Morning to you readers. I’m obliged you came by for a read.
If I’m going to get anywhere in this life I think I’m going to have to learn how to not be so stupid.
Yesterday I made that post about the F350 wiring, which I’d been fretting and gnashing my teeth about for months. Ben offered to try to find me a wiring diagram, and tffnguy recommended a Ford Truck Enthusiasts Forum. I felt fairly uppidy and hopeful, but not sky-high enthusiastic because I’ve learned the hard way to suppress my melodrama.
But I went to the Forum site and immediately remembered I’d been there before, several months ago. The reason I remembered was the popup advertisement for Phoenix University that blocked the entire screen and came back as soon as I clicked the X, every time. The site took forever to load on a dialup, too. So I blew it off and spent the next few months twiddling my thumbs trying to find ways to fix the immediate problem.
But yesterday, because of tffnguy’s recommendation I fought my way through the esoterica, waited while things loaded, killed popups as though I could dress them out and have them for supper. Registered, posted a question about the wiring, along with pics, and asked for any help anyone could offer.
In a matter of hours I had a reply and a wiring diagram. Now I’m back where I could have been several months ago if I’d had the patience and determination to wait for that site to load and posted an identical request back then.
Gale’s fond of saying that during the 40-odd years we’ve been friends every mutual acquaintance, if asked to list my traits would have had, “If there’s an easy way and a hard way, he’ll pick the hard way and stay to the end.”
Maybe I’m beginning to understand what they were talking about. If I can get that grapefruit out of my mouth I might try to sort it out and change it.
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:
Yesterday several blogs I subscribed to began with identical words:
A recent Freedom of Information Act request has revealed that the FBI wants what it calls “food activists” prosecuted as terrorists, perhaps because nothing could more terrifying than exposing where our so-called food comes from and how it is manufactured.”
I didn’t disbelieve it initially, but it seemed a bit sloppy, though not outside the realms of the possible. What bothered me about it was the fact nothing was mentioned about who made the FOIA request, why, and the precise wording of the contents of the FBI document.
So I plugged the sentence, A recent Freedom of Information Act request has revealed that the FBI wants what it calls “food activists” into the dogpile dot com search engine. http://tinyurl.com/7y6cokz
My thought was that it wouldn’t require much search to find an initial post with the core information. Instead, as of early evening yesterday, there were 20 pages of posts repeating the one I’d recieved. Earliest I found was December 23, then more a couple of days later, gradually building up to a landslide yesterday. Blogs all over the web re-posting the same piece of writing, some with variations or addenda of their own.
Not one expressing the slightest doubt the story was true. Not one questioning where the original claim originated. Today there’ll be more as the panic spreads, I’m thinking.
But once that desire to be able to lock US Citizens up without any due process based on being suspected of terrorism was enshrined in Congressional activity, all bets were off. Suddenly it makes all kinds of sense for the folks charged with law enforcement and pesky people doing all manner of legal things they’d like to lock them up for to want to squeeze them into the meaning of the word terrorist. They know that, and you and I know they know that.
So out of nowhere comes a claim the FBI’s already doing it. How much disbelief does the discerning reader need to suspend to accept it as gospel without the acquired skepticism of experience with the huge mass of BS on the web?
Heck. Maybe it’s even true. The only evidence it isn’t true is the fact there isn’t a grain of evidence it is.
Expecting the unexpected has some inherent pitfalls. One being that we see what we expect to see.
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.
The Cohoe women raised and sheared the sheep, made the dye, hand-wove this rug.
As the post-non-Y2K hard times hardened, I did a lot of scrambling trying to make ends meet. One by-product of that squeeze was that I began doing some trading with the tribes for pottery, rock art, rugs, and other products to resell.
This got me acquainted with a Navajo man who became a running buddy for a while. Curtis Cohoe. [Not to be mistaken for his namesake, the Mescalero referred to on several posts.] A man about 50 years old. Pine Hill (Self-determination) Rez. Good family, a generation earlier. His mom and aunt still raise sheep, shear, dye the wool with dye they make from crushed rock and plants, and weave good rugs the old way.
Early in his life, Curtis started out pretty well. He was intelligent, talented, and I’ve always assumed he must have attended a university. When he was being an artist everything he did was in demand. He was an excellent shade-tree baling-wire and chewing-gum vehicle mechanic, and he could chop a cord of wood with an axe almost as fast as I could cut one with a chainsaw.
Worked for the US Forestry Service as a fire fighter, then as a Ranger in California until things went haywire. Back in New Mexico, a cop raped his younger sister and got by with it. Curtis came back and beat the cop to death with his fists, which got him 10 years in prison.
Once that decade of bars was over, Curtis never really got back onto the right track. He had a lot of anger in him, and he had some brothers who were in and out of prison a lot, who kept the pressure on from the law. (Curtis was fairly frightened of one of the brothers, whom he described as a bad-ass. The other was an evangelical preacher who sold some drugs and stole in between times).
Curtis was much of a man in a lot of ways when he was sober, or mostly sober. I’d known him a considerable while before I ever saw him drunk, never realized he was sometimes a drinker. He shifted his residence frequently between the family place on the Rez and Grants, New Mexico. Maybe that’s how it escaped my notice.
But early in our friendship one day I drove up to a place he was doing some artwork painting on a table top in an alleyway next to the railroad track in Grants. I was just in time to see three semi-drunk Din’e toughs in their mid-20s approach him, exchange a few words, and start swinging.
By the time I got out of the truck to help him he didn’t need any help. The two fully conscious ones got to their feet and left at a stumbling run. The less-conscious one stuck around long enough for me to try to stop the bleeding by tying a bandana around his head while Curtis intermittently kicked in his ribcage. I’m glad I never met the brother Curtis was scared of and considered a badass.
I don’t know whether I knew Curtis didn’t have a license to drive an automobile. He frequently drove my truck running errands and chores. I had no qualms about loaning the Ford pickup to him when he needed to go out to the Rez for one reason or another provided my old Isuzu was running okay.
One day we were preparing for a trading trip to Shiprock and Curtis left in the Ford to get it gassed up for the trip. When he didn’t come back for a couple of hours and I saw a wrecker go past towing my truck I immediately went over to the wrecker to find out what was going on.
“Is this yours?” He grinned because he knew damned well it was mine. My apartment was no more than 150 yards from his yard and we both occasionally had coffee a few feet apart in the Chinese restaurant between his place and mine. “Your damned Indian’s in jail. Towing fee on the truck’s $50.”
“What did he do?”
“They stopped him for a routine traffic check. He didn’t have a license and when they called it in they found out he’d had a lot of DWIs. He’s going to be in there a while.”
I paid out the $50 to get the truck out of hock and seethed about it considerably. It would have been too easy for it all not to happen and I found myself thinking Curtis had about outlived his usefulness in my affairs.
But mutual acquaintances brought me a message from Curtis asking me to bail him out of jail, telling me how sorry he was about it all. He was going to be stuck in there for at least six weeks if he couldn’t raise bail. Swore he’d pay me back everything he’d cost me.
I wasn’t Mister Moneybags, but I could squeeze $500 if I had to, and I did over a few days, selling things cheaper than I’d intended. Once he was released he brought a friend from the Rez over and told me he was going back to Pine Hill for a while. Asked if he could borrow my pickup for his friend to drive him back out there. His friend had a license, and I loaned it to him, figuring it would be gone for a day, maximum.
The truck never came back. Curtis and his friend evidently got drunk on the way to Ramah and got chased by a Navajo-hired cop on the State Highway until they ran the truck into a tree, Curtis driving. I wasn’t long finding out he was being held in the private penal facility outside Grants, and that he was looking at two years in prison, and I was looking at losing the bail money.
A week or two later I heard a guard had grabbed him and Curtis knocked him down. He was now looking at no-less-than five years hard time.
Everything else being equal I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s still there.
Sometime afterward I had a buyer for one of the rugs his mother and aunt made, so I stopped in on her for a visit at Pine Hill. Naturally the subject of Curtis came up.
“He needed to stay out of town,” was all she said.
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.”
Adventure wears a lot of disguises. In garage laboratories, in pens behind their homes, in backyards, they’re out there enduring the smiles and shrugs of the non-adventurous.
For discussion of Nikola Tesla history, inventions, and coil design and construction techniques. The physics of Tesla’s varied patents, and ideas are especially welcome, even if they generate some heated discussions.
This list is for the dissemination and discussion of all things TESLA. Since Tesla was a man of wide and varied talents, other physical phenomena discussions are possible.
All About Packgoats is a collection of interesting and insightful people who share an interest in hiking and packing with goats. With experience ranging from veteran packgoat professional to weekend hiking enthusiast, the answers to your packgoat questions can be found here.
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Or this:
In the Sandia mountains east of Albuquerque, New Mexico, there’s about an acre of house and museum built by a man with his own idea of adventure. It’s called Tinkertown. Above the entrance there’s a sign, “HERE’S WHAT I DID WHILE YOU WATCHED TELEVISION”.
He adventured through life creating thousands of Rube Goldberg mechanical animations just to see if he could do it.
If he couldn’t create that animation, or make a Cadillac with the outer-surface covered by pennies, he wasn’t half the man he thought he was.
“We wonder what was the inspiration that could cause a man to spend 28 years to carve a Coral Castle from the ground up using nothing but home made tools. An homage to unrequited love? Perhaps to illustrate ancient sciences that defy gravity? Or maybe just sheer, raw human determination? The Coral Castle is an everlasting mystery to those who explore it.”
Or The Perfect Man Shrine, middle of desert nowhere, Columbus, New Mexico:
Human lives don’t last long. There are plenty of candidates who consider themselves wise and willing to tell us how we ought to spend ours.
The people who built it are dead, or too old to maintain it.
But maybe when we close our eyes that last time we’d consider it well spent if we just did something, sometime while we were stumbling through it.
I’d bet not one of the people above ever voiced the lament, “I’m SO bored!”
It’s about forty miles south of the Zuni Rez, almost in AZ.
There’s a ghost town you can barely see in the pic…. used to be a considerable community down in there when it was private land, from the mid-1800s until the 1950s, evaporating salt from the huge concrete beds. Most of the buildings are still intact, though they’re going away rapidly.
Today it belongs to the Zuni tribe, one section of land, but it’s not in the national trust as part of the Rez. Tribes have been acquiring a lot of land from casino monies and other ways during the past decades, making the lands acquired ‘tribal’, but not Rez, which puts them into an interestingly ambiguous position insofar as road maintenance and county taxes.
Salt Lake was acquired as a piece of a lawsuit against the US government involving an airplane with a hydrogen bomb aboard that crashed on the Rez, with first responders being Zunis, but which the feds didn’t bother telling them about the bomb, leaving emergency workers exposed to hazardous materials without knowing it. The tribe got a few million out of that, which they used to purchase 60k acres of land to the south of the Rez, but Salt Lake was thrown in as a bonus.
Salt Lake’s a sacred place for the Zunis, home of Salt Mother. If you are willing to risk hopping the fence and wandering around down there ….. it’s a volcano crater with a hollow secondary plug you can climb, then a spiral trail leading back down inside … that’s where most of the rituals for Salt Mother are held… but all over that section you’ll pass over various religious items from recent times you’d be well advised to leave untouched.
Salt Lake used to be the place all the warring tribes got their salt throughout history. A place where a constant truce between enemy tribes existed.
It’s also part of what the power companies would love to strip mine. The great percentage of the desert surrounding it, from north of Springerville, and Saint Johns, Arizona is government land with shallow coal deposits comparatively inexpensive to ‘recover’. They’ve already converted the desert on the Arizona side to a wasteland. Still desert, but more in the moonscape vein than the usual, regular arid country mode.
The people in El Paso and Phoenix need electricity so they can fire up their hair dryers every morning, and keep their homes refrigerated. Those places have climates uncomfortable to the human skin most of the time and they’d rather savage a few million acres of country they’ve never visited and never will than suffer a few degrees of discomfort and use a towel to dry their hair.
Which the Zuni believe would thoroughly piss off Salt Mother, with considerable resulting pain for the Zunis, and all the rest of us.
They might be right.
The Zuni and a few commie-pinko-obstructionist greenie environmentalists are the only people who give a damn, and the other desert-dwellers in the area would welcome the jobs helping ravage the country around them would bring to the area. The last time I looked the Zuni tribe was burning up a lot of tribal money trying to stop the mine expansion into New Mexico. The prospects didn’t appear promising because the New Mexico government, the feds, and the mining interests were stacked up singing songs of human progress and greater good.
Heck, it’s been a few years now. Maybe they’re already mining it. Probably easier to ask someone in Phoenix or El Paso whether the hair dryer worked this morning and if it did, assume that desert has gone to the moon.
Send her roses now and then
A box of chocolates might help
She loves to hear, “I love you.”
Even if you don’t
Candy lies with chocolates and roses
When things get bad
And the secretary winks
Keep in mind
This won’t make it any better
Keep your valentines at home
Secretaries don’t come easy
And two women in your life
Ain’t a big improvement
Over one
When the embers cease to glow
Don’t forget or you’ll regret
You forgot the anniversary
There’s nothing out there better
Give her candlelight and roses
Candy lies with candlelight and roses
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 
