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?”
One thing that happens when you get a group of country people hanging around without a lot going on involves a mysterious sorting and filtering process. Small groups of strangers with similar interests are drawn into intense exchanges of arcane esoterica.
Saturday a few old guys including me got talking about chickens, coons, skunks and feral hogs none of us would have ever learned if we hadn’t been to the auction.
The wild hogs seem to be concentrated, we found, in some locations and absent in others. A guy from a few miles east of town seems to have the worst problem of any in the group, and despite the fact he’s killed a hundred hogs this year he says it hasn’t made a dent in the population.
He’s devised an ingenious trap with several interior rooms the hogs can get into but can’t get out, allowing him to capture a dozen at a time. He kills them in the traps and drags them down to a remote corner of the property with the previous hauls.
That guy knew some hog catching tricks I’ll probably use here next time they come in here or up and Gale’s tearing things up. He uses boxes of Jello as bait. Says they can’t resist it and they’ll choose going into a trap after Jello over breaking into a feed bin or tearing the walls off a storage shed for chicken feed.
But everyone agreed the hog population in Central Texas is out of control something awful.
Then, this morning, my old bud Rich sent me a link to this Yahoo News story:
Mexican officials have unveiled plans to slaughter some 50,000 wild boars that have crossed the border from the United States and now threaten agriculture in Mexico.
The Ministry of Environment in Chihauha state said some 1,500 hectares (3,700 acres) of farmland in the border town of Ojinaga have been affected by the large number of feral pigs that have come from Presidio County, Texas.
“We must get rid of these European wild boars because they sleep overnight on US soil during the day and cross over to the Mexican side to feed,” Ignacio Legarreta, a state official, told local media.
The boars of European origin, which were imported to Texas as pets and then replicated in the wild, have caused serious damage to the flora and fauna of the area, officials said.
“They have reproduced to reach more than 50,000 animals that threaten the area,” said Legarreta.
The authorities intend to use cages with food inside to trap the animals.
But back at the auction. I asked whether any of them had ever tried bringing the hogs in and selling them at auction. None had, and at first everyone’s reaction was a guffaw. Nobody likes getting close to a critter capable of ripping you in two and eating you. Probably the auction folks wouldn’t take them despite the fact they handle a lot of dangerous animals.
But then someone mentioned there’s a place in Ingram always advertising they want to buy swine on the hoof. Sausage place, one thought. Which got us thinking how a person might build a trap on a trailer so’s to not have to deal with them more than dragging the trailer to Ingram, letting them inspect them and kill them in the trap, drag them out, weigh them, and pay up.
I allowed if I’d considered that and thought of it earlier this year I’d be a lot better off financially today than I am. There was a lot of muttering and thinking going on among all of us before the conversation changed to coons.
“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.
Bulging motion cauldron cloud of stone
Patchy layer of brief life paint
Boils against the swirl of mist
Caresses swift changes of sky
And seasons
Sleepy knuckles on the skull of earth
What do you ponder?
Promontory above the sweeping distance
Falling, sliding into basin of the eons
This flea of life across the flash of moment
Longs to feel your numbness
To the march of time
Your wisdom of silence
I want to do a post on human bullying, but yesterday and today I’m leading into it with more important issues, namely the way the creatures I observe every day interact and the shifting bullying behavior among them.
I’m only going to skid across the surface of it, but I don’t want to digress and find myself up to my neck in human bullying issues without first briefly having laid the groundwork among the kinds of creatures people probably learned bullying from. In this case, cats and chickens.
This is Tabby, daughter to Shiva, the Cow Cat. Tabby’s the youngest cat around here, always reckless, always strong-willed and independent, always one to avoid conflict. She’s always been demanding of attention and affectionate.
But for the past month she’s suddenly become the bull-goose bully around here, beating the hell out of the older cats including her mother, Shiva.
This is Shiva the Cow Cat. Mother to Tabby, probably hatched around 2000, wandered into proximity with me around 2002 as a stray. Jeanne carried her to Kansas with her where she lived a few years and had a litter including Tabby. Around 2005, she and Tabby drifted back into the mix in my life.
Shiva’s never wanted much attention, only a daily stroke and scratch behind the ears to acknowledge I knew she was around. But her main joy in life was taking walks with me in the woods, sometimes accompanied by Tabby. When there were cows on the place Shiva took a lot of pleasure helping me chase them off, sometimes almost getting underfoot of them in the process.
But she was weakened a couple of years ago from some illness almost killed her and she’s never completely recovered. Sometimes she’d still like to take woods walks, but Tabby’s put a stop to it, and generally with the walks with cats, by attacking her and driving her back to the cabin. That ends the strolls for both of them.
This is Niaid, littermate to Hydrox, but without a contract. The old friend who loaned her to me shortly after she was weaned was murdered a few years ago, so she’s in an awkwardly poor-relations status. She’s part of a 1997 or 1998 litter, but she’s still the hunter/gatherer of the place. Even travels through the woods up to Gale’s house as nearly as we can figure, to catch rodents in his chicken pen. She was never a bully, but she could always take care of herself. Now Tabby’s beating hell out of her, too.
This is Hydrox, littermate to Niaid, 1997-1998 vintage. He used to have aspirations for being Top Cat, he and I both figuring he’d take over the boss-man job around here if I die before him. But he’s sort of lost interest in all that the past year, become satisfied to just lie around and let things happen. Aside from a daily hissing-swatting-spitting match with Niaid he doesn’t get involved in the social climbing and networking. He’s the only one Tabby’s not bullying yet.
As I explained yesterday, the chickens bully all the cats, though Tabby’s become more prone to put it to the test, locking eyes and playing out the last scene to The Good, The Bad and The Ugly with them. But she still backs off when someone has to.
Meanwhile almost all the deer have become a lot more aggressive, challenging both cat and chicken in standoffs they always win. A cat sleeping out by the garden’s liable to find itself nose-to-nose with a deer, then shoved, then chased back to the cabin. Or a chicken, deliberately knocked ass-over-appetite by a deer with a sudden urge to scurry off.
This is almost certainly a lot more information than you think you need to know about the animals around here, as well as the social life. But I think some of it applies to how humans interact in human environments and I might use some of what goes on among these creatures as a platform for discussing human bullying patterns.
Someone found this blog by search engine yesterday with the question, “What kind of words does a man want to hear during sex?”
I don’t believe I’ve elaborated on the issue on the blog because I don’t have a lot of sex going on around here. The cats are all neutered, the Great Speckled Bird is getting a bit long-in-the-tooth with the crippled up wing and leg causing the hens to threaten break-ins to the pen where the younger roosters abide.
So all I can figure is the person wasn’t thinking in terms of me, or the chickens or cats. The person had to be thinking more along the lines of a generic man. A brave new world post-Y2K feller.
I don’t want anyone going away from this blog with questions unanswered and 21st Century puzzlement inhabiting his/her mind, so I’m going to answer on behalf of the generic man, the 21st Century man:
The sounds a 21st Century man wants to hear during sex are: “I saw the prettiest dress at WalMart today, honey! Are you nearly finished? Is it okay if I eat that apple if you’re going to be at this a while?” and the sound of an apple being eaten.
Old Sol’s still muttering and grumbling. The earlier theory entertained by astrophysicists that the widespread sunspot activity was being caused by the Occupy Wall Street movement’s lost a lot of following. The cold weather has evidently caused the movement to adopt a wait-and-see posture, while the solar activity continues despite the inclement weather.
But you might notice there’s growing activity south of the equator.
Meanwhile, the moon was playing footsey with Jupiter last night.
“BRIGHT CONJUNCTION: Last night, sky watchers around the world witnessed a conjunction between Jupiter and the Moon. “It was very nice sight seeing the two bright heavenly bodies so close together,” says P-M Hedén of Vallentuna, Sweden, who photographed his daughter and a friend admiring the view. The show’s not over. The Moon and Jupiter are drifting apart but still less than 10o apart tonight. Look east after sunset for a conjunction so bright it shines through thin clouds and city lights.”
Astrophysicists continue to believe this affair between the moon and Jupiter is a product positions of the two within the orbits of the two celestial bodies as they relate to the position observers on the earth surface, which might be true. Certain Mayan scientists and Renaissance theologians believe otherwise.
The affair is evidently being conducted outside the sanctity of marriage, which brought shouts of indignation from certain quarters in Washington, DC. White House spokesmen have asserted they have no interest in what the moon and Jupiter choose to do with their genitals so long as both consent.
Not much else going on here, though the cats all occupied cat houses last night and the sounds coming from the chicken fortresses lead me to believe they all survived the night.
The following is a transcript of a recorded conversation I had with a woman several years ago. I don’t know whether I still agree with myself about what I said here, but I suppose I must have at the time.
She: You were talking about these dependency relationships, where the man, if he wants certain things from a woman, is willing to put up with a certain amount of bullshit to get it, and the woman usually ends up with more bullshit to tolerate. And you made a point of saying that, whether or not he says “I love you,” makes a big difference in how she’s handling it. What does that mean, does he feel like he has to say it, even if he doesn’t really love her? Why is it so important for women to hear that, but it doesn’t seem to be important for men to say it? Or is that just some circumstances, and some relationships?
He: It’s just some circumstances and some relationships, but it’s pretty pervasive. Fact is, it doesn’t matter what the guy feels. He can truly love her. He can sort of love her. He can not know whether he loves her. Or he can not love her. But he knows the rules say that he’s got to say that he loves her.
From the perspective of the woman, she can’t know which one of those situations he’s in. She doesn’t acknowledge that such things exist. But the female sex has forced the issue. Thanks to 10,000 years of females demanding that men say they love them whether they do or not, you have all the men saying I love you, easily.
Now some don’t, I don’t, some other old guy friends of mine don’t, but it’s a subject of some discussion between us, it pisses us off. Fact is, that’s what women try hard to make a guy do, they are willing to go through all kinds of games and machinations to try to force a man to say it, no matter what the man feels.
My friends encounter it all the time with women. I’ve encountered it with most of the women I’ve ever gotten involved with. It’s pretty much a hundred percent. It’s as though they don’t give a rat what you’re really feeling.
What women are saying is, “Okay, what I want you to do is say I love you, whether you feel it or not, and I’m gonna behave as though I believe it’s true, for whatever reasons. Then I can use it as a bludgeon against you.”
(“Ooh, you said you loved me, and now you’ve done this or that, or haven’t done this or that, to prove you were lying. What you’ve done or haven’t done is prima facie evidence of your liarhood! And down underneath that is proof that you are lowlife scum because you said it to get something out of me. And besides that, the fact you actually don’t love me is proof you are cold and unfeeling, because I love you sooooo much.”).
“So,” the female sex is saying, “First and foremost I want to hear you say it. I want you to hear yourself say it. And I’m going to take all kinds of coercive and manipulative steps to make you do that.”
Well, the fact is, most of the male population out there says, (“Screw it.” *sigh* ) “Okay, I love you.”
She: You don’t think most women really want to know?
He: Well, they want to know if the answer is Yes. None of them want to know if the answer is No. “I want you to tell me you love me, and I want it to be true.” But if it isn’t true, say it anyway. The object isn’t getting a better hold on reality, or a better understanding about how he actually feels. The object is to hear him say those words, and to make him hear himself saying them.
She: So it doesn’t really matter whether he loves her or not, if he’s going to play that game and say it?
He: Well, he’s going to play it. But fact is, men know this about women. And for the most part, men have a really cynical view of it. It’s something that gets talked about. She’s on the warpath? “ Oh, send her some roses. Tell her you love her, man. Snuggle up a little bit. She’ll get over it.”
Guys will, for the most part, go ahead and do it. They’ll do whatever they have to do to make their lives easier. And so the upshot is that women have created a situation where a guy out there who won’t lie is all of a sudden called cold and unfeeling, when in fact all he is, might be just honest.
One of the problems is in the difference in the way men and women view sex. Men, as a rule, have no problem with the concept of uncomplicated sex. Even if they don’t happen to indulge in it. Women, on the other hand, have 10,000 generations of training to use it as a weapon or an instrument of coercion and extortion. The monopoly women have is one they’ve guarded so consistently, so long that for most women the concepts of sex and power are inseparable.
Selling sex for any commodity is prostitution. Trading sex for power instead of money isn’t exempt. But those who do it are ‘unadmitted whores’, as opposed to straight, upfront whores.
Many years ago a whore named Frenchie in a bar on the waterfront in Texas was bantering with me. I was trying to seduce her in the non-commercial sense. “Sex is no fun if there’s no money involved!” was her final answer.
Frenchie just about said it all, one way or another, and if you think of money as a synonym for power.
One of the reasons women who don’t admit they are whores dislike women who do admit it so much involves the concept of inflation. From the perspective of a non-admitted whore, the whore is selling a commodity for mere money that’s worth so much more than money. In doing so, she (the admitted whore) is making that commodity available for a price that’s easily met, thereby robbing all non-admitted whores of some measure of power. Several generations of Texas men had their first encounters with uncomplicated sex at a cathouse in LaGrange called the Chicken Ranch (now famous). For most of those men visits to the Chicken Ranch ended up as the ONLY encounters with uncomplicated sex in their entire lives.
The only commodity rarer and more precious than uncomplicated sex is honesty.
I don’t recall ever seeing such an abundance of flies in Texas. I first noticed it a week-or-so in Kerrville in a restaurant. Flies were buzzing around the place in such profusion the customers were waving forks and dinner rolls in the air trying to drive them off.
Then I began seeing them here, hanging around the windows and door, waiting for things to happen in their favor. I usually think of fly problems in a context of fly-breeding sources, so I checked the chicken roosts, figuring I’d allowed the droppings to build up enough to allow fly eggs to hatch and go through their development cycle. Not so.
But up at Gale and Kay’s house a few days ago I saw they were similarly blessed. Plenty of flies to go around. Enough for most usual purposes.
Yesterday, or the day before they began finding their way into the cabin. They weren’t docile enough to allow chasing and swatting as an option, and I’m not all that big about having flies walking over my face while I try to sleep, type, or meditate. The military surplus mosquito net head-cover I’ve had for thirty years or more works as well as anything I know of to keep that from happening.
I’m a person who tends to believe most things are indicators of other things, but I haven’t a clue what this is an indicator of. Probably someone somewhere would say it means we’re going to have a hard winter, or some other unusual kind of winter. Usually Texas has a few flies and they’re worse in the fall season, but on its worst day this part of Texas usually can’t compare to a normal fly-day in the high desert country. Desert flies converge on perspiration and any other water from miles around.
But this year Texas can brag it has something to compete with New Mexico. Rich folks from Houston and Dallas won’t need to go to Ruidoso, Eagle Nest and Taos to have as many flies as they hanker to have crawling around on them.
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 