on the edge of the big weekend

 I have a group of old Champaign beer drinking buddies who are all Cub fans and we email each other during the season, and sometimes during the off season and I know that more than one of them have big yards with birdfeeders so I consider them my panel of experts,

I got that phrase from Jimmy Swaggert who in one of his phases had maybe five people seated behind a counter and behind them was a big map of the world, and all of them were as ignorant as he was and mostly they just said "That's right Jimmy, you're so smart," (remind you of anybody?), and he called them his panel of experts.  Have we ever discussed televangelists?  Might be an interesting topic, but not for now.

Anyway I consulted my panel of experts and they were unanimous that this was no big deal.  All birds, like all humans, had certain bad habits, and as birds go, sparrows are not any worse than any others, so I guess I will just learn to live with them.

I don't have any furnace stories.  I guess I am pretty lucky because I lived in a lot of dumps in my Champaign hippie days, but I was mostly toasty warm enough in the winter and none of them ever blew up on me.  In fact you hardly ever hear of furnaces blowing up.  I reckon they have some kind of fail safe feature where if something is going wrong they shut down rather than blow up.  Seems a little dangerous though getting the furnace going while the inhabitant was sound asleep.

I have a melted plastic electrical appliance story though in this case it was a tv and not a clock.  When I was down in southern Illinois, I had friends who were a few years younger than me and among them were a young married couple 

(It was a teenage wedding, and the old folks wished them well

You could see that Pierre did truly love the mademoiselle

And now the young monsieur and madame have rung the chapel bell
"C'est la vie", say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell

They furnished off an apartment with a two room Roebuck sale
The coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale
But when Pierre found work, the little money comin' worked out well
"C'est la vie", say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell

They had a hi-fi phono, boy, did they let it blast
Seven hundred little records, all rock, rhythm and jazz
But when the sun went down, the rapid tempo of the music fell
"C'est la vie", say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell

They bought a souped-up jitney, 'twas a cherry red '53
They drove it down to Orleans to celebrate the anniversary
It was there that Pierre was married to the lovely mademoiselle

"C'est la vie", say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell) 

living in a tiny rented house where their parents had loaned them an old tv so they could have some entertainment.  Of course the entertainment that they really liked was having all their beer drinking, pot smoking, buddies over for a party.  In the midst of the good times the tv had been moved from wherever it was to a radiator, and at some point in the beer and pot fog somebody looked over and saw the tv all melted.  Pretty cool.

We had a bungalow with a porch just as Beagles describes, but I had never heard of catching a sleeping sparrow, so I never tried it.  One has to wonder why would somebody do that, but I suppose if you were having a party such as the one in the last paragraph that would have seemed like a good idea.

Well Gentlemen, quite the weekend ahead of us.  Halloween tomorrow and the next morning we will wake to an extra hour that we can spend any way we choose, which will probably be to sleep it away and that evening well it will get dark awfully early so that we can contemplate the long pitiless winter ahead.  Monday will be election eve, and Tuesday will be The Election itself.  If all goes as predicted (and I know these predictions have been wrong before), Florida will fall around eight or nine and our long crazy nightmare will be over, and with the craziness gone we may be able to again discuss politics in a calm and reasoned manner.

Up and Running

 Our new furnace is up and running.  There were some problems with the installation, but the guy was able to do a temporary fix that should see us through till next week when the new parts will be here.  There were actually two guys, one the owner and one an employee.  I was impressed with their technical skill and work ethic, and would recommend them to anybody.  

I found out why all the plumbing and heating people are so swamped with work these days.  It seems they are still trying to catch up from last spring's lockdown.  They were not allowed to do any new installations for a month, only emergency repairs.  The reason it was only a month is that the construction trades, which were similarly affected, sued our governor over it. This was even before our legislature filed their own lawsuit.  I don't think the construction suit ever got off the ground because Queen Gretchen graciously lifted their restrictions out of the goodness of her heart.  The lawsuit had nothing to do with it.  It does seem funny, though, that they haven't been ale to catch up a month's worth of work in the ensuing six months, but that's the story I got from one of the furnace guys. 

Meltdown at Old Orchard

 The guy called me yesterday and installed my new furnace today.  It's not up and running yet because he needs to order a couple of parts, but he assured me he could get overnight delivery on them and finish the job tomorrow.  I'm glad he decided to replace the whole furnace straight off instead of just replacing the chimney.  Turned out that there was nothing wrong with the chimney anyway, so it must have been the furnace after all.  It's 20 years old, which is about as long as that model usually lasts.  

My first winter in Cheboygan, I was living alone in an old rented trailer in the Old Orchard trailer court.  It was heated with an old fuel oil furnace, the kind with a pilot light and a minimum of electronics.  That kind lasted longer, but I guess they weren't as efficient or safe.

I came home from working the midnight shift one cold morning to find that the trailer was almost as cold on the inside as the outside temp, which was around zero.  I turned the thermostat up all the way but nothing happened.  Then I checked the pilot light and it was out.  I tried to relight it without success, so I went over to my landlord Stan, who lived right across the driveway from me, and asked him if there was some trick to it.  He said that the fuel oil tank was probably empty.  He had a guy who came around once a month and topped it off but, with the cold weather we had been having, it probably ran out early.  Stan said he would call the guy and he should be there within a couple hours.  After the oil was delivered, Stan said he would come in and light the pilot light for me, trying not to wake me up because he knew I would be tired after working midnights.

I went back to the trailer, took off my clothes, and donned a pair of long johns and my warm hunting socks.  Then I crawled under a pile of blankets and coats, pulling the covers over my head.  When I awoke later, I didn't know where I was at first.  It was so hot and dark under there that I thought I might have died and went to Hell.  Then I remembered the furnace and thought the trailer might be on fire.  Turned out it was none of the above, I had just failed to turn the thermostat back down to a normal setting and Stan hadn't noticed that it was turned up all the way.  I turned it right off and the trailer quickly cooled down, whereupon I put it back to its usual setting.  

There was a cheap plastic clock on the cheap panel wall that separated the furnace from the kitchen, and it had melted.  The numbers, the hands, and the decorative trim were all melty and droopy, just like a clock in one of those Salvador Dali paintings.  Since it was Stan's clock, I offered to give it back to him, but he didn't want it because it didn't work anymore.  I thought it might have some artistic value.  If people will pay good money for a painting of a melted clock, I thought they might pay even more for a real melted clock, but Stan didn't think so.  I kept it for a long time, but I seem to remember that I threw it away eventually.  I wish I had it now because Uncle Ken, being an artist himself, might be able to appraise it's true value.

Speaking of Uncle Ken, the sparrows he is dealing with are probably English sparrows, sometimes called house sparrows.  There are several other sparrow species that are commonly grouped together under the heading of song sparrows.  English sparrows are ubiquitous in urban neighborhoods, but we don't see a lot of them in Beaglesonia.  If you go to the front porch of one of those bungalows, they usually have two square brick pillars that support the porch roof.  The capstone on the pillar is a little larger than whatever it is that sits on top of it.  If you go there at night and stick your hand into the extra space above the capstone, you can often catch a sleeping sparrow.  My father showed me this trick once, but I was never tempted to try it myself.  The prospect of sticking my hand into a blind hole never appealed to me.

trouble in paradise 2

 That didn't sound so bad at first, house sparrow has a kind of biblical ring, God noting the fall of the sparrow.  See I was thinking that was biblical, but a google tells me it comes from Shakespeare, still, small and drab and meek and mild, it sounds like the kind of bird that would warm His heart.

Not so much, small and drab, but meek and mild, hardly.  When I went to the google I learned that it is an evil bird hated by many, one of the first pages that showed up wanted to know if it was okay to kill sparrows, and the answer seemed to be, doesn't do any good, they just keep coming back.  Here in the states it is an invasive bird.  And it kills other birds.  Invades their nests, pecks their eggs and takes it over.

Maybe because bluebirds have a big lobby, it seems like they specifically kill bluebirds.  I asked directly if it killed finches and didn't get a direct answer.  

And besides all that I am not to crazy about the way they have taken over my balcony party, seemingly partying, hardy, all daylight long,  When I step out onto my balcony the finches were all like "Oh my goodness," and flying off, and these guys are more like what do you want fatso, and standing their ground until I walk right at them, and looking over my shoulder as they fly to the next balcony in a light Bavarian accent, I'll be back.

I could just stop putting food out, but I wonder what good that would do.  If they left that wouldn't mean the finches would necessarily return, and even if they did and I put out food again, wouldn't the sparrows come right back?

Maybe I could get used to them, if a bit too raucous for my delicate finch-honed fancy, they do seem merry enough.  And they are birds, and any birds are better than no birds.  And if they are invasive, well so are my beloved morning glories.  And it isn't like this is some pristine prairie, it's downtown Chicago for Chrissake. And if their ways seem brutal that is just the path mother nature made for them.  I guess I shall have to learn to live with them.

I'm glad that Old Dog's memories mesh so closely with mine.  I had thought that the guys somehow shoveled it out of the truck, but that laying it down at the curb makes more sense, but I don't remember coal dust on the curb, the kind of thing that interests a young lad.  And I remember the steam engines from my youth pushing around freight cars in the Grand Trunk yards by 55th and St Louis.  And those huge engines are something else, and now about those streamlined versions of the art deco era?

More beautiful engines were never made.

Jews and Muslims

 I was using modern terminology.  Actually, the Jews were not called Jews in the Old Testament, they were called Israelites or the Children of Israel.  Jacob was the son of Isaac until he had his name changed to Israel after a wrestling match with an angel.  Israel is translated as "he who contends (or struggles) with God".  This is confusing to me because Jacob struggled with an angel, not with God Himself.  Be that as it may, Israel had 12 sons which were the origin of the 12 tribes of Israel.  Actually, Jacob kind of stole the birthright from his older brother Esau, but that's another story.  I don't think the Arabs were called Arabs in the Old Testament either.  There are many tribes and peoples mentioned, and I think at least some of them were the ancestors of today's Arabs, but I'm not sure about that.  

The Muslim thing is a little more complicated.  The Muslims of today trace their origin back to Abraham as do the Jews. The Koran, however, doesn't mention the split between Isaac and Ishmael.  It talks about both brothers as if they never diverged, so I guess they consider themselves to be the descendants of both of them.  I think they view the Jews as a renegade people that went astray from the true religion, and that Mohammed tried to win everybody back to it.  The ones that returned became the Muslims of today, and the ones that didn't became the Jews and the Christians of today.  

I don't think that masturbation is mentioned in the Bible.  Lots of people think that the story of Onan is about masturbation, but that's not what I got out of it.  Onan's sin was refusing to father a child in his dead brother's name according to the custom of the time.  The spilling of the semen on the ground was incidental.  

I've got another furnace story to tell, but it's kind of long. Maybe tomorrow.

Hot air and steam

Uncle Ken's recollection of the "octopus" furnace lured me down a delightful rabbit hole of my own childhood memories of basement mysteries.  Everybody called that type of furnace an "octopus," even my father, the furnace fixin' steamfitter.  More correctly, it is a gravity furnace, elegant in it's simplicity.  No fans or blowers, just the gentle action of cold air descending and hot air rising will heat your building, as long as it's only one or two stories.  Gravity furnaces are quiet, cheap to operate because coal was inexpensive (and still is), but terribly inefficient.  If you are serious about heating a building steam is the answer.

I would wager that any large building in Chicago that was built before 1950 is heated by steam.  There is a progression of the heat source for the steam; first coal, then fuel oil, and finally, natural gas.  That's the order in which my childhood home's furnace was upgraded until the old boiler proved too difficult to repair and a newer, smaller but more efficient, unit was installed.

When we had coal delivered, at least a couple of tons at a time, a truck would dump the coal in the street along the curb and a black guy (always a black guy) would take his shovel, fill a wheelbarrow, and use an old plank to get over the curb and then on to the basement window that led to the coal bin.  There were a lot of different coal companies until the 60s and delivery methods varied depending on the building  type.  Chutes were common if the trucks had access but the oddest method I saw was with the coal in canvas bags, bigger than a shopping bag, that were neatly stacked in the back of a truck and the delivery guy would hump them, one at a time, to the coal bin where he would empty the bag.  Hump, dump, repeat until the job was done.

This ruminating about furnaces got me wondering about coal, a dirty word nowadays.  It's not illegal in most places although it is heavily regulated, but if you want the best BTUs for the buck, coal may be the answer.  You can even get it on Amazon but other source are much cheaper.  It's still available in different grades, like bituminous and anthracite but it also comes in different sizes which I wasn't aware of.  The largest size is steam, and it ranges from 4.5 to 6 inches in size.  The smallest size is No. 3 Buckwheat which is about an eighth inch in size.  Seems kind of small to me but then I remembered a field trip my sixth grade class took to the Commonwealth Edison generating plant at Addison and California.  That was a huge place, with gigantic piles of coal just waiting to be burned to help feed the steam turbines.  Their furnaces used No. 3 Buckwheat, or maybe something even smaller, and they used a lot of it.

The rabbit hole went deeper.  Coal and steam led me to the final destination of steam locomotives and the mesmerizing videos on YouTube. I didn't realize that steam engines in the United States reached their peak as late as the late 40s/early 50s.  Some of those beasts are still running and their raw power is almost visceral.  Check out "Union Pacific Big Boy" on YouTube if you have any doubts.

 

 

trouble in paradise

 I was wondering about the adultery thing, whether it came before or after the Ten Commandments, I just went with it, knowing that our biblical scholar would set me straight. That thing about Isaac becoming the father of the jews and Ishmael of the muslims kind of threw me though, as at the time that the bible was being written there were no muslims.  Maybe Beagles means arabs, but still it doesn't sound like something that came out of the bible.  

Yoiks, killed outright by a bolt of lightning, and not even for masturbation but coitus interuptus, a stern god indeed, but then it makes you wonder if masturbation was ok?  Is it mentioned somewhere else in the bible?

But there is trouble in paradise, by which I mean my balcony.  When I lived in Texas I had a tiny little balcony in the back of my apartment which I loved, and so when I realized I was never going to get out of Chicago alive and went condo hunting, one of the things I looked for was a balcony.  Marina City certainly fit the bill in that the balconies are 180 sq ft, about a quarter again the size of the whole condo.  

This was great.  I had had a garden maybe fifteen years earlier in Champaign and it was great, but no place I lived after that had access to such a thing, and now here it was.  I put out maybe five pots the first spring after I moved in, and every year I added two or three more, and now they line the railing and are two deep in some places.

I grew tomatoes, hot peppers, a motley assortment of cheap flowers.  It was okay.  Even up here I got weeds, but I was generally pretty tolerant, as long as they didn't seem to be crowding my regular plants I let them live.  Maybe ten years ago I noticed a little fellow who once grown out of the pot reached for the railing and twined around and around it.  What manner of fellow was this?  On one of my walks through the city I came across a similar fellow twining around a fencepost, and when I traced the vine upwards there was beautiful flower, a morning glory.  

Well dadgum it, and maybe a week later my own little guy started putting out flowers, and flowers and flowers, like a machine gun one after another, because as I am sure the dawgs know a morning flower flower lasts but a day.  Anyway I was well pleased with him, and the next spring I was wondering if I should buy some morning glory seeds when bam, I saw them sprouting out all over my balcony, the sons and daughters of that first little guy who had spilled his seed all over my land of pots.  

Tough little guys too.  I likened them to the asiatic hordes on their short ponies, they gave the tomatoes, normally the big bullies of the garden a run for the money.  Bragging to my fellow gardeners about them, I noticed that their smiles had turned upside down to frowns.  Weeds, was the word that came out of their sneering mouths, goddamn weeds, if ever the devil spawn showed up in their edenic gardens they snuffed it out at first sight, and were ever vigilant against it.

Well you don't say, fuck them, I loved my morning glories.  Ladies love outlaws and Ken loves his morning glories.  

One spring I added sunflowers to my balcony flora, thinking how nice it would be to see the purple morning glories ascending the stalk towards the big yellow flowers.  And that worked out just fine, but there was another bonus, house finches.

They were attracted to the seeds in the sunflowers.  And when I saw them hanging around, of course I went out to the hardware store and bought a big bag of birdseed.  I have had them for about four years now.  Delightful little fellows and fellowettes, pretty of song and light on their feet.  I suspect they have somewhere else to dine because they come and they go.  This spring I was worried about them because of the covid.  The worry started with the pigeons, that whole world of city sidewalks once strewn with tasty human debris was now empty. and so now they would have to forage the feed of other birds who would now have to forage the feed of other birds, and up until my poor finchies must be having a tough time of it.

And sure enough when I put out the first flax sock of spring they were all over it, famished I assumed.  After a week or two they were plump and restless. hanging around for a few weeks, gone for a few, then back again, their usual pattern.

I was used to the regular pattern. so I didn't pay it much mind, but then maybe three weeks ago I noticed that they were back, and they seemed plumper, and there were more of them, seven or eight, while previously there had never seemed to be more than four or five, and instead of perching primly on the railing having a bite and then flying off, they were stomping all over the balcony and they were hanging out for it seemed like all day.

So I took a closer look and I discovered that they were sparrows, house sparrows!

To be continued

Furnace Update

 A guy came out and looked at my furnace on Friday.  It was a guy I had called before who had put me on his waiting list, estimating it would be two or three weeks.  I thought I could do better than that, but I couldn't, so I called him back to make sure I was still on his list.  He called me back the next day and came over.  I think he sandwiched me in between his other customers because he thought it might be a quick fix.  Well, it wasn't.  He is going to have to replace a major component and, if that doesn't work, the whole furnace, and he won't have time to do that for another week or so.  That's okay, I'm just happy that he came out at all.  Meanwhile, the wood furnace is keeping up for now.

The day before the guy called me, I saw a big billboard sign at the edge of town.  It was a plumbing and heating outfit in Alanson, some 30 miles from here, advertising for help.  I was planning to call them next before my guy called me back.  It probably wouldn't have done me any good, though, if they are so desperate that they have to look all the way to Cheboygan for help.  My guy told me that somebody called him from Alpena, some 90 miles away, asking if he could come over and fix their furnace.  Alpena is a much larger city than Cheboygan, and it appears that their plumbing and heating people are just as swamped as our guys.  I have never heard of anything like this before.  I suppose it's related to COVID, since everything else seems to be, but I don't know how.  

Abraham and Onan

Long before God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, Abraham was encouraged by his wife Sarah to sleep with her handmaiden Haggar.  There was nothing kinky about it, it was all about producing a male heir, which was a really big deal in those days.  At the age of 80, Sarah was well past her child bearing years and figured that an illegitimate son was better than no son at all.  Abraham and Haggar begot Ishmael, and then a miracle happened, Abraham and Sarah begot Isaac.  Being the first born, Ishmael was in line to inherit even though he was illegitimate, and Haggar kept rubbing it in Sarah's face.  To resolve this, Sarah asked Abraham to banish Haggar and her little bastard from the camp.  Abraham was reluctant to do this until God told him to go ahead, promising to take care of Ishmael and his mother and to make them the progenitors of a mighty nation.  So it came to pass that Isaac became the father of the Jews and Ishmael became the father of the Muslims, while Abraham is regarded as the father of them both even unto this day.

I seem to remember that Onan was indeed punished for his sin, struck dead by a bolt of lightning or something like that.  Contrary to popular belief, however, Onan's sin was not masturbation, it was coitus interruptus.  It was the custom in those days for the brother of a married man who died childless to beget a son with the widow in his dead brother's name.  Onan never did like his brother and didn't want to beget a son in his name, so he withdrew at the last moment and "spilled the semen on the ground".

Immanuel Kant

 I was meaning to follow up on my post of earlier this week about, furnaces, Davy Crockett, and Immanuel Kant, but I don't think Kant would be much of a hit with the dawgs.  Well frankly I don't know much about Immanuel Kant myself, that thing about not lying even if it means leading the thugs to your friend, is pretty much it.  

Well there is this thing about higher laws like not lying and Thou shalt not kill for instance.  But of course the Israelis who Moses handed down the laws to were killing people all the time, and it's not like they were being punished for it, I believe God was quite pleased with it, even helping out the Israelis from time to time.  Of course at the time God was Jehovah and pretty much the personal god of the Israelis, so people outside that sphere I don't think it mattered that much.

There was adultery.  You would think that that was one you could not fudge, but wasn't there some guy who got permission to sleep with the maid because his wife was barren?  I don't know if that was a good thing or if he got punished for it, I'll leave it to the biblical scholar among us.

And wasn't there a guy who got in trouble for spilling his seed?  Yoicks.  But that's not a Commandment per se, and I don't think he got in big trouble for it.

But I have drifted.  I was speaking about lying.  There is an experiment where the guy one is in a room with a very young kid and he shows him a piece of candy which he will give to the kid in just a minute but first he has to step out a bit, and he puts the candy in a box and leaves the room.  Guy two steps in and says, "Boy am I hungry. is there any candy in the room that I can eat?"  and the kid opens the box and shows him the candy.

The thing is a kid at that early stage of life has not learned that different people have different view points on things, and basically he believes that everybody knows everything that is going on and therefore guy two knows the candy is in the box, so it would be pointless to say it wasn't.

But eventually the kid figures out that everybody does not know everything that happens.  For instance when he filches from Mom's box of chocolate, he knows that she was in the basement washing clothes,so she couldn't possibly know he did it.  All he has to do to get away with it is to tell a lie.  What a wonderful world this is turning out to be.  However lying is like kissing ass, it's not enough to do it, you have to do it well.  That's why we have all those kids on that funny video show, where the kid's face is smeared with chocolate telling Mom he was nowhere near that box of chocolates, or that his teddy bear ate them.

Another study on lying that I remember is that guy one tells the kid to do him a favor, and tell a little lie to guy two about something.  The kids are then rated on how good a liar they are, and it turns out the kids who are the best liars are also the leaders in their little group of kids.

Since there was a debate last night some might suspect that I am going to bring up our lying president.  Well I guess I just have, but what I wanted to say was that he lies a lot, but he is not a good liar.  Bill Clinton, now there was a superb liar.

I know the title indicated that I would be talking about Immanuel Kant, but you know what?  I lied.

Daddy's Little Helper

I'm not mad or bored or anything like that.  The reason I didn't post the last couple of evenings is that I wasn't feeling well and went to bed early.  It was probably from the stress of calling all over two counties trying to find somebody to come out and fix our furnace.  Tomorrow I plan to extend my search out to at least one other county.  

I don't remember seeing coal at our house on 51st Street.  I remember that we had a fuel oil tank out in the yard, and then one day I noticed that it was gone and a natural gas meter had sprouted up against a wall of the house.  I don't remember seeing it installed, I just noticed it one day and asked my parents what it was.  

When we still had the fuel oil tank, it fed a small heater in the garage in addition to the main furnace in the basement of the house.  I didn't know how either of them worked, I just knew that they produced heat.  We seldom kept a car in the garage because it was usually filled up with some project that my dad was working on.  I remember sweeping up after one of those projects and wondering what to do with the sweepings, which were mostly sawdust and small bits of wood.  I had seen my grandmother in Michigan putting wood into the old fashioned range that she still used for most of her cooking, so I shoveled my sweepings into the heater in the garage.  It wasn't running at the time and I didn't know how to start it up, which turned out to be a good thing.  Some time later, when my dad went to start up the heater, he found all that stuff inside and decided that it was time to explain the difference between a wood heater and a fuel oil heater to me.  He wasn't mad at me because I hadn't known any better, but he made sure that I would never make that mistake again.  Another time he found it necessary to explain the difference between a floor drain and a garbage can.  I must have been pretty young at the time, but that was my first experience with plumbing and heating technology.  

My only experience with coal came much later in the army.  Each barracks building had both a coal fired furnace and a coal fired water heater.  Since we were training in Georgia during the months of July and August, they didn't think we needed the extensive training that they usually gave to the guys assigned to furnace detail, so they gave us a quickie course that covered just the water heaters.  I must have fallen asleep because I didn't remember much of the class, but I wasn't worried because, as a former Boy Scout, I already knew how to build a camp fire.  

When I went to build my first fire, I was confronted with a bunch of gadgets on the unit, and I had no idea what they were for.  They didn't provide us with any kindling, so I had to go scrounge some up from the trash cans behind the mess hall.  I managed to get a simmering fire started in the first heater, and then went out to look for some more kindling because I had three more units to fire up.  There was no more kindling to be found, so I planned to get some coals out of the first unit and carry them on a shovel to the other three.  When I opened the firebox door, there was this big poof that blew me back against the wall and thoroughly coated me with ashes and soot.  Years later, I learned that a wood stove will poof like that when the fire isn't getting enough air, and then suddenly it does, but I have never seen a wood fire poof like that coal fire did.  After reinstalling the firebox door, I gave up and went back to the barracks for a cold shower and some much needed rest.  

Apparently I wasn't the only one who had trouble with those heaters, because we only had hot water in the barracks one time, but nobody cared because it was so stinking hot in Georgia that a cold shower at the end of the day was refreshing.  The one time we had hot water, this big colored guy was on duty.  It only took him an hour or so to fire up all four units, and he came back as clean as he left.  When asked him about it, he said that he had done that sort of thing for a living back in civilian life and it was easy once you knew how.

  

Davy Crockett

 We were relatively late in getting a tv.  I remember other kids at Tonti coming back from lunch, almost all kids went home for lunch, seems so odd nowadays, and talking excitedly about Uncle Johnny Coons, and The Little Rascals, and wondering what the wonder was.  People next door got one before us, we used to sneak up onto their porch and watch it through the window.  And then finally our uncool, unhip, parents got one.

It was so cool,we sat around all evening, me with my back against the register, hogging the heat until I was chased from it and watched.  I knew what was on every channel every hour of every day of the week and that was not unusual.

And then the word came down that a new show was going to be taking to the airwaves, The Mickey Mouse Club.  Wowie zowie, a show just for us kids.  How cool was that?

In addition to the mouseketeers walking around and dancing or singing and whatever (and Annette Funicello's little breasts budding) they showed like cartoons and shows, and one of the first shows was Davy Crockett.

I suppose they could have used Daniel Boone, but we kids had already heard about Daniel Boone in school, one of the pioneers, and frankly pioneers were boring, but Davy Crockett here was a brand new hero.

And along with Davy Crockett came a whole range of merchandise, coonskin caps of course, but even stuff like Davy Crockett yoyos, anything. 

And here is a thing I've read about, but not done proper research on, it was the first emergence of the boomers.  Before this if a kid got anything it was because their parents got it for him,  Kids didn't have any money and generally they were happy with whatever they got.  But now we had television, the social media of the day, and we could see our own shows, and we were maybe a little spoiled I think.  The times were fat after the war and maybe our folks splurged a bit on our allowances.  

And Madison Avenue, those hucksters, thought why not skip the parents and sell directly to the kids?  In the toy section of the store half of it was given over to Davy Crockett merchandise.

We grew up listening to our parents' music, Snooky Lanson and The Hit Parade, rather lame music in retrospect but that was all we had, until Elvis.  Suddenly we had our own music, and best of all possible worlds our parents hated it,

And then came the war, and instead of marching off dutifully as those before us had done, we didn't like it and tried to end it, and so on and so on, spoiled self-centered boomers ruling everything, and even now have Depends ever been so popular?

And what of Davy Crockett, the guy who started everything, though he was more likely effect than cause, we hardly ever think of him,

the furnace on Homan Avenue

 It was like an octopus. It stood fat and squat in the back side of the basement where upstairs were the kitchen and the bathroom while way in front was of course the front room.  It's tentacles reached even there and when we got our television and all sat around the front room watching the blue tinged hypnotist, I would sidle down to the floor and across it and plant myself right against the register until Mom noticed and called out, "Kenny, stop hogging the heat."  This was followed by some admonition that I would ruin my kidneys.

It was fed on coal.  I don't know how many times a day Dad had to go down there and shovel coal, but I'm sure to him it was way too many, until one day we got that modern miracle, the stoker, probably a happier day for Dad than when we got our first tv.

The coal was kept in the coal bin maybe ten full shovel steps from the furnace.  The stoker erased that from Dad's daily routine.  There was a little window on the gangway side of the bin which was actually a coal chute.  In the summertime, I 'm thinking of those broiling mid fifties Julys and Augusts, massive rumbling trucks would thread their way through the tidy-lawned streets of the bungalows and one would stop in front of our house and out of the cab would come big burly black guys.

The only other time we say black guys was taking the fifty-fifth street bus downtown, which after maybe two miles entered the black neighborhood, and they would begin to board the bus.  Their neighborhoods were shabby compared to our neat rows of bungalows.  The word on the street was that these had all once been neat and tidy white neighborhoods until they moved in.  The whites kind of huddled together as the blacks boarded, but I can't remember that there was ever any kind of disturbance.  Mom had warned us kids that they all carried knives and if you called them a nigger they would use it on us.

I don't remember how they got the coal into the wheelbarrows, I suspect there was some kind of raised-bed chute, but once filled it would be rumbled down the gangway and upended at the chute. We kids would watch wide-eyed, but from a little distance because we were a little afraid, though the guys seemed moderately friendly.

They would be sweating up a storm, and then my tiny little mother, the one who told us they all carried knives.  Would walk down the back porch step with tall glasses of cold lemonade for the guys.  Made me happy to see that.

The bin would be filled and ready for winter and used up in the winter ready to be replenished again.  Eventually some of the neighbors switched to gas and then more.  One summer I came back from college and the old octopus was gone and in its place was a slim new gadget.  A vast improvement I am sure, but progress always makes us a little sad.

I know carburetors are long gone.  That is part of the joke.  I have always felt a little unmanly by my lack of knowledge and disinterest in the internal combustion engine and machinery in general.  That's why I bring it up.

Not Your Father's Furnace

 Old Dog is correct, I was not boycotting the Institute, I was just tired of posting the same arguments over and over again.  I intended to resume posting when I found something that captured my interest, and now I have.

Modern furnaces are controlled by electronics.  They work well until they don't, and then it's time to call in the professionals.  These guys go through lots of training and are licensed to perform their work.  As I have been told, only one guy in the whole shop needs to be licensed, and everybody else can be an apprentice.  The shop I have been dealing with for 20 years apparently lost it's licensed guy and they can't find another one.  They can still sell parts, but they can't do any repairs of installations.  The other shops in the area now have jobs booked for several weeks and are not accepting new customers until they get caught up.  One of them put me on a waiting list, another one doesn't keep lists but told me to try again "later".  A couple of them won't even return my calls.  I have been told that they would like to hire more help, but they can't find anybody.  Our retail stores and restaurants have been having this problem for at least a year before the COVID hit the fan, and now it seems to have spread into the skilled trades.  I would be happy to buy a new furnace if it turns out to be necessary, but I am neither physically nor mentally qualified to install it.

Coal furnaces can burn wood, but wood furnaces cannot burn coal because coal generally burns hotter than wood.  The wood furnace we have is no longer in production.  When a guy replaced the blower last year, he had to send all the way to Kentucky for it.  The store that used to sell my wood furnace has replaced it with one that is rated for coal.  I don't need a new wood furnace but, if I ever do, they are the only people I know of who still sell models like mine, the kind that blows into the existing ductwork of your central heating system.  

The truck is fine.  It took some getting used to because of all the electronics in it.  I don't know why anybody needs all that crap, but that's all they sell nowadays.  Motor vehicles haven't had carburetors for a long time, having replaced them with something called "fuel injection".  Small engines like chain saws and lawn mowers still have carburetors, and you have to buy special gas for them because the ethanol they put in regular gas these days dissolves the membranes in carburetors.    

Oh, rats!

I should pay more attention to these posts, or lack of them.  I didn't realize that Mr. Beagles was boycotting the Institute; I thought he was taking a break, not wanting to go over the same-old, same-old.  And I don't blame him for that, not one bit, because I often feel the same way.  Funny thing, though; I can't recall any time that Mr. Beagles expressed disappointment that any of his topics were ignored.  Quite a few of mine have been ignored, too, but I don't mind.  Will complaining about it bring them back to life?  I don't think so but in a different context they may spark more interest in the future.

-----

Take furnaces, for instance, a recent hot topic, har, har.  I had to dig a little but the last time the topic came up was this past March, when Mr. Beagles mentioned that the gas furnace was humming along nicely.  Maybe not really humming, they should be pretty quiet except for fan motors and stuff like that, but you get the idea.  You have to go back another year to the time of the roof leak when the furnace needed repair, so all in all, the furnace seemed pretty reliable.

But now it's inoperable, broke, defunct, or on the fritz and I got to ask myself, "Hmmmm?"  Sounds like an interesting challenge to me, but not a trivial problem or something to be taken lightly.  The Googler revealed a lot of info after a search for "gas furnace" but I don't know what Mr. Beagles considers an acceptable risk, even if it's only to take a close peek at the unit.  Mistakes with the combination of gas and electricity can be fatal and insurance won't cover damage caused by the incompetent homeowner, will it?  I'm surprised that it's so difficult to get a repair guy to check it out, especially in that neck of the woods, er, swamp.  I bet if you said you wanted to buy a new furnace they would be there in a heartbeat.

And how's that new truck working out for you, Mr. Beagles, does it meet or exceed your expectations?  No big dings or dents, I hope.

 -----

Finally, according to Orkin, for the sixth year in a row Chicago is the rattiest city in the United States.  We're #1!  We're #1!

let a thousand topics bloom

When I saw Beagles's headline I thought he was going to bring up Ayn Rand as a new topic, which would have been fine.

There is no need to conceal my name for I am proud of my valiant struggle with the forces of tyranny.  Not unlike that new movie I have just seen, The Trial of the Chicago Seven, which I highly recommend.  Got my blood racing like in days of yore when I have to admit that most of my revolutionary activity took the form of shooting off my mouth in various bars.

But I have to admit that in the heat of my glorious battle for the lights I sometimes saw myself in the heroic mold of those bold protestors, which was dimmed a bit by the realization that I wasn't establishing the worker's paradise, nor even advancing The Liberal Agenda, well maybe just a bit of the latter.

As I recall it was a lively topic, there were many developments, there were a lot of ideas involved, it was something everybody could take an opinion on and exercise the American way of shooting their mouths off.

Beagles's furnace though, not so much.  I'm sorry he's cold of course and his hypothetical wife, but the situation seems more discomfort than life threatening.  The wood furnace might be a bit different.  I remember well our own coal furnace in the basement, and I could tell some tales, which ok I already have, but I could dust them off, dress them a bit differently and present them.  But what of a wood furnace?  Is it just a coal furnace that you put wood into, or does it have a whole different design?

But as a topic it a bit lacking.  That's why I made up that thing about the C13 connecter.  Kind of like hanging around an open car hood with a bunch of cool guys and trying to impress by saying that it is probably the carburetor, 

Anyway it was Beagles who boycotted The Institute for a week because he wanted new topics, and now I bring up four or five and he turns his nose up at them and wants to beat the dead horse of the corona, one of the topics he said he was fed up with during his sojourn away from The Institute.

I guess I would be interested in the wood furnace, not really The 

Good Place,  Immanuel Kant would be nice but the dawgs show no interest in philosophers.  Davy Crockett however, who I said I would do research on over the weekend, and I actually did, was to my surprise an opponent of the pre-Trumpian Andrew Jackson.  He opposed The Indian Removal Act, and would rather shoot game than injuns.  He was a champion of the little guy on the frontier though wiki didn't go into any details on that.

He came from French Huguenot stock, a group that I feel does not get as much attention as it should in those dusty old history books.  His family name was originally de Crocketagne which does not sound like the name of a guy who would be wearing a coonskin cap.

We the Living

I seem to remember one of my esteemed colleagues (We won't mention his name, he knows who he is.) that was so upset about some Christmas lights last year that he spoke of little else for some time.  Where was Davy Crockett when we needed him?

Davy Crockett is dead, Emmanuel Kant is dead, and all the characters portrayed in The Good Place are dead.  Dead people don't need heat, it is we the living who need heat.  I find it hard to focus on dead people, historical or fictional, when I can't find somebody to come fix my furnace.  The wood furnace is working almost too well.  The outside temperature last night rose as the night wore on, reaching 51 degrees before morning.  It got way too hot in the house, which is why we prefer to use the gas furnace this time of year, easy on and easy off.  I guess I shouldn't complain, there must be people around here who have no alternate source of heat if their primary source fails them.  

By the way, this is a joke, right?  

Have you tried reversing the C13 connection and transfusing the Simpson duct with freon?  

You might have had me if you hadn't included freon, which is used in refrigerators and air conditioners, not heating units. 

There was considerable resistance to some of the restrictions imposed during the 1918 pandemic.  If it wasn't as prevalent as we are seeing today, it might have been because the flu virus moved relatively quickly through the country and didn't linger in one location for as long as the COVID does.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Mask_League_of_San_Francisco

Davy Crockett, Immanuel Kant, and The Good Place, and ok furnaces for the thermally minded: Three new topics

 What?  Davy Crockett meant nothing to you?  What kind of red blooded American boy were you?  How about the Wolverine Watchmen, guys right in your backyard and also haters of Gutsy Gretch, you have no opinion on that?  I bring you two new topics and all you have is your furnace?  I am sure it is very interesting to you, but it's not much of a topic for sparking discussion.  Have you tried reversing the C13 connection and transfusing the Simpson duct with freon?  

I am sure that we get a lot of our right and wrong from our families and friends but the primary source is our genes because we are social animals and altruism is beneficial for our survival,  

I've discovered The Good Place on netflix, that was a discussion topic of this forum a few years in the past.  It was interesting at first.  It touched lightly on ethics and metaphysics, and had some interesting ideas but at season three it is all about who is hot for who and silly escape plots.  I think the turning point was when Eleanor became a cloying sweet little girl.

But they throw around Kant a lot.  Well he is a big enchilada around the philosophy set.  I remember him mostly for his issue with lying.  It was bad,  Period.  Your friend, Joe, who has done no wrong asks you to hide him because bloodthirsty criminals are after him, and you tell him to hide under your bed.  Their is a knock on the door and it is the criminals and they want to know if Joe is hiding in your house and of course you tell them yes he is.

Because you are obeying a higher law, and as for humans like Joe, well they come and go don't they?  But that doesn't feel right does it?  What kind of jerk acts like that?  It's good to read philosophy,  It's good to kick ideas around, but when it comes to a real-life situation we go to the heart,  Still it's no harm to think about something a bit before blasting off Old Betsy.

I don't think there was much division in behaving right about the epidemic in 1918.  If the prez was one of the Bushes, or Reagan, or even old Tricky Dick we wouldn't have this problem because any of them would have done something to fight it, because they wouldn't want a quarter million Americans to die.  Even Nixon if for no other reason than he would see that doing good on this would ultimately be to his own benefit.  The difference is Trump.

I did some reading up on Davy Crockett and I was going to expand on that but again the morning grows short.  Maybe next week.

We Don't Need No Stinking Philosophy

 That's what Davy Crocket, or most of his contemporaries might have said.  Even unto this day, most people don't get their sense of right and wrong from books, they get it from their families and friends.  Although many churchgoing Christians claim to get their sense of right and wrong from the Bible, few of them have ever read it from cover to cover.  If they had, they'd have seen that the Bible is not in total agreement with itself about such matters.  It would be surprising if it was, seeing as it was written by numerous different authors over a period of several centuries.  

I've been trying to come up with some new topics to no avail.  Maybe we've already said everything that we know about everything.  I suppose my mind is obsessed with politics lately, which is not surprising since we are bombarded by it daily in the news media.  Logically, this COVID thing shouldn't be political, but it is.  I don't think the 1918 flu was so afflicted, but of course they didn't have TV in those says.  

Here's something, our gas furnace broke down today and nobody seems to have time to come out and fix it.  One of our local plumbing and heating businesses has closed down, and the other four are busy taking up the slack.  I don't know if the closure is COVID related or not.  The sign on their door and the recorded message on their phone didn't say why, but one of the others told me that they closed for lack of qualified help.  If this is true, then the unique situation in Cheboygan of a labor shortage during a time of high unemployment has spread from the minimum wage jobs to the skilled trades.  It's an inconvenience for us, not an emergency.  We have a small electric space heater that is keeping up for now but, with the impending cold spell, I might have to fire up the wood furnace a month earlier than I had planned, which means we will run our of firewood in February instead of March.  I only hope we can get the gas furnace repaired or replaced by then.

That's what Davy Crockett says

 I hope none of those hunting licenses went out to the Wolverine Watchmen, but then they don't seem like the sort who care about any stinking badges.  Who needs a badge when you think you are doing the right thing?  Kind of like those guys that tore down a couple of Columbus statues of late.  They are fighting imperialism and racism, which are wrong and therefore anything they do against them is right.  

What is it that Davy Crockett said, and in song at that, "Be sure you're right and then go ahead."  I just wrote in the last post about looking up what I am not sure of, and I wasn't too sure of that song.  I have a dim memory of some little platter, maybe yellow, because kids' records were often in colorful hues, on one of those kids' little record players, spinning in my bedroom in the bungalow, so I went to the google, and bam, pages and pages of references.  And it turns out that the great man actually said that himself and it was not put into his mouth by Disney.  

Anyway I remember as a kid thinking yes, here are words to live by.  I think the emphasis at the time was on the going ahead part rather than the being sure you are right part. I just don't imagine Davy hauling around a lot of philosophy and law books, and certainly in none of the shows did they show him doing a lot of deep thinking.  Maybe just before he blasted the bad guys there would be the slightest lip bite and then a quick nod, and then blam.  

The main issue as I read that the Watchmen had with Gretchen is she shut down their gym.  There is a long chain of thought between that and leaving her in a boat in the middle of  Lake Michigan, but thinking is boring and action is so satisfying.  Same with the guys tearing down the Columbus statues.  Do they think racists and imperialists are going to look at that sad lump of metal lying on the ground and think, well geez, maybe I better stop being an imperialist and a racist?

This was going to devolve into a long and boring discussion of stoicism and utilitarianism but the morning grows long.

I had thought that Beagles, saying he thinks we need some new topics would have presented some in his first post of the week, but it sounds like the same old stuff to me.  

I guess that leaves it all up to me, so here we are: Davy Crockett.  So go ahead, and for the purposes of the Institute you don't even have to make sure you are right.

Gretchen's Loophole

Y'all may remember that I said our governor, after losing her court battle, was looking for a loophole.  Well, she found it, at least for now.   It seems that a different law, which dates back to 1918,  gives our state health department the authority to impose some, but not all, of the same restrictions that our supreme court told Queen Gretchen she no longer could.  I understand that an outfit called the Mackinaw Center Legal Foundation is investigating the legality of that claim.  "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."

At last report, Cheboygan County has had 85 COVID cases.  That's not 85 cases per day, that's 85 total cases since the beginning.  Sixty seven of those cases have recovered and two of them have died, leaving 16 active cases.  I don't think we ever had more than a couple dozen active cases, which represents less than one tenth of one per cent of our population.  Statewide, we have had about 140,000 cases, with 7,000 deaths and 105,000 recoveries, leaving approximately 28,000 active cases, which represents about three tenths of one per cent of the population.  

The bottle and can return situation seems pretty much back to normal.  No long lines, but we still get the occasional ding dong who repeatedly jams up the machine by feeding too fast or trying to force crushed cans through.  

Walmart still runs out of things, different things each week.  The other stores seem to be in pretty good shape, so this might be the new normal.  "Help Wanted" signs are still numerous around town, mostly on retail stores, but I saw one on the Big Boy restaurant the other day.  They never did go to "take out only", preferring to stay closed until they were allowed to open back up for indoor seating.  

Our DNR reports that they have already sold twice as many hunting licenses this year than they did all of last year.  This represents a reversal of a downward trend that has been going on for decades.  They figure it has something to do with COVID, but they didn't say exactly what.  

Anybody listening?

 For seven years now, by the little listing off to the side, and maybe a couple years earlier in its email days, writing my post was part of my morning schedule.  Get up, feed the cats, gather up my coffee and yogurt, sit down in front of the computer and while I am drinking and eating write my post, afterwards there is the reading of the paper and painting and lunch and a nap and then killing time and crap tv and off to bed.  Actually I used to do a lot of stuff in between, two watercolor classes, improv, lunches with my sister and friends, condo stuff, the Ten Cat.  All wiped out by the corona, though the Ten Cat has resumed the past couple weeks.

But I was here to write about the blog not my everyday life, but you know sitting behind the keyboard is a lot like getting behind the wheel of a car, which ok I have not done in twenty years, so maybe it is more like slipping into my flip flops and slipping out the door, meaning maybe to pick up some stuff at Walgreens and then you notice what is this here, what is this there, what is going on with that building rising along the river, and the next thing I know I have had a little adventure and, if I remembered it, even brought back whatever it was that I meant to get at Walgreens.

You know I maybe use some experience as an example, and that gets me to thinking about that, or I use an idiom and then I wonder how that was birthed and I am off to wiki to find out, or maybe I am making some argument and I realize that I am not sure of the facts that I am marshalling and off to wiki where I will probably pick up some interesting facts that I hadn't known before.

Another thing I liked about the postings is that it kept my mind in order.  I don't know where I heard it long ago but it always stuck with me that you really don't know anything unless you can write about it.  So true.  I would sometimes find some shiny thing in the rag bag of my thoughts and take it to the keyboard only to find out that it was not as shiny as I thought it was and I had to prune it from my mental treasures.

Well I could go on and on but the yogurt is eaten and the fat black headlines beckon, so I will leave the dawgs with the question of what originally drew them to The Institute and why does it no longer do that?

you choose the topic

 A week of silence from the distant freehold so I took it on myself to send photons streaming northwards to see what is going on and this is what I got back: 

 It's the same as before.  I get tired of repeating the same arguments over and over again.  Neither of us is likely to change the other's opinions about these subjects.  Maybe we need different topics.  

Well alrighty then but I have to wonder why you didn't just post that?  Isn't that what the Institute is all about?

I have long ago left behind the hope that minds could be changed.  But I am always wondering what the other side is thinking, or more importantly why do they think the way they do.  To do that you have to ask questions, and then if you come across something that does not seem logical, you have to point that out and ask why that is.  Unfortunately at this point tempers begin to rise and the discourse of pure reason is lost and you get into this yammering thing that even a guy like me who loves to argue, does not enjoy.

I have often said that we need different topics and I have tried to introduce them but often they have fallen like the Autumn leaves with nobody interested in picking them up.  I try to do a lot of philosophy but nobody has any interest in that at all.  I've tried asking questions like what it was like being in the army, but what I got back was what you guys did, not what you felt about it.  I've tried things like favorite jobs and the worst jobs you ever had and nada.

I had to look up that chestnut about the three things you should never talk about.  I knew about politics and religion, but I couldn't remember the third thing which internet research revealed was money.  Money?  Who the hell ever talks about money?

Religion we've talked about a bit, but there is really not much to say, you either believe it or you don't.

I remember back some time I got in a bit of a huff over that damned ice cream machine.  My bad.  If people want to talk about something I am not interested in, well that is their right.  If I don't like what is being discussed I can ignore it and just talk about what I want to talk about, which also seems like a good response to political stuff you don't want to talk about.

I seem to have the biggest mouth at The Institute and do the most talking, so I am leaving it to the dawgs at this juncture.

What do you guys want to talk about?

Hitting the pause button

It's been since Tuesday that anybody since me has posted on this page.  /What is going on?

Something like this:

...I'd rather see a a dead man in the White house than a Democrat.

Well.  There's not much room left for reasonable discussion, is there?  This is a good time for me to pause, think, and choose my words wisely for my next post.  But as I read the news I keep asking myself, "How can people be so stupid?"

 

 

What's going on?

 It's been since Tuesday that anybody since me has posted on this page.  /What is going on?

The Veeps

 Waiting for the debate, listening to the pundits, I learned that the theory going on was that neither side was going to go in for the big kill.  This was a little disappointing, but you know, you never know.  

As it came on I was fiddling with something on my computer and only half listening to the tv and I was a little distracted, and suddenly I realized, hey they have begun.  I guess I was expecting a shitstorm like the first presidential and this was more like a tea party.  They were further apart and they didn't look at each other as much, and the white shadow interrupted a bit, and almost always kept talking past his time, but not nearly to the extent that Trump did.  Much less name-calling and emotion, much more well behaved.

Nothing new there, my mind wandered a bit and something began to occur to me.  Among the roster of candidates Biden had been far from my favorite.  He was kind of cornpone, you know, sentimental, low brow, the kind of guy whose heart goes pitter pat when old glory is paraded by,  Not the kind of guy a sophisticate such as myself favors.  

But the thing is he is that kind of guy.  Trump, who always has like two dozen flags lined up on the podium. is not that kind of guy.  He doesn't like heroes who are captured and thinks our fallen are a bunch of suckers, but he pretends to love the flag and the bible and all that jazz, and he gets away with that with his hard core 35%.

You know I am cynical and I mostly pay attention to the mechanics of the fight.  I kind of ignore what's in the hearts of the candidates, but during this debate it struck me.

The white shadow was mostly a surrogate, defending the Trump record at every turn, mostly with the terms that Trump himself uses but expressed much more politely.  He's so stiff and loyal that I always suspect he has a dagger concealed in his toga.  A lot of republicans, especially in the last week, would love to dump the Trump and run the unstained white shadow.  He only has to indicate with a slight nod, that he would except the crown and they would jump to put it on his head.  But thus far he has not done so.

Kamala was subdued.  I had expected that she would slice and dice the shadow, but she folksy, smiling mostly in contrast to the shadow's frown, and keeping her sharp tongue in its scabbard.

As a partisan of course I thought the dems won the debates but had to agree with the pundits in the postgame roundup that it most likely did not move the needle.

And that is good enough.  We have a large lead at this point with less than four weeks to go a tie is almost as good as a win.

Question for the day.  Is it the steriods, or is it just Trump being his loveable self?

The fall of Trump part 101.

 Nero comes to mind, that fiddle thing.  The real story of Nero is more complicated, but we won't worry about that now.

Trump basically did nothing except the usual ranting and whining while the deaths from Corona have ascended into the two hundred thousands.  But hell what are a couple hundred thousand Americans dead in the face of the tragedy of Old Betsy being pried from Beagles's hands.? Which was never going to happen.  I don't remember anyone ever saying they wanted to take away hunting rifles.  Well maybe somebody did but certainly nobody hoping to win any kind of political office.  While we are on that track the Mexicans were never going to take over the country and the wall that Trump proposed was to keep them out has not extended at all in the four years of Trump's presidency.  And the budget gap has skyrocketed under the republican tenure and you know it is not going to be the rich people who will have to pay that so the non-rich people will have to pay most of it.

But it doesn't really matter, that mantra of Beagles is just something he repeats so that he doesn't have to think or bother to educate himself on anything.  And if Trump lets all those Americans die and is too stupid to even protect himself, well he doesn't have to even consider that he can just hum his mantra.

Oh let me add to Old Dog's story about his lechery, but his calling all those soldiers lying in Flanders Field a bunch of suckers.  That shows a lot of pride in the military.

Fortunately right now ten percent of Michiganders have more concern for their fellow citizens than the Trumpists, and the once-proud state is now likely to rejoin the blue wall.  And in that course they will very likely toss out those republican legislators who gerrymandered  themselves into power, and the Wolverine State will return to sanity.

Yes, I am once again, for likely the hundredth time, predicting the fall of Trump.  Okay I was wrong all those other times since the dissing of McCain, but now I am pretty sure I have it right.

I am thinking of one of those street guys, one of the crazies, standing on the corner, wearing some bizarre costume now completely in tatters, screaming at the sky something that nobody else can understand.

But he doesn't cross the street until the light turns green.  Because somewhere in his Swiss cheese of a mind he knows that if he crossed on red he might get killed.

I am not including the hard core of 35 percent, the Q believers and bleach swiggers, there is no hope for them.  If they were crazy street people they would be dead by now.  I am speaking of maybe the ten percent wrapped around that core, a little further from the center of the maddening crowd, who still retain that little phrase, red means stop, green means go, yellow says cool you heels I'm changing you know.

Oh it is all fine fun to rant and rave, to diss the liberals and watch their faces turn red, to elect crazy idiots just because you can, to besmirch all those smarty pants who got better grades than you, all those tweedy folks in the ivory towers who tried to make you go to integrated schools, to make fun of all those queers who think they have the right to get married, to dump on anybody who isn't white like you.

But it's no fun crossing against the light and getting hit by a truck, and it will likely be no fun being on one of those ventilator things.  Fun is fun, but dying is no fun, and look at the hero, too stupid to wait for the light to turn green.  Maybe it's time to get off this train.

Only a month to go. all signs are go.  Of course I have been wrong about a hundred times before, but this time you can take it to the bank.

Recap and Review

 I thought I had made my position on these issues clear in the past but, since a certain amount of memory loss is to be expected at our age, I guess it won't hurt to go over them again.

Queen Gretchen, in her infinite wisdom, has been allowing us to return our bottles and cans for some time now.  She did specify certain criteria, but our local Walmart was the only store in town able to meet them.  Therefore all returnables in the entire Cheboygan metropolitan area have been funneling through Walmart, which has resulted in some long lines and waiting times.  Her Majesty recently relaxed the criteria to some degree and, now that she has had her wings clipped, the situation should soon be back to normal, if it isn't already.

Two years ago, the caravans were just the tip of the iceberg.  Thousands of individuals were swarming across the border every day.  At that rate they would have numbered over a million a year if Trump hadn't taken the actions that he did, which are summarized in the link I provided in my last post.

https://a.msn.com/r/2/BB19ErHZ?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare

Trump is certainly not my hero, he is my choice of the lesser of two evils.  I don't like his personality, but I care more about issues than I do about personalities.  I don't agree with everything Trump has done, but we are on the same page regarding gun control, taxes, and immigration, which is more than I can say about Biden or any Democrat that I know of.

The problem with our governor is that she unilaterally extended her state of emergency without legislative approval in defiance of the law.  The legislature was willing to talk about it with her, but she refused to negotiate any of her edicts.  The legislature then passed a bill to make some of the more reasonable edicts a matter of law, which she vetoed.  She also stated that she would veto anything that attempted to limit her powers in any way.  The thing is, there was already a law on the books, passed in 1976, that limited her emergency powers to 28 days without legislative approval.  Unfortunately, there was also a law on the books, passed in 1945, which seemed to contradict the 1976 law.  Both the trial court and the appeals court ruled in the governor's favor, but the Michigan Supreme Court declared the 1945 law to be unconstitutional.  Last I heard, Queen Gretchen was still searching for a loophole.  

A father's choice

The judicial wheels in Michigan turn slowly but they get the job done.  I'll give the governor the benefit of the doubt in stating that she was acting, in good faith, for the public's greatest good; it could be worse.  Can Mr. Beagles finally get his cash deposits for all of those bottles and cans?

Too often when a person's mind is made up, it's made up without much consideration of facts and there's nothing I can do about it.  Is there a threat of an immigrant invasion?  I don't think so; I'd like some proof beyond the braying of an ill-informed autocrat.

Mr Beagles has made his voting preference clear but I'd like his opinion on something.  Suppose, years ago, he was in a conversation with Trump and the fifteen year-old Daughter Beagles walks by, with Trump commenting (as he did with Michael Cohen), "Look at that piece of ass, I’d love some of that.”  To be fair, Trump didn't know it was Cohen's daughter, but still... we already know that Trump agreed with Howard Stern when he said his own daughter, Ivanka, was a "piece of ass."

Is Mr. Beagles thinking, "This guy's got my vote!"

 

 

jocks vs jackasses

I don't normally comment on Tuesdays especially when there is not a post from Beagles, but as I was perusing the sports section this morning something occurred to me.  They are in the post season now, and while there were a few cases of corona at the start of the season, for most of the season they have been free of it.  This is 30 teams with rosters going up to 40 at sometimes, and then there are the coaches, grounds crews etc. and basically nobody got the corona.

Sure they have plenty of dough for preventive methods, but nowhere near the dough the white house had and certainly not the expert care, and yet look how many of the white house team have gone down.  That's all I wanted to say.

polls

And now it appears that your hero has not only been  too ignorant to keep himself from the corona, but also once he found out that he had it instead of quarantining himself he was spewing his covid breath over his allies so that now the reps aren't even sure that they have enough senators without covid to nominate their latest supreme court judge.  Well you have your mantra that keeps you from having to consult your conscience or think too deeply about anything.  

But thankfully there are people who think about things.  You know earlier I kind of disparaged the wishy washies, but now I am thinking maybe they are not as bad as those who are just dead set on something, like Sure he shot that guy in bright daylight in cold blood in the middle of Fifth Avenue but I am going to vote for him anyway because I have this unfounded fear that the other guy will take my gun anyway and nothing in the world can ever change my mind about that.

Well luckily many of the wishy washies and more than a few republicans, after noting what an idiot he was at that debate have realized the folly and are coming to realize that maybe Biden is a better choice because you know, he isn't bull goose looney, which has been reflected in the most recent polls, and we are still waiting on polls that will reflect the knowledge of his covid idiocy.

My sister doesn't believe in polls, well she is thinking mainly of the 2016 polls that incorrectly said that the big girl would win the election, but really what they said was that there was a two thirds chance she would win, but that left a one third chance that she would lose.

After all these years people wonder why is the weatherman wrong so often, and the reason is that it is so complicated, it is all about molecules of air and, oh I had to look it up, there are 

1.04 × 10⁴⁴ molecules of air in the atmosphere and it is all about how they bump into each other and if one hits the other just so that one will hit its neighbors just so, but if it hits it just a little differently it will hit its neighbors, and perhaps other neighbors a little differently and so on and so on until you get to the butterfly effect.  

Of course there are nowhere near 1.04 × 10⁴⁴  people in the country. but they are made up of  7*10^27  molecules, and unlike the atmosphere there are way more different kinds of molecules, and if you calculate how many people there are in the country, I think that puts us at maybe a million or a billion times less complicated than the atmosphere but of course that is just peanuts in this magnitude of numbers.  

Kind of a digression there but the point is the weatherman doesn't always get it right, but you do read him or watch him every morning and plan your day approximately with that.  And that is why polls mean something.

Victory!

 Remember when I told y'all about how our state legislature was suing our governor because she illegally extended her state of emergency without their approval?  At issue were two contradictory laws, one passed in 1945 and the other passed in 1976.  The 1945 law said that she could, and the 1976 law said that she couldn't.  Both the trial court and the appeals court ruled that the 1945 law took precedence over the 1976 law.  Then an initiative petition drive was launched to repeal the 1945 law, which would have settled it once and for all.  On Friday, October 2 the petition was submitted to the Michigan Secretary of State with 539,384 signatures on it, almost 200,000 more than was necessary.  On that same day, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the 1945 law was unconstitutional.  The repeal effort is being continued to get the law off the books so that a future Supreme Court decision can't reverse today's ruling, but the good guys have won, at least for now.  All of our governor's executive orders pertaining the the plandemic have been declared null and void.  If she wants to impose new regulations, she will have to collaborate with the legislature, which is what she should have done in the first place.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC5o8QzSyb4

Trump's catching of the virus has not changed a thing for me.  I still plan on voting for him, even if he dies before the election, because I'd rather see a a dead man in the White house than a Democrat.

https://a.msn.com/r/2/BB19EsZr?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare

The main reason the hungry hordes didn't wreck this country two years ago is that Trump stopped them.  If it hadn't have been for him we might all be speaking Spanish today.

https://a.msn.com/r/2/BB19ErHZ?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare

wise choices in troubled times

 So what made up your mind to vote for Trump was that somebody you hated hated him and he hated her back, and what confirmed to you that it was a wise decision was that it pissed off The Institute's very own kindly Uncle Ken.  Well it's good to know that we have steady and informed hands such as yours to steer the ship of state.

Steady and informed hands to choose the stable genius who helmed the richest and most powerful ship in the world into a covid morass, and now it appears that even though his office has way more preventive medicine than he has bothered to obtain for the country at large that has not prevented himself and his wife from getting the disease. Yes you have chosen wisely.

It would not take a Democrat three days to come out against white supremacists, so it's unlikely we would ever nominate a candidate to the liking of Beagles.

Oh, is the latest Latin American horde going to destroy America just like all the ones before it did?  Trump may not be able to save Beaglestonia because he may well be too sick.  Pence could step in but he has spent all the time maskless with the equally maskless covid breathers, and he might be too sick too.  But that's ok too because I'm sure Nancy could handle the situation.

 

The Die Is Cast

I think I made up my mind to vote for Trump more than a couple months ago, but I can't say for sure because it wasn't a hasty decision.  I remember wishy-washing about it for awhile, but I think what pushed me over the edge was when Queen Gretchen unilaterally extended her state of emergency declaration in defiance of our state legislature, which was last May.  I understand that Her Majesty and Trump hate each other's guts, which is good enough for me. Seeing how upset it made Uncle Ken tends to confirm in my mind that I made the right decision. 

I said that I might vote for a Democrat if they nominated somebody like George Wallace, but I don't think they make them like that anymore. 

I see that the hungry hordes from Central America are on the march again.  It's a little early for that, but I think they want to be first in line when Biden throws open the gates, which is another good reason to vote for Trump.   

https://a.msn.com/r/2/BB19CBCg?m=en-us&referrerID=InAppShare

A Trumpust(ule) amongst us

 Well shit.  I wonder what tipped you,  Just a couple of months ago you were going to vote for the libertarian or some other third party nutcase,  I believe you even said you might vote for a democrat if the dems chose a dem you could get behind, which I didn't believe at the time.  Maybe that wasn't you, just one of those dolts you see on interviews.

Anyway since my vote and Old Dog's votes are meaningless due to the Electoral college, while yours has heft because you live in a swing state, I gleaned a little happiness from the knowledge that at least you were throwing your vote away rather than sending it like a poison arrow into the heart of America.

So what changed?  You say that the Democrats want to raise our taxes, take away our guns, and let illegal immigrants over run our country.cr But then you were saying that same thing a couple months ago when you were planning on voting for the 'Tarians, so what I want to know is what changed your mind in the last couple months.

I'm not going to go down the rabbit's hole of trying to argue logically with this because that would be a big waste of time and emotion,  I just want to know what changed your mind.