Red Grain Truck Blues – Jerry Sires circa 1975-1980
The yellow corn sure looks good up ahead
inside the red grain truck.
It’s piled high to testify
that some farmer had a little luck.
I sure like to drive these country roads
even though they’re changing every day
but I always was kind of slow
and sometimes I just feel in the way.
In the city there’s people getting by
taking in each other’s dirty clothes.
Where the big cars and fine homes all come from
I guess nobody knows.
I wonder how long it can last
When the teeming billions watch and want theirs too.
it all has to come from the earth
and she’s about done all she can do.
You can almost hear her cry
You can almost hear her moan
as another garage door opener
is carved right from her bones,
but daddy needs a new golf cart
and mama needs a new suntan machine.
Oh Bobby wants a race car
and Sally wants a full sized movie screen.
You can almost hear her cry
You can almost hear her moan
when Singapore and Shanghai
want to refrigerate their homes.
Still, daddy needs a new golf cart
and mama needs a new suntan machine
Oh Bobby wants a race car
and Sally wants a full sized movie screen.
The yellow corn sure looks good up ahead
inside the red grain truck.
The yellow corn sure looks good up ahead
inside the red grain truck.
First off, The Invader Cat’s not becoming a fixture around here. It’s just hanging around getting meals and paying the fare by being bullied by chickens and the other cats. It has a home somewhere. I’m certain of it because sometimes it vanishes for a couple of days.
But it’s not a fixture and it’s not becoming a fixture. Even though when I was putting the piece of the can of feed I’d saved for it down last night, it came within a couple of feet of me scratching it behind the ears.
Secondly, if you’re among those trying to figure out what’s not happening by tracking Ganymede, you’re a day late and a dollar short. Ganymede looks great at first, but the further you hone things down the more you’ll conclude something’s missing. I’d suggest doing some dizzying calculations correlating Ganymede positions with with the position of Mercury. Which, if you run through enough ways of measuring where they are, will give you a lot clearer view of what’s not happening.
Thirdly, I worked a lot on the brush dams in the ruts on the road coming down here yesterday in hopes of further rainfall runoff forcing the hill to give up more of the dirt it’s been bringing down from above. Over the years it’s gradually been filling the worst blow-out-a-tire, high-centering ruts. Now if we can keep getting a few of these male rains I think this will finish it off.
Which is to say, spectacular erosion won’t be happening and past erosion will have reversed itself somewhat.
Lastly, despite your hardheadedness on the issue if you’ve got any, cold weather isn’t happening.
If you’re going to be a part of what’s happening you’re going to have to switch from felt to straw. If you try to hang on to your outdated good-times idea about felt you’re going to have sweat running down around your eyelids and getting into your ears next time you go to town. And you won’t be happening.
Just saying.
Old Jules
Edit 8:37 am: I neglected to mention earlier while talking about Mercury and Ganymede that Saturn seems to be happening a little bit. Even though it’s way to hell and gone off the other side of things where you’d expect it to have to be.
Good morning readers. Thanks for stopping by for a read this morning.
Those of you who haven’t been getting enough magnetism in your areas will be glad to know we’ll be having a nice little geomagnetic storm today.
CME TARGETS EARTH, MARS: A coronal mass ejection (CME) launched from the sun on Feb. 24th appears set to hit both Earth and Mars. According to analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab, the cloud should reach Earth today, Feb. 26th around 1330 UT, followed by Mars two days later.
The CME was hurled into space by a filament of magnetism, which rose up from the sun’s northestern limb and erupted on Feb. 24th: SDO movie. Although much of the cloud headed north, out of the plane of the planets, the cloud’s lower edge will dip down low enough to intersect Earth, Curiosity, and Mars.
It couldn’t have come at a better time here. The ranchers have been complaining something awful about the magnetic drought.
Meanwhile, it’s mostly business as usual here. When I went out onto the porch to say my hellos to the felines it was all present and accounted for except the invader cat. It was out there last night, but I figure it’s commuting to whatever place it has real people somewhere, keeping them on edge, then hurrying back here where things are really happening. But that leaves it open to the possibility of missing something both places.
I’m thinking it will carry on this game as long as it thinks it can get by with it at both ends.
Those of you who believe radio waves are messing with your heads will be gratified to know there’s a place in the US where you can get away from it.
There’s a 13,000-square-mile section of West Virginia known as the Quiet Zone where there’s no WiFi, no cell service, and strict regulations placed on any device that could pollute the airwaves. Those unique conditions are enforced (and aided by the surrounding mountains) to protect the radio telescopes in the area from interference, and it’s hardly anything new — as The Huffington Post notes, Wired did an extensive profile of the zone back in 2004 (the area itself was established in 1958). But as the BBC recently reported, the Quiet Zone is also now serving as something of a refuge for people who believe that wireless technology makes them sick — a condition sometimes called Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (or EHS). Those claims are, of course, in dispute by most medical professionals, but that apparently hasn’t stopped folks from calling the local real estate agent “every other week or so” to inquire about a place in the zone.
For those who don’t want to migrate to West Virginia, however, experts suggest a person might just hit the switch at the power pole and see whether it results in any improvement.
One body of opinion leans to the thought that radio waves have a lot more influence on the human mind when they’re allowed to enter an antenna, swoop down through some receiver to an amplifier, then out to a speaker. Then back through the air where they encounter a human ear.
Making sure those radio waves don’t get passage through and convert themselves to something the human mind can interpret into pictures and words, those experts say, interrupts the damage they can do, or at least reduces it.
Almost no one here is qualified to tell you how not to blow yourself up, but one of our favorite members and one of the Group’s founders, Art Corbitt, would rail about ammonia in lraches being explosive. Keyword fulminate.
Cyanide tailings are the wirst offenders, so one really has to process that out before extraction.
Geology degrees I am told could have morr chemistry and mechanical engineering, so this may be normal for the industry.
Good morning readers. I’m obliged you came by for a read. I wasn’t going to make another post for today, but I thought I’d better in case some of you haven’t been visiting spaceweather.com to keep current on news events.
As you can see, Old Sol has a few magnetic field issues he’s trying to work through. Astrophysicists and Mayan priests are trying their best to walk him through the tough spots and get him back on track.
You’ve also probably been having nagging questions about what else is going on in the solar system. Nothing to get excited about though. Uranus and Saturn are standing off opposite one another with their seasonal spin axis configurations and their ‘not fully understood’ offset magnetic fields whirling around firing something a bit strange at one another and Old Sol just found himself downrange. No big deal. It will pass.
If you’re like me, you’ve probably also been asking yourself what the Galilean moons are up to today. As you can see, Europa and Ganymede are somewhat lined up down-orbit, Io’s sort of off to the side and Callisto’s way-to-hell-and-gone back the other side of Jupiter.
Other than that, there’s not much going on. I hope this helps you through the day.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
The Universe is off attending a manditory Universe Sensitivity Training Conference today. It worked a little overtime so things wouldn’t stack up while it was busy getting sensitized.
So everything that was scheduled to happen in the Universe today has already happened. No point in anyone all worked up worrying about anything they thought might occur. If it hasn’t happened yet it’s been re-scheduled for Wednesday.
All that’s over there until the first post tomorrow is the single-post archive migrated from Facebook. But if you’d care to go for a look at the archive it might give you an insight into the general drift.
I’m posting this today in hopes of discovering whether anything needs changing, whether the navigation works, and to just give anyone interested a gander at it. If you click it and find there’s a problem of any sort I’d be obliged if you’d send her an email, post it here, or let us know by mental telepathy.
Seems the advantages of being out of sight and out of mind for most of the population aren’t necessarily advantages when the out-of-sight geography includes something a multi-national corporation wants. All those city folks needing to keep the air conditioners turned down to 70 and to be able to light up the hair dryers every morning probably never ask themselves where the electricity popped out of the ground and hopped into the wires they plug things into.
One more bug on the windshield of civilization. Old Jules
[The following letter was written by former Hopi Tribe chairman Benjamin H. Nuvamsa from Shungopavi. He presented the letter to the Hopi Tribal Council on Friday January 13, 2012]
January 13, 2012
Hopi Tribal Council
Hopi – Tewa Senom
It is time we have a serious discussion about coal mining on our reservation, our water rights and our environment. For far too long, we have pushed these issues aside, not willing to talk about how these issues impact our lives. We must talk about how the Peabody Western Coal Company and Navajo Generating Station are affecting our lives. Since the mid 1960’s, Peabody Coal has been mining our coal, pumping our precious Navajo Aquifer water and paying us pennies on the dollar in return. Navajo Generating Station is emitting dangerous and harmful particulates into the air we breathe. Our coal resources are being depleted. Our Navajo Aquifer has been damaged…
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by this morning.
That’s not my High Roller because I still have to migrate my Dropbox folder over to the spanking new E Dell Machine, and I’m typing this on the old one. But I’m confident later today will find me pushing this guy aside, re-plugging my heavy lifter, and getting back to where I left off a few days ago.
Came a bull-goose mano daddy-longlegs thunderstorm here last night. Sounded as though things were falling on other things to create the illusion the underneath stuff was being crushed, but I just crawled out of bed, turned off the computers and listened to the roof holding up as well as could be expected.
There’s something thought-provoking listening to an attack by the sky on a metal roof, provided the roof doesn’t distract things by letting it pour through onto the bed. But I’ve shown you pics before of how I prevent that with sheets of black plastic stapled to the ceiling to move the water over to the downhill wall before releasing it.
So I did a lot of thinking about all manner of things while the night and the roof talked to one another about how frustrating that sheet of plastic makes things for them.
One realization I came to involves having to go back and adjust times in the past when things didn’t happen, which is going to be a lot of work. I’ve avoided allowing myself to consider that a need for this project because of the amount of labor intensive format manipulation required to get the data into something I can use. Now the stress of not relying on a dying machine is reduced and the heavy lifter’s going to be back lifting I’ll probably be getting things prepared for that today.
Which beats the dickens out of stomping around in mud. The other alternative.
The invader cat came in last night, was up on the porch chowing down on the cat food the regular army didn’t eat. At least it ran off without any exchange of greetings.
Several other matters are begging to be brought up and typed, but my coffee cup’s empty, the temperature’s dropping and I sense I’m going to have to put on another layer of clothing. Probably need to hunt down that pair of gloves with no fingers, too.
So thanks for reading, if you have, and maybe I’ll post something that makes more sense later if I’m feeling up to the task.
I’ve spent most of a lifetime avoiding virtue successfully without having to devote a lot of energy to doing it. But it’s gotten a lot more difficult.
For instance, I predominantly eat veggies along with some rice. If I feel the need for protein I throw in some eggs. Sounds harmless enough. I’ve got a rice steamer with a platform compartment in the top allows me to steam a mess of veggies and rice faster than I can tell it. I love it, and it’s easy to clean afterward without using any water. I run a 1.1 penny US baby-wipe wipe over it after I pour out the vittles and it’s ready to run another race.
But suddenly I’ve discovered not eating meat is at least a virtue, in some cases, a religion. Wedges me firmly between a rock and a hard place. I’ll eat a bit of meat sometimes when I can afford it, but honestly I feel better saving the money against the possibility of something coming up so’s I need money.
I’ve got a little sausage in the freezer I had Gale pick up for me last time he was in San Angelo, but in some sense it’s like the quarter-bottle of Y2K Jack Daniels Black Label sitting on the microwave drawing dust. It’s just too good to use, except on special occasions.
So, for the purposes of not being virtuous, the sausage doesn’t help much more than the Jack Daniels. I need to come up with some cheap, non-virtuous things I can do that don’t require burning any gas, borrowing a vehicle, or glutting myself more than I do when I cook up a nice Idaho potato, chop up some jalapeno, onion, half-stick of butter and smother it in yogurt or cottage cheese.
Lessee.
pride…. heck, I’m already up to my Adam’s apple with pride. Any more pride might be a hazard to my health.
covetousness Maybe that’s a possibility. Maybe I can think of something to want really badly. Nothing much comes to mind, but this is too important to reject out of hand.
envy … That would be pretty cool, finding someone to envy. But I can’t recall running across anyone I thought was enviable in so long I’m not sure I ever did.
lust … Nope. Donealready beentheredonethat with lust. I ain’t going there again.
anger …Took me 50-odd years to figure out I was an angry person, same as everyone claimed I was. Big job of work getting rid of it once I figured out I was. Anger needs to make a home in people who don’t know the tricks. I don’t think I could hold onto anger in a way it would find palatable.
gluttony . . . Gluttony might work. I’ve got 100 pounds of milo maize out there. Maybe boil some up, put some butter on it, maybe some pepper and onions. Curry. But I’d have to drop in some sausage to keep it from metamorphosing into something virtuous. Something to think about, anyway.
sloth … Sheeze! Sloth is absurd. It’s a red herring they hang out there pretending to offer up hope in case a person can’t avoid virtue some other way. But hells bells! When’s a person supposed to find any time for sloth when there’s only 24 hours in a day? Sloth is BS. Forget it.
That milo’s looking better and better. At least until I can think of some more respectable way to clear my conscience without bankrupting myself.
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 
