Puke on a Hot Radiator

I don't remember keeping my school supplies in a cigar box.  We had something called a "pencil box" that was made of plastic, but it was smaller than a cigar box.  There was enough room in it for several pencils and an eraser of two, and the top slid off to become a ruler.   I seem to remember there was a pencil sharpener at one end, but we mostly used the mechanical sharpener that was screwed to one of the windowsills in every room.

I think it was during first grade that one of the kids went to use the pencil sharpener and puked all over the hot radiator that was located along the wall beneath the windowsill.  A custodian was called in, but there wasn't much he could do because much of the puke had trickled down between the fins of the radiator and gotten bonded there by the heat.  There is nothing quite like the smell of puke on a hot radiator, and that smell lingered in our classroom for the rest of the school year.  I suppose the custodians took the radiator apart and cleaned it during summer vacation, but I don't know that for a fact because I was in a different room by then.

The halls of Gage Park High School sometimes smelled like that, well not exactly, but pretty close.  When I took chemistry in my junior year I found out that the source of that smell was butyric acid.  I don't remember using it in any of our experiments, but I understand that some of the students used to fool around with it when the chemistry teacher was out of the room.  To this day I associate the smell of puke on a hot radiator with school. Maybe that's why I didn't go to college.

Time for a new cigar box

The difference between a porn, or porno, movie and a conventional movie is that they really do it in a porn movie while, in a conventional movie, they just pretend to be doing it.

Not always, Mr. Beagles.  European films have fewer qualms about depicting sex acts but they can get away with it because they're not made for the American market with it's restrictive rating system.  With well known actors body doubles are used, sometimes using digital trickery to superimpose their faces on the bodies of the porn doubles actually doing the deed.  I liked it better in the old days when things were implied and hinted at so the viewer could use their own imagination, otherwise it's too distracting from the story.

That's the problem, I think.  Too many modern films rely on sex scenes, car chases, gun fights, and the eye candy of special effects in lieu of a good story and plot.  The wretched excess of those gimmicks makes for a film that may be exciting to watch but is forgettable, which is what modern audiences seem to want; an adrenaline rush from what is basically a crappy film.  Well, there's no accounting for taste, is there?  I still like a good car chase and gun fight, though.

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I haven't had a beard in a couple of years. I liked it, not shaving and seeing how long it would grow.  I never trimmed it and it was amusing to see how people would react; a face full of whiskers seemed to confuse some folks but children usually gazed in awe, especially around Christmas time.  But a close call with some machine tools made me rethink my priorities, maybe a big beard isn't such a good idea so I've been clean-shaven, more or less, since then except for the moustache.  I never liked shaving my  upper lip, so I don't.  And I don't remember my last haircut, it's been at least ten years.  It never gets beyond a certain length and I tie it back to keep it out of my face, which is the main thing.  It's the most low maintenance solution that I can think of.

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Summer is over and it's back to school time for the youngsters, one of my favorite times of the year.  I remember those last minute scrambles for new school supplies in grade school, the most important to me was a pristine cigar box.  Do kids even bother with cigar boxes anymore or is everything stuffed into a backpack?  It seems like backpacks suddenly became a thing in the late 20th Century and that was it, no looking back.

porn and haircuts

I remember going to the barbershop as a little kid, I guess I tolerated it well enough.  But then my mother got a hair cutting kit that contained these manual clippers, and they pinched, Man, well that and what little kid wants to sit still that long, especially on a sweaty summer day?  I learned to hate haircuts.

I first started paying attention to my hair around eighth grade.  I favored the greaser look which was quite popular at Gage Park High.  I don't know, I was never able to get my hair greasy enough or something.  I was never able to achieve and Elvis-like pompadour.  

Then when I went to college there were no greasers.  Everybody favored the college prep look, which I guess made sense.  I still continued my greaser look out of loyalty to old Gage Park.  Then came the Beatles and then came the hippies, and I remember cleaning out my room at the end of my senior year and coming across a comb and some Brylcreem, had to laugh, what use did I ever have for that?

After that if I wasn't working I didn't get any haircuts or shave, if I was working I had as much hair as I thought the current job would allow.  When I finally retired it was just a haircut twice a year because at some point long hair does get in the way,  I still used to trim my beard periodically, but I did a bad job of it, and then a light bulb went off in my head, why bother?  That made life a bit easier.  I think it was maybe four years ago, the first year /I grew out my beard that coming home from my sister's for Thanksgiving I saw a Santa hat lying on the sidewalk,  I put it on and looked in the mirror and there it was.  Now it's a haircut and shave a week after New Years and another a week after the Fourth of July.  It's simple and orderly.

There used to be a porn theater in Champaign,  My first years in college I have to admit that I went there pretty regularly.  It was pretty soft-core, there was no copulation, hardly even any full frontal nudity, a lot of nudist volleyball scenes, but they had kind of a plot and I liked that.  I always liked the transition where the repairman comes into house and then this and that happens and the next thing you know they are having sex.  I liked to have the fantasy where you would just be doing some everyday thing and the next thing you know you are having sex.  I liked to think maybe that such a thing could happen in my daily life.  As the years passed and I went there less and less often, they became more and more explicit.  The last one I remember seeing was just non-stop inandout to percussive rock music.  You call that entertainment?

And I'm not a fan of lovemaking scenes in regular movies, unless it somehow has plot elements.  If it's just to show how hot they are for each other then why bother, I already know that.  It's like chase scenes and gunfights.  Somebody is going to win and somebody is going to lose and those are the only possible outcomes, so let's get to that point quickly and get on with the movie.  All the vroom vroom and bang bang is nothing but a waste of time, a big inandout.

Leaving for St Louis this weekend.  I may or may not have a Friday post, and won't be back here until Monday or Tuesday.

Comin' Through the Rye - Part 2

Here you can see the rest of the rye planting process.  First I broadcast the seeds, then I run the tiller over them.  They don't need to be very deep, but they need to be in contact with the soil.  A commercial grower would use something called a "seed drill", but this works better for my purposes.

  You may notice that I trimmed my beard since the last photo I posted.  I don't shave it, just buzz it off with an electric clipper three or four times a year.  For a few weeks I will be sporting the bum look which, I understand is quite stylish in some circles theses days.  Like with the hat, I don't do it as a fashion statement, I do it for convenience.

I forgot to answer one of Old Dog's questions about rye yesterday.  Rye is a popular choice for wildlife food plots because it's relatively easy to grow in this climate.  Another choice might be winter wheat, which grows the same way.

Uncle Ken, thanks for the info about those two women.  People like Stormy are generally called "porn stars" to distinguish them from conventional movie stars.  The difference between a porn, or porno, movie and a conventional movie is that they really do it in a porn movie while, in a conventional movie, they just pretend to be doing it.

Two Women

One odd thing about Stormy Daniels coverage is that in about half the stories about her there is a little aside saying that her real name is Stephanie Clifford.  I had to look it up because even though I've heard it a hundred times I'm always zoned out at that point because WHO CARES?  Other entertainment stars (I was looking for an adjective to distinguish mainstream stars from adult stars, what would it be, non-adult, child?  I guess you could use mainstream like I just did, but it's not really satisfying, there are lots of stars who aren't mainstream but are still, um, non-adult) change their names all the time, and nobody makes a big deal out of it.

I can see the Stormy part.  I believe there was a Tempest Storm, back in our days.  A little redundant, but that's probably a good thing.  But why Daniels?  The google machine says she was originally Stormy Waters which makes a little sense but changed it Daniels to honor Jack Daniels which doesn't make sense.  Here's an idea, why didn't she name herself Danielle Boobs, and wear a coonskin cap to appeal to us baby boomers?

I also asked google if she gave the $130,000 back, and indications were that she planned to, but I'm not sure if she ever actually has.  Actually I'm not sure where that particular lawsuit or whatever it is stands today.  I think even Trump has admitted that he had his two minutes of ecstasy with Stormy, but then he may have taken it back and then Rudy said, well who knows.  Why doesn't he call himself Stormy Giuliani?  Has a ring no?

Avenatti, who I once had a throb for, has fallen in my esteem.  He's been at a couple confabs and seemed to be as interested in attacking his competition as he was in attacking Trump.  Actually he seems like Trump in that if he doesn't have someone to fight with he doesn't know what to do.

Omarosa was I think the biggest asshole that was ever on The Apprentice, so naturally she won Trump's affection.  Trump is one of those guys who says he has a lot of black friends, but he doesn't really, so he tosses Omarosa in some vague outreach program, but it turns out she's too big an asshole for Kelly, and then she mouths off, and the anti-Trumpists take a shine to her, but not for long because she is too big an asshole for them too, and you can't believe a word she says.  There were supposed to be tapes, but it seems like just the two, so her two minutes of fame appear to be over.

Nice Guys Finish Last

Say what you want about Trump, he won the election.  McCain was a nice guy, Romney was pretty decent himself, but they both lost.  Both of the Bushes were kind of dorky and Bill Clinton was a snake oil salesman, but they all won in their day.  Obama was a nice guy, but he never would have won if he wasn't Black.  It's like some famous guy said, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people."

I don't usually follow celebrity gossip, but that Stormy Daniels thing is hard to ignore.  What I want to know is, if she indeed had an affair with Trump, and if Trump paid her to keep her mouth shut about it, did she give him his money back when she blabbed?  I don't know much about Omarosa.  Is she one of those me-too-ers?  What kind of a name is Omarosa anyway? Sounds Japanese to me, but I saw her on TV once and she looked Black.

My straw hat is not a fashion statement, it's to keep the sun off my head and out of my eyes.  I wear sun glasses for driving and boating but, for some reason, I can't keep them on my face when I'm on the tractor.  I have tried different hats, but the wind blows them away.  This one has a draw string that goes under my chin to prevent that from happening.

My rye patch doesn't help the deer in the winter, just in the fall and spring.  They will paw through a few inches of snow to get to it, but they lose interest after the snow gets about a foot deep.  The deer don't hang around Beaglesonia much after November anyway.  They are supposed to go into the swamps for the winter, but they must have a swamp that they like better than mine.

Two minutes or less

I like your preparations for the Beaglesonia Deer Buffet, Mr. Beagles.  Is rye the grass of choice for the local ruminants or is it simply the cheapest seed available?  At any rate, I'm sure your efforts will keep the deer from starving come wintertime.

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The coverage of McCain's death is getting a little tiresome but in this case I don't mind.  All of the effusive praise for a patriot, an unselfish public servant, and a faithful husband (as far as we know) stands in harsh contrast to the current occupant of the Oval Office.  It's impossible to not compare and contrast the lives of those two men and maybe some Republicans will grow some spinal tissue and emerge from their sycophantic stupors.  I expect Trump to keep unraveling but a nudge from GOP stalwarts could move things along.

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The news cycles continue their brutal pace; whatever happened to Omarosa?  It seems like only last week or so she was a big deal with a lot of dirt to dish out but I guess not.  At least Stormy Daniels is still contributing to our surreal narrative.  She's hinted very strongly that, performance-wise, two minutes is the limit to the stamina of the First Member.  This is the kind of salacious gossip that our nation needs in these troubled times.

a nation in mourning

That's a cool looking hat Beagles, kind of pioneer, kind of Amish.  I think I've seen you wearing that in fb posts, so it's more like your everyday hat than just something you pulled off a hook because you were going out to till the rye,  Nice big brim.  A hat is nothing unless it has a brim, unless it is a thick stocking cap in winter,

It looks like this McCain-athon will go on until Labor Day.  Not that he wasn't a pretty good man, but it's just the same thing being said over and over  It's not news. 

I had always thought he was flying a bomber, but research reveals that he was flying a fighter jet when he was shot down.  I wonder why he was flying a fighter when North Vietnam had no air force.  Well I guess it was to take out those anti aircraft guns that got him.  The North Vietnamese treated him pretty badly, but I wonder how we would have treated captured enemy airmen who were shot down bombing New York City.

But shit happens in war, and I guess he helped make better relations with Vietnam.  The war killed way more of them than it did us, and we were the ones who came over to their house and wrecked it. but after it was over it was us who were all standoffish about accepting a handshake.

He was against torture.  That was good.  I can't believe how easily the nation slipped back into doing it, it used to be something we were so proud of.  He had a certain candor, and even a sense of humor.  But along with that squealing Lindsay Graham he was a terrible hawk, never saw a battlefield he didn't want to jump into. 

But it was something he believed in, not something he was just saying to get votes.  You have to give credit to a guy who acts on his beliefs, but not all that much if you don't like his beliefs.  Well I guess you can give him credit, but you certainly don't have to vote for him. I thought he was the best of a motley crew of republicans running in the 2008 primary, but once he won it I didn't much like him at all.  You know they kept  showing that clip where the woman said that Obama was an Arab and McCain said no he was a decent family man.  If I was an Arab, I think I would have been pissed.

It seemed to me that CNN was running more remembrances of McCain than Fox.  Well Fox is well aware that Trump is watching them, so they are a little careful what they say.  There was that little dustup about the White House not keeping its flags at half staff, and Trump not wanting to say anything nice about McCain.  Way back when Trump first said he didn't think much of McCain because he got captured (why didn't he employ the patriotic bone spur maneuver?) I thought that would be the end of his campaign. 

But Trump's support remained the same after the Manafort conviction and Cohen turning against him, so I don't  know,  I think the Trumpists have hardened into people like that juror who doesn't believe that truth is true.

Comin' Through the Rye

Here's a better picture of me on the tractor.  What I'm doing is tilling up the rye patch in front of my deer blind.  First I mow it, then I till it, then I broadcast the seeds, then I till it again.  You can see that it's still pretty dry even after the substantial rain we got the last few days.  We're supposed to get some more in the next few days, so I plan to buy the seeds tomorrow and plant them the next day.  With any kind of luck, the seeds will sprout in the next couple of weeks, and then I can spread the fertilizer.  I don't care about the grain, what I want is fresh green grass for deer season in November, when it will be getting scarce in other locations.  It will stay green until the snow buries it, and then will green up again as soon as the snow melts in the spring, another time that natural green grass is in high demand.

Too bad about McCain, he would have made a good president, a solid conservative but with a decent personality.  They don't hardly make them like that anymore.  

Monday, Monday

Further research reveals that those Mackinaw peaches aren't even from Oregon.  They're not from anywhere.  The folks at Seinfeld made them up.  When I asked if Michigan is a big cheese state, I meant to say peach.  Sometimes I just type in the wrong word.  I double check after I write anything but sometimes I don't catch it.

I vaguely remember in my early days the ragsaline guys.  I seem to remember fruit trucks too, and a guy who had some knife sharpening wheel on a cart, and the guy with the pony, who would take a photo of the kid on it.

My Czech grandmother used to say that her parents left Czech because the Kaiser wanted to make them speak German.  They were in the Austrian Hungarian Empire and the Kaiser was in Germany, but you know, a kraut is a kraut.  I remember in high school trying to find out the derogatory names for ethnicitys.  An odd one was Lugan for Lithuanians,  Who hates Lithuanians?  I don't remember the derogatory name for Finns.  I guess it would be to call them Swedes, and to call Swedes Norwegians, and the Norwegians, Finns.

Back in 1953 when we bought our first automobile (a lime green Customline Ford), my Dad's idea of a fun vacation was to drive around Lake Michigan with three kids howling in the back seat.  The outstanding thing I took away from Mackinaw Island is that they did not allow automobiles, and I just looked it up and they still don't.  Good for them.

A third of the people in the US are hardcore Trumpists. How do you screen them out?

I wish Old Dog would explain in his own words this Chinese AI social reputation thing, whenever I read one of those articles my head needs scratching.  I don't guess I care what my fb rep is.  You know there are people out there who establish little kingdoms in twitter and snapchat and youtube, or whatever and somehow monetize it.  Maybe that would effect them, by they are so out of my orbit that I don't care.

There were a ton of derogatory names for black people in Gage Park.  It was extremely racist.  Not much on Jews though.  I don't think we had very many.

I read where Trump was offered some comments to make about McCain by KellyAnne and Sarah Sanders that included praise of McCain, but he rejected the praise part.  I hate when somebody big dies because the real news is hidden behind this veils of praise and endless funny anecdotes that aren't really that funny.  I watched on CNN and Fox and it seems like CNN favored things like the vote for Obamacare, and Fox favored his hawkish stuff.  I wonder how Carrot Top is taking all this news about somebody other than himself, and all that praise, and the implied rebuke for Trump who has gone after McCain many times.

I expect he will not be able to stand it much longer, but it is still early in the morning.

Who's Checking Up?

I seem to remember there was a song back in the 50s or 60s that went: "Who's checking up on the man who's checking up on the man who's checking up on the man who's checking up on me?"  Personally, I don't care who checks up on me as long as they get it right.  When I was trying to sign up for DISH satellite TV, they didn't want to sell it to me because they ran a credit check which led them to believe that I didn't exist.  I had to send them a photocopy of my driver's license and Social Security card to prove that I was a real person.  While it's true that we hadn't bought anything on credit for awhile, there was that construction loan in 2000, less than a decade previous, which we paid off ahead of schedule.  Apparently that didn't count.  I saw something on the TV news the other day about Face Book blocking the U.S. Declaration of Independence as "hate speech".   They apologized for the error, blaming one of their algorithms that apparently needed some tweaking.

Speaking of the Declaration of Independence, I believe it was 1976, the year of the bicentennial, when somebody stood on a street corner asking people if they wanted to sign it, but they didn't tell them what it was.  Many of the subjects glanced at the document briefly and refused to sign it, saying that it looked like subversive propaganda which, ironically, it was.

It makes sense that the term "sheeny" used to be applied to Jews in Chicago because there was a big open air market on Maxwell Street where street peddlers plied their trade.  I think many of those street peddlers must have been Jewish because, whenever my sister or I hollered too loudly for her taste, my grandmother used to say, "You sound like a Jew on Maxwell Street."

I remember that Black people used to be called "shines", among other things.  I even remember this old joke:  "How do you spell Polish? - p-o-l-i-s-h.
                 How do you spell polish? - p-o-l-i-s-h
                 That proves that there's no difference between a Polack and a shine."

Note to Google, or whoever else might be monitoring this post: Please do not delete the preceding joke as hate speech.  I only wrote it as an historical educational tool so that today's young people can witness the low brow humor that was prevalent back in the days before political correctness was invented and appreciate how lucky they are to have been born in a more enlightened age.

Sheeny but no shine

A while ago I was blabbing about the Chinese and how they are using AI and other means to determine social reputation.  This seems to me to be a sneaky way for an authoritarian government to manipulate peer group pressure to maintain social order; I don't know how well it's working out for them but the idea has gained some popularity.  The good folks at Facebook are going to try the same thing.  Since both of you fellows are on Facebook (and I'm not) I am curious about your feelings on this.  Do either of you give a rat's ass about your Facebook reputation?

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"Sheeny" is a term I haven't seen in decades, probably since childhood.  In my neck of the woods it was another derogatory term for a Jew.  Online resources are vague about the origin of the term and I don't think it was commonly used.  But I remember the term mostly for it's use in "sheeny rub," where some adult (usually) will grab a kid (usually) and rub the top of their head vigorously with their knuckles; an annoying and a little painful experience.  I think it was supposed to be funny, done for the amusement of others in the group but as a recipient it never was.  In those days kids never smacked an adult even if they deserved it; the sheeny rub was usually unprovoked.  On TV and in other media the sheeny rub is called a "noogie" and I don't know how it got that name.

I'm wondering if sheeny was a term used more often on the North Side and if there is a North/South difference in derogatory terms.  Did South-Siders ever refer to a black person as a "shine?"  It's used very rarely today, mostly by white cops of a certain age.  Or so I've heard.

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It seems like the only thing that keeps Trump out of the news is the death of a notable person.  Last week it was Aretha Franklin and this weekend it's the passing of John McCain, possibly the last honorable Republican.  Plenty of folks have disagreed with him but he was always treated with the respect that he deserved, respect that was earned at great cost.  Almost always, I should say, the exception being the bloviating Cheeto himself, he of the dreaded bone spurs.  I don't think Trump is capable of any feelings of humiliation but knowing that McCain didn't want him at his funeral has got to be like a stab in the back; McCain's request for a eulogy by Obama is a delightful twist of that blade.  I think Trump's self-destruction timer will soon start ticking.  The guy can't even be trusted with crayons to color in the American flag.

Mackinac/Mackinaw

I couldn't readily find the origin of the name "Mackinac/Mackinaw" but I suspect it's French because the French have a way of swallowing the letter "c" when it's the last letter in a word so that you almost don't hear it. The straits and the island are spelled "Mackinac" and most other usage of the name is spelled "Mackinaw", but it's pronounced "Mackinaw" either way.  Mackinac island was a favorite gathering place of the local Native Americans long before the French arrived on the scene, and it remained an important trade center during the French and English occupations.  It's strategic location also gave the island military importance, and the old Fort Mackinac is still a popular tourist attraction to this day.  Lake trout used to be called "Mackinaw trout", and there is also a plaid woolen jacket called a "Mackinaw", although it was actually invented in nearby Canada.  Suffice it to say that the name has been around awhile, so it's quite possible that it could be used to describe peaches from as far away as Oregon.

One would think that hard core Trumpists would have been screened out in the jury selection process for the Manafort trial. Then again, none of the charges against Manafort had anything to do with Trump, so maybe not.

I remember seeing street peddlers in my early childhood, but they were phasing them out at the time, and I don't remember seeing them during my teens, except for the "ragsaline man" who operated until my army days.  We called him the "ragsaline man" because that's what we thought he shouted as his horse drawn wagon with iron rimmed wheels clattered down our concrete alley driving our dogs nuts.  I found out years later that what he really shouted was "rags and old iron" because he was a junk man.  Some of the old timers called him the "rag sheeny" or the "sheeny driver", but I don't know the origin of the "sheeny" part.

I knew most of what Old Dog reported about peaches and apples, and also that the Hapsburg rulers tried to stamp out the Czech language and culture, but I didn't know about the puppets.  Cool!

Puppet masters

So is Michigan a big cheese state?

You must be thinking of Wisconsin, Uncle Ken, but I have no idea how it relates to peaches.  Just to make sure, I did a Google search for peach + cheese and nothing came up except for a big boatload of recipes for peach cheesecake, all of which appear to be quite delectable.  Good old Wikipedia has a lot to say about peaches, more than I really need to know, but there are some fun facts that somehow escaped my notice such as the fact they originated in China.  Those damn Chinese again!   If a peach lacks fuzz it's a nectarine; how 'bout that?  And now I know what a "cling" peach is; same as a freestone peach but different.  Go figure.

Back in the Fifties there were immigrant guys, possibly Italian, who sold peaches throughout the neighborhood in the summertime, slowly driving a truck down the alleys and shouting "Peaches! Peaches!"  He sold more than peaches, stuff like corn, apples, and other seasonal fruits and veggies but I guess  yelling "peaches" made his sales pitch easier.  Did you South Siders have the same kind of thing?

It's too bad that your local growers have given up on apples, Mr. Beagles.  It's difficult to compete with the "big guys" especially when it comes to shipping.  Small volume producers can get screwed unless they specialize in heirloom or exotic cultivars of apple.  Once in a while at the supermarket I'll see an apple that I've never heard of so I have to
write down the name and run it through the Google Fu.  Some apples I just don't like, mostly because of texture.  One very cool aspect of growing apples is that, since the branches are grafted onto a root stock, you can have different kinds of apples growing on the same tree.  One branch could be Granny Smith, another branch could be Fuji, and a third branch could be Rome Beauty.  I don't know if there's an upper limit to the number of varieties that are possible but it's fun to think about.

Another curious thing about apple trees is that if you plant one from seed you will have no idea what kind of apple tree will grow.  There's some weird genetics at play; plant the seeds from a Golden Delicious and you won't get Golden Delicious trees.  If you want Golden Delicious apples you'll have to graft a Golden Delicious branch onto whatever apple tree root stock you have handy.  Nature can be weird.

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It wasn't long ago that there was a little discussion about the Czech language which I believe both of you South Siders are familiar with.  But did you know that the language was nearly wiped out because the people of that area (Bohemia) were forced to speak German?  The language was saved by puppet shows; the puppets weren't forced to speak German, and it's a charming tale.

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Hoo, boy!  Mueller is playing a cagey game while cutting deals with offers of immunity, and some folks are snatching those offers up.  That tabloid publisher reportedly has a safe full of documentation about payoffs, killed stories, and other rocks Trump would rather not see turned over.  The killer deal of immunity is for the guy who is the Chief Financial Officer of the Trump Organization; this guy goes way back, even so far as to have worked for daddy Fred.  So that makes it that the Trump Organization is being investigated, the Trump Campaign is being investigated (no collusion!), and the Trump Foundation is being investigated.  Luckily he has only the best people working for him, high quality and high IQ types, just like him.

Neighborhoods and peaches

I do remember things being pretty idyllic in the bungalow belt.  I don't  remember any neighborhood feuds or any neighbor at the end of the block who hated everybody and everybody hated him.  It was kind of an odd thing because everybody lived in the same kind of bungalow so everybody earned about the same amount of money so there were no class differences.  I guess the big difference was between Catholics and non-Catholics.  You kind of felt out of the loop if you weren't Catholic.  It always kind of fascinated me hearing the tales of what went on it their complicated religion.  There were all these rules and rites, and not one kind of sin, but two, almost like a complicated legal case as to whether you got into heaven or hell, and then there were also limbo and purgatory in between, whereas all we Methodists had to do was dress nice on Sunday mornings and not kill anybody or something like that.  I guess it's actually more complicated than that, but I did not become a biblical scholar like Beagles.

When I was down in Herrin, a town of 10,000 I was surprised to learn that if you crossed paths with a stranger on the sidewalk they would always say hello, no long conversation, just a howdy do.  It seemed odd, but I liked it.  Even though I had grown up in Chicago when I came back to visit after living away a number of years, the people seemed so rude, so cold, in such a hurry.  But they're not really rude, the default mode is indifference, but if you're in the mood, you can strike up a little conversation about the weather and it will be pleasant enough. 

It's kind of odd in the towers.  I'll notice somebody getting off the elevator on my floor and ask how long they have lived here thinking they must have just moved in and it turns out they have lived here five years.  You can't stroll the neighborhood and ask your neighbor how the zinnias are coming along this spring.  The only time you see each other is on the elevators and if your hours are different than your neighbor's you might as well be living on different coasts.  I have had the same neighbor on my right since I moved in, but I barely know her, the next neighbor down is a very good friend of mine who takes care of my cats while I'm away, after that were two guys I knew but one died and then the other and now it is undergoing renovation, after that are a couple people I run into but we don't have any extended conversations, she's Romaine, and I don't remember his.  On the other side there has been a long run of renters, some of which I've known a little, and some not at all.  Currently there is a nice couple and we had a chat on our balcony last night and maybe we will become pretty good pals, but you know you have to be careful.  What if they turn out to be assholes?.  It's one thing to have an asshole down the road and another to have just a wall between you.

I did a little research on Mackinaw peaches and it turns out that the Mackinaw peaches that were in Seinfeld actually come from Oregon.  So what is with that?  I'll need to do further research.

I'm wondering why the Manafort jury is still out.  It seemed pretty cut and dried to me.  It seems to me that maybe there is a Trumpist holdout on the jury sitting at the edge of the table and muttering "Fake news, fake news," over and over again, but this is just my speculation. 

You heard it here first,  Of course probably a lot of other people had the same speculation.  Interestingly enough the jurist who revealed this is a Trumpist herself, a proud wearer to the satanic red hat.  But apparently not so far gone as that holdout jurist that she thought all news, except that coming out of Trump's mouth was fake news, and that the truth isn't true.  If we give up Objective Reality how will we ever convict criminals.

There Goes the Neighborhood

Rural living is not as idyllic as it used to be.  People are friendly enough, but their best friends are not always their closest neighbors.  I suppose Henry Ford is to blame for that.  With the proliferation of the automobile, people started choosing their friends from farther away.  Looking back on it, the people in our old Chicago neighborhoods were about as friendly and caring as the people of Cheboygan are today.   I don't know what it was, or still is, like downtown because I didn't spend a lot of time there.  Uncle Ken, are the people of Marina City more friendly with each other than they are with people of other apartment complexes?   I believe there are two buildings in Marina City.  Are the people in one building more bonded to each other than they are to people in the other building?

Of course, the more people in a community, the more need for rules and regulations, but I don't think there is a magic number like Dunbar says.  I already spoke about population density, but another factor is diversity, or lack thereof.  It is possible for diverse groups to get long well, if they have something in common that overshadows their differences but, in general, "birds of a feather flock together".

"Mackinaw peaches" must be  brand name, because nobody around here grows peaches commercially.  A few people might have a peach tree in their yards, but the pickins are too slim to justify making a career out of it.  Apples used to be a big business around here, but the big operators started phasing out in the 1970s.  It's not that apples won't grow well here, but there are places where they grow better, and our local growers could no longer compete with them.  As far as I know, the Fruit Belt of Michigan runs along the Lake Michigan shore from the Indiana border to Traverse City.  The lake serves as kind of a climate buffer that protects that zone from the worst that winter throws at us.  They frequently get more snow than we do, but it melts sooner in the spring and insulates the ground while it's there.

rules and peaches

Subgroups are part of a bigger group or else they would just be groups.  The important thing is that beyond an elastic number there is a point where you have to make rules and establish a hierarchy so that things will run smoothly. 

I expect this is because now you are dealing with strangers.  I suppose there are gradations between strangers.   There is the absolute stranger who is a guy you have never seen or heard of before, and there is the guy you have seen around or who is the brother of somebody you know, but let's stick with the absolute stranger.  If you are hunting with your pals everybody kind of knows what to do, but if you are hunting with strangers there have to be rules and to keep things fair they would be written by an impartial high committee of the meta tribe. 

People that live in small towns are generally fans of that experience.  How warm is the embrace of neighbors, all smiling at each other and helping each other out.  But sometimes, especially if they are out of sync with the mores of the town, they feel stifled.  It can be a pain in the ass to be nice all the time, but if you aren't in the mood that day, or maybe you don't like that particular person, you still have to be nice because otherwise they will tell everybody and they will like you less, and things will go harder for you. 

In big towns when you are out on the street you are mostly surrounded by strangers, so really you can do whatever you want, nobody will tell anybody else, because who cares what some stranger did.  On the other hand if you get into some kind of trouble, say you faint by the side of the road, since you are a stranger they are more likely to pass you by and leave you to whatever becomes of people who lie by the side of the road. 

But what about if somebody punches you in the mouth and steals your wallet?  In a small town everybody will know about it, and they will probably take some kind of action to redress the wrong, and the miscreant will suffer.  But if the same thing happens in a big town who cares if some stranger punches another stranger and takes their money?  Nobody.  But in general nobody wants to live in a town where this happens regularly so rules have to be made to prevent it, and rules to enforce it, and rules as to how the enforcers behave.

There, I think I've gotten to what I wanted to say about Dunbar's number and the rise of civilization.  It's a little ragged and I've rambled a bit, but I'll let it stand for this post. . 


A friend of mine posted a bowl of peaches on fb.  Well not any peaches, Michigan peaches she went out of her way to say,  That reminded me of that famous Seinfeld episode (they are all famous) about Mackinaw peaches.  So is Michigan a big cheese state?  What about  Georgia?  How can two states so far apart both brag about their peaches?

Groups and Sub-Groups

I just read the article on Dunbar's Number. While the general concept makes sense, I don't know about 150 being the magic number.  I think it would depend on the purpose for which the group is gathered.  Maybe 150 people could live in the same cave, assuming the cave was large enough, but they would probably hunt in smaller sub-groups so as not to spook the game.  The exception would be a big drive hunt where they were trying to get a bunch of buffalos to jump off a cliff, which is the way Native Americans used to hunt buffalo before they got horses.  Such a drive hunt would require extensive planning and organizational structure, otherwise the buffalos might end up driving the hunters off the cliff instead of the other way around.

Last I heard, 150 would be about the size of an infantry company at full strength, but that company would be divided into four platoons, each platoon would be divided into four squads, and each rifle squad would be divided into two fire teams.  Actually, one out of the four platoons would be a weapons platoon and one of the four squads would be a weapons squad, which would be divided differently than the rifle platoons and squads, but we don't need to get into that here.  The point is that groups are divided into sub-groups that can operate more or less autonomously or combine with the other sub-groups, depending on the mission or task at hand.

Social groups are like that too.  We all have our little circle off friends, but that circle might be part of a larger circle of people who we might also count as friends, but not necessarily as best friends.  Most social groups have some kind of leadership.  In an organized club it might be the officers or directors, in an informal social circle it might be a few "cool kids" who the others look up to as role models.

Another consideration is how close people live or work to other people in the group.  Rural communities might be bonded to each other just as strongly as city dwellers, but they don't need as many rules because they are not always getting into each others faces.  A barking dog in the next apartment would certainly be more annoying than a barking dog on the neighbor's farm a quarter mile away.  Studies have been done with various animal species that suggest each species has an optimal population density.  Even if there is plenty of food and water to go around, overcrowded animals tend to squabble more and display other signs of stress.  If population density is too low, some species will quit breeding.  Apparently, a certain amount of competition is good for business.

the hard sciences and the soft sciences

I had a chance to read up on that Dunbar's number last night.  It was a little disappointing because the methods for determining it, seemed a little loose.  Well that is the problem with social sciences, they are all a little loosey goosey for a physics groupie such as myself.  Not that certain areas of physics don't have their own oddities,  There is the apocryphal story of the guy lecturing students on muons and gluons or some such, and he notices that there is some eye-rolling going on in the audience and he gets a little annoyed and he is about to say, "Say now, it's not like we are making this all up," but he stays his tongue because he realizes that they are making this all up. 

Anyway physicists  have an easier job than sociologists because electrons are easier to study than that huge ape brain, each one of them a little different.  All electrons are exactly alike.  Though you have to wonder how physicists know that.  The other thing is that since sociologists study people there is a lot more interest in it, and politics gets involved with different ideologies favoring different theories.

So the generally agreed on Dunbar number of 150 is not hard like the mass of an electron that everybody agrees is: approximately9.109×10−31 kilograms, or5.489×10−4 atomic mass units. On the basis of Einstein's principle of mass–energy equivalence, this mass corresponds to a rest energy of 0.511 MeV.    I don't know why I had to look up that number, you would think it would be at the tip of every physics groupie's tongue.

Anyway common sense says there has to be some kind of Dunbar number.  At Mom and Pop's grocery there may be no need for anything other than the weekly schedule of who shows up for work,  but when you get to running Wal-Mart you need at least several volumes and a separate division just to keep track of those rules and probably another book just to cover how those guys do their job.

So that's what I was getting to in the rise of civilization, within the tribe everybody knew each other and things worked out well enough, but when it got bigger, there had to be rules, and really you are going to have some kind of written language so that there is a book of some sort to consult when you have disagreements.


I have to admit that I found myself tuning in to Trump's West Virginia pep rally between the innings of last night's Cub game.  I know it's a sickness because if, or when, he says something truly outrageous I'll be able to see it two or three times an hour in clips on CNN, but you know you want to be there when he says it, like it's better to see the baseball soaring over the wall rather than read the box score the next day.  But he seemed to be more on script, his sentences were longer and grammatical, and beyond the repeat of no collusion there wasn't anything new.  He didn't say anything about  Cohen though.  I think Cohen is the dagger closest to his vile and slimy heart, but that, like all things, is subject to change.

Rules and Fools

I think that primitive tribal people had rules, they just weren't in writing because writing hadn't been invented yet.  Now that I think of it, that might have been how the shaman got his job, he was the only one in the tribe who could remember all the rules.  By the way, do you know why all those proto human species became extinct?  They couldn't reproduce because they were all homos. (I make small joke.)

I remember, when I was a kid, I had a plastic model of the Nautilus, the first nuclear powered submarine. The model wasn't very impressive as it was quite plain compared to the models of old fashioned sailing ships and even the naval ships of World War II.  Inside the box, however, was a detailed schematic of the sub's interior.  One day a Russian spy was caught with a copy of that schematic, and there was a big investigation about how he got it because it was supposed to be classified.  Turned out he had just walked into a hobby shop and bought the model.  I don't remember hearing how the model company got the schematic in the first place.  That information itself was probably classified to save somebody from a whole lot of embarrassment.

That stupid Google machine has been locking me out of my account again.  I thought I was done with that foolishness since it had not happened in a couple of months, but now it has happened twice in the last month or so.  I am able to get back in relatively quickly now because I found out the month and the year that I opened my Google account.  Turned out I had never deleted my original "welcome to Google message", which is funny because I usually delete all the old stuff.  They ask me a couple of questions and then send a recovery code to my other email carrier.  After giving them that code, they tell me they will get back to me in 1-3 hours, but I just go have a cigarette and come back, and then I am able to access my account.  The next day I get another message asking me how satisfied I was with the experience and, believe me, I tell them. Not that it does any good, but it makes me feel better.

No secret sauce

A fella can go nuts trying to keep up with the news this afternoon: Manafort guilty on eight counts and Cohen pleading guilty to a bunch of charges which means there will be no trial for him.  Egads!  There is still the scheduled "Make America Great Rally" in West Virginia this evening which may be worth watching, just to see how well Trump spins today's events.  I don't think he will be sticking to his notes and it could be quite the show.

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Having gotten that out of the way, Uncle Ken is correct in the benefit of security clearances for former officials.  Institutional knowledge only goes so far and sometimes you have to get the old war horses back in harness to clue the youngsters into what's what.  There's another factor, too.  Once in a while these guys are called in for testimony and have to go digging into the archives to refresh their memories and keep the record straight, which can't be done without the necessary clearances.  There are many valid reasons to revoke those clearances but political bias isn't one of them.

I had a "secret" clearance when I was working in the printing plant on Okinawa and didn't know it until a hush-hush job came in.  This grizzled sergeant came in with a pile of crap and asked me if I had a Secret clearance and I told him I didn't know.  He left and a half-hour later came back and said "You do now, get to work."  The job was some kind of book or report and they blocked off the camera area and darkroom, posted a guard, and all the bad film negatives had to be accounted for and taken offsite for later destruction. I think I may have had to sign something acknowledging my role in the process, swearing myself to secrecy.  The funny thing is that I have no idea what the damn thing was about; when you are making negatives for printing plates you don't have time to actually read the stuff.  It could have been a new recipe for SOS as far as I know; my only concern was that the film was properly exposed.

Some time afterwards I found out that everything in that big job was stuff you can find out through newspapers and in a public library; all the facts and data were readily available to anyone.  It was the analysis of those facts and data that made the report secret.  The film Three Days of the Condor covered it well with Robert Redford's character just another mope reading crap for the CIA and trying to connect a few dots.  I think that's the way it is with most intelligence agencies, very little James Bond stuff and an awful lot of drudge work and eyestrain.

Dunbar's number

I think the law of the pack is that you do what the pack tells you to do.  Not a very enlightened thing for young Americans to follow, but I imagine it is something to say to little kids to get them to thinking they are something more exciting, like wolves.

I think all the Beaglestonians were members of the boy scouts in some form in their youth.  Well I guess it was mostly a way to hang with your pals.  The camping out part sounded exciting, but when it came to pass you were cramped into this cold wet tent wishing you were home on the sofa watching tv.  But there was all this other stuff, like keeping yourself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.  I memorized these, though I had to look up that last one to get it straight, but I don't recall that I took them too seriously.  Just so much bushwa like grownups are always trying to pump into you, am I right?

Beagles didn't mention it but when the leader of the pack gets old and slow, some strong young wolf takes his place.  It's the same with humans, but being a human leader is more complicated, you have to be smart as well as strong.  Where do we camp tonight, where do we hunt, what kind of flint should we use for our fires, how should we put on our make up?  Decisions, decisions.  The chief can be overthrown simply because the rest of the tribe doesn't like that stripe on the forehead of their war paint.  This is the rough democracy of our forebears that I was speaking of earlier.

We lived in tribes before we even became people, when we were homo hablis (I always think of him as wearing a tool belt) and all those other guys, going back tens of millions of years.  And those were carefree days, but you know we weren't getting anywhere, we weren't building a civilization.

There is something called Dunbar's number (I just looked it up, I remembered it as the hundred people number) and it's the number below which people can get along in say a business without  a lot of written rules, and above that you have to establish rules and regulations.  Here's the link, I'll have to read it myself because I am hazy on details, but I want to wrap this up right now.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

So it seems like one tribe got so big, or several tribes merged and that's when they started establishing rules and that's how we got civilization.

The Law of the Pack

The first time I remember hearing about the Law of the Pack was in Cub Scouts.  We used to promise to obey it, but I don't remember anybody ever explaining to us exactly what it was.  It was just one of those things we learned to repeat by rote, never questioning or caring, what it meant.  Be that as it may, I'm not talking about the Cub Scout Law of the Pack here.  What I'm talking about is the social habits of real wolves in the real world.

One night I was watching a show about a wolf pack on PBS.  There was this one female wolf who came in dead last in the pecking order.  The other wolves used to pick on her and she was always the last to eat, living on the scraps that were left after the other wolves had eaten their fill.  I was asking myself, "Why doesn't she just leave the pack and strike out on her own?"  when the narrator answered my question.  The reason she stays with the pack is that, even with her low status, she has a better chance of survival than she would as a lone wolf.  I don't suppose the wolf knew this in a cognitive sense, it must have been intuitive, but know it she did.

I think it must have been like that for primitive people as well.  In one sense, it was the strong imposing their will on the weak but, in another sense, it was the weak following the strong around because they ate better from the leftover scraps of the strong than they would have tying to pull down a hairy elephant all by themselves.  One of the distinguishing characteristics of human societies is the specialization of labor.  The more aggressive become hunters and warriors, the less aggressive become root gatherers and spear makers.  Others become healers or shamans, gaining the respect of their people by providing a service that not everybody knows how to do.  Somebody needs to organize all this, so a headman or chief is selected, usually by consensus.  The chief has to be tough, for sure, but I doubt that he would last long if the only way he could maintain control was by force.  If the people lost confidence in their leader, all they would have to do is walk away from him.  Like the poor little girl wolf, they would then have to take their chances on their own, the difference being that humans can weigh the odds and make a conscious decision to either follow the leader or not.

I seem to remember learning about classified information in the army.  The reason it's called "classified" is that there are several categories of information, like "secret" and "top secret".  The only other one I remember is "need to know", which is one of the lower classifications.  Anything that doesn't fit in any of the classifications is called "unclassified" which means it's okay to tell anybody about it.  "De-classified" means that it used to be classified, but now it's not.  The reason for classifying information is to keep it from falling into enemy hands, but sometimes it's a convenient way to cover your tracks if you do something stupid or embarrassing.  

Monday musings

Rousseau was an early firebrand of the enlightenment, driven from country to country. but always finding a place to land because the enemy of one king was considered the friend of the king across the border, until that king too got fed up with his shooting his mouth off.  There is an idea that what fueled the rise of Europe was that unlike other continents Europe had all these nations and a gadfly could always hop from one to the other and this afforded the gadfly not to be crushed by say, the emperor of China.

I wonder how much they knew about prehistoric man, but I think they used the American Indians as an example of how people lived before signing that social contract.  Wiki tells me that Rousseau never actually used the term noble savage, but that was along the way of his thinking.  They did have a rough form of democracy, and they didn't have to put in as many hours to earn their daily bread as the peon, but they were more subject to dying of starvation when things went badly.

Of course there was no actual signing of a social contract.  It seems to me that strong men imposing their will on the less strong was more likely what fueled the rise of civilization


That Kansas city was wiped out by the diseases of the white man but one wonders why Cahokia died out.  Maybe it was like the Mayans who whose societies fell victim to their over population.  Ancient European civilizations rose and fell.  Maybe the Indians just hadn't been around long enough to develop a written language.


This whole thing about classified information has long puzzled me.  What exactly is it?  By its own definition we can't know, but it seems like a lot of it is just inconvenient truths, guys covering their asses because they can.  What about the Pentagon papers?  Wasn't their revelation a good thing for the country?

That being said the explanation for guys keeping their security clearances is that having been in spycraft so long these guys are repositories of knowledge that can be tapped into during a national crisis.  How often this happens is unclear, but also there have been no cases of a guy with a security clearance misusing it, so what is the harm?  Of course Trump is using the revocations to punish his enemies.  Why does Flynn still have a security clearance?  The theme of the Trumpists in government is that these people have abused their privilege by criticizing the president.  Is criticizing the president treason? 


I'm wondering why the Manafort jury is still out.  It seemed pretty cut and dried to me.  It seems to me that maybe there is a Trumpist holdout on the jury sitting at the edge of the table and muttering "Fake news, fake news," over and over again, but this is just my speculation.  The pundits are saying  the charges are complicated and cases like these often go on for a couple days.  I hope they are right.

Fake news. You know in the old days if you disagreed with somebody you had to actually refute their arguments.  Nowadays you just say fake news, and then attack your opponent personally.  This is not good.

We Should be Dead by Now

I believe Old Dog is right about that life expectancy thing.  I seem to remember hearing, when I was a little kid, that life expectancy for Americans was about 70.  By that standard, all three of us should be dead by now.

Before we can decide if the cave man's life was better than ours, we need to define "better".  Those guys didn't have all the stuff we have today but, having never had it, they wouldn't have missed it.  When my mother was a teenager, she was moping around the house as teenagers are wont to do. When her Czech immigrant father asked her what was wrong, she told him that she was depressed.  Grandpa didn't know the meaning of that word, so he looked it up in his English/Czech dictionary, but he didn't know the meaning of the Czech equivalent of "depressed" either.  Mom explained to him that it meant that she wasn't feeling good.  Grandpa asked his daughter if she was sick, hungry, cold, or in pain.  Mom said "no" to all of that.  Grandpa: "You've got a roof over your head, food in your belly, and clothes on your back. What the hell do you have to be depressed about?" By that standard, our caveman must have been happy most of the time.

Archaeological digs around nearby Mackinaw City have uncovered artifacts that date human habitation in the region back some 10,000 years, about the time the glaciers went away.  The levels of the Great Lakes were higher then, so Beaglesonia would probably have been underwater.  Even now, if you dig down two or three feet around here, you hit the water table, and that's on the high ground.  If there are any artifacts under there, you wouldn't be able to dig them up with a shovel, you would need a drudge or something.

As I understand it, most of the people that are getting their security clearances cancelled by Trump are former government agents.  Why would somebody like that even need a security clearance?  It seem like their clearances should have been cancelled when they left their government jobs.  That's probably not why Trump is doing it, but I'm just saying.

Brutal, but not so short

To say that the lifespan of a caveman was only twenty years, although technically true, is misleading.  Lifespans are calculated at birth and high infant mortality will skew the numbers downward.  The lifestyle of the hunter/gatherers was fraught with peril and no toddler would have an easy time.  Simple infections could prove fatal.  But if a child survived until five years old his lifespan would shoot up to about forty and if the kid made it fifteen or so he could easily reach sixty.  Our modern lifespans are very close to those of the cavemen once you adjust for the differences in infant mortality.  I wonder how long we would live if we had the same lifestyle and diet of the caveman; heart disease and diabetes, both modern killers, were unknown in those times.

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Those 16th Century Spanish Conquistadors made it much further into North America than I thought.  I knew they were in Florida and along the West Coast, but Kansas?  That's an eye opener, and the discovery of a lost city, second only to Cahokia in size, is an even bigger eye opener.  You never know what you're going to find once you start digging.  Perhaps there's a hidden fortress lurking beneath the swampy environs of Beaglesonia, or at least some pottery and arrowheads.  Ever dig up anything interesting, Mr. Beagles?

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The revocation of the security clearances of former officials baffles me; I mean, what's the point?   There are no signs of abuse that I'm aware of; this strikes me as an act born out of fear and desperation.  But Trump is the kind of guy who, finding himself in a hole, keeps digging with renewed vigor.

Let's see what happens this week; the Manafort trial should come to a verdict, Omarosa may entertain us with some video, and maybe some new subpoenas will land near the White House.  I read a joking observation that, to the rest of the world, the US has become a reality TV program.  Sounds about right.

The State of Nature Theory

Around the time that Hobbes was doing his thing, there was a competing school of thought, I believe it was founded by a French guy named Rousseau, that believed people were better off before governments were invented and man lived in a "state of Nature".  I don't think that Rousseau was particularly religious but, in those days, even the Atheists and Deists believed that the Earth was only about 5,000 years old.  This belief went largely unchallenged until the development of sciences like archaeology and geology, mostly in the 19th Century.  It's doubtful that either Hobbes or Rousseau knew much about prehistoric cultures, so it was mostly speculation on their parts.

I seem to remember reading somewhere, probably National Geographic, that the average cave man lived for about 20 years and that his body was pretty well busted up by the time he cashed in.  This would seem to confirm the "nasty, brutish, and short" theory but, as Uncle Ken's man Hume pointed out, correlation does not prove cause and effect.  Was life nasty, brutish, and short because there were no governments? Maybe, but it's just as likely that there were no governments because life was nasty, brutish, and short.  With people dying off almost as fast as they were making babies, the world was probably a lot less crowded that it is today, making governments unnecessary.

Last I heard, Libertarians believed in minimal government, it's the Anarchists who believe in no government.  I conversed with an Anarchist once on the internet, and I asked him if he could totally eliminate government, what would he replace it with.  His answer was "voluntary cooperation".  I replied that, if everybody would voluntarily cooperate with each other, government would indeed be unnecessary, but they won't.  He didn't seem to have an answer for that one as I never heard from him again.

hobnobbing with Hobbes and being at home with Hume

I thought my colleagues would have something to say about whether life was nastier, more brutal, and shorter before we had organized governments.  One would think libertarians would have something to say about that, but libertarianism is sort of like socialism these days, it is whatever the current speaker says it is.  It was, of course Thomas Hobbes who was quoted.  I often confuse him with David Hume because of the similarity of the names. 

Logic is based on cause and effect, if this than that, but Hume asked how do we know what is the cause.  All we really know is that two incidents occurred closely in time, one after the other, but that doesn't necessarily mean the first caused the other.  Walnut-brained cats may think the sound of a knife on a grinder causes food to appear, but we humans like to think we know better.  Of course generally the first action causes the second and we huge-brained apes, go along with that because we can't be philosophical all day because we will never get anything done.

That's why people especially nowadays,. especially Americans who are doers not thinkers don't think much of philosophy.  In truth not even me, who puts on airs like he is some deep thinker, is that crazy about them.  Oh it's nice to pluck out an idea here and there for speculation, but when I realize that that idea is just a generalization of what is described in greater detail in this big fat tome that should be read to fully understand, I lose interest. 

We weren't taught any philosophy in grade school, nor in Gage Park High.  It's just a little too free-thinking for a public high school.  If you think too much about things you will realize that most of them don't make any sense, and that is not good for young minds.  I should have learned it getting my liberal arts degree in college, but I managed to avoid it.  But when I applied to edukashun school, of all places, they required it.  It was kind of a stupid course where you watch an educational tv show every day, go in to class once a week for discussion, and maybe four times to take multiple choice tests, and there you are, a master of western civ thought.  Oh and you had to buy a rather thick book, which I just this morning plucked from the shelf to be sure I had Hobbes and Hume right, and since Society forced me to take this course I am boring my colleagues with it, because it will be good for them,  Trust me.

And look I've completed a whole post without addressing was life nasty, brutal etc.  So it is still fresh and unsoiled for my brothers to don the robes of contemplation, and whip out their quill pens and contemplate the matter.  And if they don't I certainly will in next week's posting, because as the dawgs well know, I am relentless.

So how about those security clearances?  Once again I am shocked, shocked, that no office-holding republican dares differ with their king, and even more so that their argument is that it is a fitting punishment for shooting off their mouths against the king.  It's like Vietnam when it was argued that you shouldn't criticize the war effort because that was giving comfort to the enemy.  Our boys were fighting for the first amendment and therefore you shouldn't use it. 

Pavlov's Cat

I don't think that all outside cats can be called "feral".  As Old Dog pointed out, some cat and dog owners just don't allow their animals inside the house.  Our Scamp started out to be an outside cat, he had his own cat house and everything.  Then, when he was six months old, he was seriously injured when he ran under the wheels of my hypothetical wife's car, and the vet recommended that we bring him in for awhile until he got better.  By the time he recovered, we couldn't see any reason not to let him in because he always asked to go out when he needed to.  He was injured at about the age when we should have had him fixed, but we didn't have the heart to put him through any more trauma.

When his girlfriend was about to have her kittens, Scamp started spending less time around the house. By the time the kittens had kittens, we thought he was gone for good until we spotted him one day across the street, apparently making a home in the wreckage of an old burned out barn.  On the day that the nice man from animal control took his cage back with the last kitten in it, Scamp came home a few minutes after the truck pulled out of the driveway and we had our cat back.  The animal control guy said that the mistake we had made was feeding Scamp outside, so we started feeding him in the utility room by the back door, and we never had any more visiting kitties after that.

That utility room had a laundry sink in it where I used to clean all the fish and small game that I brought home, which was a lot in those days.  Whenever I was about to clean something, Scamp would show up and beg for scraps.  It didn't matter if he was outside or inside, he always knew when I was about to clean something.  One day I was sharpening a knife for some other reason, and Scamp came running, even though I was not about to clean any game or fish.  We postulated  that it was the sound of my touching up the knife with a butcher's steel that he had come to associate with those tasty snacks.  I tried a few dry runs, which tended to confirm our hypothesis.  After that, one of Scamp' nicknames became "Pavlov's Cat".

All the dogs we had over the years were outside dogs.  They had sturdy dog houses with dry bedding that I changed regularly, and a large pen to run around in.  Chaining a dog up to his house will tend to make him crazy unless you let him off and interact with him every day, which I didn't have time to do in those days.  Our last dog Splash never was tied up or leashed in his life.  I would let him out of his pen once a day for an hour or so on days that we weren't going hunting.  If he wasn't back when I wanted to close the gate, all I had to do was bay like a beagle to bring him in.  And that's how Talks With Beagles got his name.

If you are an enrolled member of a political party, you can go to meetings and vote on stuff, and you might get yourself elected as a delegate to their state or national convention.  Many members, however, aren't interested in going to meetings or conventions, they just want to contribute to the cause.  I went to one meeting and one state convention with the Republicans, but there were no Libertarian meetings within a hundred miles of Cheboygan.  I suppose I could have started a local chapter, but I thought I needed more than one member for that.
 

This party sucks

My understanding of cats is that they are natural born hunters; they like to chase things and play with them but it's up to momma cat to teach them the killing blow.  I don't know if cats will learn to kill on their own, maybe they will if they get hungry enough.  Feral cats are a special kind of problem in that they can wipe out local bird population.  Nowadays it's common to spay and neuter cats (dogs, too) but according to my mom a surprise litter of felines was never welcome and they were dispatched, sometimes mercifully (car exhaust) and sometimes not so mercifully (drowning).  Life on a farm can be brutal.

One thing I remember from the times I visited the various farms of my aunts and uncles is that neither the cats nor the dogs were allowed inside the house.  Except for extremely rare exceptions, such as illness, they were strictly outdoor animals.  They had their own little houses and shelters and were well fed but never ventured further inside than the porch.  I am not sure if that was a typical practice but it's a good way to keep fleas and ticks out of your living room.

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Maybe some political parties issue cards while others don't but otherwise Mr. Beagles nailed it.  You aren't a member of the party until your name is on the membership list, according to the bylaws of the Cook County Democratic Organization.  From Section I, Article II I found this: A member of the Cook County Democratic Party shall be any person registered to vote within Cook County, Illinois who volunteers, contributes to, supports, advances the interests of, or participates in the activities of the Party and who requests to be added to the membership list and who further demonstrates the suitable attributes of character, judgment, and commitment to the principles, vision, programs, and policies of the Cook County Democratic Party.

Whew!  You really have to buy into their program, what with that talk of character and judgement.  Maybe if you're too honest they won't let you join.  I can't see the point of the average voter joining the party  but if you're a lawyer, businessman, or aspiring mover and shaker it could be a way up the ladder to riches and power.  Connections will be made, alliances will be forged, and as is often the case in Illinois, they will meet again in prison.

speaking of cats

What Beagles is calling outside cats I think are more commonly known as feral cats.  They have not  been cuddled by human hands as kittens and never developed a taste for it, and their lives are, as the philosopher described the condition of man before the formation of governments, nasty, brutal, and short.  That seems like a bit of exaggeration, hanging around the barn, hunting vermin and freeloading doesn't sound that bad.
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Not as nice as having your own cup and straw like inside cats

But really not so bad at all.  

There are some cats who never go outside at all.  Mine would be in that condition if I didn't have a balcony, but some might not consider a balcony with no access to the outside world truly outside.  Sometimes I take them for a walk in the hallway and in the course of that sortie I open the door that leads to the stairs that lead to downstairs and the whole rest of the world.  They bolt up or down a flight and out of my sight, but soon their heads reappear,and then they are trotting down at a rapid pace.  Is it because they find stairs boring or is the concept of infinity too intense for their walnut-sized brains?

But any cat owner whose door leads to the great outdoors, unless they are vigilant as hawks when opening or closing it, has an inside/outside cat.  As Beagles correctly notes if a cat is outside it wants inside and if it is inside it wants outside, and the preferred position is in the doorway while the great ape with the huge brain holds the door open and urges them to make up their minds, which they will in due course, or not.

I have been told, and I believe it's true, that a cat has to be taught by its mother to be a hunter.  Many years ago in my room in my hippie house me and my pals were smoking a joint.  My cat had had a litter maybe a month previous and they were snuggled in a corner of my room, but where was Mom?  Oh there she was trotting in holding a struggling squealing bird in her mouth.  She took it right to the nest and set it down before her wide-eyed kittens,  

We all believed in peace and love of course, but we also believed in Mother Nature.  What to do, what to do?  One of us stood up and walked out of the room and the rest of us followed and we finished the joint in the backyard,  When I came back there were  a few feathers and some lessons learned in the walnut brains of the kittens.  I expect they all grew up to be good hunters.

A couple years later I gave one of her litter to my sister, who moved to California and left the cat in my parents' house on Homan Avenue.  I had mice.  At first I thought they were cute.  Well they were cute but they also made quite a racket, scratching around inside the walls or wherever and I took that cat back to Champaign, and maybe a week later there was dead mouse laid out carefully beside her food dish.  I guess Mom had taught her well.

The cat I got from the shelter when I first moved into my tower caught a few birds that ventured onto my balcony.  I was able to save all but one of them.  There is no feeling like standing on your balcony with cupped hands, and opening them and having a bird fly free into God's blue heavens.  The one that didn't get rescued was entombed in one of my tomato pots.

My current crew were apparently not taught.  I was a little worried because I have some flax socks hanging from my railings to feed the house finches that drop by.  My new kitties did that teeth chattering thing when viewing them from inside the window and once they got out they appeared to stalk them, but after a few steps they stopped and shook their furry heads like, what am I doing, and they didn't know, so they just sniffed some tomatoes and curled up on the balcony floor.  The finches seem to have picked up on that and now no longer flee in terror when a cat steps out, but remain on the railing doing whatever their bird brains (the size of a pea maybe?) tell them what to do.  It is the peaceable kingdom outside my window.

My intention, many paragraphs ago was to expand on whether life was truly nasty, brutal, and short before we developed governments, but you know how it is when you get to talking about cats.  Makes em want to hunt up videos once this post is over.

Cards and Cats

The last time we discussed the card issue I posted a copy of the Republican Party membership card, and also reported that the Democratic Party of Cook County doesn't issue cards, but that their members are all enrolled on a list.  You have to pay something to get the Republican card, and one way you can get on the Democrat's list is to give them money.  Maybe they call it a donation rather than dues, but it's the same difference.  My main point is that you can't become a member of any organization by unilaterally declaring that you are one.  You have to apply and they have to accept your application.  If the Democratic Party doesn't have Uncle Ken's name on their list, he is not a member.  Ipso facto, case closed.

There are three ways to keep cats: inside, outside, or inside/outside.  Inside cats are usually not comfortable outdoors and, if they get out accidently, bad things can happen to them.  Outside cats, sometimes called "barn cats", are usually not comfortable indoors and some of them will not tolerate being handled by humans.  Inside/outside cats are comfortable in both domains, although they are known to linger in an open doorway for an inordinate amount of time trying to make up their mind if they really want to cross over into their alternate habitat.  Inside cats probably make the best pets, but they seldom are useful for mouse control.  If mice have the free run of your house, it will take more than a cat to get rid of them.  Outside cats are the better mousers, especially if you don't feed them excessively.  One would think that inside/outside cats provide the best of both worlds, but one drawback is that they occasionally bring outside mice home with them, and those mice are not always dead.  I saw something on TV once that said feral cats bring home live mice to teach their kittens how to hunt, and it may be that inside/outside cats are following this instinctual imperative.  Another theory is that they think they are bringing you a present, I suppose in gratitude for all the food you provide for them.

Speaking of food, if you feed your cats outside, they will likely invite other cats over for dinner.  This is usually not a problem with barn cats because they tend to have short lifespans, and you almost can't have too many barn cats.  With inside/outside cats, if your cat is not neutered and one of their visitors is of the opposite gender, there will be kittens.  Kittens are cute when they're little, but they soon grow up and have kittens of their own.  When most wild animals grow up, they disperse and establish new territories in which to make babies of their own.  With cats, not so much.  While each successive generation becomes more wild and unapproachable, they still hang around the house, eating your original cat's food and anything else they can drag home from the surrounding countryside.  After a while, the property starts to smell really bad, and something has to be done.  As I said, these cats are generally unapproachable, but they will readily enter a cage trap, provided by your local animal control agency,  that has been baited with ham, or so I have been told.

Get a cat Beagles

I hate this argument about whether you have to pay dues or carry a card to belong to a political party, because it always ends up with Beagles sez vs Uncle Ken sez, and if there is any research to be done it has to be done by Uncle Ken and that cuts into his pontificating time.  Anyway I googled do democrats pay dues and the only thing there was an article from The Hill where office holding dems are supposed to pay dues to the central party, but according to the article many don't. 

There.  If Beagles wants to argue that you have to pay dues or carry a card, he can present his internet search results.  Myself I am, done with it.

Cheboyganites, I don't know, sounds like some rare earth element.  But I guess everybody has the right to call themselves what they want to, which is largely negated by the right of all others to call them what they want to, as is illustrated by our discussion of the names of countries. 

D-Con (snort).  Get yourself a cat and you will have a charming companion and you won't be despoiling Beaglesonia with that awful diphenadione.


So Old Dog admits to watching The Apprentice also.  I never caught the show with Omarosa on it, but for the most part the contestants were loathsome, but none more than their king, and that is when he was theoretically a liberal dem.  Apparently Omarosa got her ordination from some church she attended, well those Baptists are pretty independent, each church its own freehold.  I saw something there about her being married to the preacher, but I was elbow deep in slime just from doing that research so I pulled out before I could ascertain the details.  It does seem like she will be getting a lot of attention in the near future.  Sarah complained that her book was getting too much coverage and some wag said it wouldn't if Trump didn't tweet about it, and I believe she was struck dumb for a few seconds.

Or could it be that nda.  I think that is the bigger issue and it seems to be getting some legs.  I think it will be bigger than this N-word on tape thing.  I'm sure his supporters have no problem with that, and if he is caught in yet another lie (gasp), so what?  Likely he will claim the tape is doctored which seems to be the White House strategy of late.

Czechs and Balances

I never heard of a political party that didn't charge its members dues, but then I never joined the Democrats.  I don't think you can be a member of any organization just because you say so, you have to be accepted and enrolled.  There must be some kind of Democratic Party headquarters in Chicago.  You could go there and ask them about it.

People from Cheboygan are called "Cheboyganites".

When I was a kid most, if not all, of the Czechs I knew called themselves "Bohemians", but my mother told me that the folks in the Old Country called themselves "Czechs", and their country was called something that sounded like "Checky", but I don't know how it was spelled.  I do know that the inverted "v" over the letter "c" makes it sound like "ch".  Without that mark, "c" is pronounced "ts".  There is no "c" sound in the Czech language.  I learned later that "Bohemia" is actually what the ancient Romans called the country because, when they first made contact, it was inhabited by the Bohii tribe. That tribe went extinct before the Czechs arrived, but the name stuck for centuries afterwards.

I buy my diesel fuel at the local gas station five gallons at a time.  I have been told that I could buy it in 55 gallon drums from a distributor and get out of paying the highway tax on it, but a 55 gallon drum would last about a year, and it's not a good idea to store fuel that long because condensation might water it down.  A five gallon can used to last about a month in my old tractor, but this one burns it a little faster because it has a bigger engine and power steering.  I think my old tractor had a three or four gallon fuel tank, and I always ran out of gas before the tractor did.

I have always practiced the "composting in place" method.  If some tree branches end up blocking my way, I push them off to the side but, other than that, everything rots where it falls.  That's the way Mother Nature does it, so it's good enough for me.  We don't really have a lawn. Lawns are for people who don't have enough land to practice agriculture or forestry.   I mow the areas I don't want reverting to forest once a year with the tractor, and I run a weedwhacker around the house two or three times a year, depending on how much rain we get.

The only snakes I have ever seen around here are common garter snakes.  We get a few mice in the garage and the barn from time to time, but D-Con makes short work of them.      

 

The game of the name

...and z's, we love z's, I'm surprised we just have one.

Ah, but you don't; there are two forms of 'Z' in the Czech alphabet, one of them has a little mark on it; I don't know what the mark is called but the two versions of Z are pronounced differently, I guess.  The people of the Czech Republic don't use a Z when referring to their own country; they have a 'C' with that little mark on it: Česká republika.

The spelling of a nation's name depends a lot on what alphabet is being used and sometimes the names are completely different than what we use in English.  Consider these  examples: Deutschland, Norge, Suomi, Sverige, Nihon, and Österreich.  In English they are Germany, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Japan, and Austria (translations courtesy of Google Translate).  It seems odd that we give different names than the nations give themselves.  This little foray into names and alphabets led me to a new word, endonym, and a cool map.  Just what I need, another rabbit hole to dive into.

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That's an admirable tractor, Mr. Beagles.  I went to the dealer site you mentioned a few months back and checked out your model; not a toy by any means.  Since it's a diesel I am curious about how you handle the fuel situation; do you have a big tank onsite for the diesel fuel or do you just use smaller containers to be filled as needed at the local filling station?  A six gallon tank sounds small to me but it's probably enough for a full day's work.

Once you are done mowing do you just leave it there to decompose naturally or do you rake it up and mulch it at another location?   It must be fascinating to see how different critters show up depending on the length of the wild grasses.  You haven't mentioned snakes yet which leads me to think that you don't have many moles, mice or other small rodents hanging around.  Maybe the owls and eagles snap them up before the snakes can get to them.

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That Omarosa is quite a character.  I remember watching the first season of The Apprentice and I don't know if it was the editing but she came across as an opportunistic diva with a touch of viper.  She hasn't changed much but it's curious how Trump kept hiring her after he fired her so many times.  The oddest thing to me is that she is an ordained Baptist minister; you would think that she would be better behaved but I don't know much about Baptists.

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I think you can become a card carrying member of any political party if you show up at their headquarters and say you want to join  but it won't be easy or cheap, I suspect.  There will be volunteer work involved, probably some fund raising, and a lot of time out hustling the locals for their vote.  I think our local precinct captains were card carrying members, always showing up near election time asking if we needed anything like garbage cans or tree trimming.  But that was in my childhood neighborhood when Richard J. was ruling the roost, and he ran a tight ship.  Shit got done, streets got cleaned, and pals got hired, if you were living in the right neighborhood.