cooperates.
Maybe something else later if anything happens and I don’t get lost in the fog.
Old Jules
“You ask me why I drive a ’56 souped-up Ford Deluxe with high-compression heads and overdrive?”
All this feral swine talk reminded me of one of the most succinct, philosophical, psychological, sociological, sexy and romantic poems I’ve ever read. Dorothy Parker authored it sometime back in the ’50s, I think:
Hogamus higamus men are polygamous. Higamus hogamus, women monogamous.
Inspiring, thought-provoking and titillating. It doesn’t get much better than that.
I mentioned the double helix nebula in a post a couple of days ago: The Sky’s Too Jam-Packed These Days. Some of you weren’t familiar with it. In fact I didn’t know about it until a couple or three months ago. Here’s a bit more about it:
The double helix nebula:
The spots are infrared-luminous stars, mostly red giants and red supergiants. Many other stars are present in this region, but are too dim to appear even in this sensitive infrared image. The double helix nebula is approximately 300 light-years from the enormous black hole at the center of the Milky Way. (The Earth is more than 25,000 light-years from the black hole at the galactic center.)
This false-color image was taken by the Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer (MIPS). Date 15 March 2005(2005-03-15)
That double-helix pattern in the gas is perpendicular to the galactic plane. It’s mainly interesting by what it implies. Problem is, nobody’s actually sure what it implies.
Aside from my humble self. And I’m not saying nuthun.
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:
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.
Morning, readers. I’m obliged you came by for a visit.
Today marks an event I never expected to see. Old Sol’s about to light things up, shake his head and shrug when he looks down and sees I am here again, come spang around him one more time. Sixty-nine times I’ve gone around him and come to this same spot, tipped my hat and said hi.
Here’s the reason neither Old Sol, nor I, had any reason to expect this:
Back in the late 1970s I had occasion to spend some time looking around nursing homes. I managed to do it enough times and look them over closely enough to convince myself that we Americans haven’t kept our eye on the ball when it comes to living and being alive.
The people in those nursing homes are alive, but they aren’t overjoyed about it, and the life they’re living only has in common with actual life that the bodies and food are warm. The caretakers roll them back and forth or they hobble between television sets, meals, games, then through the long hallways filled with the forever odor of urine, back to their rooms.
I did a lot of thinking about why that happens, those mass coffins for the living. Of one thing I was certain. I didn’t want it to happen to me.
The reason, I decided, people end up in those places is because they live longer than they’d have expected to, wanted to. The reason they lived so long was that they took all kinds of measures to make certain they did, increasing the intensity and focus as the years built up on them.
Every year those elderly reduced the numbers and kinds of risks they took. They watched their diets, quit doing things they enjoyed when they were younger, many barely did anything at all as they reached into the advanced years of retirement besides a golf game or sea cruise.
And they got what they paid for. Lives that endured long past anything a person would call living. They sidestepped and hid and and ran from Death, and he didn’t find them when he was supposed to. So now they sit around strapped into wheel chairs watching rolling television screens paying the price for being too worried about dying when they were still alive.
That’s when I came to an important conclusion about how I wanted to live my own life.
From that time until now one of the rituals I’ve tried to perform around birthday time and New Years Day involves examination of the physical risks I’m taking now, and how I’m going to increase them during the coming year. And how I’m going to stay as far as possible away from do-gooder, busybody medicos and CPR-knowers sticking their noses in my living experience getting me cross-wise with Death.
How I’m going to be out there when Death comes looking for me, in a place where he can find me, doing something I love to do.
“A theory,” Robert Frost observed, “If you hold it hard enough and and long enough gets listed as a creed.” “And people build castles on it,” observes Old Jules.
A September report from CERN giving results of neutrino experiments might rattle some expensive real estate underneath castles so solid we don’t even think of them as ‘theory’. Neutrino bunches, they found, were moving at speeds higher than light speed. 60 billionths of a second faster than light doesn’t sound like much, but it was enough to raise a lot of naysaying and protests the results couldn’t be valid.
The experiments were repeated, this time taking into account the factors that might account for result errors. Now those results are out. Those Communist neutrino SOBs are STILL going faster than light speed.
Lousy news for all manner of certainties of physics stacked precariously atop old Albert’s theory that became a creed. But nobody cares about neutrinos anyway and how fast they go. The smart approach would be to just ignore it and not let it foul the nests of everyone working on all manner of important other theories they figured on becoming creeds.
But if you can’t trust a neutrino, who can you trust? What other Communists and anarchists are skulking and going faster than light and not getting caught at it because it would violate the speed limit and nobody was playing cop?
The world of people who call themselves scientists because they’ve read and memorized what people getting their hands dirty put forward as theory and adopted it as a creed to say back and forth to one another doesn’t like to be banged around this way. Yanking the rug out of things they memorized creates all manner of conversational difficulties. Now when they say something they memorized there’s a chance someone who memorized something different will say that back. Instead of two people reassuring one another how mutually smart they are, how well they both understand everything, you get this pack of mooshy uncertainties and blank looks.
All because of something so small nobody can see it anyway.
Who cares how fast a neutrino goes, anyway? It doesn’t exceed light speed because 10,000 grant applications are based on premises relying on light speed being the speed limit.
First I was trying to chase down anything I could find about that double-helix nebula the Spitzer watched a while before it died. There’s almost nothing about it I can find aside from the little bits and pieces just before Spitzer went south. That helix nebula arrangement perpendicular to the galactic plane almost certainly says something fairly strange about magnetic field behavior in the vicinity of the galactic center. Or at least makes for an interesting postulate. But can a guy find out anything about it? Nada. Nada. Double-helix-nada.
But that got me trying to look at things happening out that way and it was no time at all I stumbled across those 2002 short-lived radio bursts from the neighborhood, GCRTJ1745-3009. http://tinyurl.com/3kd8v. But one of the articles about it mentioned in passing that part of the reason they couldn’t nail the source was all manner of things between here and there bending things every which way.
I happen to be fairly interested in Sagitittarius A, [Sgr A*] and S2. They’re in there pretty close. So I started checking to make sure Sgr A* and S2 weren’t being pushed around and bullied by neighbors getting into their personal space.
“Astronomers have been unable to observe Sgr A* in the optical spectrum because of the effect of 25 magnitudes of extinction between the source and Earth.” Osterbrock, Donald E. and Ferland, Gary J. (2006). Astrophysics of Gaseous Nebulae and Active Galactic Nuclei (2nd ed.). University Science Books. ISBN 1-891389-34-3.
25 bags of trash lying around in the grader-ditch blocking the view. It’s no wonder nobody can see what’s going on in there. What ever happened to the DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS program to clean up all that garbage? Why don’t we have some jailhouse students out there cleaning things up?
But that ain’t all. A regular guy without a lot of fancy instruments and some parallax has another problem. There are a dozen or so regular stars bunched up standing in the way, too. HR this that and the other. TYC so-on-and-so-forth. And all manner of ICRF J174 radio source nonsense.
I’m thinking of writing a State Congressman about this if I can figure out who one is. Or maybe call the sheriff.
I’m much thrilled about this. That outer shell is going to help haul a lot of water, but that ain’t the half of it.
That fiberglass tube feels as though it has walls half-inch thick. It’s evidently intended to take a lot of pressure. Don’t know yet what I’ll use it for.
This says it had an 8 gallon per minute capacity. Which probably means there’s an 8 gpm pump somewhere here.
Sheeze the Universe was kind to this old guy yesterday.
The Making of the Roman Army From Republic to Empire, Lawrence Keppie
I don’t recall ever reading the Keppie version.
Myles Keogh Biography by Charles L Convis
The Art of War, Sun Tzu, forward by Liddell Hart. My version’s paperback and doesn’t have the Hart forward, so I’m tickled pea green with this.
Frontier State at War – Kansas 1861-1865, Albert Castel
I’ve already got this, but it’s an old copy and doesn’t have the dust jacket.
Brown Water Black Berets – Lt. Commander Thomas J. Cutler
Never read this one.
I’d have been back sooner if it hadn’t been for this billy goat on the Ranch Road. Spent considerable while trying to find an unlocked gate to one or another ranch nearby. He was tame, really tame, and I could have lifted him over one of the fences, but didn’t know which side of the road to choose. Gale and Kay are calling around to try to find who owns him.
Lots of roadkill deer and exotics in the ditches between here and Kerrville. I’d hate to see this guy join them.
But the biggest, most exciting haul of the day: Someone dumped an intact Kenmore Water Softener in the grader ditch. The outer shell is rigid nylon, looks to hold 20 gallons, and inside’s a fiberglass cylinder might hold another 7, 8 gallons if I can think of something to use it for. And the pump appears to be undamaged, also. Something really heavy in there somewhere. The whole shebang must have weighed over 100 pounds.
The HEB grocery store parking lot was jam-packed and I REALLY didn’t want to go in there. But I said to myself, “If you’ll go in there and promise not to be forever whining and complaining about it I’ll give you a special treat.”
“Hmmm,” says I. “What do you have in mind?”
“How about a pie? Or some Elgin sausage?”
“If you don’t want me whining and complaining you ought to fork over Elgin sausage AND a pie. All or nothing.”
“Cripes! You’re driving a hard bargain, but time’s wasting. You got it.”
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 
