I couldn't use my computer last night because it was doing updates. That usually takes only a few minutes, but this time it warned me that "this will take awhile", and it did. It was still only 23% complete after a half hour, so I gave up and went to bed. I was tired anyway, and I wanted to get up early because it was the last day of deer season. Usually the update machine shuts the computer down when it's done, but this time, by 3:00 AM, it had only gone into hibernation mode. I turned it on to see what was going on, and was given a summary of all the wonderful updates it had given me. I doubt that I will ever use any of that stuff, but we don't get to pick and choose our updates with Windows 10, it gives your everything, whether you want it or not.
Deer season could have been worse. I encountered a mechanical problem with Old Betsy two days before the opener, and I knew that I couldn't get anybody to fix it in time, so I made it work enough to get me through the season. By next season, I will have it fixed or get a new gun. I wasn't able to practice much, so I resolved that I wouldn't take any iffy shots, which is part of the reason I let that little one walk away. I went out a total of six times, which is not a lot for somebody who hunts from his house and doesn't have to work for a living, but it was better than nothing. I didn't see any more deer after the first day except for the one I saw this evening as I was dumping ashes from the wood stove out the big garage door. Technically, I wasn't hunting at the time, but Old Betsy was close at hand and I might have gotten a shot off, but I passed because it was too dark to shoot with confidence.
The book Uncle Ken asked about is "Confronting the Color Line - The Broken Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago" by Alan B. Anderson and George W. Pickering. I remember thinking, "What are they complaining about? They eventually got everything they wanted." By the end of the book, however, I realized that there was more than one "they" at work here. The followers of MLK really believed that all races should live side by side in perfect harmony, but the Black Power people just wanted to kick ass and take names. If anybody got what they wanted, it was the Black Power people, probably because MLK was martyred for the cause, although the book didn't mention that.
Maybe it's like that with Uncle Ken's TLA. He makes a distinction between the good liberals and the other lefties who are maybe not so good. The same thing might be said about the conservatives as well. We are not all the same, any more than all Blacks or all Muslims are the same.
One thing that does seem to be all the same are those sex scandals that are all the rage lately. Maybe some of those guys are guilty, but I find it hard to believe that they all are. Like Uncle Ken said, it's starting to look like a witch hunt to me.
Thursday, November 30, 2017
a foe on the horizon of TLA
I am glad to hear that The Oxford Comma (TOC) is making progress, even gaining a convert on the far north side. It's not technically part of TLA but I like to think of it as a fellow traveler as it stands for reason and clarity much like TLA.
It seems to me that as people communicate and travel more they become increasingly liberal and tolerant.
This is a basic tenet ot TLA. If we live in communities where everybody is ethnically just like us we begin to think of the other in a hostile way, as in who knows what they are up to, probably something bad for us, maybe of taking over. And if we are thinking that of them then they must be thinking the same of us so we should not let them have any advances. But as we get to know the other as they marry our sisters and we marry theirs, why hells bells, they aren't that different from us, there's no reason to fight and fuss and when we put that aside we can devote that energy to moving forward to a better society.
Education is a big part of that. Part of it is just getting a bunch of kids of different stripes together in a big old public school classroom, part of the reason I don't favor private schools or home schooling. The other thing is you learn things, for instance some history and some science which right there will disabuse you of any racial superiority ideas. And then there is just learning how to think, not so much in high school where I remember the teaching as pretty rote, pretty much it's true because teacher says so, and this is going to be on the test so you better get it right, but in college you get exposed to more ideas that don't necessarily agree and you have to think about them and that thinking leads to other thoughts and so on and so on and doobie doobie do on.
I want to make a distinction here between leftist and liberal. One can be both, but leftist is kind of a position on let's call it that line, like those number grades leftist and rightist groups give congressmen as a result of their voting records. A liberal is someone who likes to think things through, to hear both sides of the issue, to think if this then that. I think this is a strength in that you make a more thoughtful decision, but it is a weakness in practice if the guy on the other side is a hundred percent sure of his position and doesn't see a need to discuss anything. It's what makes liberals seem wishy washy.
Does that sound preachy? It is preachy, another weakness of the liberal is that they think they have found the true path (be thoughty and tolerant) and they want to spread the word, they want to enlighten the well, the masses, the ones who haven't gotten around much, who haven't had as much schooling, who don't read a lot.
But nobody likes preaching, well preaching about something different than what they believe and the masses can see that these preachers are looking down on them. We liberals are denying it but of course we are, these people are clinging to ignorant beliefs that impede progress.
Maybe Obama said it best: And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations. He got in a lot of trouble for that, not least because that is what we liberals think. Of course we don't mean it that way we mean something like because these people have been oppressed by the man they fall into patterns of thought that blah, blah, blah.
And I decry the habit of some of my ilk to toss around terms like fascist, sexist, racist, like they are nickels, to brand their opponent with that label and then think they have won the argument, to brand certain thoughts as just wrong so that anybody bringing them up is a bad guy. This is the antithesis of TLA,
Historically I think this takes us to the emergence of the tea party, and I will get to that next. Income equality is a complex issue and we will have to wait on that.
I am just putting my thoughts together as i write this, I am just tracing my ideas and I can see where people might disagree and that's fine.
The Sexual Harassment Scandals are a hysteria, fanned by those of my ilk who like to toss terms around and feel so, so righteous when they say it. Those who are guilty should be punished of course but right now it is a witch hunt. Like a good liberal I have more to say than that, but right now I want to continue with my TLA agenda.
It seems to me that as people communicate and travel more they become increasingly liberal and tolerant.
This is a basic tenet ot TLA. If we live in communities where everybody is ethnically just like us we begin to think of the other in a hostile way, as in who knows what they are up to, probably something bad for us, maybe of taking over. And if we are thinking that of them then they must be thinking the same of us so we should not let them have any advances. But as we get to know the other as they marry our sisters and we marry theirs, why hells bells, they aren't that different from us, there's no reason to fight and fuss and when we put that aside we can devote that energy to moving forward to a better society.
Education is a big part of that. Part of it is just getting a bunch of kids of different stripes together in a big old public school classroom, part of the reason I don't favor private schools or home schooling. The other thing is you learn things, for instance some history and some science which right there will disabuse you of any racial superiority ideas. And then there is just learning how to think, not so much in high school where I remember the teaching as pretty rote, pretty much it's true because teacher says so, and this is going to be on the test so you better get it right, but in college you get exposed to more ideas that don't necessarily agree and you have to think about them and that thinking leads to other thoughts and so on and so on and doobie doobie do on.
I want to make a distinction here between leftist and liberal. One can be both, but leftist is kind of a position on let's call it that line, like those number grades leftist and rightist groups give congressmen as a result of their voting records. A liberal is someone who likes to think things through, to hear both sides of the issue, to think if this then that. I think this is a strength in that you make a more thoughtful decision, but it is a weakness in practice if the guy on the other side is a hundred percent sure of his position and doesn't see a need to discuss anything. It's what makes liberals seem wishy washy.
Does that sound preachy? It is preachy, another weakness of the liberal is that they think they have found the true path (be thoughty and tolerant) and they want to spread the word, they want to enlighten the well, the masses, the ones who haven't gotten around much, who haven't had as much schooling, who don't read a lot.
But nobody likes preaching, well preaching about something different than what they believe and the masses can see that these preachers are looking down on them. We liberals are denying it but of course we are, these people are clinging to ignorant beliefs that impede progress.
Maybe Obama said it best: And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations. He got in a lot of trouble for that, not least because that is what we liberals think. Of course we don't mean it that way we mean something like because these people have been oppressed by the man they fall into patterns of thought that blah, blah, blah.
And I decry the habit of some of my ilk to toss around terms like fascist, sexist, racist, like they are nickels, to brand their opponent with that label and then think they have won the argument, to brand certain thoughts as just wrong so that anybody bringing them up is a bad guy. This is the antithesis of TLA,
Historically I think this takes us to the emergence of the tea party, and I will get to that next. Income equality is a complex issue and we will have to wait on that.
I am just putting my thoughts together as i write this, I am just tracing my ideas and I can see where people might disagree and that's fine.
The Sexual Harassment Scandals are a hysteria, fanned by those of my ilk who like to toss terms around and feel so, so righteous when they say it. Those who are guilty should be punished of course but right now it is a witch hunt. Like a good liberal I have more to say than that, but right now I want to continue with my TLA agenda.
Wednesday, November 29, 2017
More than half
As deer season draws to a close I was wondering if Mr. Beagles had any success and if there is a newly dressed haunch curing in the shed. When the subject of hunting comes up I tend to wander through YouTube looking for interesting videos and I found some relating to airguns but these aren't your Red Ryder BB guns of yore. Airguns have gotten very serious, with large calibers, and can be used to take down larger game. Some guys in South Africa used them to take down warthogs and the slugs penetrated cleanly, through and through, much more quietly than a firearm. Interesting, I thought.
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The Thanksgiving conversation about the Oxford Comma didn't proceed very far. It started when my sister mentioned the proofreading she has to do for her job at Loyola Law School. Those professors write a lot of articles and papers and she has to clean them up sometimes. I asked her about the Oxford Comma and she is fully in favor of it, as is her daughter, the elementary schoolteacher. My nephew, the rising star at Air Canada, thought it was goofy but his sister showed him the light and he came around to acknowledge it's superiority. The other three at the table made no comment, probably not having any opinion one way or the other and the issue wasn't forced. So it ends up with four out of seven Thanksgiving diners firmly in favor of the Oxford Comma, a better outcome than I expected.
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I don't know about the Liberal Agenda, I suspect there is less than it appears. It seems to me that as people communicate and travel more they become increasingly liberal and tolerant. More thought is required before I draw any conclusions.
Likewise, the distribution of wealth requires more thought on my part. Some guy is always going to be the richest and some other guy (poor sap!) is going to be the most impoverished. Too many factors are involved, some yet unidentified, for any quick or glib answers. But if you visualize wealth as a bell-shaped curve I think it is skewing to the poor end. And then I think about the relationship between wealth and power and how little I understand about either. I'll be taking my time.
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The Sexual Harassment Scandals of 2017 continue unabated; today Matt Lauer of NBC and Garrison Keillor of NPR fell as the latest victims. Okay, victims may not be the right word but I wonder where this is all going. Are we entering a new era, as the pendulum swings, or is it simply an abuse of power? Some men can be terrible at reading signals from women, and none of the principals were accused of groping and fondling strangers on the street (to my knowledge). Some folks might say that none of this would have happened if the ladies didn't wear so much makeup and dressed like whores, but not me.
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The Thanksgiving conversation about the Oxford Comma didn't proceed very far. It started when my sister mentioned the proofreading she has to do for her job at Loyola Law School. Those professors write a lot of articles and papers and she has to clean them up sometimes. I asked her about the Oxford Comma and she is fully in favor of it, as is her daughter, the elementary schoolteacher. My nephew, the rising star at Air Canada, thought it was goofy but his sister showed him the light and he came around to acknowledge it's superiority. The other three at the table made no comment, probably not having any opinion one way or the other and the issue wasn't forced. So it ends up with four out of seven Thanksgiving diners firmly in favor of the Oxford Comma, a better outcome than I expected.
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I don't know about the Liberal Agenda, I suspect there is less than it appears. It seems to me that as people communicate and travel more they become increasingly liberal and tolerant. More thought is required before I draw any conclusions.
Likewise, the distribution of wealth requires more thought on my part. Some guy is always going to be the richest and some other guy (poor sap!) is going to be the most impoverished. Too many factors are involved, some yet unidentified, for any quick or glib answers. But if you visualize wealth as a bell-shaped curve I think it is skewing to the poor end. And then I think about the relationship between wealth and power and how little I understand about either. I'll be taking my time.
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The Sexual Harassment Scandals of 2017 continue unabated; today Matt Lauer of NBC and Garrison Keillor of NPR fell as the latest victims. Okay, victims may not be the right word but I wonder where this is all going. Are we entering a new era, as the pendulum swings, or is it simply an abuse of power? Some men can be terrible at reading signals from women, and none of the principals were accused of groping and fondling strangers on the street (to my knowledge). Some folks might say that none of this would have happened if the ladies didn't wear so much makeup and dressed like whores, but not me.
Triumphs of TLA
I don't think this is just another swing to the right ala W or Reagan, I think this is something much different than the semi regular swing of the dem/rep pendulum, and it is in the electorate as well as the elected. I refer to the Trumpists who are certainly something new, and to the conservatives who are more than happy to ride this tiger because they think he will advance their agenda, and if he bends the rule of law a bit, well no biggie.
I'm speaking of economic inequality conditions in the US and if you have any doubts just hop on the google machine.
Nowadays if you say every adult should be able to vote and that a person should be able to live wherever they can pay the rent and have a chance at a job they are qualified for, pretty much everybody outside of the alt right will agree with you, but it wasn't that way in our childhood. Before Old Dog joined The Institute Beagles and I had a long conversation about the time MLK dropped into Gage Park. There was a book cowritten by a former pastor of Elsdon Methodist that we both sent away for and read and discussed. A quick survey of my bookcase does not reveal it, I wonder if Beagles remembers the title.
Anyway on the one hand there were really no laws in Chicago against Blacks being able to live and work wherever they chose, on the other hand most whites were against them and would not rent their properties or consider hiring them.
Meanwhile in the south technically Blacks were free to vote since the civil war, but all kinds of impediments were put in their path so that they could not in fact do that, and there was nothing on the books where anybody could do anything about it. Not until LBJ, who passed the laws that enabled the National Guard to come in and enforce the right to vote and to attend schools etc at the point of the bayonet.
This wasn't popular in the south, and MLK wasn't popular with white folks in Chicago, and things are still not all hunky dory with racial equality, but they are much better than they were. Both triumphs of TLA.
And women, they had the right to vote and all, but they had a hard time getting into schools and getting good jobs because men who ran things didn't think they were smart enough or that they should stay home and take care of the kids and not take the job of some man who needed to support his wife and kids. The ERA failed, but now half our collegiates are women and they are getting pretty good jobs. Another triumph of TLA.
It used to be illegal for gays to even have sex and now they are proudly walking down the aisle and eating of the cake with two grooms or two brides. Another triumph of TLA.
There was that economic inequality thing,we weren't doing so well there. Well it's a tough one, maybe we would get to it in the future and look here in 2008 we elected the first Black president. Was that a triumph or what? The people, a majority of Americans had voted Democrat for the first Black president, was that not a sure sign that the TLA was about to fix things for once and for all?
It turns out it wasn't. Next post, what went wrong.
I'm speaking of economic inequality conditions in the US and if you have any doubts just hop on the google machine.
Nowadays if you say every adult should be able to vote and that a person should be able to live wherever they can pay the rent and have a chance at a job they are qualified for, pretty much everybody outside of the alt right will agree with you, but it wasn't that way in our childhood. Before Old Dog joined The Institute Beagles and I had a long conversation about the time MLK dropped into Gage Park. There was a book cowritten by a former pastor of Elsdon Methodist that we both sent away for and read and discussed. A quick survey of my bookcase does not reveal it, I wonder if Beagles remembers the title.
Anyway on the one hand there were really no laws in Chicago against Blacks being able to live and work wherever they chose, on the other hand most whites were against them and would not rent their properties or consider hiring them.
Meanwhile in the south technically Blacks were free to vote since the civil war, but all kinds of impediments were put in their path so that they could not in fact do that, and there was nothing on the books where anybody could do anything about it. Not until LBJ, who passed the laws that enabled the National Guard to come in and enforce the right to vote and to attend schools etc at the point of the bayonet.
This wasn't popular in the south, and MLK wasn't popular with white folks in Chicago, and things are still not all hunky dory with racial equality, but they are much better than they were. Both triumphs of TLA.
And women, they had the right to vote and all, but they had a hard time getting into schools and getting good jobs because men who ran things didn't think they were smart enough or that they should stay home and take care of the kids and not take the job of some man who needed to support his wife and kids. The ERA failed, but now half our collegiates are women and they are getting pretty good jobs. Another triumph of TLA.
It used to be illegal for gays to even have sex and now they are proudly walking down the aisle and eating of the cake with two grooms or two brides. Another triumph of TLA.
There was that economic inequality thing,we weren't doing so well there. Well it's a tough one, maybe we would get to it in the future and look here in 2008 we elected the first Black president. Was that a triumph or what? The people, a majority of Americans had voted Democrat for the first Black president, was that not a sure sign that the TLA was about to fix things for once and for all?
It turns out it wasn't. Next post, what went wrong.
Tuesday, November 28, 2017
Swing to the Left, Swing to the Right
I thought that the Liberal Agenda was a done deal, and that the current swing to the right represented a reaction against the excesses of it. I don't think that most conservatives want to go back to the bad old days, they just want to let some gas out of the bag before it overinflates and pops, kind of like what the stock market people call a "correction".
I'm not so sure that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. I know that's what many people are saying, but I wonder if they are just repeating what they have heard others say. I'm not prepared to argue the numbers but, anecdotally, there were certainly times in history when poor people were starving in the streets, and I don't think that's happening now, at least in the developed countries. I understand that there are some people who feel that the latest recovery has passed them by, and that many of them expressed their frustration by voting for Trump, which may be what turned the election in his favor. I doubt that Trump is going to do these people any good, which may cause them to swing to the left in the next election.
There probably is more to be said on this subject, but that's all I can come up with at the moment.
I'm not so sure that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. I know that's what many people are saying, but I wonder if they are just repeating what they have heard others say. I'm not prepared to argue the numbers but, anecdotally, there were certainly times in history when poor people were starving in the streets, and I don't think that's happening now, at least in the developed countries. I understand that there are some people who feel that the latest recovery has passed them by, and that many of them expressed their frustration by voting for Trump, which may be what turned the election in his favor. I doubt that Trump is going to do these people any good, which may cause them to swing to the left in the next election.
There probably is more to be said on this subject, but that's all I can come up with at the moment.
TLA explained
Old Dog's family discussed the Oxford comma over Thanksgiving? Oh my I wish I could have been there. What was the consensus? Any interesting viewpoints? I still remember the time a young woman grammar maven sat down in the geezer corner of the Ten Cat and we had a nice grammar conversation, but then she never came back for some reason.
The Liberal Agenda and The End of the World. I am not trolling here I am laying out what I believe. I'm not even saying I am necessarily right, there will be plenty of things the dawgs can disagree on, and I am sure they will for is that not the nature of The Institute that I have recently chronicled? By the way, does anybody have anything to add to that? Also by the way I just tested that right click on dawgs, and it worked fine. Actually that is what I always do when writing emails and stuff in Word, but on the blog I have been using that little ABC thing in the upper right, which now, even after I have added dawgs to my dictionary, still refuses to recognize it. I won't be using that anymore.
When I stated that 1. in the liberal agenda was that all people should be equal, of course I meant in the eyes of the law. That would certainly include the right to vote, and I would add the right to live where they want and the right to apply for a job, the latter two are a bit squishy and I'll get into them later,
2. By economic equality I mean a fair distribution of wealth. The worst case would be one guy owns everything and everybody else has nothing. The best case would be that everybody has the same amount. Of course the latter case will never happen, there are all kinds of forces in the economy, and probably the economy works better if some have more than others, but The Liberal Agenda (TLA), wants the distribution to be more equal than it is. Mainly TLA is for helping the poor, and the money to do that is going to have to come from those with more, preferably the richer of them.
3, Sometimes you have to pass laws to move things forward. That's where TLA meets resistance. Most people generally agree to 1 and 2, but they don't like laws that might impinge on them.
We seem to have made great strides in 1. At the beginning of the country only landholders could vote, then all white men, then all men (though other laws had to be passed to enable Blacks in the Jim Crow south to vote), and then women too. Gays could always vote, but they had plenty of discrimination against them which has largely evaporated,though I don't know if the moral righteousness of TLA or the popularity of Will and Grace are more responsible for that. Now TLA has gotten into transgender issues,which okay I have to agree they should have their rights too, but I sometimes wish we wouldn't get so strident about it.
We seem to be losing on 2, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at an accelerated rate.
3. As I said, is where TLA runs into trouble. Technically there weren't any laws impeding Black people from voting, living where they wanted to, having an equal chance at jobs, but practically speaking they were barred from all three so laws had to be passed to bring that about. That battle is still being fought today.
In The End of the World I will get into why right now it looks like TLA will never get implemented and I will get into that later.
The Liberal Agenda and The End of the World. I am not trolling here I am laying out what I believe. I'm not even saying I am necessarily right, there will be plenty of things the dawgs can disagree on, and I am sure they will for is that not the nature of The Institute that I have recently chronicled? By the way, does anybody have anything to add to that? Also by the way I just tested that right click on dawgs, and it worked fine. Actually that is what I always do when writing emails and stuff in Word, but on the blog I have been using that little ABC thing in the upper right, which now, even after I have added dawgs to my dictionary, still refuses to recognize it. I won't be using that anymore.
When I stated that 1. in the liberal agenda was that all people should be equal, of course I meant in the eyes of the law. That would certainly include the right to vote, and I would add the right to live where they want and the right to apply for a job, the latter two are a bit squishy and I'll get into them later,
2. By economic equality I mean a fair distribution of wealth. The worst case would be one guy owns everything and everybody else has nothing. The best case would be that everybody has the same amount. Of course the latter case will never happen, there are all kinds of forces in the economy, and probably the economy works better if some have more than others, but The Liberal Agenda (TLA), wants the distribution to be more equal than it is. Mainly TLA is for helping the poor, and the money to do that is going to have to come from those with more, preferably the richer of them.
3, Sometimes you have to pass laws to move things forward. That's where TLA meets resistance. Most people generally agree to 1 and 2, but they don't like laws that might impinge on them.
We seem to have made great strides in 1. At the beginning of the country only landholders could vote, then all white men, then all men (though other laws had to be passed to enable Blacks in the Jim Crow south to vote), and then women too. Gays could always vote, but they had plenty of discrimination against them which has largely evaporated,though I don't know if the moral righteousness of TLA or the popularity of Will and Grace are more responsible for that. Now TLA has gotten into transgender issues,which okay I have to agree they should have their rights too, but I sometimes wish we wouldn't get so strident about it.
We seem to be losing on 2, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at an accelerated rate.
3. As I said, is where TLA runs into trouble. Technically there weren't any laws impeding Black people from voting, living where they wanted to, having an equal chance at jobs, but practically speaking they were barred from all three so laws had to be passed to bring that about. That battle is still being fought today.
In The End of the World I will get into why right now it looks like TLA will never get implemented and I will get into that later.
Monday, November 27, 2017
When In Doubt, Right Click
Maybe I forgot to report this, but I have been getting the spell checker to work properly for some time now. My daughter put me on to this one. When the spell checker flags a word, right click on it, even if the little hand doesn't appear when you hover over it. A drop down menu should appear giving you the option of adding the word to the dictionary or ignoring it. Either way, the wavy red line under the word should disappear. Lots of things work like that in Windows 10, but it may work with older systems as well. Try it, either it will work or it won't, but nothing bad should come of it.
Maybe that's what happened to the liberal agenda, people had the feeling that it wasn't working for them, so they right clicked on it. Chances are they won't be any more satisfied with the results, but they figure it's worth a try. Many people don't seem to know what they want anyway. They want everything, they want it now, and they want it for free. Then, when they get it, they don't want it anymore, they want something else instead.
The politicians, on the other hand, know what they want. They want votes, and they will tell us anything they think we want to hear to get them. As soon as they get elected, they start working towards getting re-elected. Term limits don't help. During their last allowed term in office, they start working towards getting elected or appointed to some other office. Either way, most of their energy is directed towards getting a government job for themselves, leaving very little energy to work on any agenda, liberal or conservative. Maybe I'm just getting cynical in my old age. Isn't that what old people re supposed to do?
Maybe that's what happened to the liberal agenda, people had the feeling that it wasn't working for them, so they right clicked on it. Chances are they won't be any more satisfied with the results, but they figure it's worth a try. Many people don't seem to know what they want anyway. They want everything, they want it now, and they want it for free. Then, when they get it, they don't want it anymore, they want something else instead.
The politicians, on the other hand, know what they want. They want votes, and they will tell us anything they think we want to hear to get them. As soon as they get elected, they start working towards getting re-elected. Term limits don't help. During their last allowed term in office, they start working towards getting elected or appointed to some other office. Either way, most of their energy is directed towards getting a government job for themselves, leaving very little energy to work on any agenda, liberal or conservative. Maybe I'm just getting cynical in my old age. Isn't that what old people re supposed to do?
Lost liberal bona fides
There was no turkey breast with drumstick at my sister's place. Well, there was but it was part of a whole turkey; economics was a factor. My sister is sensible and discovered that the whole bird was cheaper than the separate parts, so she went with that. Except for the lasagna the rest of the menu was classic Thanksgiving: mashed potatoes, cranberries, glazed sweet potatoes, dinner rolls, and string beans. No stuffing as I recall; it may have gotten lost in the switch from turkey breast to whole turkey. The cornbread was well received unless I was being lied to, but there wasn't much left afterwards. And three kinds of pies for dessert, with two types of homemade ice cream. Good eating for our small group of seven.
No heated arguments, but not much alcohol either. We did, however, discuss the Oxford Comma. My niece brought her new boyfriend around for the first time and nothing was made of the fact that he is from Lebanon. Maybe it was that bottle of Lebanese wine he brought, or that he was in the army. Which army I don't know and didn't ask, but he seemed like a nice guy and joined the conversations.
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I don't want to disparage Uncle Ken's memory but I remember his jalapeno/cheddar mini-muffins, his first effort I think. They looked a little odd and I asked him if he used a muffin tin for the pleated paper muffin liners and he said he didn't. I lost interest when he said he used a box mix instead of baking from scratch. Where's the fun in that? Box mixes are perfectly acceptable and often yield better results but there is no risk, no chance at failure.
For such a simple food cornbread can be very tricky in that it can crumble and fall apart easily. Recipes are all over the place with varying ingredients and baking instructions so it can be a challenge to sort it out according to your own taste and preferences. I like that kind of stuff but I've eaten enough cornbread for now. Next time I bake I think I'll add some bacon bits.
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Sorry, Uncle Ken, but I think the first two points of your Liberal Agenda are nonsense unless they are poorly stated. Everybody should be equal? What does that mean when there are so many differences in people? I accept that everyone should have equal opportunity and be treated equally under the rule of law, if that is what you mean. And I have no idea what you mean by economic equality; please elaborate.
But given your penchant for the art of the argument I realize you may be simply trolling to get the juices flowing in your fellow Beaglesonians. I'm reminded of one bit of advice from the old UseNet newsgroups: Do not feed the trolls.
-----
Even though we are in a mid-season hiatus The Good Life has been renewed for a third season, a little extra something to be thankful for.
No heated arguments, but not much alcohol either. We did, however, discuss the Oxford Comma. My niece brought her new boyfriend around for the first time and nothing was made of the fact that he is from Lebanon. Maybe it was that bottle of Lebanese wine he brought, or that he was in the army. Which army I don't know and didn't ask, but he seemed like a nice guy and joined the conversations.
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I don't want to disparage Uncle Ken's memory but I remember his jalapeno/cheddar mini-muffins, his first effort I think. They looked a little odd and I asked him if he used a muffin tin for the pleated paper muffin liners and he said he didn't. I lost interest when he said he used a box mix instead of baking from scratch. Where's the fun in that? Box mixes are perfectly acceptable and often yield better results but there is no risk, no chance at failure.
For such a simple food cornbread can be very tricky in that it can crumble and fall apart easily. Recipes are all over the place with varying ingredients and baking instructions so it can be a challenge to sort it out according to your own taste and preferences. I like that kind of stuff but I've eaten enough cornbread for now. Next time I bake I think I'll add some bacon bits.
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Sorry, Uncle Ken, but I think the first two points of your Liberal Agenda are nonsense unless they are poorly stated. Everybody should be equal? What does that mean when there are so many differences in people? I accept that everyone should have equal opportunity and be treated equally under the rule of law, if that is what you mean. And I have no idea what you mean by economic equality; please elaborate.
But given your penchant for the art of the argument I realize you may be simply trolling to get the juices flowing in your fellow Beaglesonians. I'm reminded of one bit of advice from the old UseNet newsgroups: Do not feed the trolls.
-----
Even though we are in a mid-season hiatus The Good Life has been renewed for a third season, a little extra something to be thankful for.
The Liberal Agenda
That sounds like a pretty good Thanksgiving Beagles. I think I have related mine, and now we just have to hear how that drumstick and lasagna went over.
The more I think about it I don't like and etc. It has a certain folksy ring, but that's not necessarily a good thing. I think it's the abbreviation that's the snag. Originally I was speaking of the qualities of corn muffins (Oh and how did that cornbread turn out Old Dog?), the moistness, the texture, the tang, etc. It's just too abrupt. I think if I substituted the full word things would go better: the moistness, the texture, the tang, etcetera. That sounds and looks much better.
Can you believe that the blogspot spellchecker does not recognize etcetera? I swan that is the worst spell-checker I have ever encountered. Its vocabulary is tiny, and there is no way to add a word to its dictionary.
I was going to go on about grammar, the strange apostrophe after numbers like in B-52's that I once abhorred, but anymore I have come to accept. Why follow some arcane rule of grammar and have the odd looking B-52s, when you can free yourself from the chains of antiquity and silly decorum and have the snappier and easier to read B-52's? I could champion the classy Oxford comma over the awkward and obfuscating non-Oxford comma, but for some reason it doesn't raise the passions that I always think it should. I could bring up phonetic spelling, but anymore I am surrounded by fogies who don't want to change anything.
But it occurs to me that there is a phonetic spelling thing going on right under our noses now. I refer to the thumb clicky clacking which good old wiki has a name for, SMS. Here you find phonetic spelling, but also letters and numbers used for words, and those annoying acronyms that you just have to learn by rote, But it may be being replaced by those things where you speak into your phone and your phone translates it into letters. Well I don't know what I'm talking about here,m it all goes on somewhere beyond my universe.
Okay then let's talk about something I know about, The Liberal Agenda and The End of the World.
The Liberal Agenda:
1. Everybody should be equal.
2. Economic equality is a goal worth striving for.
3. Sometimes you have to pass laws to move these things forward.
The End of the World
1. The Liberal Agenda is stalled.
2. The very people it is meant to help are rejecting it in favor of the current regime
3. This is happening across Europe too, the lamps are going out and who knows if we shall see them lit again.
To be continued.
The more I think about it I don't like and etc. It has a certain folksy ring, but that's not necessarily a good thing. I think it's the abbreviation that's the snag. Originally I was speaking of the qualities of corn muffins (Oh and how did that cornbread turn out Old Dog?), the moistness, the texture, the tang, etc. It's just too abrupt. I think if I substituted the full word things would go better: the moistness, the texture, the tang, etcetera. That sounds and looks much better.
Can you believe that the blogspot spellchecker does not recognize etcetera? I swan that is the worst spell-checker I have ever encountered. Its vocabulary is tiny, and there is no way to add a word to its dictionary.
I was going to go on about grammar, the strange apostrophe after numbers like in B-52's that I once abhorred, but anymore I have come to accept. Why follow some arcane rule of grammar and have the odd looking B-52s, when you can free yourself from the chains of antiquity and silly decorum and have the snappier and easier to read B-52's? I could champion the classy Oxford comma over the awkward and obfuscating non-Oxford comma, but for some reason it doesn't raise the passions that I always think it should. I could bring up phonetic spelling, but anymore I am surrounded by fogies who don't want to change anything.
But it occurs to me that there is a phonetic spelling thing going on right under our noses now. I refer to the thumb clicky clacking which good old wiki has a name for, SMS. Here you find phonetic spelling, but also letters and numbers used for words, and those annoying acronyms that you just have to learn by rote, But it may be being replaced by those things where you speak into your phone and your phone translates it into letters. Well I don't know what I'm talking about here,m it all goes on somewhere beyond my universe.
Okay then let's talk about something I know about, The Liberal Agenda and The End of the World.
The Liberal Agenda:
1. Everybody should be equal.
2. Economic equality is a goal worth striving for.
3. Sometimes you have to pass laws to move these things forward.
The End of the World
1. The Liberal Agenda is stalled.
2. The very people it is meant to help are rejecting it in favor of the current regime
3. This is happening across Europe too, the lamps are going out and who knows if we shall see them lit again.
To be continued.
Friday, November 24, 2017
I'm Okay - You're Okay
I haven't posted lately just because I couldn't think of anything that I wanted to say. I have been reading the posts of my colleagues, and they seem to be covering their subjects well. Uncle Ken is doing a good job summarizing the history of the Institute. I suppose I could take one of his points and run with it, but I just don't feel like it. Maybe later.
Thanksgiving at the Inn was very nice. They had a buffet with turkey, prime rib, ham, salmon, and more sides than you could shake a stick at. The boyfriend insisted on paying for everything. He gets some kind of employee discount, but it still couldn't have been cheap feeding five people in a place like that. He's been working there for some time and everybody knows him. After lingering over dinner, we went into the hotel lobby and sat visiting before a big gas fireplace. The Inn is about the oldest building in Bay Harbor, dating back to 1990s, and the rest of the village seems to have grown up around it. There are fancy looking condos, a yacht harbor, several restaurants, and I don't know what else. A nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there, even if I could afford to, which I can't anyway. We were able to park close enough that we didn't have to use the valet parking service.
I think the "and" is already included in the "etc." I don't know a lot of Latin, but I'm pretty sure that "et" means "and", as in "Et tu Brutus?" The "c" is an abbreviation of "cetera" which, I assume means something like "more stuff". I also seem to remember seeing it spelled "&c" in old fashioned texts.
I have seen clips of the Black Friday frenzy on TV, and it doesn't look like anything in which I would want to participate. I don't care how much money I could save, it's not worth being trampled by a rabid mob. Here is the probable origin of the term according to Wiki:
The earliest evidence of the phrase Black Friday applied to the day after Thanksgiving in a shopping context suggests that the term originated in Philadelphia, where it was used to describe the heavy and disruptive pedestrian and vehicle traffic that would occur on the day after Thanksgiving. This usage dates to at least 1961. More than twenty years later, as the phrase became more widespread, a popular explanation became that this day represented the point in the year when retailers begin to turn a profit, thus going from being "in the red" to being "in the black".
Thanksgiving at the Inn was very nice. They had a buffet with turkey, prime rib, ham, salmon, and more sides than you could shake a stick at. The boyfriend insisted on paying for everything. He gets some kind of employee discount, but it still couldn't have been cheap feeding five people in a place like that. He's been working there for some time and everybody knows him. After lingering over dinner, we went into the hotel lobby and sat visiting before a big gas fireplace. The Inn is about the oldest building in Bay Harbor, dating back to 1990s, and the rest of the village seems to have grown up around it. There are fancy looking condos, a yacht harbor, several restaurants, and I don't know what else. A nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there, even if I could afford to, which I can't anyway. We were able to park close enough that we didn't have to use the valet parking service.
I think the "and" is already included in the "etc." I don't know a lot of Latin, but I'm pretty sure that "et" means "and", as in "Et tu Brutus?" The "c" is an abbreviation of "cetera" which, I assume means something like "more stuff". I also seem to remember seeing it spelled "&c" in old fashioned texts.
I have seen clips of the Black Friday frenzy on TV, and it doesn't look like anything in which I would want to participate. I don't care how much money I could save, it's not worth being trampled by a rabid mob. Here is the probable origin of the term according to Wiki:
The earliest evidence of the phrase Black Friday applied to the day after Thanksgiving in a shopping context suggests that the term originated in Philadelphia, where it was used to describe the heavy and disruptive pedestrian and vehicle traffic that would occur on the day after Thanksgiving. This usage dates to at least 1961. More than twenty years later, as the phrase became more widespread, a popular explanation became that this day represented the point in the year when retailers begin to turn a profit, thus going from being "in the red" to being "in the black".
black friday
I'm getting a little worried, no posts from Beagles since Monday. I hope it is just some internet glitch thing.
Thanksgiving ended for me with my sister and brother-in-law drinking coffee and eating pie up in my place, just us old folks, the young folks, my nephews, both pushing fifty, had bolted after eating a free meal at Harry Carey's. Poor social form.
What else do old folks talk about? The old days. The old Thanksgivings, the groaning table in the dining room of the bungalow on Homan Avenue when the nephews were boys, the ones before that when I was a boy and my sisters were girls and the old folks were Gramma and Grampa Janovsky.
Well they were something, the cranberries sliced from the can, the sweet potatoes with the melted marshmallows, stuffing, some kind of biscuits, still hot from the oven, stringbeans.
My mother used to cook stringbeans with bacon, sometimes little bits of potatoes, maybe baby potatoes. When I was living in the trailer in Herrin Illinois sometimes the landlady would invite us into the big house and fix up stringbeans like that, but I've never had them since.
At some point we stop eating the foods of our youth and then we get old.
I've pretty much finished my History of the Institute. I had been hoping the dawgs would chime in at this point. You know I get up in the morning, turn on Mr Coffee, shower, feed the cats and sit down at the computer, and even as it is powering up I am wondering what will be new in the morning like the paper that thunking up against the door. I read the post or two, run them through my mind a bit, pick out things I want to comment on, maybe think of a general plan that will pull it all together, take a breath and then I am off. An hour and some change later, I go through it for typos and maybe a passage that doesn't make any sense. I catch some, but some get through. Sometimes I wonder why I do it, that's an hour plus a day, five days a week, it piles up a bit. It only gets read by a couple people, maybe the occasional interloper. That's all true, but you know I enjoy it, I always enjoy it.
Black Friday. A couple years ago I came across a post from one of my leftier Champaign pals about how black Friday had something bad to do with Black people, it was kind of hackneyed logic, and really as thin as tissue paper narrative, it was like you don't even need to hit the Snopes button to know it was all bogus. I called her on it, showed her the Snopes comment, and she was like, well, maybe it's false but there is so much racism, and this is against racism, so even if it is false, it's false in a good cause so I'm leaving it up. I hate when that happens.
Thanksgiving ended for me with my sister and brother-in-law drinking coffee and eating pie up in my place, just us old folks, the young folks, my nephews, both pushing fifty, had bolted after eating a free meal at Harry Carey's. Poor social form.
What else do old folks talk about? The old days. The old Thanksgivings, the groaning table in the dining room of the bungalow on Homan Avenue when the nephews were boys, the ones before that when I was a boy and my sisters were girls and the old folks were Gramma and Grampa Janovsky.
Well they were something, the cranberries sliced from the can, the sweet potatoes with the melted marshmallows, stuffing, some kind of biscuits, still hot from the oven, stringbeans.
My mother used to cook stringbeans with bacon, sometimes little bits of potatoes, maybe baby potatoes. When I was living in the trailer in Herrin Illinois sometimes the landlady would invite us into the big house and fix up stringbeans like that, but I've never had them since.
At some point we stop eating the foods of our youth and then we get old.
I've pretty much finished my History of the Institute. I had been hoping the dawgs would chime in at this point. You know I get up in the morning, turn on Mr Coffee, shower, feed the cats and sit down at the computer, and even as it is powering up I am wondering what will be new in the morning like the paper that thunking up against the door. I read the post or two, run them through my mind a bit, pick out things I want to comment on, maybe think of a general plan that will pull it all together, take a breath and then I am off. An hour and some change later, I go through it for typos and maybe a passage that doesn't make any sense. I catch some, but some get through. Sometimes I wonder why I do it, that's an hour plus a day, five days a week, it piles up a bit. It only gets read by a couple people, maybe the occasional interloper. That's all true, but you know I enjoy it, I always enjoy it.
Black Friday. A couple years ago I came across a post from one of my leftier Champaign pals about how black Friday had something bad to do with Black people, it was kind of hackneyed logic, and really as thin as tissue paper narrative, it was like you don't even need to hit the Snopes button to know it was all bogus. I called her on it, showed her the Snopes comment, and she was like, well, maybe it's false but there is so much racism, and this is against racism, so even if it is false, it's false in a good cause so I'm leaving it up. I hate when that happens.
Thursday, November 23, 2017
History of The Institute Part Two
Hum, two nights off for Beagles. Not like him, Hope it is nothing that gets in the way of his enjoying valet parking tonight and handing out that fat Manly Arts tip.
I wonder if Old Dog is aware that I too am a baker of cornbread. I have served it up at my last two Ten Cat shows, Corn and Cats and Corn. The Cats and Corn featured cornbread muffins and Kit Kats, cool, huh? I usually bring a sample of the corn bread muffins to the Ten Cat the Friday before the opening and perhaps Old Dog has sampled them. But likely not because I think I would have remembered that.
Because Old Dog is not the type to say why thank you, select a tidbit, pop it into his mouth, mutter very nice, and get on with the current topic. No, he is a gentleman scientist and everything is up for analysis and the baker will be sure to receive a report on the moistness, the texture, the tang, etc.
I had a powerful urge to end that last sentence with and etc. But it had the feel of bad grammar. Just etc. didn't feel right either, too abrupt, I like that little and bump before my list enders. .
I have experimented with jalapeno cheddar, but they weren't hot enough or cheesy either, should have put in more of each, but then you get to the point where you think why not just serve chunks of cheddar with jalapeno slices, and then you might as well put that over chips and have nachos.
My regular cornbread muffins (there seems to be not much difference between cornbread and cornbread muffins except that one is like a cake and the other is a muffin and I think has some sugar added. I always buy the store brand. I assume corn is corn and that extra quarter (though it could be more, store brands are on sale a lot) just goes to advertising, though I am hard pressed to remember a Del Monte commercial.
I was trying to imagine Old Dog's sister, and I just could not imagine a female version of Old Dog. Did it ever occur to you guys that all three Beaglestonians have sisters but no brothers? What does that mean?
I've always liked writing letters. I like to write long ones, and most people don't. I would write my friends long letters and expect a long letter back, but most people, they may have the gift of gab, but not so much of writing. Of course writing is way superior, but I know I am talking to the choir here.
Beagles is more of a story teller, and I am more of a guy who likes to argue, but he doesn't mind an argument and I like to tell a story too. Beagles had been writing in various forums, but they kept going out of business. He can tell that story if and when he gets back from that valet parking with his car.
We exchanged emails, me in the morning, Beagles at night every day for I'm going to guess three years because that puts the birth of The Institute at a nice round even 2010, then Beagles instituted the blog which began November 2, 2013. You can go back and read it if you have a whole bunch of time to kill.
I think I first met Old Dog at the Ten Cat in 2010, I had a show of abstracts up in the windows and we stepped out for cigs at the same time. Well you know how it is, you want to hear what the other guy thinks, so I asked him, but you know what you usually hear is oh it's great and a quick change of subject, but Old Dog said something like that one over there, it has too much brown. And maybe I said something like, no it doesn't, and he answered something like, yes it does. And like that last scene in Casablanca it was the start of a beautiful friendship.
After years of Friday night seminars Old Dog began posting in The Institute.
And just now the thunk, or should I say THUNK, of the paper against the door. It used to be the black Friday paper, but now I guess they have moved it up to Thanksgiving day paper. There is nothing like that in North Korea you can be sure.
I wonder if Old Dog is aware that I too am a baker of cornbread. I have served it up at my last two Ten Cat shows, Corn and Cats and Corn. The Cats and Corn featured cornbread muffins and Kit Kats, cool, huh? I usually bring a sample of the corn bread muffins to the Ten Cat the Friday before the opening and perhaps Old Dog has sampled them. But likely not because I think I would have remembered that.
Because Old Dog is not the type to say why thank you, select a tidbit, pop it into his mouth, mutter very nice, and get on with the current topic. No, he is a gentleman scientist and everything is up for analysis and the baker will be sure to receive a report on the moistness, the texture, the tang, etc.
I had a powerful urge to end that last sentence with and etc. But it had the feel of bad grammar. Just etc. didn't feel right either, too abrupt, I like that little and bump before my list enders. .
I have experimented with jalapeno cheddar, but they weren't hot enough or cheesy either, should have put in more of each, but then you get to the point where you think why not just serve chunks of cheddar with jalapeno slices, and then you might as well put that over chips and have nachos.
My regular cornbread muffins (there seems to be not much difference between cornbread and cornbread muffins except that one is like a cake and the other is a muffin and I think has some sugar added. I always buy the store brand. I assume corn is corn and that extra quarter (though it could be more, store brands are on sale a lot) just goes to advertising, though I am hard pressed to remember a Del Monte commercial.
I was trying to imagine Old Dog's sister, and I just could not imagine a female version of Old Dog. Did it ever occur to you guys that all three Beaglestonians have sisters but no brothers? What does that mean?
I've always liked writing letters. I like to write long ones, and most people don't. I would write my friends long letters and expect a long letter back, but most people, they may have the gift of gab, but not so much of writing. Of course writing is way superior, but I know I am talking to the choir here.
Beagles is more of a story teller, and I am more of a guy who likes to argue, but he doesn't mind an argument and I like to tell a story too. Beagles had been writing in various forums, but they kept going out of business. He can tell that story if and when he gets back from that valet parking with his car.
We exchanged emails, me in the morning, Beagles at night every day for I'm going to guess three years because that puts the birth of The Institute at a nice round even 2010, then Beagles instituted the blog which began November 2, 2013. You can go back and read it if you have a whole bunch of time to kill.
I think I first met Old Dog at the Ten Cat in 2010, I had a show of abstracts up in the windows and we stepped out for cigs at the same time. Well you know how it is, you want to hear what the other guy thinks, so I asked him, but you know what you usually hear is oh it's great and a quick change of subject, but Old Dog said something like that one over there, it has too much brown. And maybe I said something like, no it doesn't, and he answered something like, yes it does. And like that last scene in Casablanca it was the start of a beautiful friendship.
After years of Friday night seminars Old Dog began posting in The Institute.
And just now the thunk, or should I say THUNK, of the paper against the door. It used to be the black Friday paper, but now I guess they have moved it up to Thanksgiving day paper. There is nothing like that in North Korea you can be sure.
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
Lasagna, too
Wonderland by Night is another one of those tunes on my iPod and it's always nice to hear when it pops up on shuffle play. There are a couple of live versions on YouTube and I started to wonder what ever happened to Bert Kaempfert so off to Wikipedia I went. He was a much bigger deal than I expected and was quite the star in Europe but never seemed to catch on in the states. Although exact authorship is disputed he is supposed to have composed the music for Strangers in the Night, made popular by Frank Sinatra (who didn't like the song even if it was his biggest seller). And while in Hamburg, Kaempfert hired the Beatles as a backup band for another singer for a recording gig. This is when the Beatles made their first studio recordings. Maybe they weren't really the Beatles yet since they lacked Ringo but who cares?
I don't know what it is about those 1960s German musicians; another song I have is A Walk in the Black Forest by Horst Jankowski. Quite a catchy tune.
-----
Tomorrow I'll be off to my sister's place for Thanksgiving. Instead of a full turkey she's going with just a turkey breast but I talked her into snagging a drumstick; I like that dark meat. Oh, there will be lasagna, too. Some family traditions can get a little strange.
I'll be bringing some fresh cornbread which I'll bake tomorrow morning. There is a recipe by Alton Brown that looked good but I had to hit the supermarket for some of the fixings, like all of them except for baking soda. At least I have a cast iron skillet that's in good shape and well seasoned.
Since it's been a while since I've done any baking I thought it would be sensible to bake a test batch, which I did earlier today. It turned out well and I didn't screw up the recipe but I think my taste buds are losing their mojo. There wasn't as much of the corn flavor that I expected but it could have been the ingredients. I wanted to get some of the hoity-toity organic corn meal but all the store had was the Quaker brand, all the good stuff was sold out. And to save a few pennies I bought the store brand creamed corn instead of a name brand like Del Monte. I am a sadder man, but wiser. Perhaps the subtle flavor will be appreciated tomorrow.
I don't know what it is about those 1960s German musicians; another song I have is A Walk in the Black Forest by Horst Jankowski. Quite a catchy tune.
-----
Tomorrow I'll be off to my sister's place for Thanksgiving. Instead of a full turkey she's going with just a turkey breast but I talked her into snagging a drumstick; I like that dark meat. Oh, there will be lasagna, too. Some family traditions can get a little strange.
I'll be bringing some fresh cornbread which I'll bake tomorrow morning. There is a recipe by Alton Brown that looked good but I had to hit the supermarket for some of the fixings, like all of them except for baking soda. At least I have a cast iron skillet that's in good shape and well seasoned.
Since it's been a while since I've done any baking I thought it would be sensible to bake a test batch, which I did earlier today. It turned out well and I didn't screw up the recipe but I think my taste buds are losing their mojo. There wasn't as much of the corn flavor that I expected but it could have been the ingredients. I wanted to get some of the hoity-toity organic corn meal but all the store had was the Quaker brand, all the good stuff was sold out. And to save a few pennies I bought the store brand creamed corn instead of a name brand like Del Monte. I am a sadder man, but wiser. Perhaps the subtle flavor will be appreciated tomorrow.
History of the Institute, Part One
It all began with facebook. Old Dog would know nothing of this, eschewing sunny, perhaps too sunny, decidedly unhip, often downright stupid, Facebook. But once you get on it fb spreads the word and tries to connect you with everybody it thinks you might know, and once you friend them you can look on their pages and of course you will know some of their friends, and the whole thing just cascades. It's like This Is Your Life, only more comfortable, without a raucous audience and some jerk sticking some book in your face. It is comely, takes place in the comfort of your living room, and you can take it or leave it as your day progresses.
My biggest crowd of Buddies is my Champaign buddies, and one night Suzie showed up. She used to waitress at the House of Chin, and though not really one of my beer-drinking buddies, she did hang with the crowd for a number of years. But there was something more about her, when she started working at Chin's, I discovered her last name, and I asked if she was Beagles's sister, and sure enough she was. Beagles had been my classmate at Gage Park High, and even before that we had sat in the same pews lustily singing out Hymn Number 504 (My, the stuff Old Man Google knows), The Old Rugged Cross at Elsdon Church on the corner of 53rd and Christiana.
I had left the faith around the age of twelve, but when I walked the halls of Gage Park, there was Beagles again. We weren't bosom pals, we moved in different circle, but we saw each other frequently.
If I remember correctly he was an avid hunter, a peculiar thing to be in the big city, I believe I made some fun of him for that, which I don't think bothered him at all, But the main thing I remembered about him is that he didn't go to college. We were in this cohort of pretty smart kids and all through our high school years we were groomed for college, there were scholarship clubs and rooms with college brochures and whatnot, we all marched off to take our college exams and the results were sent to the colleges and all, and then it turned out that Beagles had no intention of going to college.
What? His grades were great, he was on the Honor Roll. It was like a shockwave through the school, a repudiation of everything getting ahead in America stood for. But he stood by it.
I believe he went to Alaska, I went to college. I didn't get ahead very much, but I guess I had a good time, and then one day, shortly after being reacquainted with Suzie, I got to thinking about her brother, and you know, even though I didn't agree with the path he had taken, I did admire him for repudiating the whole establishment of Gage Park.
I asked Suzie whatever happened to her brother. Well there he was right there on fb, but he wasn't very active about it, and maybe it would be easier if I just emailed him. So I did. We exchanged this and that, and it came out that he was pretty Goddamned conservative.
Well I've been a liberal democrat ever since Golden Barry scared the shit out of me as a young man, but I love talking politics, and I'm rather bored with talking politics to other liberal democrats because most stuff we agree on so what is there to say?
So the idea was that we would exchange emails mostly I was thinking about politics because that is what gets my motor humming.
The newspaper has just thunked against my door, so I will take this up again Thanksgiving morning.
Tuesday, November 21, 2017
thanksgiving dinner
When we drove up from Champaign for a Cub game Wrigleyville was a Puerto Rican neighborhood, and there would be kids there who would ask for some pittance to watch our car. I don't imagine they patrolled the streets to keep other rapscallions from doing damage, but the pittance prevented the disappointment that they otherwise might have taken out on our automobile. Or our hubcaps. Whatever happened to hubcap stealing. In the old days it was widely believed that any ambitious young hoodlum could easily make enough dough to buy a motorcycle jacket from an evening of prying off hubcaps, but you never hear that anymore. No wonder young kids of today are disillusioned.
I hate the guy in the restroom. Mostly I hate giving him money, but I also hate the idea of somebody making a living that way. How depressing to punch the clock and walk into the Men's Room. And none of the guys coming in there want to discuss the weather, maybe sports, some guys will talk sports at the drop of a hat, but pretty much nobody wants you there. I guess hotels and fancy restaurants thought it was somehow classy, because guys hated to reach for a towel to dry their hands or whatever. Thank god you hardly ever see them anymore. I think women still have them, but women's bathrooms are like ballrooms I hear where they have some little party among themselves before returning to their dour men. Damn there was an Erma Bombeck column on the subject which I cannot find.
My sister's having some wood floors put in and the wood has to breathe or something so we won't be having Thanksgiving at her house. It will be at Harry Carey's, When it first opened it had guys in the restroom, but once I found that out, I would just slip out around the corner to where I lived when I wanted to go. Now that Beagles and I have been accounted for where will Old Dog be eating those sweet potatoes with the little marshmallows melted over them?
Perhaps I shouldn't put the onus on the whole state of Alabama, but geez, what do you say about a whole state who voted for this guy in the primary and likely (though increasingly less) will vote him in? That old time religion, bad enough when the church on the corner is rocking with talking in tongues and snakes, but when everybody on your block is doing the same, well, I couldn't live like that.
I sometimes wander down to the mall hoping the teen girls there will play me like a dime store fiddle (a dime store fiddle?), but I guess they think I am too sharp for that.
I hate the guy in the restroom. Mostly I hate giving him money, but I also hate the idea of somebody making a living that way. How depressing to punch the clock and walk into the Men's Room. And none of the guys coming in there want to discuss the weather, maybe sports, some guys will talk sports at the drop of a hat, but pretty much nobody wants you there. I guess hotels and fancy restaurants thought it was somehow classy, because guys hated to reach for a towel to dry their hands or whatever. Thank god you hardly ever see them anymore. I think women still have them, but women's bathrooms are like ballrooms I hear where they have some little party among themselves before returning to their dour men. Damn there was an Erma Bombeck column on the subject which I cannot find.
My sister's having some wood floors put in and the wood has to breathe or something so we won't be having Thanksgiving at her house. It will be at Harry Carey's, When it first opened it had guys in the restroom, but once I found that out, I would just slip out around the corner to where I lived when I wanted to go. Now that Beagles and I have been accounted for where will Old Dog be eating those sweet potatoes with the little marshmallows melted over them?
Perhaps I shouldn't put the onus on the whole state of Alabama, but geez, what do you say about a whole state who voted for this guy in the primary and likely (though increasingly less) will vote him in? That old time religion, bad enough when the church on the corner is rocking with talking in tongues and snakes, but when everybody on your block is doing the same, well, I couldn't live like that.
I sometimes wander down to the mall hoping the teen girls there will play me like a dime store fiddle (a dime store fiddle?), but I guess they think I am too sharp for that.
Monday, November 20, 2017
Paying to Pee
I seem to remember that Magnum was the owner of the Chateau, or maybe it was Magnam or Magnim, something like that. It was this fancy pantsy place where you were supposed to take somebody who you wanted to impress. I think my parents went there a few times for their anniversary or some other special occasion. They were having a prom night special that night and the whole place was full of prom people like us. I had something called "lobster thermador" which was a big disappointment. I have always liked regular lobster, but I found out that lobster thermador is not the same thing. I think they start out with a regular lobster, take it out of its shell, grind it to mush, mix it with some other stuff, and put it back into its shell.
Another goofy thing was this guy in the men's room who tried to brush my tuxedo off with a whisk broom, and I'm pretty sure there was nothing on it to brush off. Then he tried to give me a whole stack of bath towels just to dry my hands after I washed them. It finally dawned on me that he was kind of the bathroom custodian and expected me to tip him. I gave him a quarter, and he left me alone after that. I ran across something like that in Berlin once. I went into this public rest room, where I was surprised to see a little old lady sitting by a table knitting something. At first I thought I had gone into the ladies room by mistake, but there was a urinal in there, so I figured I was all right. When I tried to leave afterwards, the little old lady jumped up and started hollering at me in German. Then she went into a kind of pantomime routine where she pretended to clean the toilets and fill the soap dispensers. Then she pointed to a plate with some coins on it and I finally got the message and put one of my own coins on the plate with the others, and then she allowed me to leave.
I seem to remember that the boat ride was nice, but I don't remember any details. I don't think that parking thing was an elaborate conspiracy or anything like that. I think this guy just hung around the entrance trying to pick up a few bucks from the boat customers. Apparently there was someplace to park right around the corner, probably on the street rather than in a lot maintained by the boat company. We might have found it ourselves if it had been daytime and we hadn't been in a hurry. The guy was right, though, we would have missed the boat that night without his help. The only thing he did wrong was not bring our car back as he had promised. He could have just told us where to find it when we got back, but he didn't do that either. He likely bought some cheap wine with our two dollars and, by the time he drank it, he had forgotten all about us.
Where we are going for Thanksgiving is The Inn, a hotel in Bar Harbor, which is about half way between Petoskey and Charlevoix on U.S 31. Bar Harbor is a big fancy resort village that was built some years ago on the site of an old abandoned cement plant. I looked it up on Google Earth and zoomed in on the Inn. It's a large building, and the restaurant is only part of it. There is a lot where you can self park, but my grand daughter recommended that we use the valet service, especially if the weather is bad, because the lot is pretty far from the main entrance.
I can't seem to get excited about all those political scandals that are going on. I think that Watergate burned me out on stuff like that a long time ago. I believe I have mentioned before that I wonder why it took so long for all those alleged victims to come forward but, other than that, I have little interest in the whole sordid scene.
Another goofy thing was this guy in the men's room who tried to brush my tuxedo off with a whisk broom, and I'm pretty sure there was nothing on it to brush off. Then he tried to give me a whole stack of bath towels just to dry my hands after I washed them. It finally dawned on me that he was kind of the bathroom custodian and expected me to tip him. I gave him a quarter, and he left me alone after that. I ran across something like that in Berlin once. I went into this public rest room, where I was surprised to see a little old lady sitting by a table knitting something. At first I thought I had gone into the ladies room by mistake, but there was a urinal in there, so I figured I was all right. When I tried to leave afterwards, the little old lady jumped up and started hollering at me in German. Then she went into a kind of pantomime routine where she pretended to clean the toilets and fill the soap dispensers. Then she pointed to a plate with some coins on it and I finally got the message and put one of my own coins on the plate with the others, and then she allowed me to leave.
I seem to remember that the boat ride was nice, but I don't remember any details. I don't think that parking thing was an elaborate conspiracy or anything like that. I think this guy just hung around the entrance trying to pick up a few bucks from the boat customers. Apparently there was someplace to park right around the corner, probably on the street rather than in a lot maintained by the boat company. We might have found it ourselves if it had been daytime and we hadn't been in a hurry. The guy was right, though, we would have missed the boat that night without his help. The only thing he did wrong was not bring our car back as he had promised. He could have just told us where to find it when we got back, but he didn't do that either. He likely bought some cheap wine with our two dollars and, by the time he drank it, he had forgotten all about us.
Where we are going for Thanksgiving is The Inn, a hotel in Bar Harbor, which is about half way between Petoskey and Charlevoix on U.S 31. Bar Harbor is a big fancy resort village that was built some years ago on the site of an old abandoned cement plant. I looked it up on Google Earth and zoomed in on the Inn. It's a large building, and the restaurant is only part of it. There is a lot where you can self park, but my grand daughter recommended that we use the valet service, especially if the weather is bad, because the lot is pretty far from the main entrance.
I can't seem to get excited about all those political scandals that are going on. I think that Watergate burned me out on stuff like that a long time ago. I believe I have mentioned before that I wonder why it took so long for all those alleged victims to come forward but, other than that, I have little interest in the whole sordid scene.
No peeking
Mr. Beagles dodged a bullet with the fake valet parking scheme, didn't he? That's not something I'd like to tell my father about, under any circumstances. The only thing that comes close in my experience was at a hockey game in the old Chicago Stadium with a couple of buddies. The parking lot was full, or nearly so, and expensive for our teenage budgets but there were plenty of parking spots on the nearby side streets. After parking, a young lad approached us and offered to "watch your car for a quarter." This baffled me, but the oldest in the group was wise to the ways of the street and replied that it was such a good deal that "here's an extra quarter to keep a real good eye on it." Money well spent; the car was in perfect condition after the game. I've often wondered what would have happened to the car had we not spent the couple of quarters to keep it safe.
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Driving around seemed to be a big part of date nights and downtown was a popular, almost magical, destination. Buckingham Fountain, the Wrigley Building bathed in floodlights, and lower Wacker Drive with the green streetlights were usually on the agenda, followed by the obligatory visit to Old Town to mingle with the weirdos and maybe buy a giant pretzel or a day-glo poster. Rising passions required a quick trip north on the Outer Drive to park along the lake east of Addison to watch the submarine races. In those days, prior to the '68 Democratic convention, the lakefront was open all nights and romance blossomed freely. I heard that if your windows got too steamed up the cops would rap on them and tell you to move on but I never witnessed it myself.
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I don't know what to make of that Moore guy in Alabama but I'm not going to harshly judge the whole state. I enjoyed my time spent down there, and the girls are quite alluring, too much so, but that guy should have known better, especially knowing how young they were. His grip on reality was poor, and it is likely that he was being played like a dime store fiddle.
But isn't there some kind of statute of limitations for this sort of thing, like there is for other crimes or bad behavior? The next wave of scandals could involve public figures who clumsily dropped a lot of pencils in high school in the hopes of sneaking a peak up some unsuspecting girl's dress. It happens, sometimes your eye can wander where it shouldn't. Honest mistake, really. But there was one guy from my sophomore year, later arrested for arson, who took things a little too far. He used a dental mirror.
Nowadays kids are probably using their smart phones for their clandestine peeping, but what's the point? The girls don't wear dresses or skirts anymore but they seem willing enough to send off a few naked selfies to the proper lad who will no doubt share it with his pals. Future college or job interviews could be awkward with those new additions to the permanent record.
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Driving around seemed to be a big part of date nights and downtown was a popular, almost magical, destination. Buckingham Fountain, the Wrigley Building bathed in floodlights, and lower Wacker Drive with the green streetlights were usually on the agenda, followed by the obligatory visit to Old Town to mingle with the weirdos and maybe buy a giant pretzel or a day-glo poster. Rising passions required a quick trip north on the Outer Drive to park along the lake east of Addison to watch the submarine races. In those days, prior to the '68 Democratic convention, the lakefront was open all nights and romance blossomed freely. I heard that if your windows got too steamed up the cops would rap on them and tell you to move on but I never witnessed it myself.
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I don't know what to make of that Moore guy in Alabama but I'm not going to harshly judge the whole state. I enjoyed my time spent down there, and the girls are quite alluring, too much so, but that guy should have known better, especially knowing how young they were. His grip on reality was poor, and it is likely that he was being played like a dime store fiddle.
But isn't there some kind of statute of limitations for this sort of thing, like there is for other crimes or bad behavior? The next wave of scandals could involve public figures who clumsily dropped a lot of pencils in high school in the hopes of sneaking a peak up some unsuspecting girl's dress. It happens, sometimes your eye can wander where it shouldn't. Honest mistake, really. But there was one guy from my sophomore year, later arrested for arson, who took things a little too far. He used a dental mirror.
Nowadays kids are probably using their smart phones for their clandestine peeping, but what's the point? The girls don't wear dresses or skirts anymore but they seem willing enough to send off a few naked selfies to the proper lad who will no doubt share it with his pals. Future college or job interviews could be awkward with those new additions to the permanent record.
wonderland by night
Magnum Chateau (Big House) didn't ring a bell with me. Google puts one in Lyons, but you said you drove downtown. Downtown nightlife wasn't much a thing of my youth. We did go down to Old Town a few times to stare at the beatniks and see if we could get served somewhere.
I'm trying to figure out what happened to you that long ago night by the river. Could the guy have thought you might say aw shucks and walk away without your car and then they could sell it? That seems a little far-fetched. Maybe the guy was just fucking with you, or probably there was some scheme to get more money out of you and when you mentioned the police it spooked him a little.
Was it a good boat ride though? I've gotten into a habit of taking a nighttime cruise in the fall with my sister and brother in law and the nephews if they don't have something better to do. A lot of bad shit going on in the city, though not so much along the river and mostly of the white color kind, but it looks like Fairyland, nope better than that. Remember Bert Kaempfurt's Wonderland by Night? That's what it looks like.
I remembered that as a bit of classical music, but replaying it on YouTube right now it clearly isn't. Those songs with no words always puzzled me.
I am wondering a bit about valet parking in the top of Michigan. How busy are the streets? But I think I remember Beagles saying that his daughter lived in Petosky which I think is a resort spot.
Back to Bama. Is this state really in our country? Seems like the regular reps are giving up on this race. Some of the Sunday pundits have said they would be better off with the dems winning, just so they wouldn't have to defend this guy and make themselves look bad. Made me wonder, should I then root for the crazy judge, but I think a dem in the bush is better than an untrustworthy rep. Odds are right now that the dem will win. It seems like most of the newspapers (Bama has newspapers?) have come out against the gentleman caller of mall teens.
I was glad to see that Al was not stepping down. I was surprised to see so many of my ilk calling for it. Two things. One, it's kind of a craze right now, like the idea of satanic cults abusing kids, and if you take a stronger stand against Al as the evil guy, that makes you taller in the army condemning evil and more noticeable the next time they are looking to slate somebody for something,
Two, a lot of my dems love to bash the reps over their sins and they have a harder time doing it with that photo of grasping Al floating around the internet, so they figure that if they condemn him too then they are more simon pure. Myself, I dunno, condemning Trump is a good time, but I don't know if it changes any minds.
And now we have some Dems saying Bill should have resigned. I see this as a barely disguised attack on the Hilary wing by the Bernies,. It would well behoove my dems to learn how to sing kumbaya, but they seem more interested in sharpening knives.
Sunday, November 19, 2017
Valet Parking
My hypothetical wife and I have been invited by our grand daughter and her boyfriend to have Thanksgiving dinner at the fancy restaurant where the boyfriend works. I have been told that they have valet parking there. I have only used that service twice in my life, both times being a long time ago, so I googled it to find out how much we are supposed to tip those guys nowadays. I found a site called "Manly Arts", that tells you all sorts of things that a modern male is supposed to know, one of them being the protocol that is expected of you if you want to use valet parking "without looking like a doofus". Too bad I didn't read something like that before my first valet parking experience back in the 60s.
I was home on leave from the army when I took my high school girlfriend to her senior prom. I borrowed my dad's car, and drove us downtown for the after prom dinner at Magnum's Chateau, where the food was not only expensive, but disappointing. As we were driving home from there, my girlfriend noticed a sign that advertised boat rides on the Chicago River, and she asked if we could do that. To my surprise, they were still running the boats at that late hour, so I pulled up to the gate where there was a "no parking" sign. This guy approached the car and told me that I couldn't park there, which I already knew, and I asked him where I could park. He said that I didn't have time for that because the last boat of the evening was leaving in a few minutes. He then told me that, if I gave him $2.00, he would take care of my car for me and have it waiting by the gate when we came back. I gave him the $2.00 and we got on the boat seconds before it pulled out.
When we got back, neither my dad's car or the guy was anywhere in sight. I figured that he had gone to get our car, or somebody else's car, and would be back shortly, but the other passengers quickly dispersed and the boat people were turning off lights and locking thing up. I asked the guy who had sold us our boat tickets where the guy was who parks the cars, and he said, "We don't have anybody who parks the cars." I then asked him who was the guy to whom I paid $2.00 to park my car. He then asked me if I had gotten a receipt or anything like that. When I sheepishly told him that I had not, he said "You're not from around here, are you?" The girlfriend asked me what was going on, and I explained that I had paid some crook $2.00 to steal my dad's car, and then asked the boat guy if I could use his phone to call the police. The boat guy asked me to describe the car, which I did. He then went around the corner and came back a few minutes later driving my dad's car. I asked him how he had found it so quickly, and he said, "That's where they always put them."
According to the "Manly Arts" article, I should have given the boat guy another $2.00 for bringing my car back, but I didn't know that at the time. I was kind of pissed at him anyway because he had first denied all knowledge of the car parking scheme, and then knew exactly where to find the car, as well as the fact that the keys were hidden behind the sun visor. Talking it over with the girlfriend on the way home, we deduced that the car parking guy indeed did not work for the boat people, but they knew him and were familiar with his routine. Seeing as it was the last boat for the night, he just went home after parking our car and had no intention of bringing it back for us. If the boat guy wanted a share of the $2.00, he should have taken it up with the car guy the next day, and maybe he did.
I was home on leave from the army when I took my high school girlfriend to her senior prom. I borrowed my dad's car, and drove us downtown for the after prom dinner at Magnum's Chateau, where the food was not only expensive, but disappointing. As we were driving home from there, my girlfriend noticed a sign that advertised boat rides on the Chicago River, and she asked if we could do that. To my surprise, they were still running the boats at that late hour, so I pulled up to the gate where there was a "no parking" sign. This guy approached the car and told me that I couldn't park there, which I already knew, and I asked him where I could park. He said that I didn't have time for that because the last boat of the evening was leaving in a few minutes. He then told me that, if I gave him $2.00, he would take care of my car for me and have it waiting by the gate when we came back. I gave him the $2.00 and we got on the boat seconds before it pulled out.
When we got back, neither my dad's car or the guy was anywhere in sight. I figured that he had gone to get our car, or somebody else's car, and would be back shortly, but the other passengers quickly dispersed and the boat people were turning off lights and locking thing up. I asked the guy who had sold us our boat tickets where the guy was who parks the cars, and he said, "We don't have anybody who parks the cars." I then asked him who was the guy to whom I paid $2.00 to park my car. He then asked me if I had gotten a receipt or anything like that. When I sheepishly told him that I had not, he said "You're not from around here, are you?" The girlfriend asked me what was going on, and I explained that I had paid some crook $2.00 to steal my dad's car, and then asked the boat guy if I could use his phone to call the police. The boat guy asked me to describe the car, which I did. He then went around the corner and came back a few minutes later driving my dad's car. I asked him how he had found it so quickly, and he said, "That's where they always put them."
According to the "Manly Arts" article, I should have given the boat guy another $2.00 for bringing my car back, but I didn't know that at the time. I was kind of pissed at him anyway because he had first denied all knowledge of the car parking scheme, and then knew exactly where to find the car, as well as the fact that the keys were hidden behind the sun visor. Talking it over with the girlfriend on the way home, we deduced that the car parking guy indeed did not work for the boat people, but they knew him and were familiar with his routine. Seeing as it was the last boat for the night, he just went home after parking our car and had no intention of bringing it back for us. If the boat guy wanted a share of the $2.00, he should have taken it up with the car guy the next day, and maybe he did.
Friday, November 17, 2017
sweet home alabama
I wanted to add something more about kids these days, but saved it for my reply to whatever the dawgs said about the subject, but apparently they are not interested. Beagles is on the hunt and thinking ahead about dressing (shouldn't it be undressing?) deer, and Old Dog is into mozzarella cheese. I guess mozzarella cheese is fine for pizza, but who would eat it by itself? When I first moved back to Chicago, the home of Italian beef, I was shocked that people would order it with mozzarella cheese. Thirty-two years later I am still shocked.
And now Old Dog is talking about chocolate cheese, and I guess by his next post he will be on chocolate cheese ice cream. I have pointed out previously that old unmarried guys are prone to crackpot ideas because we don't have wifey to tell us that is the stupidest thing that they have ever heard, and speaking of stupid why don't you get your stupid ass up on that ladder and clean the stupid gutters? Myself I try to get out a little bit and maybe that helps, but I don't know about Old Dawg.
But he has brought up the subject of male sexual misconduct which is all the rage these days and the unlikely pair of Judge Roy Moore and Smilin' Al Franken.
The Judge is by far the more interesting one, in that he has been more interesting before all this shit blew up, and I am not even talking about being tossed off the Alabama supreme court twice. I am talking about him being Donald Trump's, Donald Trump, defeating the Donald's own man in the primary by accusing him of being too insider, now being backed by Bannon who now leads The Church of Donald Trump without Donald Trump, though its whispered that he still whispers into an ear of amber hue.
About seven accusers, as of this morning, have come forth on the touchy issue of touching teen-aged girls when you are pushing middle age. To him it was apparently some kind of courtship, and there is strain of bible thumpers (older men) who favor older men marrying young girls before they have had too much of that book learning, so that they can be proper helpmates and obey the master of the house like the bible intends. Now this negates Ken's advantage of having somebody to tell you that your crackpot ideas are crackpot, but here we are not talking about someplace civilized like the northern swamp, we are talking about Bama.
In any case he pretty much denies the whole thing. Did either of the Dawgs witness men in suits claiming that his signature in one of the young ladies' yearbook did not match what they claimed was his actual signature, which you couldn't actually tell from photocopies so they needed the young lady to take the book to some neutral site where their handwriting expert could examine it? I do declare those folks down there should spend more time sitting in the shade drinking sweet tea and less time standing out there in the hot sun wearing suits.
Meanwhile back in Washington his fellow reps hate the guy, they all believe the women and think he should bow out, except for Amber Ears who doesn't want this believing of women accusers becoming a fad because he has his own covey.
Like all good liberals, I hated to see Al fall. Well I think it's more of a little stumble, a sloppy stolen kiss eleven years ago when he was still a civilian in the mad world of showbiz, and that photo which was clearly a joke, and she is wearing a Kevlar vest, what's the big deal? But it's a big deal because Al is a liberal and a democrat, and we live and breathe by this stuff. He clearly remembers the incident differently, but to describe how is to call the woman a liar, to call the wronged woman a liar.
The amber-eared one can do that till the cows come home because reps don't mind, but Al is with the dems and in some shit. He has said he is fine with McConnell investigating him because what else can he say? Women these days, seems like they would like to get us all into the hoosegow so they won't have to waste so much time calling us crackpots and put that time towards inventing a gutter cleaning machine.
A long weekend ahead, I suggest Old Dawg goes out and gets some more popcorn and maybe brew up a mozzarella chocolate topping. Yum yum. .
Thursday, November 16, 2017
Crash Day
I didn't make it out to the blind today. It was still raining when I woke up, and I wasn't feeling so good anyway. That's the trouble with being old, it takes longer to rest up than it took to get tired. When I used to hunt with my dad in Illinois we stayed out from dawn till dusk, but we only did that for three days. With the longer seasons in Michigan, not to mention my advanced age, if I burn myself out too soon, then I get sick and am no good to anybody. They are predicting better weather for tomorrow, so it's probably just as well that I saved myself for another day.
It's only about a quarter mile from my house to my blind, but walking in the woods is not the same as walking down a sidewalk in Chicago. Walking slowly and stopping to look around every half dozen steps gives you a better chance of seeing a deer before it sees you. That's called "still hunting", and it's a difficult skill for young hunters to master because they are not used to walking that way. It's much easier for us old timers because that's the way we walk most of the time anyway. I have a tractor trail that leads out to the blind and loops back to the house. When I get a deer, I only have to drag it out to the clearing, then I go back for the tractor and carry the deer home with my front end loader. Sometimes I drop them right in the clearing, but sometimes even a well hit deer runs off into the swamp for up to hundred yards before dropping dead. A wounded deer can run for miles, and you don't want that. Either way, you've got a tracking job on your hands, which is difficult at best when there is no snow and a heavy rain is falling, which is why I passed up that chancy shot yesterday.
The gamey taste that many people associate with venison is largely due to improper handling and preparation of the meat. If you slaughtered a cow, left the guts in it for hours, put it on the roof of your car and drove around town all day showing it off, it would probably taste gamey too. The guts should come out soon after the deer stops kicking. A decent interval, about the time it takes to smoke a cigarette, is customary to show respect for the game and allow your coronary symptoms to subside. Then it's time to get to work. Care must be taken to not puncture the guts with your knife. If you do (it can happen to anybody), then you've got to clean the meat as best you can in the field and do a better job at home or in camp where you have access to clean water. When you are cutting up the meat later, anything that looks off color should be trimmed off and discarded. I like to skin my deer while it's still warm. The skin comes off easier, and it enables the meat to cool faster. I don't do that in the field, but I have a rope and pulley rig in the barn that I use to hang and skin the carcass as soon as I get it home. I let it hang there at least overnight, longer if the weather permits. A walk in cooler would be ideal, but an unheated barn or garage works fine if the outdoor temperature stays between 20 and 40 degrees, which it usually does this time of year. Deer fat does not taste good, it's like eating candle wax, so that all needs to be trimmed off when you cut up the meat. If you need more shmaltz for cooking, add some pork fat like Old Dog says. I make stew meat out of all the scrappy parts because my hypothetical wife tells me that, while you can get hamburger anywhere, good stew meat at a reasonable price is hard to find in this town
I have been in Protestant churches where they have substituted "Christian" for "catholic" in the Apostles' Creed, but I don't know if the Methodists have ever gotten on board with that.
It's only about a quarter mile from my house to my blind, but walking in the woods is not the same as walking down a sidewalk in Chicago. Walking slowly and stopping to look around every half dozen steps gives you a better chance of seeing a deer before it sees you. That's called "still hunting", and it's a difficult skill for young hunters to master because they are not used to walking that way. It's much easier for us old timers because that's the way we walk most of the time anyway. I have a tractor trail that leads out to the blind and loops back to the house. When I get a deer, I only have to drag it out to the clearing, then I go back for the tractor and carry the deer home with my front end loader. Sometimes I drop them right in the clearing, but sometimes even a well hit deer runs off into the swamp for up to hundred yards before dropping dead. A wounded deer can run for miles, and you don't want that. Either way, you've got a tracking job on your hands, which is difficult at best when there is no snow and a heavy rain is falling, which is why I passed up that chancy shot yesterday.
The gamey taste that many people associate with venison is largely due to improper handling and preparation of the meat. If you slaughtered a cow, left the guts in it for hours, put it on the roof of your car and drove around town all day showing it off, it would probably taste gamey too. The guts should come out soon after the deer stops kicking. A decent interval, about the time it takes to smoke a cigarette, is customary to show respect for the game and allow your coronary symptoms to subside. Then it's time to get to work. Care must be taken to not puncture the guts with your knife. If you do (it can happen to anybody), then you've got to clean the meat as best you can in the field and do a better job at home or in camp where you have access to clean water. When you are cutting up the meat later, anything that looks off color should be trimmed off and discarded. I like to skin my deer while it's still warm. The skin comes off easier, and it enables the meat to cool faster. I don't do that in the field, but I have a rope and pulley rig in the barn that I use to hang and skin the carcass as soon as I get it home. I let it hang there at least overnight, longer if the weather permits. A walk in cooler would be ideal, but an unheated barn or garage works fine if the outdoor temperature stays between 20 and 40 degrees, which it usually does this time of year. Deer fat does not taste good, it's like eating candle wax, so that all needs to be trimmed off when you cut up the meat. If you need more shmaltz for cooking, add some pork fat like Old Dog says. I make stew meat out of all the scrappy parts because my hypothetical wife tells me that, while you can get hamburger anywhere, good stew meat at a reasonable price is hard to find in this town
I have been in Protestant churches where they have substituted "Christian" for "catholic" in the Apostles' Creed, but I don't know if the Methodists have ever gotten on board with that.
The cheese stands alone
As another urbanite I seldom give thought to deer season, but my opinion is that I'd rather see the deer culled through a responsible hunting program than have them starve to death, a likely fate since there are so few natural predators. And I've enjoyed venison from time to time but it's a difficult item to prepare properly, it being so lean. The tenderloins are the best, in my experience, but you can also make fine burgers if you add about 1/3 ground pork to the ground venison mix. A little gamey for some palates but nonetheless satisfying.
The Bambi reference got me thinking about antlers and how weird they are. The males shed their antlers every year but the next year they grow bigger. It's like if you grew a beard and it fell off every year but then it grew longer, increasing in size every year. The same growing period but greater size, how weird is that? It's amazing what you can find by simply entering a single word in Wikipedia, like the fact that the smooth, curved nature of moose antlers improves their hearing, not something that ever occurred to me.
And if you're out hunting alone Mr. Beagles, be safe.
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YouTube is always suggesting different videos for me to look at and one recently caught my eye, a video to easily make your own mozzarella cheese. And it does look easy but I looked at other videos for mozzarella and the recipes only vary a little bit. Heat some milk, add stuff to make it curdle (vinegar, lemon juice, rennet), fiddle with it to drain the whey and there you have it, fresh mozzarella cheese. Seems like a worthwhile project, so I decided to look for recipes for cottage cheese, which I also like. Almost all the same ingredients but the preparation is different. It then occurred to me that there is little difference between the ingredients in cheese and ice cream, something that requires further thought and experimentation. Has anyone ever made chocolate cheese?
In a callback to an earlier discussion, we've all heard of the moon being made of "green cheese," right? I could never figure that out, cheese isn't green. But I learned that green refers to the level of maturity and not the color, like green recruits. Well, that makes sense. My father once told me that blackberries were red when they are green and I thought he was just messing with me.
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It looks like 2017 is closing out in a big torrent of scandalous sexual behavior, and it's moving from the Hollywood types to the political arena. We already knew about the guy in Alabama with a keen eye for the younger girls, but today there is hot news about the good senator from Minnesota, Al Franken. This came out of nowhere and must be a big shock to the liberal types. It will be amusing to see how the pundits on both sides of aisle will be spinning these disclosures. I can't believe I'm out of popcorn already and it's time to restock. Sorry, Al. You were looking pretty good there for a while.
The Bambi reference got me thinking about antlers and how weird they are. The males shed their antlers every year but the next year they grow bigger. It's like if you grew a beard and it fell off every year but then it grew longer, increasing in size every year. The same growing period but greater size, how weird is that? It's amazing what you can find by simply entering a single word in Wikipedia, like the fact that the smooth, curved nature of moose antlers improves their hearing, not something that ever occurred to me.
And if you're out hunting alone Mr. Beagles, be safe.
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YouTube is always suggesting different videos for me to look at and one recently caught my eye, a video to easily make your own mozzarella cheese. And it does look easy but I looked at other videos for mozzarella and the recipes only vary a little bit. Heat some milk, add stuff to make it curdle (vinegar, lemon juice, rennet), fiddle with it to drain the whey and there you have it, fresh mozzarella cheese. Seems like a worthwhile project, so I decided to look for recipes for cottage cheese, which I also like. Almost all the same ingredients but the preparation is different. It then occurred to me that there is little difference between the ingredients in cheese and ice cream, something that requires further thought and experimentation. Has anyone ever made chocolate cheese?
In a callback to an earlier discussion, we've all heard of the moon being made of "green cheese," right? I could never figure that out, cheese isn't green. But I learned that green refers to the level of maturity and not the color, like green recruits. Well, that makes sense. My father once told me that blackberries were red when they are green and I thought he was just messing with me.
-----
It looks like 2017 is closing out in a big torrent of scandalous sexual behavior, and it's moving from the Hollywood types to the political arena. We already knew about the guy in Alabama with a keen eye for the younger girls, but today there is hot news about the good senator from Minnesota, Al Franken. This came out of nowhere and must be a big shock to the liberal types. It will be amusing to see how the pundits on both sides of aisle will be spinning these disclosures. I can't believe I'm out of popcorn already and it's time to restock. Sorry, Al. You were looking pretty good there for a while.
the lonely voice of youth
I get that youth wants to know from the Man in Black. And the lonely voice of youth cries, what is truth. I use it in imitation of the youth of today who I hear are always being ironic. Irony is a funny thing, better described by example than by definition. It seems to me that what passes for irony today is any form of mocking. And of course youth must mock. Everybody older they talk to knows more than them because they have been around longer, and by the time they learn all this stuff they won't be youth anymore, so it's best to just discredit it all. Why learn about the lore of blues when you can invent rap, which is brand new so those oldsters couldn't possibly know more about it than the kids do?
They dress different, they talk different, they have their own kind of music which the fogies hate, and as they surf this wave of newness they learn more about it and become, for a spell, the respected 'elders' of youth, and then one day when they are pontificating, they notice way back in the crowd among the youngest of the youngest, a roll of the eyes, and soon they are sloughed off of the youth movement like old dead skin. Not so bad, they don't have to stay up so late anymore and do that stuff that now seems kind of crazy, and they can get together with their sloughed off cronies and talk about the problem with kids these days.
You know I'd heard the word Soyuz before and had a vague idea that the Soviets were doing the heavy lifting viz a viz the space station, but a visit to wiki on the subject was most enlightening. You know we built those handsome challengers that looked like passenger planes, and I guess they had a pretty good run for thirty years, but this Soyuz thing, which I admit looks like shit, and it goes from the sixties till current times. Which makes you wonder why the Soviets made such crappy cars.
Splashdown sounds like a lot more fun than the hard hot rocks of a country ruled by some guy like Borat, but I suppose those international scientists know what they are doing.
Wild Blue Yonder isn't my favorite Herzog movie. The plot was garbled and seemed to be written new every day, but I just liked the space station video with those people floating around carelessly. The women weren't wearing the scanty uniforms the scifi mags of my youth had predicted, but no gravity just made them sexy. There I've said it. And Old Dog appears to be hinting that there may indeed be some hanky panky going on up there. Good for them.
As an urbanite I am certainly routing for Banbi and against Elmer. I had no idea the blind was so far across trackless swamp from the homestead. Which brings to mind how does one haul a what, hundred and fifty pound deer, once loving father or mother, now just dead weight? Well I imagine there is some kind of sled, well I don't want to think about this anymore. Wouldn't a can of Dinty Moore be just as fulfilling for supper, and the chunks of meat in that come from, well I don't want to think about that anymore. How about some nice lentils, with fennel?
Were we calling It the Holy Spirit back in Elsdon? I guess, not surprisingly for one who would fall from the flock, I wasn't paying attention. Well right after that was the holy catholic church, which I know, did not mean that church, that whore of Babylon, just some kind of universal church. Which begs the question why not just say universal instead of catholic? If we can change a ghost into a spirit, and wine into grape juice, and send men to the moon, why can't we change one little word?
They dress different, they talk different, they have their own kind of music which the fogies hate, and as they surf this wave of newness they learn more about it and become, for a spell, the respected 'elders' of youth, and then one day when they are pontificating, they notice way back in the crowd among the youngest of the youngest, a roll of the eyes, and soon they are sloughed off of the youth movement like old dead skin. Not so bad, they don't have to stay up so late anymore and do that stuff that now seems kind of crazy, and they can get together with their sloughed off cronies and talk about the problem with kids these days.
You know I'd heard the word Soyuz before and had a vague idea that the Soviets were doing the heavy lifting viz a viz the space station, but a visit to wiki on the subject was most enlightening. You know we built those handsome challengers that looked like passenger planes, and I guess they had a pretty good run for thirty years, but this Soyuz thing, which I admit looks like shit, and it goes from the sixties till current times. Which makes you wonder why the Soviets made such crappy cars.
Splashdown sounds like a lot more fun than the hard hot rocks of a country ruled by some guy like Borat, but I suppose those international scientists know what they are doing.
Wild Blue Yonder isn't my favorite Herzog movie. The plot was garbled and seemed to be written new every day, but I just liked the space station video with those people floating around carelessly. The women weren't wearing the scanty uniforms the scifi mags of my youth had predicted, but no gravity just made them sexy. There I've said it. And Old Dog appears to be hinting that there may indeed be some hanky panky going on up there. Good for them.
As an urbanite I am certainly routing for Banbi and against Elmer. I had no idea the blind was so far across trackless swamp from the homestead. Which brings to mind how does one haul a what, hundred and fifty pound deer, once loving father or mother, now just dead weight? Well I imagine there is some kind of sled, well I don't want to think about this anymore. Wouldn't a can of Dinty Moore be just as fulfilling for supper, and the chunks of meat in that come from, well I don't want to think about that anymore. How about some nice lentils, with fennel?
Were we calling It the Holy Spirit back in Elsdon? I guess, not surprisingly for one who would fall from the flock, I wasn't paying attention. Well right after that was the holy catholic church, which I know, did not mean that church, that whore of Babylon, just some kind of universal church. Which begs the question why not just say universal instead of catholic? If we can change a ghost into a spirit, and wine into grape juice, and send men to the moon, why can't we change one little word?
Wednesday, November 15, 2017
Opening Day 2017
I've had better Opening Days, and I've certainly had worse Opening Days so, all things considered, this one was pretty good. I saw two deer, one didn't give me a shot at all, and the other one presented a chancy opportunity, and I let it walk away. It was a small deer anyway, and I didn't relish the prospect of trying to track it through the trackless swamp in the pouring rain. I guess I'm getting soft in my old age. It rained most of the night, and the Weather Channel predicted that it was going to rain all day, which it mostly did. As luck would have it, the rain quit for a half hour just as I was leaving the house, enabling me to walk out to my blind without getting wet. Coming home at noon was a little more difficult, but I walked fast (for me) and made it home in half the time it usually takes, leaving my outer clothing a little damp, but not soaked through. In between I took advantage of the good sleeping weather, waking up just in time to see those two deer.
I don't claim to be an expert on the Trinity, all I was trying to do was make sense out of the extensive information I found on Wiki. I had never thought of Jesus as the Communicator before, and was always puzzled by that opening line in the Gospel According to John, "In the beginning was the Word....and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us." If you think about it though, Jesus was the interface between God and Man, being consubstantial to both (according to the book). I could never see the necessity of the Holy Spirit before, since God is already a spirit, but maybe that's the whole point. I think the King James version uses the term "Holy Ghost", but the Revised Standard and most subsequent translations say "Holy Spirit". Technically the terms are interchangeable, coming from the Greek word for "breath" or "wind", but "ghost" has taken on some connotations in modern times that might make it seem kind of malevolent, while "spirit" remains benevolent and benign in public usage. I learned the Apostle's Creed in Elsdon back in the 50s, and it says "spirit", so I would hardly call the use of the term "new-fangled".
Got to go now, morning becomes Electra, and I can't count on the deer letting me sleep in peace tomorrow.
I don't claim to be an expert on the Trinity, all I was trying to do was make sense out of the extensive information I found on Wiki. I had never thought of Jesus as the Communicator before, and was always puzzled by that opening line in the Gospel According to John, "In the beginning was the Word....and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us." If you think about it though, Jesus was the interface between God and Man, being consubstantial to both (according to the book). I could never see the necessity of the Holy Spirit before, since God is already a spirit, but maybe that's the whole point. I think the King James version uses the term "Holy Ghost", but the Revised Standard and most subsequent translations say "Holy Spirit". Technically the terms are interchangeable, coming from the Greek word for "breath" or "wind", but "ghost" has taken on some connotations in modern times that might make it seem kind of malevolent, while "spirit" remains benevolent and benign in public usage. I learned the Apostle's Creed in Elsdon back in the 50s, and it says "spirit", so I would hardly call the use of the term "new-fangled".
Got to go now, morning becomes Electra, and I can't count on the deer letting me sleep in peace tomorrow.
Wild Blue Nonsense
Youth wants to know.
Ha, ha, Uncle Ken make joke!
The only way for astronauts to travel to and from the ISS is via the Soyuz spacecraft, which is run by the Russians. Supplies are delivered by unmanned vehicles and different parties are involved. So far, the list includes Russia, NASA, the European Space Agency, and Japan. It is an International Space Station, after all, and they all send stuff up. NASA contracts the launches to two companies and it probably saves them a few bucks and lets them off the hook if something goes wrong with the launch.
I wonder why the Chinese aren't in on the game; they have their own space stations but they are a lot smaller. Their first space station, probably only a lab, is due to come crashing to Earth in the next month or three but the second one is still fine. They also have a much bigger station on the drawing board which is due to reach orbit in the next couple of years. That's what I've read but it may be fake news.
There's not much point in going to the moon unless it can generate a lot of income; it's too damn expensive. Maybe some day robots can build habitats out of moon bricks but food and water will always be a problem for any human habitation. For the time being, things like the ISS are all we can expect. We are still in the early stages of this game and there is much yet to learn. Mars is still a long way off.
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I've liked the few Werner Herzog movies that I've seen but The Wild Blue Yonder was a real stinker. There may have been a good story hidden there, but I thought it was a steaming pile of self indulgent twaddle, and about an hour too long. The "musical" soundtrack drove me nuts.
Having said that, there were bits I liked, a lot. The dialogue by the alien, for instance. The statements about the sins were pretty good and the arc of the story itself was nice and it would have made an excellent thirty minute radio-type broadcast. But as a movie I thought it sucked. Herzog managed to make dramatic film images into something very boring and tedious. Good idea but terrible execution.
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For further insight on life on the ISS check out YouTube, there's a lot of stuff including Q&A sessions. It looks like they have some fun in between the experiments and research, and the place is big enough that they can sneak off for some "personal" time and maybe turn off the cameras. One can only hope.
I doubt that returning astronauts would like a dramatic splashdown. The Soyuz capsule lands on the flat steppe of Kazakhstan.
Ha, ha, Uncle Ken make joke!
The only way for astronauts to travel to and from the ISS is via the Soyuz spacecraft, which is run by the Russians. Supplies are delivered by unmanned vehicles and different parties are involved. So far, the list includes Russia, NASA, the European Space Agency, and Japan. It is an International Space Station, after all, and they all send stuff up. NASA contracts the launches to two companies and it probably saves them a few bucks and lets them off the hook if something goes wrong with the launch.
I wonder why the Chinese aren't in on the game; they have their own space stations but they are a lot smaller. Their first space station, probably only a lab, is due to come crashing to Earth in the next month or three but the second one is still fine. They also have a much bigger station on the drawing board which is due to reach orbit in the next couple of years. That's what I've read but it may be fake news.
There's not much point in going to the moon unless it can generate a lot of income; it's too damn expensive. Maybe some day robots can build habitats out of moon bricks but food and water will always be a problem for any human habitation. For the time being, things like the ISS are all we can expect. We are still in the early stages of this game and there is much yet to learn. Mars is still a long way off.
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I've liked the few Werner Herzog movies that I've seen but The Wild Blue Yonder was a real stinker. There may have been a good story hidden there, but I thought it was a steaming pile of self indulgent twaddle, and about an hour too long. The "musical" soundtrack drove me nuts.
Having said that, there were bits I liked, a lot. The dialogue by the alien, for instance. The statements about the sins were pretty good and the arc of the story itself was nice and it would have made an excellent thirty minute radio-type broadcast. But as a movie I thought it sucked. Herzog managed to make dramatic film images into something very boring and tedious. Good idea but terrible execution.
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For further insight on life on the ISS check out YouTube, there's a lot of stuff including Q&A sessions. It looks like they have some fun in between the experiments and research, and the place is big enough that they can sneak off for some "personal" time and maybe turn off the cameras. One can only hope.
I doubt that returning astronauts would like a dramatic splashdown. The Soyuz capsule lands on the flat steppe of Kazakhstan.
what's going on up there?
I guess if Certs added handsome medallion to their alternate identities of breath mint and candy mint, they too would become a trinity, I suppose if I added Ten Cat raconteur and performer of improv to my identities I could be, I don't know, a pentamax.
When you say we have God the Creator, the Communicator (What Jesus was a PR guy?), and the Doer, that sounds like three different um People. The whole point of the Trinity (and why not the Pentamax, or the Hip 666?) is that they are One, but they are Three, but they are One. Kind of like (I don't think any of the Beaglestonians are Polish) that piece of paper with see other side written on both sides that reputedly keeps Polish people entertained for hours.
But I bow to the biblical scholar. I'm pretty sure I've read that Jesus never claimed to be the Son of God, but I guess the New Testament goes on after Jesus has left the building. At one point (Paul?) they decided that He was the Son of God, which automatically makes God a Father no? Wait a minute, if the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary what happened to the Father? I don't know what fast crowd Beagles is hanging around with these days, but the people I hang with stick with Holy Ghost and not some new-fangled Spirit.
I suspect if you want to know the true story of the Trinity the best thing to do is study the politics of the barbarians and the Byzantine empire a little after the fall of Rome.
I was just reading something last night about Cygnus which brought a bunch of stuff up to the space station. I got the impression it was remote controlled. No mention was made of bringing any people back. Surely people go there and come back, but we never hear about it. You know those last five minutes of the network news where they always slot some saccharine story about the Triumph of the Human Spirit, you'd think they could throw in a bit about a returning astronaut, the dangerous descent, the dramatic splashdown, the hugs of the crew. It would seem that these people would have interesting stories. And they are always doing experiments, what are they discovering? Youth wants to know.
Maybe it's the optics. Every now and then we get a little coverage of the guys and gals up there, and it looks like a crappy place, cramped, and the walls appear to be made of circuit boards with dangling wires that look like cobwebs, and who knows what kind of food they eat, and they never shower, and we certainly don't want to know how they take dumps.
But when the hand of man (and woman) first stepped out into space, there was some talk among fast crowds (Holy Spirit types), about who would be the first couple to, you know, do it, in space. Seems likely that would have happened by now. So what's the story? Youth wants to know.
When you say we have God the Creator, the Communicator (What Jesus was a PR guy?), and the Doer, that sounds like three different um People. The whole point of the Trinity (and why not the Pentamax, or the Hip 666?) is that they are One, but they are Three, but they are One. Kind of like (I don't think any of the Beaglestonians are Polish) that piece of paper with see other side written on both sides that reputedly keeps Polish people entertained for hours.
But I bow to the biblical scholar. I'm pretty sure I've read that Jesus never claimed to be the Son of God, but I guess the New Testament goes on after Jesus has left the building. At one point (Paul?) they decided that He was the Son of God, which automatically makes God a Father no? Wait a minute, if the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary what happened to the Father? I don't know what fast crowd Beagles is hanging around with these days, but the people I hang with stick with Holy Ghost and not some new-fangled Spirit.
I suspect if you want to know the true story of the Trinity the best thing to do is study the politics of the barbarians and the Byzantine empire a little after the fall of Rome.
I was just reading something last night about Cygnus which brought a bunch of stuff up to the space station. I got the impression it was remote controlled. No mention was made of bringing any people back. Surely people go there and come back, but we never hear about it. You know those last five minutes of the network news where they always slot some saccharine story about the Triumph of the Human Spirit, you'd think they could throw in a bit about a returning astronaut, the dangerous descent, the dramatic splashdown, the hugs of the crew. It would seem that these people would have interesting stories. And they are always doing experiments, what are they discovering? Youth wants to know.
Maybe it's the optics. Every now and then we get a little coverage of the guys and gals up there, and it looks like a crappy place, cramped, and the walls appear to be made of circuit boards with dangling wires that look like cobwebs, and who knows what kind of food they eat, and they never shower, and we certainly don't want to know how they take dumps.
But when the hand of man (and woman) first stepped out into space, there was some talk among fast crowds (Holy Spirit types), about who would be the first couple to, you know, do it, in space. Seems likely that would have happened by now. So what's the story? Youth wants to know.
Tuesday, November 14, 2017
Three Uncle Kens For the Price of One
I used my computer time last night to brush up on the Holy Trinity via Wiki. Turns out I was wrong about one thing. Although it's true that the name "Trinity" is not mentioned in the Bible, there are a few places where the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost appear in the same sentence. There also are a few passages that could be interpreted as alluding to the Trinity, which were the source of much of the controversy about the subject among the early Christians. The controversy is understandable seeing as those cryptic references lend themselves to creative interpretation. In trying to make sense of it all, I came up with the following simplified model: Everybody knows there is only one Uncle Ken but, in a manner of speaking, you could say that there are three Uncle Kens: Uncle Ken the Democrat, Uncle Ken the Blogger, and Uncle Ken the Artist. If you met Uncle Ken for the first time at an art show, you might not be aware of the other two aspects of his personality.
That's what they are, you know, three different aspects of the same personality. God the Father is mostly involved with creation, God the Son is sometimes called "The Word", which I think implies that He is in charge of communication, and the Holy Spirit is the guy who gets things done on Earth. Significantly, it was the Holy Spirit who impregnated the Virgin Mary, not the Father, for it is written in the Apostles' Creed that Jesus was "conceived by the Holy Spirit". By the way, "Holy Ghost" is the old fashioned nomenclature, most people say "Holy Spirit" nowadays.
It is my understanding that the Space Shuttle fleet was retired because they were old and worn out, kind of like those Chinese junks we were talking about. Instead of replacing them, the government has contracted with Elon Musk's company Space-X to provide ferry service to the International Space Station. I don't know whether or not the Russians are party to that deal.
I think they quit sending people to the Moon because all they ever brought back from there were bags of rocks. If Columbus had only brought rocks back from his first voyage to the New World, I doubt the Spanish government would have funded a second voyage.
That's what they are, you know, three different aspects of the same personality. God the Father is mostly involved with creation, God the Son is sometimes called "The Word", which I think implies that He is in charge of communication, and the Holy Spirit is the guy who gets things done on Earth. Significantly, it was the Holy Spirit who impregnated the Virgin Mary, not the Father, for it is written in the Apostles' Creed that Jesus was "conceived by the Holy Spirit". By the way, "Holy Ghost" is the old fashioned nomenclature, most people say "Holy Spirit" nowadays.
It is my understanding that the Space Shuttle fleet was retired because they were old and worn out, kind of like those Chinese junks we were talking about. Instead of replacing them, the government has contracted with Elon Musk's company Space-X to provide ferry service to the International Space Station. I don't know whether or not the Russians are party to that deal.
I think they quit sending people to the Moon because all they ever brought back from there were bags of rocks. If Columbus had only brought rocks back from his first voyage to the New World, I doubt the Spanish government would have funded a second voyage.
why can't we go to the moon again?
So those printer cartridges have chips. I remember getting a new printer and trying to use the cartridge from the previous and it wouldn't recognize it, probably the chip just turned the cartridge off. Oh the perfidy of it all, why doesn't the government issue a warning to the populace? How could I have been so stupid? But you know it wasn't always that way. I used to have printers that worked well. It seems like maybe this is a development of the last five years. I kept thinking I must've got a lemon and it's so cheap I can just buy another.
I Read that article. They were much more favorable to ink jet printers than I would be.
Wonder what is up with Beagles. Was watching the science channel last night. Generally they just have crap like all those cable channels that started out high class but now show Duck Dynasty or Storage Wars in an endless loop, but this one was actual science, asteroids that might brush close to earth, those mysterious moons of the gas giants that may be warmed by gravitational forces and have underground oceans that may be teeming with life like around our own thermal vents. Did any of you see that shark with the frilled teeth that just got drug up? Fascinating. Anyway one of items was the earth seen from space stations and they showed the guys like surfing the northern lights, and whenever I see or hear of the northern lights I think of the freehold on the top of Michigan.
When I was a kid I was all pumped up by the space race, the sputniks and walking on the moon and then, like most of my countrymen, I lost interest, At one time I was surprised to hear that we still had a space station. It's a Russian one too. I remember when those guys were up there and Russia was in turmoil and they guys had to be hoping they won't forget about us, will they, And remember those space shuttles? They were a big deal, but now they are gone, I think they decided that they were unsafe, and I don't know how they get supplies and people up there anymore.
My favorite director, Werner Herzog has a movie, The Wild Blue Yonder which uses archival film of the space station and other places out of context and makes a whole story out of them. Recommending that for Old Dog who knows how to get free movies out of the internet.
I can understand how we can put a man on the moon, but we can't put the shift or caps lock key in a better place, but I can't understand why we can't put a man on the moon again, just for the hell of it. I mean aren't we more advanced now after fifty years, don't we just keep on advancing?
I Read that article. They were much more favorable to ink jet printers than I would be.
Wonder what is up with Beagles. Was watching the science channel last night. Generally they just have crap like all those cable channels that started out high class but now show Duck Dynasty or Storage Wars in an endless loop, but this one was actual science, asteroids that might brush close to earth, those mysterious moons of the gas giants that may be warmed by gravitational forces and have underground oceans that may be teeming with life like around our own thermal vents. Did any of you see that shark with the frilled teeth that just got drug up? Fascinating. Anyway one of items was the earth seen from space stations and they showed the guys like surfing the northern lights, and whenever I see or hear of the northern lights I think of the freehold on the top of Michigan.
When I was a kid I was all pumped up by the space race, the sputniks and walking on the moon and then, like most of my countrymen, I lost interest, At one time I was surprised to hear that we still had a space station. It's a Russian one too. I remember when those guys were up there and Russia was in turmoil and they guys had to be hoping they won't forget about us, will they, And remember those space shuttles? They were a big deal, but now they are gone, I think they decided that they were unsafe, and I don't know how they get supplies and people up there anymore.
My favorite director, Werner Herzog has a movie, The Wild Blue Yonder which uses archival film of the space station and other places out of context and makes a whole story out of them. Recommending that for Old Dog who knows how to get free movies out of the internet.
I can understand how we can put a man on the moon, but we can't put the shift or caps lock key in a better place, but I can't understand why we can't put a man on the moon again, just for the hell of it. I mean aren't we more advanced now after fifty years, don't we just keep on advancing?
Monday, November 13, 2017
A little printer blather
,,,have you guys known this all along about laser printers and ink jets?
Only for the last twenty-five years or so, Uncle Ken, but I was working in graphic design so I might have been a step or two in front of the general public. Laser printers aren't perfect and can pose their own unique problems, particularly in regards to paper quality. My color printer is fussy and requires a higher quality paper but the black and white printer is happy with just about anything. Paper jams can be frequent if the paper is not suitable for the machine.
Inkjet printers can waste a lot of ink if you need to run a cleaning cycle, which may be often if you don't use it on a regular basis. I tried refilling the ink cartridges once but it was a disaster; big mess with unsatisfactory results. But now the cartridges have chips in them and can't be refilled although re-chipped cartridges are available if you know where to look. Current toner cartridges for laser printers are chipped too, but I think they can be easily refilled; some kits supply new chips. I haven't kept up with the ins and outs of this and buy factory cartridges for best results, and it's one less thing to worry about.
A final advantage of laser printers is that the ink doesn't smear. You can spill coffee on the print and it's still fine, except for the coffee stain. Photo quality inkjet prints take a long time to dry and may not tolerate fingerprints or handling very well. Again, I haven't kept up.
This link summarizes the differences nicely: https://www.ldproducts.com/blog/pros-cons-of-inkjet-and-laser-printers/
Only for the last twenty-five years or so, Uncle Ken, but I was working in graphic design so I might have been a step or two in front of the general public. Laser printers aren't perfect and can pose their own unique problems, particularly in regards to paper quality. My color printer is fussy and requires a higher quality paper but the black and white printer is happy with just about anything. Paper jams can be frequent if the paper is not suitable for the machine.
Inkjet printers can waste a lot of ink if you need to run a cleaning cycle, which may be often if you don't use it on a regular basis. I tried refilling the ink cartridges once but it was a disaster; big mess with unsatisfactory results. But now the cartridges have chips in them and can't be refilled although re-chipped cartridges are available if you know where to look. Current toner cartridges for laser printers are chipped too, but I think they can be easily refilled; some kits supply new chips. I haven't kept up with the ins and outs of this and buy factory cartridges for best results, and it's one less thing to worry about.
A final advantage of laser printers is that the ink doesn't smear. You can spill coffee on the print and it's still fine, except for the coffee stain. Photo quality inkjet prints take a long time to dry and may not tolerate fingerprints or handling very well. Again, I haven't kept up.
This link summarizes the differences nicely: https://www.ldproducts.com/blog/pros-cons-of-inkjet-and-laser-printers/
taking the Underwood to the Starbucks
Well roll me in a corn tortilla and call me an enchilada, have you guys known this all along about laser printers and ink jets? I guess I just thought printers were printers. I remember the laser printer we had when I worked for the state and what a yeoman that was but I thought they would be prohibitively expensive, but I see right now I can get a laser at Target for like a hundred bucks, monochrome, but I like a simple machine, the more features you have the more things that can go wrong,
I expect that Rand Paul would never compromise on anything and it just drove the neighbor bonkers, but I expect more will come out at the trial. Maybe not, maybe the worst that can come out about Rand is that he is a big nut, but that ship has sailed long ago, I'm surprised the Foxies haven't found a Hilary link.
I don't know if I know anybody's eye color. It seems like a pale blue would stand out but i can't remember. I never remember what anybody is wearing either. I'd be no help for cops looking for a perp.;
Oh I love the idea of taking a portable typewriter into Starbucks. You could punctuate the click clacking and the dinging by every now and then ripping the paper out of the machine and crushing it into a ball and bouncing it off the barista's head. Cigs or a cigar would probably be a no no, but you could probably get away with a discreetly stored half pint.
I don't know how three gods in one who are kind of separate but not really and one of whom is a ghost is easier to believe in than just one.
I am an objective realist, I define reality as that which exists independent of perception or belief.
There is a perfect definition of objective reality, or OR as I am pleased to call it, I don't know why you guys give me such a hard time about this.
So in the news we have Trump taking Putin (in his defense he asked him several times and got the same answer every time) at his word rather than our intelligence agencies, but hell's bells, that's just Trump being Trump, nothing to see her very much that you haven't seen before.
And then there is that judge in Alabama, who beat the Trump candidate so that makes him an outsider's outsider, and after his strange courtships the reps would really like to run someone else, but he doesn't owe the reps anything and he is standing pat, so now the reps will have to back him with big bags of pac money lest they lose a seat in the senate.
I expect that Rand Paul would never compromise on anything and it just drove the neighbor bonkers, but I expect more will come out at the trial. Maybe not, maybe the worst that can come out about Rand is that he is a big nut, but that ship has sailed long ago, I'm surprised the Foxies haven't found a Hilary link.
I don't know if I know anybody's eye color. It seems like a pale blue would stand out but i can't remember. I never remember what anybody is wearing either. I'd be no help for cops looking for a perp.;
Oh I love the idea of taking a portable typewriter into Starbucks. You could punctuate the click clacking and the dinging by every now and then ripping the paper out of the machine and crushing it into a ball and bouncing it off the barista's head. Cigs or a cigar would probably be a no no, but you could probably get away with a discreetly stored half pint.
I don't know how three gods in one who are kind of separate but not really and one of whom is a ghost is easier to believe in than just one.
I am an objective realist, I define reality as that which exists independent of perception or belief.
There is a perfect definition of objective reality, or OR as I am pleased to call it, I don't know why you guys give me such a hard time about this.
So in the news we have Trump taking Putin (in his defense he asked him several times and got the same answer every time) at his word rather than our intelligence agencies, but hell's bells, that's just Trump being Trump, nothing to see her very much that you haven't seen before.
And then there is that judge in Alabama, who beat the Trump candidate so that makes him an outsider's outsider, and after his strange courtships the reps would really like to run someone else, but he doesn't owe the reps anything and he is standing pat, so now the reps will have to back him with big bags of pac money lest they lose a seat in the senate.
Sunday, November 12, 2017
You Better Believe It !
Someone has said it this way: If you try to explain the Trinity, you will lose your mind. But if you deny it, you will lose your soul.
That's one of the problems I have with Christianity, it's all conditional on belief. I am an objective realist, I define reality as that which exists independent of perception or belief. Either the Trinity is true or it's not, my belief or disbelief has nothing to do with it. Since I can neither prove it nor disprove it, I choose to keep an open mind about it. The reason I believe in God is that I find it easier to believe that the Universe was created by an intelligent being than by random chance, but that's just me. God's existence or non existence is not dependent on my belief or anyone else's.
I also find it easier to believe in a single god than a tripartite god, but again, that's just me. If belief in the Trinity makes it easier for others to believe in God, then I can't see any harm in it. Maybe God is just too big for some people's understanding, so they break Him up into more manageable pieces. Not that I claim to fully understand God in any form, but there are a lot of things that I don't understand. I only have a vague idea about how this computer, my TV set, my pickup truck, or my tractor works, but that doesn't stop me from using them. If we had to wait until we totally understood everything before we dealt with it, we wouldn't get a whole lot done.
That's one of the problems I have with Christianity, it's all conditional on belief. I am an objective realist, I define reality as that which exists independent of perception or belief. Either the Trinity is true or it's not, my belief or disbelief has nothing to do with it. Since I can neither prove it nor disprove it, I choose to keep an open mind about it. The reason I believe in God is that I find it easier to believe that the Universe was created by an intelligent being than by random chance, but that's just me. God's existence or non existence is not dependent on my belief or anyone else's.
I also find it easier to believe in a single god than a tripartite god, but again, that's just me. If belief in the Trinity makes it easier for others to believe in God, then I can't see any harm in it. Maybe God is just too big for some people's understanding, so they break Him up into more manageable pieces. Not that I claim to fully understand God in any form, but there are a lot of things that I don't understand. I only have a vague idea about how this computer, my TV set, my pickup truck, or my tractor works, but that doesn't stop me from using them. If we had to wait until we totally understood everything before we dealt with it, we wouldn't get a whole lot done.
Into the pool
Do they change your stats on your drivers license?
Sure, at least they did in my case. Weight changes are pretty routine and they didn't challenge my claim that I've shrunk a bit over the years. I don't know if eye color changes are a regular thing but I suppose it's possible. My eyes were blue until the age of six, I think, and then they became green. It's funny that of all the times I've talked with Uncle Ken I couldn't tell you his eye color. In fact, eye color is one of the things I am least likely to remember about anyone unless it's really weird or memorable; my usual attention to detail fails miserably in this case.
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Like Mr. Beagles, I am a big fan of laser printers. I have two, one is a black and white machine I fished out of a dumpster at a former workplace. It makes a horrible noise when printing and will only print from the auxiliary paper tray but it works well enough otherwise and will be dumped when it runs out of toner. The other printer is a color Samsung unit I got about six years ago; it's a beauty and was cheap at the time, less than $150. But I hardly ever print anything these days, except for the annual tax forms. The printers just sit in an out of the way place under dust covers and will work perfectly the next time I need to use them.
Inkjet printers are quite a racket to sell ink, all printers require their own special cartridges and that's why the printers are so cheap and sold well below their manufacturing costs. The companies make money selling ink, not printers. Look at the old typewriter ribbons, they were universal and would work in any typewriter except for some rare models. Good thing, too, as they are still available. I have an old Remington portable and the ribbon is still good but it's nice to know I won't have a problem getting a replacement if I need one. Someday I'd like to show up at the local Starbucks, start typing and teach the kids a history lesson. I wonder if they know what a typewriter even sounds like...DING! A whole bunch of folks using portable typewriters would be a joy to behold, a reminder of the good old days when offices used to be loud, at least around the typing pool.
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Someone has said it this way: If you try to explain the Trinity, you will lose your mind. But if you deny it, you will lose your soul.
That's the best quote I've found; the concept of the Trinity is too damn confusing to me. Maybe there's a fourth aspect of the Godhead that hasn't yet been revealed, hidden away in scrolls below bombed out ruins of the Middle East.
Sure, at least they did in my case. Weight changes are pretty routine and they didn't challenge my claim that I've shrunk a bit over the years. I don't know if eye color changes are a regular thing but I suppose it's possible. My eyes were blue until the age of six, I think, and then they became green. It's funny that of all the times I've talked with Uncle Ken I couldn't tell you his eye color. In fact, eye color is one of the things I am least likely to remember about anyone unless it's really weird or memorable; my usual attention to detail fails miserably in this case.
-----
Like Mr. Beagles, I am a big fan of laser printers. I have two, one is a black and white machine I fished out of a dumpster at a former workplace. It makes a horrible noise when printing and will only print from the auxiliary paper tray but it works well enough otherwise and will be dumped when it runs out of toner. The other printer is a color Samsung unit I got about six years ago; it's a beauty and was cheap at the time, less than $150. But I hardly ever print anything these days, except for the annual tax forms. The printers just sit in an out of the way place under dust covers and will work perfectly the next time I need to use them.
Inkjet printers are quite a racket to sell ink, all printers require their own special cartridges and that's why the printers are so cheap and sold well below their manufacturing costs. The companies make money selling ink, not printers. Look at the old typewriter ribbons, they were universal and would work in any typewriter except for some rare models. Good thing, too, as they are still available. I have an old Remington portable and the ribbon is still good but it's nice to know I won't have a problem getting a replacement if I need one. Someday I'd like to show up at the local Starbucks, start typing and teach the kids a history lesson. I wonder if they know what a typewriter even sounds like...DING! A whole bunch of folks using portable typewriters would be a joy to behold, a reminder of the good old days when offices used to be loud, at least around the typing pool.
-----
Someone has said it this way: If you try to explain the Trinity, you will lose your mind. But if you deny it, you will lose your soul.
That's the best quote I've found; the concept of the Trinity is too damn confusing to me. Maybe there's a fourth aspect of the Godhead that hasn't yet been revealed, hidden away in scrolls below bombed out ruins of the Middle East.
Friday, November 10, 2017
It's Good if You Never Use It.
Uncle Ken, are you still fooling around with those old fashioned ink jet printers? I started out with one of those back in 2000, and it was nothing but trouble. I eventually upgraded to an HP Laser Jet 1020, and I would never go back to ink. This particular model doesn't do colors, just black and white, which is all I need. Laser printers are generally more expensive than ink printers, but you make it up in the long run by not having to buy those expensive ink cartridges. They have something called a toner cartridge instead, and it lasts way longer than any ink cartridge. I have only changed mine once in something like a decade, but I don't print a lot of stuff. My old one didn't go out all at once, it just gradually faded away like those old typewriter ribbons. If you don't use an ink jet for awhile, the ink dries out and plugs up the works, but a laser printer can sit idle for years with no ill effects.
According to the news reports I have read, Rand Paul was assaulted by his neighbor of 17 years because of "a disagreement about yard waste disposal". Since Rand was mowing his lawn at the time, my guess is that he was grinding up dead leaves with his lawn mover instead of raking them up. That's the way I used to do it when I had a lawn, and I never had any problem with it. Maybe Rand's lawn mower blew some ground up leaves onto his neighbor's property, which can happen on a windy day, but that's no reason to tackle a guy and break a bunch of his ribs. All he had to do was ask Rand to come over and grind the leaves up some more until they just disappeared. If the neighbor was a raker, though, he would not have been satisfied with that. He would have wanted Rand to rake those leaves, which Rand, being a grinder, would have refused to do. I'm just speculating here but, if people would fight to the death over matters like communion wafers and the Trinity, I don't see why they wouldn't come to blows over a bunch of old dead leaves.
According to the news reports I have read, Rand Paul was assaulted by his neighbor of 17 years because of "a disagreement about yard waste disposal". Since Rand was mowing his lawn at the time, my guess is that he was grinding up dead leaves with his lawn mover instead of raking them up. That's the way I used to do it when I had a lawn, and I never had any problem with it. Maybe Rand's lawn mower blew some ground up leaves onto his neighbor's property, which can happen on a windy day, but that's no reason to tackle a guy and break a bunch of his ribs. All he had to do was ask Rand to come over and grind the leaves up some more until they just disappeared. If the neighbor was a raker, though, he would not have been satisfied with that. He would have wanted Rand to rake those leaves, which Rand, being a grinder, would have refused to do. I'm just speculating here but, if people would fight to the death over matters like communion wafers and the Trinity, I don't see why they wouldn't come to blows over a bunch of old dead leaves.
my eyes are still blue
Oh those ribbons, threaded through those um. little metal things, surprisingly they generally stayed where they were supposed to be, but they did run out of ink eventually. The longer you used one the fainter your letters became, and eventually you would have to buy a new one and have to thread that through. But you know what, while the ribbon was wearing down you could still get some faint pages out of it, unlike the current day equivalent, the printer cartridge, that just stops dead when it senses it is low, or as a matter of fact when any of the four cartridges is low the whole damn $70 printer refuses to work at all even if you only want black and white for Chrissake. I hear this Epson ecotank printer advertised a lot and one day soon I'm getting one and will give a report to the institute.
Speaking of reports I await Old Dog's on SOS. I found a restaurant not far from me who has it, but I'm guessing they will have like fennel-rubbed beef on artisanal toast, and it won't be the same as the stuff that surely came out of a can and was spread on burnt Wonder bread, on a cold morning when you'd rather be in front of the tv watching cartoons.
Do they change your stats on your drivers license? I notice that I am still passing for 5' 10", and my eyes are still blue, which they aren't and never were. An early girlfriend told me that my eyes were hazel and young hippie me thought that was cool and my drivers license used to say HAZEL, but sometime ago I noticed they had become blue and I have never corrected them. Oh and I guess I never did that donor thing. I should do that, as should all good citizens.
Of course it's good to pick up ideas from people around you, but it's bad when you connect those ideas, good or bad, to your identity. Like if you are a proud Gage Parker, and Gage Parkers think the Beatles were better than the Rolling Stones and you go along with that so as not to betray your brothers even though you personally like the Rolling Stones better.
Which strangely brings us to the trinity,by way of the Arians, which you might think is short for barbarians, which they mostly were, the way 'Stros is short of Astros, and 'Tarians! is short for Libertarians, speaking of which whatever is going on with Son O' Rand and the battle of the brush? The truth is yet to come out on that.
Anyway the Arians believed, reasonably I think, that God and the Son O' God, were two different people, or Beings. I think they also thought that there was a bit of human in Jesus. The established church, or the church that became the established church once they defeated the Arians insisted, unreasonably in my opinion, that He was all God and no human in Him and that he was also God who was Him.
If guys like Plato and Pythagoras were still around they would have pointed out that if you were the son of somebody you could not possibly be that person, but their descendants, the high priests of Constantinople, said see, that's where the Miracle is, it's not a bug, it's a feature. Best I can tell, and it's quite complicated and involves a lot of arguments and bloodshed, the Holy Ghost just got yanked in there out of nowhere to complicate things and that's their story and their sticking with it.
I find it hard to believe that out of sixty Texans sitting in a church none of them were packing heat. If the guy had had a regular gun instead of a super gun fewer people would have been killed, but note that the bumper stock, which is only good for cheap thrills at the shooting range and shooting people in a barrel, is now back in production and selling like hotcakes.
Speaking of reports I await Old Dog's on SOS. I found a restaurant not far from me who has it, but I'm guessing they will have like fennel-rubbed beef on artisanal toast, and it won't be the same as the stuff that surely came out of a can and was spread on burnt Wonder bread, on a cold morning when you'd rather be in front of the tv watching cartoons.
Do they change your stats on your drivers license? I notice that I am still passing for 5' 10", and my eyes are still blue, which they aren't and never were. An early girlfriend told me that my eyes were hazel and young hippie me thought that was cool and my drivers license used to say HAZEL, but sometime ago I noticed they had become blue and I have never corrected them. Oh and I guess I never did that donor thing. I should do that, as should all good citizens.
Of course it's good to pick up ideas from people around you, but it's bad when you connect those ideas, good or bad, to your identity. Like if you are a proud Gage Parker, and Gage Parkers think the Beatles were better than the Rolling Stones and you go along with that so as not to betray your brothers even though you personally like the Rolling Stones better.
Which strangely brings us to the trinity,by way of the Arians, which you might think is short for barbarians, which they mostly were, the way 'Stros is short of Astros, and 'Tarians! is short for Libertarians, speaking of which whatever is going on with Son O' Rand and the battle of the brush? The truth is yet to come out on that.
Anyway the Arians believed, reasonably I think, that God and the Son O' God, were two different people, or Beings. I think they also thought that there was a bit of human in Jesus. The established church, or the church that became the established church once they defeated the Arians insisted, unreasonably in my opinion, that He was all God and no human in Him and that he was also God who was Him.
If guys like Plato and Pythagoras were still around they would have pointed out that if you were the son of somebody you could not possibly be that person, but their descendants, the high priests of Constantinople, said see, that's where the Miracle is, it's not a bug, it's a feature. Best I can tell, and it's quite complicated and involves a lot of arguments and bloodshed, the Holy Ghost just got yanked in there out of nowhere to complicate things and that's their story and their sticking with it.
I find it hard to believe that out of sixty Texans sitting in a church none of them were packing heat. If the guy had had a regular gun instead of a super gun fewer people would have been killed, but note that the bumper stock, which is only good for cheap thrills at the shooting range and shooting people in a barrel, is now back in production and selling like hotcakes.
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