Tag Archives: other

The link to the Ask Old Jules blog is active

http://askoldjules.com/

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.

Gracias,

Old Jules

 

The Backyard Chickens Conspiracy

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

Yesterday I got an email from someone called himself Rob, AKA ‘Nifty Chicken’ of the Backyard Chickens newsletter telling me I need to re-register. 

“This is Rob, AKA “Nifty-Chicken” of www.BackYardChickens.com.   I noticed that you’re registered for our newsletter, but can’t find you in our community membership.  This quick note is to let you know of some important changes and to help you get re-registered so you can continue receiving the BYC Newsletters.”

Naturally, I’m deeply suspicious about this.  Someone’s wanting me to become a part of their ‘we’ over there without me having done anything to deserve it, other than subscribing to their newsletter for several years. 

Then I went over to the site instead of clicking the ‘register’ part of the email and the first thing I saw was:

Welcome To BYC!

Hi Peeps,   Welcome to the new & upgraded version of the BackYardChickens.com website!   There are a ton of exciting new features and areas of the site for you to explore.  To help get started we suggest you… » read more

Can you imagine that?  I go over there with more-or-less neutral intentions, other than a few suspicions about what manner of ‘we’ someone was demanding I include myself in, and the first crack out of the box he calls me a ‘Peep’?   The guy thinks people joining his ‘we’ are peeps.

Whatever the hell a peep is.   Strikes me this might be a group of ‘we’ folk who go around looking through windows trying to see naked women.  Nothing whatever to do with chickens.

Or he’s an agent provacateur for Homeland Security trying to identify all the people who’d be gratified to belong to a ‘we’ that considered itself peeps.

I’ve donealready got plenty of ‘we’ stuff in my life.  I ain’t including myself in any we bunch of peeping toms even if they’re peepers that like chickens.  Heck, maybe it’s chickens they’re sneaking around spying on.  Maybe they’re trying to find out where I am so they can come in here nights spying on the Great Speckled Bird and the hens do and talk about when I shut them up in the fortress nights.

Or more sinister yet, maybe they’re trying to see if I gather the eggs every day.  Or whether they’re doing okay on the milo feeding I’ve been doing lately to save money.   Or somebody over there read the post, Shame and a Confession About Inter-Species Sex and thinks because I have a perverted chicken I’d want to draw my circle of ‘we’ bigger and feel a part of some group of peepers. 

I think it might well be one of those government traps like the one they did in Colorado a few years ago, sending in agents to open up a taxidermy shop, putting out the word they’d buy endangered species carcasses under the table.  After a couple of years they’d bought and paid for hundreds of otherwise healthy endangered birds and animalcules and collected names dates and places of the folks killed them because there was suddenly a market.

Indicted half the community before it was over.

I ain’t joining no government plot to arrest my rooster.  As far as I know he can’t even get out nights to do any peeping.

Old Jules

A Scene of an Ancient Massive UFO Crash

This is located almost atop the Continental Divide in the Gila Wilderness at around 8000′-9000′ above Mean Sea Level elevation.  Nobody much goes up there.  I was actually looking for something else when  two comparatively ‘small’ parallel gouges mid-picture first caught my eye.

Trench deep on our left pushes up rocks ahead
Closer view of key impact
 
 
Bad things happening to good people
 
 
Impacts and energy events stage 1
 
Stage 2 Along path breaks up and explodes
 
Impact trenches
 
Hot spots
 
Stage 2 energy events
 
  

 
Main pieces remaining
 
Interesting local geology
 
Aftermath investigation and cleanup
 
Better view of initial ground contact
 
Pilot applies full power – Dire emergency attempt at recovery
 
Meanwhile a couple of ridges away 1
 
  
 
 
Meanwhile a couple of ridges away 2
 
Mother nature anticipating and waiting – It only needed the human imagination to complete the picture
 
Skeptics probably won’t believe this is a UFO crash site.  I personally don’t. and so far as I’m aware I’m the only person who’s ever suggested it might be.  I’d surely like to get up there and have a look at it sometime, but for other reasons than the UFO story.
 
I’d like to spend about a month up there with half-dozen pack goats just nosing around the immediate area.  Some places don’t need a crashed ancient UFO to have appeal.
 
Old Jules
 
Edit:  You can have a look for yourself by going to flashearth dot com and entering the longitude/latitude coordinates in the lower right corner of each image.

The Ask Old Jules Blog

Jeanne’s migrating the Ask Old Jules feature from Facebook to a blog to be linked to this one.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Facebook thing, here’s what it’s all about.

Several years ago I used to amuse myself between doing other things by answering questions on a Question/Answer site.  Over the years I somehow managed to build up 13,000 answers to every sort of question imaginable, many of which were inappropriate or off-the-wall enough to forever have them banning me from the site.

I’d send them an apology promising never to do it again, they’d restore my membership, and in no time at all some pencil-necked stuffed-up questioner would report me again and get me banned.  But while all this was going on, Jeanne was religiously copying and pasting the stuff, saving it for her own incomprehensible reasons.

When this blog came to being and nobody was reading it Jeanne decided to use some of the more inane Q/As in her files on Facebook to point people towards the blog.  But a lot of the Q/As were too long to post on Facebook, so eventually the choice was to drop them entirely, or to continue them on a blog.

She’s been working like an illegal alien or some foreigner setting it up, putting some of her art work as headers, generally creating a pleasant blog site.  Her thought is that people reading it might wish to participate by asking questions there.  I welcome any avenue providing me more opportunities along the lifelong journey of discovery to discover what I think.  Especially in an environment where I’m less likely to be banned than was the case in that other Q/A thing.

So beginning February 1st the Ask Old Jules blog will be up and running.  A link will show up in the blogroll. All the old archives from the whatchacallit, Facebook one, will also be stored there if you want to have a look-see to get an idea what she was doing.

Old Jules

Note from Jeanne: Posts here on So Far From Heaven will continue as usual when Old Jules and WordPress are cooperating with each other.
At this time posts are scheduled on Ask Old Jules for Wednesdays and Sundays. That might change depending on participation.  Comments are  welcome as usual, but if you ask a question, it might be used (without your name) as a new blog entry with an answer.
Shorter Ask Old Jules entries will still show up on Facebook from time to time.
And here’s some Leonard Cohen that I’m fond of, even if he’s not singing:

Blogging to Keep Off Boogie Street

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

I’m a bit out of sorts this morning.  That pic above was taken for the post about hats worn backward, but if I paused and had a look in the mirror it think it would be me again, minus the backward High Roller.  Hats You Can’t Wear Sideways or Backwards

The protracted computer fiasco put me fairly far behind on one of my projects, which I went a hundred miles an hour for a lot of hours yesterday playing catchup without getting there.  But I think doing it must have worn my mind down along the edges and frayed my thinking processes enough to have me wondering if I’m not getting old.

If I had a vehicle and enough slack in the budget I think I’d probably forget everything for a day and just go for a road trip for a day.  Try out my Texas Thumb and Finger Signs and let the projects, the chickens, and the cats fend for themselves long enough to get a recharge on my batteries.

But that’s not going to happen, and the project’s going fairly well once I reconstructed where my head was when I got distracted by computers.  The roosters are singing up Old Sol and I hear cats hissing at one another on the front porch, so all I have to do is wait until my head clears, kick start myself into motion.

I’ve been fighting off urges to write long written works lately, which I’m not going to do, and one of the ways I avoid doing it and push the urges back involves typing words on this blog.  Pressure release valve, more or less.

I appreciate the role you readers play in the process.  If you weren’t here I think I mightn’t write the blog, and find me sneaking up on myself writing a book instead.  A pure disaster.

Thanks, all of you, for coming by occasionally.

Gracias,

Old Jules

UFO and Certainties About What Isn’t

Good morning readers.  I’m obliged you came by for a read.

We human beings love ourselves better for our certainties.  Most of us take particular satisfaction in sneering about the certainties of others when we’ve applied something we pretend is logic to prove theirs are invalid.  Pulls us up by the rhetorical bootstraps in a reality where being intelligent is considered a virtue almost as resounding as being ‘right’.

One of the areas of opinion that breaks down into sneers rapidly involves unidentified flying objects and whether creatures from somewhere else have visited this planet.  The ‘right’ side of the issue is they are fig-newtons of the imagination and declaring it to be so proves intelligence, level-headedness, education and superiority to those who believe otherwise.

The ‘wrong’, ‘stupid’, ‘irrational’, ‘illogical’ side is people who’ve experienced them.  Police, airline pilots, military pilots, lawyers, psychologists, physicians, and thousands of other people who might have been ‘right’ once, but were transported into the camp of ‘wrong’ by personal observation and experience.

A while back I posted about a visit I had with Kay’s aunt, Loretta. [An Afternoon with Aunt Loretta (Proctor)- Roswell, 1947] Loretta’s one of the folks still living who was close-enough to the Roswell UFO incident to have an opinion about it based on her own experiences and observations at the time.  I’ve got a lot of respect for the lady and value what she had to say, even though it’s just naturally ‘wrong’.

But I was backed into a corner of open-mindedness on the issue by a couple of experiences of my own.  One with a lot of other witnesses on California Avenue in Socorro, New Mexico.   The second was long-lasting and relatively close-up and personal.   Back during the Y2K time.

 

Pie Town’s located about 30 miles west of the Very Large Array [VLA] telescopes near Datil, New Mexico.  The village sits almost atop the Continental Divide, an isolated community in the middle of nowhere.

I was in the only telephone booth in Pie Town  around midnight. The town only has a couple-hundred people and there were no lights of any sort in town. Low overcast, 500 feet or less.

Whatever it was appeared above me below the overcast and stayed there while I told the person I was talking to on the phone what was happening.  It stayed maybe 10-15 minutes and gave me the willies badly enough, I got thinking I was the reason it was there.

I told the person I was talking to adios and went to the truck, took a .45 out from under the seat and racked in a round.  It moved a bit about then, not much but some, while I stood there pointing a pistol at it waiting in the dark. It moved a little more, seemed to descend — at least it got larger, and stopped again.

I decided to just get the hell out of there if I could. Cranked up the truck and drove about a quarter-mile and pulled off the highway to make sure it wasn’t following me. It sort of drifted or glided off to the north and vanished into the overcast.

The experience motivated me enough to try to find out whether objects of that particular description and configuration were common, because I’d never heard of one. I occasionally would research various UFO sighting archives on the web.

Years later I found that within a few days of my own sighting an object of almost identical description upset a lot of on-duty military personnel by behaving almost the same way at White Sands Missile Testing Range near Alamogordo, New Mexico, a couple of hundred miles SE from Pie Town. White Sands is an extremely high security area and they take it personally when something intrudes into the airspace over the place, more personally yet when it hangs around and isn’t scared.

There was [maybe still is] a squadron of F117s stationed at Alamogordo [Luftwaffe] at the time, and they scrambled. But the object removed itself before they arrived.

As for my own experience and the times involved — I’m having to best guess. The person I was describing it to on the telephone and I took a stab at it toward the end of our conversation before I decided to evacuate. But things seem longer and it mightn’t have been that long. Afterward, while I was standing there watching and pointing the .45 it’s anyone’s guess. Might have been as little as 5 minutes, seemed a lot longer.

Which is to say, I don’t know much about aliens and the things they fly around in, but I don’t put a lot of value on the speculations of people who know all about what they aren’t.   Even if they’re real smart and have a lot of school-housing.

Old Jules

 

Penis Enlargement Software from Norton Symantic

Got an email I haven’t opened, presumably from Norton Symantic noting I haven’t plugged the modem into the E Dell Machine to test the 79 mb downloaded driver.

At least I assume it’s from Norton Symantic, though the whatchallit ‘from’ says it’s from Best-Penis and the subject line says, Max-Gentleman Enlargement Pills.  But I’m not fooled.  Norton Symantic was popping screens up on me all manner of ways yesterday creeping in with things intended to interrupt my focus and goals for eventually getting this E Dell Machine online.

Norton most likely suspects a degree of trepidation on my part and is poking sharp sticks in my eye suggesting I need to grow a set of whatchallits and go ahead and test it.  After which they’ll sell me some penis enlargement software to make it work, which they figure at the moment it ain’t going to do.

Bastards.

Old Jules

Finding Non-Virtuous Pursuits: The Challenge

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.

Old Jules

 

The Toothless Soothsayer

The Toothless Soothsayer

I must have been four, or maybe five
When grandfather said, with a snicker,
“Where a man wouldn’t go with a Colt .45
That boy will follow his pecker.”

Half a century now mocks:
I’d surely be elated
If Papa’s eye had turned to stocks
Or land speculated.

I’ve frequently suspected my granddad was speaking from his own experience.

One of the rewards the Universe gave me for getting to be this old was the raging hormones fading into oblivion.   There’s still plenty of passion in my life, but it’s of a different nature, and it listens to the voice of reason. 

I’d never have believed back when passion was a misery to be endured that the Universe had other passions in mind if a person could just make room for them between the preoccupations.

And yet, today I listen to any one of the songs below and it brings back vivid, pleasant memories of [usually] one woman.  The shadow of the past agonies is still there if I choose to examine it, but if I don’t the songs and the passage of time allows it all to be a bit nostalgic.  And the songs don’t last long enough to insist on thorough remembering.

Old Jules

(Arirang) Korean Folk Song [She never had an orchestra background that I recall]

;

Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, We’ll Sweep Out the Ashes said things too well.  It was one of several I put as a single song on a 90 minute tape and wore out.  Live version, no embed: http://youtu.be/GQJAsEZ-S3I

 Hank Snow
90 Miles an Hours Down a Deadend Street  was another ‘said things too well’.

Terry Stafford – “Suspicion” (1964)

 

Leroy Van Dyke Just Walk on By

DALE & GRACEI’M LEAVING IT UP TO YOU.wmv

 

Johnny Duncan and Janie Fricke Thinking of a Rendezvous

Eartha Kitt – C’est Si Bon (Live Kaskad 1962)

 Leonard Cohen – Take This Waltz

 

Cohen’s tribute to Lorca

Merrilee Rush & the TurnaboutsAngel of the Morning

 

 We’ll Sing In The Sunshine– Gale Garnett- 1964

 

Third Rate Romance Low Rent Renzezvous – Amazing Rhythm Aces

Leonard Cohen – Closing Time

 

White Doves, Rainbow Family and Esoterica

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

WordPress is being a communist this morning. Or maybe the world came to an end last night sometime but it hasn’t gotten to me yet because I’m so far out in the country.

I was going to regale you this morning with some things I dug up online about building and retrofitting hydrogen generators to internal combustion engines yesterday but on the off chance the world ended last night, I won’t.  The whole thing might be a moot issue.   Talking Our Way Into Oblivion – Hydrogen and Hot Air

I’d also thought I’d share with you a couple of interesting things that appear to occur when the center of mass of a system of orbiting bodies changes, but if the world ended there’s no point getting into that, either.  I suppose I’ll be obliged to break my iron discipline and focus to tell you about a couple of things happened here a while back.

A while back this dove flew in here and spent a few weeks sharing the chicken feed on the ground.

I’d never seen a white dove before.  It’s forty miles to the nearest town of any size, fifteen miles to a village big enough to have a gas station/convenience store.  So I didn’t figure it was a pet.

But when I approached it on the ground it didn’t fly.  At first I thought it was injured or sick.

It had no fear at all.  Nothing seemed to be wrong with it.

A week or two after these pictures were taken it began spending more time higher in the trees and less on the ground.  Then it evidently just decided to move on to whatever was waiting for it somewhere else.

A free spirit.  Sort of reminded me of the Rainbow folk I’ve shared campsites with in remote places and occasionally picked up as hitch hikers.  Didn’t have much in common with the wild doves around here and nothing at all with birds somewhere else in houses with cages.  Marching to her own drum, not letting anything get into the way of doing it.   But not living in fear.

Which behooves me to tell you a bit about the Rainbow Family.

I first attended a Rainbow Gathering as part of a team of New Mexico Emergency Management Planning and Coordination  [EMPAC] personnel assigned to be there with the National Guard during the Taos gathering of the early 1990s.  I’d never heard of the Rainbow group prior to that, had no idea what to expect because neither did anyone else in New Mexico government.

What I observed was Woodstock without the music, a lot of folks who reminded me of my own younger times of long hair, protest, sex, drugs and rock and roll on the family side of things.

On the other side I saw National Guard troops loaded with live ammuntion and no clear instructions and rules of engagement being frequently hassled, treated with condescension alternately with re-enactments of some flower-chile ‘Come Join Us’ pleas from earlier times.  ‘Family’ members running alongside government vehicles engaging in every form of engagement except disengagement.

And  to complicate matters further,  a civilian group of Taos Hispanics who wanted nothing so much as the gathering broken up and out of those mountains they considered their own.

I spent a harrowing week or two up there trying to keep my mind from falling into a state of spacial-time disorientation.  When it was all over we drove back to Santa Fe wiping our brows in relief that nobody’d been shot, beaten to death by locals, no major incidents.   My thoughts at the time were as far from ever wanting to see another Rainbow Family member as they could get and stay on the planet Earth.

I count myself lucky to have encountered many of Family members in other settings during the two decades afterward, picking them up hitch hiking, sharing remote campsites, discovering there’s a side to some part of the Rainbow Family membership I hadn’t noticed in the Taos experience.

Gypsy-like free-spirited, thoughtful and considerate people just doing their own thing, trying their best not to leave any bigger mark where they’ve been than they absolutely must.  Good pleasant folks to spend some time with.

So long, I’d have to add, as a person stays clear of the party-animals and really cool people drawn to the mass gathering.

Old Jules