I’ll leave it to you to decide what’s strange about it. Cob-webs around here are the norm. Maybe it has something to do with the nuclear waste part of things. Old Jules
Hawaii Konate, the people who keep me posted on what time it wasn’t over the past while, what time they think it probably isn’t now, and what time they’re middling sure it won’t be in the future sent me a nice greeting by email.
The card arrived in my hotmail email box at 3:25 AM someone’s time, maybe mine, maybe theirs, maybe hotmail’s. I’m not sure whether that picture is of something at the Hawaii site, or whether it’s wherever they speak the language at the top of the circular they send out: BUREAU INTERNATIONAL DES POIDS ET MESURES, ORGANISATION INTERGOUVERNEMENTALE DE LA CONVENTION DU METRE. [Muddy muddy muddy etcetera]
But even if I knew what time it wasn’t in that city where the place on the card isn’t, I still wouldn’t know what that thing is they sent me a picture of wishing me a Merry Christmas.
I generally don’t like people telling me what kind of Christmas to have, but especially I don’t like them telling me how to have a whole year. But in this instance, they did let themselves be nailed down on the thorny issue 0f 2012. 2012, unless they’re being cunningly sarcastic, isn’t a time that won’t happen.
The card didn’t come with one of the circulars they send out telling what time it hasn’t been all over the place, what time they don’t think it is now, and what time they don’t think it will be in the future. That would be unsettling if they hadn’t gone ahead and mentioned 2012 in the card.
So maybe there was no authoritarian motive behind telling me what kinds of Christmas and 2012 to have. Maybe they were being subtly reassuring.
I suppose it’s probably best not to try to second-guess them.
Good morning readers. I’m obliged you came for a visit and read.
I’m going to start this morning by telling you something you ought to know already, but mightn’t:
Sometimes I take myself a lot more seriously than is justified by my history of being ‘right’ compared to my history of being ‘wrong’. People who’ve known me forever are acutely aware of this. The terms, ‘alarmist‘ and ‘melodramatic‘ have occasionally been used with brutal accuracy by people in a position to arrive at informed judgements.
Keep in mind I’m the guy who dumped a second career within a couple of years of being able to draw a hefty retirement check because I believed so thoroughly Y2K was going to happen, leading eventually to my current situation. Keep in mind I also spent a lot of years climbing and unclimbing mountains searching for a lost gold mine I believed I’d find.
And keep in mind I don’t regret any of it.
So with all that in mind, I think those of you who read my ‘indefinite detention’ posts of the past few days would be well advised to examine other opinions, even though I still believe I’m generally right. My believing it shouldn’t carry any weight for you.
Here’s another viewpoint offering up a mitigated set of possibilities regarding the same situation and the activities leading to it:
The NDAA Is A Horrible Bill, And Why Obama Is Going To Sign It
December 17, 2011 By Wendy Gittleson
If you’ve formed any opinions based on anything I’ve said here I think you owe it to yourself to read it. Wendy Gittleson is certainly a lot more qualified to have an opinion than I am, most likely. Even though I don’t necessarily agree.
Morning readers. I’m obliged you came by for a read.
I’ve been studying on that picture of the pretty little airplane those whatchallit, Iraning people found in the sky and captured. I’m fairly impressed and would sure like to have me one, even though I haven’t figured out exactly how it works.
That airplane doesn’t have much in the way of control surfaces and weight-and-balance might be tricky. Not as much rudder on it as a person might wish.
I’m wondering if a person might lure one down with an orange jump suit, Helicopters and Orange Jump Suits. If those things are flying around some silly-assed place like whatchallit, Irang, where there’s nothing to see but a bunch of Persians, seems to me they’re bound to be flying around here where there’s really good stuff.
Anyway, they can’t be that hard to catch. A man with a CB radio might be able to snag one, I’m thinking, if the orange jump suit didn’t do the trick.
I’ll have to study on it after I’ve got it to decide whether it’s best to put a harness underneath of the hang-glider variety, or mount a saddle on top. I don’t like the idea of riding it bareback the way Slim Pickens rode that bomb. Until a person got the feel for it, that thing might just buck some.
Besides, I’m used to more rudder than that and I’ve never flown anything without a tail section. Likely I’d want to fly it around treetop level a while so I didn’t have too far to fall at first.
Yesterday I was talking on the phone with my friend, Rich, in North Carolina. We were discussing this ‘indefinite detention’ thing going on in Congress and the fact it’s a lead-pipe cinch it’s going to happen. The US Government is defacto eliminating habeas corpus.
The conversation kept drifting back to the question, “How in the world did we get here? How did it come to this?”
The answer always came back the same. “We followed the yellow brick road.” We did it. He did it. I did it. We all did it. We saluted, marched in step, ignored the unpleasant obvious, and allowed ourselves to be cogs in a giant wheel. We closed our eyes and Rip Van Winkled our way into this.
We abdicated. When we saw our energy needs exceeding our capabilities to produce energy we took the comfortable route of ‘protecting’ sources someone else owned and kept the thermostats where they were. We wanted government services we couldn’t afford, so we signed the chits to let our descendants pay for it. When we saw the elected officials rubber-stamping the desires of multi-national corporations to move our production and manufacturing to countries where someone else could do it, we tacitly helped fill the void with government jobs. We watched them add layer after layer of new cop functions at every level. We watched them militarize the police throughout the country. We cheered as they imposed increasingly draconian measures of ‘protection’ of us against the microscopic threat our lives would be touched by terrorism.
We marched in step because it was the easy way and trusted someone else would pay the price.
We’re there now. There’s no going back. There’s not a damned thing you, I, anyone can do about it. It’s time to salute the future. Congress and the president wouldn’t have done this if they didn’t plan to use it.
Sometime during the next few years you’re going to have some choices to make. You can watch them haul off people you don’t like for indefinite detention. You are going to watch that, whether you like it or not. But since you don’t like those people anyway it will be easier to accept.
So long as it’s someone else.
We’re there and we’ve gotten what we paid for.
I don’t know about you, but it seems to me to be a strange place to find ourselves. Hog-tied, handcuffed, at the absolute mercy of the whims of people we were crazy ever to trust and really never did.
That line of misbehaving sunspots that were marching across above the equator so long finally got its comeuppance. Today there are only three honest-to-goodness ones and the litter of little peckerwoods just coming around the horizon.
Astrophysicists aren’t in agreement about what was getting out of hand up there, but many now assert it might be mud and all this rain that finally got it under control. There’s been so much rain lately every stick of firewood here’s been soaked, and even though cooling down Old Sol with wet firewood would be a big job of work, eventually it was bound to happen. Probably the reason for this cold snap, too.
But the other line of thinking among Hopi Elders, surviving Mayan track-of-time keepers, and the folks at BUREAU INTERNATIONAL DES POIDS ET MESURES, ORGANISATION INTERGOUVERNEMENTALE DE LA CONVENTION DU METRE, believe there’s a more novel reason that line of sunspots dwindled. They couldn’t stay in step.
Time, they assert, is so screwed up it’s impossible to keep anything going with any regularity and the sunspots finally just got too frustrated to keep trying.
There might be a lot to that. I get the email reports from the Hawaii Konate folk, and the circular always starts off with the caveat:
“Coordinated Universal Time UTC and its local realizations UTC(k). Computed values of [UTC-UTC(k)] and uncertainties valid for the period of this Circular. From 2009 January 1, 0h UTC, TAI-UTC = 34 s.”
Those uncertainties cover a lot of ground all over the planet and the people making a living trying to keep track of what time it is send out the Circular to advise interested parties of what time it wasn’t, mostly, any given day in cities of clockwatchers. But even telling what time it wasn’t has a considerable uncertainty factor, which they aren’t ashamed to admit.
I don’t know why they even keep those people on the payroll if they can’t tell us what time it wasn’t.
I’m going to kick this around with the cats and chickens. See if we can’t figure out a way to get a piece of the action on this timekeeping racket.
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.”
Please help me control the egos of the hats, cats, chickens, deer, wild hogs, dead trees and the Communist Toyota 4-Runner.
I appreciate all you visitors who come here and the kind words many of you say about So Far From Heaven. But I’m asking a favor of all of you. Accept our gratitude, but don’t offer awards.
There are thousands of fantastic blogs on the web. Many of those great blogs are getting blog awards. I believe all of those receiving those awards deserve them, aside from the awards offered to this blog. This blog is not yet worthy of any blog award.
Jeanne and I work hard on So Far From Heaven and we’re both determined to make it better, possibly good enough to receive an award someday. But we both know we aren’t there yet. So Far From Heaven has a long way to go..
Giving blog awards to So Far From Heaven detracts from the value of the awards.
But the blog awards offered to this blog have also bloated the community ego. The cats, chickens, deer, dead trees and even the Communist Toyota have all become insufferable.
So until some time in the future when we consider the blog to have reached a better standard, please accept our thanks for the thought, but don’t nominate So Far From Heaven for blog awards.
I know some of you readers are out of work and having difficulties finding jobs. With this post I’d like to twist your mind around in a way that might give you a different way of approaching the affair of starting to make money to live on.
I don’t know whether there’s any hope or not, but I can tell you it ain’t easy. From the time I gave myself a Y2K until I moved back to Texas I tried a number of desperate ideas that might have worked if I’d been smarter.
But I think there still might be something here in the way of thinking about it to give you a fresh perspective. Trying to find jobs flipping hamburgers at minimum wage or clerking in a motel graveyard shift, or stocking shelves and unloading trucks for a Dollar General didn’t prove out for me. I suspect it won’t for you. A lot of the reason is that young people don’t like working around older people. At least, they din’t in my case.
But the world’s still got niches a person might fill, things that people need doing and might pay to get done that the Chinese can’t get over here to do yet.
Polishing long-haul truck rims, bumpers, gas tanks:
I don’t know whether they’re still doing it, but truckers within the past few years [some of them] had an overweening pride in their wheels, bumpers and grilles.
Frequently they’ll pay up to $100 for the tractor wheels, gas tank, bumper and grille while they catch a snooze at a roadside park or overnight truck stop. An angle grinder/polisher, portable generator and a CB radio are the main costs of going into business.
Didn’t work out for me because my angle polishing head flew off, the knurled stem that held the head walked across the gas tank, cut through a fuel line [the truck was idling] and started squirting diesel all over the place before it caught fire [after he’d shut the rig down].
Might work out better for you. A person could make $500 – $1000 per day if he was fast and good.
Bodyguard:
Bodyguard didn’t work out well for me, either, though it paid well. Anyone who needs a bodyguard usually has a reason for needing one.
Respectable people doing legal things hire bodyguards from companies who do that for a living. But there’s a type of activity going on out there in the world that needs a different kind of bodyguard. If you’re a person who’s generally law-abiding, but desperate or open-minded enough to look into it, you might find a place there.
You’ve got to be a non-drug user, absolutely and unwaveringly, uncompromisingly honest, and you’ve got to be willing to be around some of the sleaziest human beings on the face of the earth all your waking hours. And you’ve got to be convincing that you’re uglier, colder and crazier than all those lowlifes around you.
Then there’s the danger of going to prison, which isn’t likely, but could happen. The things that go sour in that line of work tend to be of a different variety.
Tool handles:
It used to be a person could do well trading with the tribes if he was willing to go deep into the rez. Might still be so. They always have tools with broken handles, so buying a load of handles somewhere for all manner of tools, replacing the handles on the broken tools you’ve bought, then taking them by the truckload onto the rez, buying their heads with broken handles and selling them a used one you’ve repaired can be middling lucrative. But you’ve got to be relatively near a big rez or a lot of small ones.
Those mightn’t fit you and probably don’t, but they might give you an idea or two about some crack you can shine a flashlight into and find a way to make a living. Even in this brave new 21st Century.
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 