Tag Archives: lifestyle

Hydrox: “So why can’t I hear Old Sol talking?”

hydroxwindow2

Hydrox: We pray him up every morning, pray him down evenings.  I hear one end of all these conversations you have with him, but I never hear Old Sol saying anything.

Me:  Once again, it’s your romantic mode of viewing reality.  You’re only sensing what’s immediately apparent, not seeing the underlying form.

Hydrox:  I have to see the underlying form to hear what Old Sol says?

Me:  Think of it this way.  You look across the meadow and see trees with birds in them.  And an inch in front of your eyes you see a grasshopper.  You have an a priori knowledge the movement of those birds and that grasshopper jumping are happening at the same time.  But they aren’t.  What your eyes tell you is now is a microsecond earlier for the birds than the grasshopper because of the speed of light reflecting off both, arriving at your eye simultaneously.

Hydrox:  You’ve lost me.

Me:  Your mind filters what it sees with a priori knowledge.  You can’t hear Old Sol talking because you have romantic, a priori knowledge Old Sol doesn’t speak.  You’re not able to sense the underlying form.  It’s the same reason the people who read this blog wouldn’t be able to hear you talk, can’t hear cats talk.

Hydrox:  Well I’ll be damned.

Me:  Think of it.  People in the Bible used to hear God talk.  Adam and Eve, Abraham, Job, Moses, they were hearing in the Classical mode of reality.  Underlying form.   They can’t hear God speak anymore because they’ve gone by necessity into the Romantic mode.  Their minds filter out what God says, because in the modern world if they allowed themselves to hear the kinds of things God said they’d get themselves into a pile of trouble.

Hydrox:  How do you mean that?  People hear God talking all the time.

Me:  Only when God says things they won’t get in trouble hearing and obeying.  God might be telling people all over the place they have to sacrifice their kids, the same way he told that to Abraham.  But you can’t go around hearing God telling you to kill your kids, nor anyone else the way God used to do.  Telling people to smite other people hip and thigh.  Stone them to death if they screw around, masturbate, don’t follow the rules.  People today who hear God telling them to do things of that nature are generally believed to be insane.  Especially if they go ahead and do it.

Hydrox:  So if I can rid myself of this stupid, romantic way of looking at reality I’ll be able to hear what Old Sol’s saying?”

Me:  Yeah, but you’ll need to keep it to yourself or people will think you’re crazy.

Old Jules

Turnbuckles – The Final Solution

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

carrier and box 1

A guy over in Rock Springs built this platform to fit into the hitch receiver out of scrap iron for me.  Another guy threw in the junk toolbox and bolted it into the platform.  Cost for the whole shooting match was too insignificant to believe.

And once I had it I could carry an el cheapo 2.5 ton floor jack to ease my concerns about future blowouts.  But carrying that floor jack home in there showed me the hitch receiver doesn’t have the moxie to keep the thing straight and level.  By the time I got home it was listing a few inches on the side the floor jack was riding.

carrier and box 2

I studied on it for a day trying to think of every possible solution.  I had a set of tiedown turnbuckles and clamps from a roof rack carrier I knew someday I’d find a use for.

carrier and box 3

Voila!

carrier and box 4a

Ran cables across the top of the bumper and attached them to the RV frame.  Pulled that mama back up level with the bumper slicker than greased owl-scat.

One of the nice things about this thing is that I can trailer it, along with other containers when I want to pull a trailer, leave the trailer behind and put this into the hitch receiver when I want to slum and go spartan.

And always have a floor jack along to do the heavy lifting.

Old Jules

Clean laundry and civil discourse – Satanist style

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

Going to a coin laundry with the RV’s an entirely different experience compared to the various times in my life when I considered hanging around watching clothes tumble something akin to hell.  Just knowing there’s a fridge out there with cold tea, milk, or ice water at a reasonable price helps.  A comfy place to stretch out, a selection of books half-read.  Lawn chair if I want to use it.

But before I decide which way I’m going to enjoy my laundrying I look the place over.  Sometimes it’s worth the hard chair to allow surreptitiously watching the people sharing the place. 

So this time I carried my stuff inside, tossed it into a washer near the front door, and casually allowed my eyes to look everyone over while I walked to the back for quarters.  Sauntered back to the machine.  Several lower-financial-drawer women, several younger couples, and a few old guys.  Mostly ignoring one another.

But I noticed a scrawny old guy wearing a Vietnam War Veteran cap watching me as I fed quarters into the machine.   So when I finished I took a chair as far from him as I could get but still see my machine.  Guy’s wearing Vietnam War Veteran caps aren’t part of my repertoire of wanna-get-acquainted.

I watched him out of the corner of my eye while I pretended to do the ‘bored-people scan’, opened my book, read a page, put it down.  Twigged to the fact nobody in the place would meet his eye, and he was trying to get eye contact.  I figured, “Oh jeeze, this guy’s been here enough so everyone wants to avoid the nuisance he makes of himself.”

But he was focusing more attention on me, working up to saying something, or coming over nearer where I was sitting.  I groaned and stood up, stretching, to go out to the RV, head off anything he was thinking.  Too late.

I turned to the door and he caught my eye.  “Hey!  You’re a lefty!”

Um.  Yeah.”  Hell.  How’d he happen to notice that?  Whoopteedoo conversation starter.  He got up and headed to the door with me.

It’s been a chore, hasn’t it?”  Two of us standing in the shade of the overhang.  Me fidgeting to break loose and sprint for the RV.

What has?”

Going through life left-handed.”

Not when I could find a woman willing to sleep on the right side.”  Figured I might as well clarify my sexual preferences in case that was what was coming down the pike.

A few minutes later it came out he was a supply clerk in DaNang during the Vietnam fracas.  Tough gig.  Whoopteedoo.  “So what the hell’s the hat all about?”

“It’s because of my religion.  People around here don’t like me because of it, so I try to put my best foot forward.  Vietnam Vet buys me an edge.”

I shook my head, remembered getting cornered by the guy preaching Urantia outside the library in Grants, New Mexico.  Wanted to be my new best friend.  Real pain in the ass I never broke free of as long as I lived in Grants, always encountering him. 

I could either brush the guy off even though he was hungry for talk, or I could grit my teeth, be polite, and hear what he wanted to tell me.  Turned out he’s a Satanist.

Whaaa?  A Satan worshiper?”

No.  We don’t worship Satan.  That’s just something Christian preachers claim we do.”

At least I don’t have a dog in THAT fight.  “Well, hell.  Better than being an atheist, I reckons.”  I really didn’t want to hear this crap.  “Nice talking to you, but I need to take a nap.”

I left him standing in the shade, careful not to look back.

Old Jules

Old Sol’s Flipping Magnetic Field Crisis

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by.

The Sun’s Magnetic Field is about to Flip

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/05aug_fieldflip/

http://science.nasa.gov/media/medialibrary/2013/08/06/splash3.jpg

So here we are again, human beings screwing things up from hell to breakfast in the solar system.  Back a few decades ago before anyone had ever noticed the polarity of the sun reverses itself every eleven years [it’s assumed, because we donealready saw it happen three times already] nobody realized how badly human beings were messing things up.

This polarity reversal seems to correspond to Jupiter being at a particular place in its orbit, similar to the sun spot cycle doing it roughly then, also.  Pure coincidence.

The reality is that human beings are creating too much various stuff in their lifestyles and some laws are going to have to be passed to keep this sort of thing from happening.  Won’t be anytime at all before the academians calling themselves scientists will be lining up for grants to study it all and make recommendations about what laws need passing.

Because those solar reversals are just another sign that man needs to mend his ways.

I consulted Old Sol about it while we were praying him up this morning, but He seemed to have a cold, runny nose or some such thing.  Kept sort of sneezing I reckons, making funny noises.

Guess he didn’t want to talk about it.  Probably something personal.

Old Jules

The Rube Goldbergism Field

non electromagnet

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

Farnham’s Freehold, by Robert A. Heinlein 1964

Hi readers.  Here’s another one of those old early-days RAH tomes to give you some smiles, some anachronisms to feel smug about, and a couple of truly interesting things to think about.

The first part of the book is all the usual suspects, family with a bomb shelter before the bombs fall, etc.  If you haven’t read a thousand others, might as well get it done  with this one, I reckons.

But then the bombs hit, one of them dead-center.  Spang blows Farnham and his family into sometime a longish while in the future, same spot.  Then the fun starts.

The big powers destroyed themselves and most of the other non-ethnic places full of advanced white people.  So when Farnham and his white family come up for air it isn’t long before they’re discovered by the meek who inherited the earth.  Africans, mainly, in this area.  A sort of do-it-yourself African empire sitting atop the ruins of the US.

Sure, some white people survived.  Most have been adopted as slaves in a manner similar to the way the Ottomans treated captured Europeans during an earlier time.  Bred the good ones for physical and mental traits, castrated the others and put them to work.  Kept a lot of females for breeding stock, too.

So once they’re captured, Farnham and his family are forced to adapt themselves to a lifestyle most white people have spent a lot more generations becoming unaccustomed to than was good for them.  Farnham’s wife lucks into being the paramour of one of the black rulers, and being a 20th Century mom, wants her son with her.  But him being a male, her being part of the harem, he’s got to be castrated first.  Which gives her pause, but only momentarily.

And so on.

Lots of laughs in this book.  A truly fun read.

Old Jules

Being doomed ain’t all that bad

Hi readers.  Thanks for coming by.

A guy I usually stop and have a cup of coffee with when I’m in Kerrville was exchanging pontifications with me lately.  Seemed everything we could think of to talk about led to a similar ‘where’, and that where didn’t invite any street dances.  At least unless a person could rotate it on the axis enough to recognize all the ‘wheres’ are the same place as they always were.

Problem was we kept switching around looking at things too collectively.  Individually he and the other old codgers who hang around there talking with him, including me, aren’t doing too badly.  Some of us have health issues, and all of us are a lot nearer death [by appearances] than we were ten years, or ten minutes ago.  Same as everyone else, though an argument might be made we’re nearer than them.

Nearer, by appearances, only.  Those people driving by out there on the pavement all are operating under the illusion they’re going to live as long as us, which one-hell-of-a-lot of them won’t.  They’ll get terminal illness, car smashups, all manner of unexpected ways to exit the vehicle while some of us old guys are still stopping by visiting one another.

And by far the greatest likelihood is that we ain’t all, including the ones driving by, ain’t going to all die the same week, the same day, even the same decade.  Which is the difference between individual, and collective doomsday.

But when you come right down to it, what-the-hell is the difference?  If we all pick the same day to die we’ll each still have had our day in the sun.  Same as we would have otherwise. 

Thinking about this during the times I’m not in the company of other people it seems to me there’s a lot more emphasis put on the collective side of things than contributes to uppidyness at an individual level.  If I happened to care a lot whether and when I die, I can see how the prospect of all sorts of risk-taking might seem something to be avoided.  Might be able to influence one-way-or-another [though not nearly as much as I might imagine] whether I kicked sooner, or later.

But looking around me and seeing all manner of cumulonimbus signs of doom coming up on the horizon and concluding it’s worse than just my own personal demise, that it’s something humanity ought to avoid, just doesn’t make any sense at all.  It requires the assumption that there’s something better after I’m dead, about lots of human beings running around watching television, driving to the grocery store, playing games on the computer, and having romances.

Fact is if they all die the same week as I do the great bulk of them will have been spared a lot of pain and worry, and looking around me I’m not certain the happiness and satisfaction they might have experienced is enough to offset it for most of them.  At least not enough to be worth interrupting the happiness and satisfaction of now on an individual level to devote thought to it.

One of the things comes up in those conversations is what a shame it was we waited so long to figure out we could have been living right back then, instead of waiting around to do it.  We’d have gotten a lot more living done, on the one hand.  And on the other, if doomsday had come along and interfered, we’d have still gotten something for our money.

Old Jules

The basic idea’s sound enough

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by.

shaker drywasher

Most of you probably won’t find this of interest, but possibly Eddie and Keith might.  Keith saw earlier efforts directed to a similar end back during the early 1990s, and I described something similar to Eddie last December.

The idea here’s to have a portable enough contraption to be light and easy to manage through some walking distance, fast enough in the assembly, unstable enough to allow a lot of shaking.  The whirlygig on the weedwhopper needs to be out of balance enough to provide the vibration.  But the bearing will be side loaded, so it might self destruct before enough use to justify it.

The next frame will be an aluminum golf-caddy on wheels, which is capable of being as unstable as the chair frames.  That would also allow it to be rolled instead of carried where it’s to be used.

There’s going to have to be a grizzly up ahead of the platform/table, which might cause too much weight for this method to allow enough shaking of the table/riffles to do the job.  Might also need a counter-balance at the bottom to keep an angle on the table, which will also need to be tested.

I don’t know how much adjusting will be needed on the table to keep things moving, but slowly enough so’s it doesn’t move too fast.  Also don’t know how much classifying would be needed ahead of the thing, how large the material could be for it to work.

You can see the two front legs on the frame are off the ground.  That’s so it can be rocked forward, both to provide instability, and to allow adjustment of the table angle.  Naturally it has to have a bottom surface on the riffle/table.

But the whole thing as the huge advantage, provided it works, of not throwing up a mile-high cloud of dust.  I doubt it will move as much material as a store-bought portable drywasher, but it lacks a lot of the disadvantages, and it is an inexpensive alternative.

Might be worth trying, anyway.

Old Jules

A jackass has feelings

Hi readers.  A jackass really does have feelings.  And those feelings can land him in a pile of confusion, same is they can human beings.

For instance, human beings don’t have a hell of a lot of use for jackasses anymore.  Jennies, either.  But some human beings still have a use for mules, and a jackass is the only way you can get a mule.

But a jackass is picky about the women he runs around with.  He doesn’t care anything about getting excited over some short-eared mare twice his size.  Unlike a Jennie, who’ll get excited about anything with four hooves when she’s in the mood.

So when a human being wants a mule he has to find a jackass colt just born, barely got its eyes open, and put it on a brood mare.  Brood mare doesn’t care what animal she nurses, so she brings up that jackass colt same as if it were a horse.

And the human being who wants a mule out of the deal keeps that young jackass running in his horse herd.  Never lets it see anything but horses.  Young jack grows up thinking it’s a horse.  Time comes he starts thinking about females, he couldn’t care less about any longeared jennie.  He wants a horse mare.

So the human being picks a mare with nice markings, good bloodlines, and at the right time arranges a love affair between that jackass and that mare, joins them in holy matrimony for the duration of the romance.

Ends up with a mule out of the deal.  And a confused jackass thinks it’s a horse.

Nobody comes out of it any worse for the wear so far as anyone knows.  Except maybe Italians.  If you think back on what you read about Roman history, Romulus and Remus had something similar happen to them.  And western civilization hasn’t fully recovered yet.

Old Jules

Hey! Looky over there!

Hi Readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read doodah, doodah.

diet water2

Funny how we humans are so prone to find anwers to bloat our egos over answers that don’t feel as good, but have the virtue of being true.  For instance, any king, nobleman, or any peasant in human history could tell you the fundamental purpose of government. 

If you asked, the peasant, the king or nobleman, would stare at you wondering if you were joking, then decide you were just the village idiot and explain, “The fundamental purpose of government is to keep the hired-help from running off with the silverware.”

Sure, goverment’s always had other functions, too.  Settling arguments between noblemen over which peasants belong to what nobleman.  Setting the peasants hacking at one another with sharpened objects if the noblemen can’t agree which is the bossman.  Sending some of the hired hands around to see what crops the peasants have managed to harvest, and taking some of it away from them.  Making some of the peasants into cops to ride herd on the peasants, keeping them doing what the noblemen tell them to.

Yeah, things got complicated when the Americans managed to run off with the silverware despite everything kings and noblemen could do. Suddenly the applecart was overturned and everyone was going to want to be a king or nobleman.   And the process of deciding who was going to order whom around could have gotten bloody if there hadn’t been some smartypantses thinking ahead. 

They had to think of a way to make everyone think they didn’t have any king, any noblemen, any dynasties of power.  The first time it was put to the test was President/King John Adams and President/King John Quincy Adams. 

That’s when they invented the methodology.  “Hey!  Looky over there!”  And nobody noticed there was suddenly a dynastic nobility forming up with new silverware they didn’t want the hired help running off with.

Worked fairly well, all things considered.  They didn’t even have to keep what they were doing a secret.  Time came when Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and Hoot Gibson all used it.

Some guy would be pointing a gun at them, and Hopolong, Roy, Gene, or Hoot would point and yell, “Hey!  Looky over there!”  The guy would look and find himself punched on the point of the chin, corrected in his designs on the silverware.

Today it’s a lot easier because there are so many things the government to point to and yell, “Hey!  Looky over there!” and people will look.  People who hate what they see as dumbasses and rednecks will even help doing the pointing.  “Hey, take the guns away from those dumbass rednecks.”

Or, “Hey!  Looky at those people who do things I don’t like with their sex organs!”

Or, “Hey!  Looky at those people getting more free rocks from the government than I do!”  [The government business of, “buy 10 rocks and get two free” doesn’t work equally for everyone.  Some people only buy 5 rocks and get 10.  Others buy 12 rocks and get 50.  Big big big problem of unequal treatment.]

Sure, it’s dizzying trying to think it all through.  But any peasant, king or nobleman could tell you the truth of it.

If we didn’t all happen to be the village idiots.

Old Jules