monday morning bric and brac

 There is the time that I had my nose buried in my magazine and was accosted by a young lady.  But I have told that several times here already.  Of course Free Boxer has not heard it, and think Gentlemen, a whole new pair of ears for our tired old stories.  But I have a full plate this morning, so I will bring it up later.

I like Grand Geezer, but it's not a hotel, Grand Geezer Estates maybe?

That is a beautiful instrument.  Do you own that?  After I had shed the abominable squeezebox my older sister, who had foolishly shown some interest in it, was saddled with it, and when she finally shed it, it went to a family friend whose child actually became some sort of musician, but there was some kind of misunderstanding or maybe downright thievery, and we were never remunerated properly and Mom never forgot.

Speaking of instruments, that is a fine one Free Boxer is showing.  I remember them being around, but I never owned one.  I had one of those plastic portables which did the job well enough, but I was glad to see computers take over the work and leave behind the erasers and brushes and liquids and tape.  But Oh, I do miss that ding when the carriage hit the end.

I hate talking to machines,  My computer has that Cortana circle which I never have touched and never will.  Unfortunately my phone is a chatterbox and some assistant or something is always trying to start up a conversation, just something to annoy me or confuse me so that I will buy something,  That's all those phones really want, to take your money.  

How is removing the buttons on an elevator any improvement?  Well I guess it removes the threat of the bratty kid that pushes every button, but how often did that happen, and couldn't he just count out loud and get the same results?  Seems like whiz bang just to be whiz bang if you ask this elderly gent who would rather keep his nose in his magazine than chat with an elevator.  

I'm interested in what kind of programming Free Boxer does.  I took some courses in Fortran, Cobol, Assembler, Pascal, and that way cool C, trying to get a cool job as a cool programmer.  When I finally got my computer job I did it all in that dbase 3 programming language which was not quite running with the big dogs.  I did a lot of programming for fun at home with Basic, and am deeply disappointed that that no longer exists, and indeed there is no programming language to fool with on pc's.  I don't know why.

Actually Fox is not that bad early in the day.  If you get away from their news(?) shows they are not too bad.  When I was saying news what I meant was what's in your daily paper and on the evening news,  computer news feeds are a little problematic, but if you read a lot you can tell who is doing the news and who is doing the hooey.

If a person has some kind of medical reason not to get vaxxed, that is fine, but I don't know if any of those other reasons have any validity in my eyes.  And certainly anybody spreading anti vax bullshit is inexcusable.

We got maybe six inches yesterday, which the local news crews went gaga about as is their nature, but then the storm traveled about a thousand miles east and blam and blooie.  Seems that's the way the storms have been going all winter, going north or south of us or not having their full strength until they hit the coast.

Well we heartlanders have always felt that the midwest was where god meant us to live.  Nice and flat and plenty of water and no hurricanes or earthquakes.  Just a few tornadoes now and then to keep us on our toes.

Was the Election Rigged?

 I neglected to answer this question in my last post, so I'm going to do it now.  I think it's unlikely that the 2020 election was rigged.  Notice I said "unlikely" and not "impossible".  That's because I believe that all things are possible, but some things are not bloody likely.  With any operation of that size, there are bound to be some irregularities, either accidently or on purpose, but I don't think they were enough to affect the outcome in this case.  The reason I think that is this election was probably the most audited one in U.S. history, and I have not heard of any of the audits finding any major discrepancies. 

In his last post, Uncle Ken asserts that both he and I believe the news.  I'm not so sure about that. What about Fox News?  What about the supermarket tabloids?  I suppose the argument could be made that those are not "true" news sources, but you could say that about any news source that you don't like.  I guess I could say that I generally believe the news, but I take it all with the proverbial grain of salt because modern journalism tends to blur the distinction between fact and opinion.  

I didn't mean to defend the rabid anti-vaxxers, I was trying to point out that everybody who has declined to be vaccinated is not a rabid anti-vaxxer.  Some of them have reservations that seem reasonable to them, even though they don't seem reasonable to us, and I was trying to look at it from their point pf view.

Welcome abord Boxer.  Sorry to hear that you are in the middle of the Blizzard of '22.  Our winter has been relatively mild this year.   The Jet Stream has been shunting most of the snow to the south of us, although we have had our share of bone chilling cold lately.  

This just in from Canada:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60190452

Canada?  Unlikely!  Canadians are much too polite and civilized to do something like this, or so I have been told.  Must be fake news.

Typewriters and Elevators

Thanks for the challenge, Old Dog, here is the promised Post.  Thanks too Ken for fixing the access issue whatever it was you seem to have done the trick.  So here is my first post, then. Not a proper story this time as I'm just getting going, but I anticipate that my fingers will warm up to it after a while.

That crowd of wild and yelling anti-vaxxers, it's a conundrum. I don't know about you, but I do have at least one aquaintance who is an anti-vaxxer, and I was not able to influence them out of it, to my chagrin. There is a large amount of money that the influencers out there are making off their misinformation and this is contributing to the overall movement, I fear.   Since the influencers are making money they are going to keep egging on their own crowd.  The attention heaped upon them by media just encourages them to be wilder and wilder over time, hense the costumes and funny hats, because it sells the spotlight.  Not sure what can really be done about them except to not encourage them.  "Don't feed the trolls," doesn't always work though.

In elevators, sometimes (at work) when I was feeling yelled-at or otherwise down I'd just walk in and continue to face the back, not turn around. We all have probably had days like that.  :(. Most days I would say, "Hi," to a person if I was the Host, though.  It's useful to have a short (30-sec) success story to tell, else I would typically remark about the weather, or something up-beat. Our elevators at work had no buttons inside.  You had to tell the computer the floor on the outside in order to call the elevator. Isn't that interesting? Inside there was only a numeric floor number display. Nothing to press (except emergency stop panic button.)

Our pack is locked inside today with our appliances due to a snowstorm here in Boston (a foot or two today.) So I can spend a little time reading a good book, and some typing.  The image you shared of an accordian reminded me that when I was around ten or so years old, we had two old typewriters hanging around. This would have been in the early 1970s or so, when my Mom was typing up some letters for a while for my Dad who was trying his hand at small-business at the time.  She was a great fast typist having done it for a living for a while in offices.

I was just amazed at the way it worked. It being an old heavy Underwood from the early 1940s, and totally mechanical you could see all of the linkages and all these tiny springs and hinge points. For someone who is 10 or 12 or so and stuck in the house with snow, this was just amazing to look at.  I was asking my Mom all about it and she showed me how to type on it. The key-travel distance was amazingly long compared to the tiny movement of today's computer keyboards. I'm was surprised at how difficult it was to press each key down hard enough that it would leave a mark on the paper.  My Mom won new respect for me that week for certain.  Additionally, you had to learn to press all the keys at the same rate, even though your pinkie isn't as strong as your index finger, you had to press your pinkie smartly and your index finger lightly, in order that your Fs don't appear distractingly darker than your As.  So all of this took lots of practice.  Pretty sure it took me all day just to write one paragraph.  I think I recall that one of the two typewriters was broken (just dirty) and I was able to fix it through basic mechanical cleanup and a bit of light oiling.

It's interesting how all things build upon each other sometimes, such as legos or in Tetris.  I actually leaned into it and learned how to type properly, with my Mom encouraging me. I think by the time I was thirteen I was typing over 25wpm, and it's all just speed practice from there.  When I got my first computer and got into programming in ninth grade or so, I was one of the only ones in the class who could type without looking, and so I was always done my assignments very quickly.   Programming requires lots of special characters, not just the home row keys therefore the discipline my Mom gave me to learn all of those really paid off when I first began programming.   She's still with us; I'll remind her my thanks today over morning coffee!  She still has one typewriter back home filed away, some where.

I eventually (decades later) did a lot of work in computers, so that influenced me.  The fact that I did learn to type was influencial in my life for sure, I'm glad I got into it back then, before it was really A Thing.   Today one can still find these 1940s typewriters in local Craigslistings for $100 or so.  They are really engineering marvels considering the time. Thanks for the image you shared!  

My bark of appreciation: Woof.         - Boxer

Let's be careful out there

...and on the way I will be reading my New Yorker and I will not be looking up from my article every five minutes and wondering Gee is that really true.

NEWSFLASH...
"Elderly gent still unconscious after refusing to surrender his copy of The New Yorker.  More as story develops."

Just trying to save your life, Uncle Ken.  Situational awareness is important in any enclosed form of public transportation, especially if the odor of Pale Ale is present.  There are some tricks that I'm sure you are aware of and if you tell me you can kick Chuck Norris' ass, I'll believe you.

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I still don't know what to call the new digs but something along the lines of Baby Boomer Biltmore or The Grand Geezer Hotel seem to be in the right direction.  But don't be fooled by the deceptive nature of the photo, Uncle Ken; the place is hardly well kept (and the wood floor is fake).  There are more than a dozen boxes that I'm still going through.  My method of packing was to grab an empty box, fill it up until it's almost too heavy to carry comfortably, and then remove a little stuff to make it a tad lighter.  No wrapping, cushioning. sorting, or special treatment.  The first load was bathroom stuff, an easy load with one box.  The next load was kitchen stuff, many more boxes.  The cloth bags from supermarkets are real handy, too, good for stuff like cast iron or lots of fiddly little stuff.  Dump the crap in and start moving, blah, blah, blah.

But the unpacking and sorting process is fun with lots of treasures being discovered, many things that have been forgotten for decades.  With all this talk of vaccines I was amused to find my old military shot record.  I never get flu shots but it seems I had a bunch of them in the Army, along with shots for polio, yellow fever, cholera, plague, tetanus, and maybe something more.

Another thing I found was my old college transcripts and it is very likely that Mr. Beagles has earned a whopping seven semester hours of college credit because of his time in the Army.  One semester hour for Hygiene (!), two semester hours for P.E., and four hours for electives.  Since I also took a couple of classes while overseas to knock down some electives I managed to get a total of thirteen semester hours while putting in my two years, nine months, and twenty four days.  That, along with the early out to attend summer school allowed me to graduate a semester early, a fine deal all around.

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Looks like the Boston Boxer Boy sneaked in for another comment.  When is he going to get off the porch and run with the big dogs?

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And just another treasure from the archive...
 

 

 

 

closing cases and letting my freak flag fly

I think I went through the fact that we can never know anything absolutely at the beginning of my last post.  Nevertheless we have to go about our lives and not stare at our hands all day and wonder if the hand is really there and if it is ours and if this is not just the fevered dream of a lizard person. So I am basically believing that the Brown Line will take me to the Ten Cat tonight and not to the planet Uranus and on the way I will be reading my New Yorker and I will not be looking up from my article every five minutes and wondering Gee is that really true.

I believe that Beagles brought this up, and correct me if I am wrong Master of the Freehold, to somehow defend the anti vaxxers, because how can we know that way more people die from covid than from vaxxes because we only hear it from the news and we don't personally know any newsmen.  I believe the news, Beagles believes the news.  Case closed.

Alleged is only used for people who are charged with a crime.  Case closed.

Remember when the non-vaxxers were claiming that they wouldn't take the vax because the FDA had not approved it.  Then in August the FDA did approve it and that made no difference in the rate of vaccination.  I believe that the varied reasons the idiots use for why they are not getting vaxxed are bogus, just something they make up on the spot because, well who knows why, but I think it is tribal.  The tribe they belong to is against the vax so to remain true to their tribe they do not get the vax.

Kind of like back in the day how we hippies fought all attempts to make us cut our hair.  Kind of silly maybe though I want to add our hair did not shed poison dandruff that would kill other people.

"And the First Shall be Last"

 Jesus said that, or more correctly, Jesus is quoted as saying that in (insert here the Biblical book, chapter, and verse.)  See, we don't know for a fact that Jesus said that, or anything else for that matter, because we have no evidence that Jesus ever wrote anything down.  All we have is secondhand accounts of His life and teachings.  It's possible but, in my opinion, not likely, that all these accounts are totally fictitious.  It's also possible but, in my opinion, not likely that these accounts are 100% accurate.  It has been my experience that most stories have a certain amount of truth in them, but not as much as some people think.  

It has also been my experience that people generally believe what they think they already know and tend to reject any new information that is not compatible with what they think they already know.  That's just the first impulse, however. It is possible to override this impulse and open your mind to new ideas or information, but you have to make a conscious effort to do so.  

I never meant to say that I unconditionally believed every single word of that story about the Polish border.  We discussed the possibility that the photo might have been staged, but even if it was, it doesn't prove that the whole story was bogus.  I came across several stories later that tended to confirm the first article.  That's evidence, but it does not conclusively prove or disprove the original piece.  My current opinion is that the story was generally true, but that opinion could be changed if I came across credible evidence that suggested otherwise.  

The "alleged" thing is not just politeness, it's professional journalism.  I know that because I took one semester of journalism in high school.  Mrs. Kew would turn over in her grave if she could see what has become of the profession today.  I didn't agree with everything she said, but I still believe Mrs. Kew knew more about journalism than any of the modern, revisionist, young whippersnappers that have come to dominate the news media in this day and age.  

metaphysical shmetaphysical

 I believe it is human nature to believe what the last guy told you.  That is what they are always saying about a guy who is not so bright, that he believes whatever the last guy told him.  Of course that is what they are saying, and really the only reason I know what they are saying is that someone told me that is what they are saying.  And for all you know I am maybe not even Uncle Ken maybe I am a Russian bot or maybe I was never even Uncle Ken to begin with but one of those lizard people beneath human skin like in that tv program from many years ago.  I mean how can anybody ever know anything?

Well we have been through this before and I was about to go through it all again, which is tiresome because it is long and there are a lot of steps.  But then I remembered not too long ago when Beagles posted a photo of Polish soldiers rebuffing Afghan, I think it was, refugees coming across the Belarussian border.  I mean that was pretty far away and who knew who took the photo and couldn't everybody in it have been actors?  But Beagles expressed no doubt that it was all true, and I had no problem accepting that this was indeed what was going on in a faraway part of the world.  Because in general I believe the news as does Beagles, so let us just dispense with this metaphysical how do we ever really know anything bushwa.

That alleged thing is just kind of a polite thing that the papers do for court cases.  It does not apply to bald faced political lies.  The idea that elections are rigged is poison to a democracy which depends on elections for its legitimacy. It's an obvious falsehood (Just checking, Beagles do you think the 2020 election was rigged?), and it well behooves the press to say so.  Although they may be overdoing it a bit, I mean c'mon we know already.

Likewise this vax stuff.  The fewer people who wear masks and and get vaxxed the more American citizens die.  Isn't it worthwhile to save American lives?  Is not the press doing us all a favor by pointing out that guzzling bleach is not going to save you?  And to inform the masses that nobody has died from being vaxxed (or maybe a few in extraordinary cases, I don't have time this morning to get on the google) and plenty have died of the covid, most of them people who have not been vaxxed?

Is that not the reason that Beagles got vaxxed?  Was not this evidence so clear in front of Beagles' eyes, not equally available to the vax refuseniks?   Were not they wrong?

I suppose we could go through all these metaphysical hoops as to how does anybody ever really know anything for sure.  But I am not going to.  They were and are wrong.

How Do We Know What We Know?

 Some famous guy once said, "All I know is what I read in the newspapers."  Of course, that was long before the TV and the internet, but the same concept still applies.  Almost everything we know, we got from other people, either directly or indirectly.  If one guy tells us one thing, and another guy tells us another thing, and if these two things are mutually exclusive, we have to decide which guy we want to believe.  Well, we could decide to believe neither of them, but we can't decide to believe both of them.  It's human nature to believe the guy we heard from first, but that doesn't mean we can't override human nature.  If, however, we don't decide to override human nature, we will default to it.  

When you say that 99% of the scientists believe something, what you really mean is that somebody told you that 99% of the scientists believe something, because you have not personally interviewed 99% of the scientists.  Okay, maybe 99% of the news articles you have read or saw on TV have said that 99% of the scientists believe something, but if you only access information from either conservative or liberal sources, you are getting 99% of 50%, which is less than half.  Well, maybe not half because we don't know for a fact that either liberal or conservative sources are exactly half of the total sources out there, but you get the idea.

For example, almost every time I read about Trump's claim that that the 2020 election was rigged, it says something like, "Trump's false claim that the election was rigged."  That would be like saying, "John Smith is the murderer.", which is not how it's usually written.  It's usually something like, "John Smith is the alleged murderer." or "John Smith is the suspected murderer."  That's because the writer of a news article is not supposed to make himself the judge or jury of the John Smith case.  It's different with an editorial or opinion piece, but a news story is supposed to be written from a neutral point of view. 

Be that as it may, it really doesn't matter what you believe until your belief inspires you to actually do something like vote or get vaccinated.  I got vaccinated because I believed that the vaccine was not as likely to kill me or make me sick as the COVID was.  There are people, however, who believe that the vaccine is more likely to kill them or make them sick than the COVID.  For these people, not getting vaccinated is a no brainer.  The fault is not in their logic, it's in their belief, which is based on what we believe to be false information.  

idiots

 The original anti vaxers were a different breed than the post covid anti-vaxxers of today.  As Beagles points out they are probably still around but vastly outnumbered by the current craziers.

It all began with a scientist investigating autism who claimed in the 70's that vaccines were responsible for autism.  The report was debunked in the late nineties, but not before it had drawn a pretty good number of adherents, to whom the debunking meant nothing.  Here's the weird thing about all this.  Millions of people will follow somebody who they never heard of because he is wearing a white coat.  But when hundreds of other white-coat wearing guys with better credentials, who have the actual proof for anybody to look over, say it is a lot of hooey, the believers still adhere to the first nut.

It's like when the climate deniers rally around some rogue scientist who says global warming is a bunch of hooey because he is wearing a white coat and from Yale, but then when you point out that 99% of white coated guys from Yale say global warming is a fact, they are all like, oh what do they know.

The vaxxes were rushed but they still had to pass all the rigorous tests that any vax has to pass, and of course we have more knowledge than we did say twenty years ago and greater technology.  And the choice was between some quirk showing up years down the road and a very good chance of death for you AND your loved ones in a few weeks.  It's no contest.

Covid is rising right now because of the delta and now the omricon variants.  Even so those who have been vaxxed are like a hundred times less likely to be hospitalized or die than those who have not had it.  Again, no contest.

Nobody had seen this virus before.  There was some knowledge of viruses in general, but there was a lot of stuff that had to be found out.  Like when you hear a new noise in your Ford Truck.  It may be this or it maybe that but you won't know until you lift the hood.  And now there is still plenty of stuff unknown.  If you are not being told the whole truth it is because nobody knows the whole truth at this time.  But the guesses of the experts are better than the guesses of the guy on the next barstool.

I don't recall anybody saying that wearing masks would eliminate the problem.  What they said was it would make it better, and high school physics and biology of the sixties make it clear why that is so.  And adjusting for population density and climate fewer people died in places where most people were masked than where people weren't.  No contest

The vaccine may well have been crushed in the USA if more people had been vaxxed.  How is a vaccine going to work if only half the people take it?  And then those people who are sabotaging it, say see it doesn't work.  Idiots.

We were always going to have to learn how to live with the virus.  Because of idiots.  

Freak Show

 I agree that the anti-vaxxers are really weird, but the whole thing was a freak show, not just the anti-vaxxer part.  I don't know if it was planned that way, but that's the way it turned out.  I think the anti-vaxxers were around before the COVID hit the fan, but their ranks have probably grown since then.  

Of course, everybody who has been reluctant to get vaccinated is not a card-carrying anti-vaxxer, some of them are just concerned that the drugs were rushed through the approval process, which they were.  I suppose the people in charge thought it was necessary because of the way COVID was spreading like wildfire throughout the land, and maybe it was, but the virus is spreading faster now than it was before the vaccines were released.  That doesn't prove that the vaccines are worthless, but it kind of makes you wonder.  

I don't believe, like some people do, that the whole COVID thing is fake, but I have felt from the beginning that we have not been told he truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about it.  First, we were told that a few weeks of shut down and quarantine were going to stop the virus, then we were told that the masks were going to stop the virus, then we were told that the vaccine was going to stop the virus, and now we are being told that we need to learn to live with the virus.  What's next?                                                                                       

noble savages

 Are you saying like a bunch of weirdos crashed the anti-vaxxer parade?  I think anit-vaxxers themselves are pretty weird.  Okay really weird.  I have often spoken of Trump breaking the surly bonds of truth, and once you have done that why you are free to believe whatever floats your boat.  Why these particular things float their boats I do not know.

That thing about people being naturally good, was the belief of the liberals of the day who thought that left to their own ways people would express their sweet natures like the noble savage, while conservatives tended to the believe that people are no damn good and they needed to bow down to the king and obey whatever laws he laid down for them for their own damn good.  

I am not that familiar with Rosseau and google led me to the Encyclopedia Britannica where I found this:

Rousseau was the least academic of modern philosophers and in many ways was the most influential. His thought marked the end of the European Enlightenment (the “Age of Reason”). He propelled political and ethical thinking into new channels. His reforms revolutionized taste, first in music, then in the other arts. 

I remember now, though enlightenment sounds kind of fuzzy and sweet, kind of new agey, those guys were a pretty hard-headed lot, who spoke in terms of facts and numbers.  A lot of folks didn't like that, they preferred the golden chariot circling the earth rather than the sack of hydrogen and helium that the earth circled around.  They prided themselves on being romantics as opposed to those just the facts guys.

It seems like the just the facts guys were on top for the last say two hundred years up until, oh Trump.  But I wonder maybe this, this whole thing is just the welling up of popular sentiment and Trump simply happened to be standing on top of the well when it happened.  Witness all the other populist authoritarian leaders who have bloomed across the world, and how Trump has been booed when he promoted booster shots.

I didn't mean to bad mouth the tiny rooms that go up and down.  Like I said if you are not in a mood for short casual conversation you can just put a scowl on your face or you could whip out your phone.  But most of the time I find a short conversation with my neighbors a pleasant experience.  

Protest Fever

 After I signed off last night, I got to thinking that there might be a new virus going around.  Afflicted people have this uncontrollable urge to go out into the street and make fools of themselves.  The anti-vaxxers might have planned this one, but as soon as it got underway, all kinds of freaks and weirdos came out of the woodwork, as so often happens with protest demonstrations.  It could have been worse, though.  As far as I know it didn't turn violent this time.

I found this article on my news app, which is the only way I would have heard of it, since I missed my 20 minutes of TV news last night and our local paper doesn't come out on Sunday or Monday.  I don't make a habit of reading the Daily Beast, but I don't avoid their articles on my app either if the subject interests me. 

I used to think that the natural man had a heart of gold, and it was civilization that made him all dark and grotty.  Some time ago, I found out that theory was developed by a French guy, Rousseau I think, and that he probably didn't know what he was talking about.  Nevertheless, I would still rather live in a rural setting.  At least there I don't have to be crammed into elevators with annoying people.  

little rooms, big apocalypse

 Well I don't know, what do you think?

I mean the whole point of the blog is to express your opinion.  Surely you have an opinion on this.  I am surprised to see that you are reading the Daily Beast, but this news has been all over the airwaves, so it's kind of like asking somebody what they think of the weather.

One thing about living in a high rise is that you spend a small fraction of your life in a tiny windowless room zipping up or down.  And often you are not the only one in the room.  Depending on who was there first you are either the host or the guest, which doesn't make much difference, maybe it should.  It would be interesting.

Welcome to my room, could I offer you some of these M and M's that have been in the bottom of my coat pocket for a couple days now?

Oh no thanks, I've just had lunch, but I admire what you have done with this place, it looks so minimalist.

Anyway the host generally sets the mood, if he is in a mood he stares straight at the numbers with a gruff look.  Don't tread on me.  Very well then you stare at the numbers also without saying something dumb like, Oh the twenty-seventh floor, I used to have a friend on that floor.  Many times we had long discussions on the role of the church in the late dark ages, see he thought that...

But sometimes the host is in a genial mood and welcomes the guest into his humble abode and so some sort of conversation will have to transpire.

When I first started flying three or four times a year I always tried to strike up a conversation with my seatmate.  Often it was an interesting exchange of places we had been and of ideas that we had, but all too often the other guy had nothing to say and said it at great length for the whole fucking trip.  Nowadays I always have a book and I bury my nose in it the second that my butt hits the seat.  

But the thing about an elevator ride is that it only lasts a fraction of a minute, so even if your fellow traveler is a dud and has nothing to say he will not be saying it too long

So you can feel free to expound, and since somebody is coming out of it and somebody is going into it, the weather is a frequent topic of conversation.  

What a wonderful day is a frequent comment.  And while it is certainly nice to have a wonderful day, it doesn't leave much to say.  You don't want to be a Debbie Downer and mention how the Channel Three weathergirl is calling for thunderstorms for the next few days, so the conversation is pretty limited but in about ten seconds the doors are opening.

Inclement weather is unpleasant, but a little exciting too, so here is a rich topic.  Adventures may be related and you find yourself telling the tale of how when you were ten years old, the winter of 55, you got stuck waiting for a bus which never came so you started off on foot for you house two miles away and then... And then there is a ding and the elevator doors are opening.

It may be permitted if the story is really really exciting, to slip your hand in front of the door and quickly get to the end of your story.  But few stories, especially about us, are as exciting as we think they are, and it's probably best to take your hand away and let your host or your guest be on their way.  You'll see them again, and outside there will always be weather.

When I was in my first year of college everybody in Rhetoric had to write a paper on The Heart of Darkness (The inspiration for Apocalypse Now).  Everywhere freshmen congregated there would be piles of this slim Signet paperback. It's a good story.  This guy is sent by one of those British trading companies to investigate some guy who has apparently gone mad deep up some river.  The first base on the trip everybody is veddy veddy civilized, the military wearing those stiff collars of the day on even on the sweatiest days. Further up the river collars are loosened, people are a little ruder, a little wilder and so it goes all the way up.  The point being civilization is just like a veneer of gold paint over a dark and grotty basalt and the slightest little scrape will reveal the beast within us all.

And that is what is going on with these anti vaxxers.  Eight or maybe a dozen years of education mean nothing when something rubs them raw and the beast within appears.

Descent Into Madness

 I look through the news every night to see if I can find anything worth writing about.  Well, I finally found something, but I don't know what to say about it.  Maybe one of my esteemed colleagues will think of something.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/anti-vaxxers-offer-up-bonkers-holocaust-analogies-at-dc-march-now-we-cant-even-hide-in-the-attic/ar-AAT4gok?rt=0&ocid=Win10NewsApp&referrerID=InAppShare

fun and comfort

 I have a variation on Beagles' adage about getting old and fun.  The older you get the more fun is of less importance than comfort.

Adding up everything from my last opening I think I did come out in the black but I haven't done that in years.  Mounting the paintings, and printing the postcards, and buying the food, costs more than the take.  I am not counting the money for the supplies and the cost of my labor since I would be doing that anyway, show or no show.

Sometimes when I am getting my shit together I am thinking what a pain in the ass, but measured against my day of being a pretty big fish in a pretty little pond (fun), it still comes out ahead of staying home and frittering away my time (comfort).

And memories, you know they are important, sometimes you just wander through your memories, and you never remember all the nights you sat home watching tv, you remember when you sacrificed comfort for fun by like taking trips, and performing something, or just general adventures. 

Watching tv, very comfortable, especially if you have a cat on your lap.  Kind of immobilizing because you hate to dislodge kitty and suffer her unhappy gaze just because you want to go to the bathroom or the refrigerator.  Used to be there wasn't much on tv in the evenings, the history channel was at a grade school level, the science channel didn't have that many good shows so it kept repeating the same ones over and over, I kind of liked the murder channel, but eventually I felt bad because those were all real people who were getting killed.  

So I would be sitting at my keyboard while I was watching and during commercials or really slow parts I would be like looking things up on wiki, maybe doing some little thing on my website.  You know getting things done.

But now I have netflix and amazon prime, and the tv is much better.  But still not all that great.  Used to be that people would say about cable, 100 channels and nothing to watch.  Now I have like a thousand things to watch, but not that much that is very good.  If you are watching something really good that is like doing something.  But if you are watching something that is merely good enough that is just killing time.  And there is not that much time left and I feel bad.  But it is comfortable.

A Question of Priorities

 Yes, they still had some folk music, but there was less and less of it every year, and more and more of the other stuff.  Call it blues, jazz, pop, or whatever, it's all rock and roll to me.  I don't need to camp out for three days just to hear three hours of the kind of music I like, I can do that in the comfort of my home.  

Another consideration was that I wasn't getting any younger, and everything I did consumed more of my time and energy than it used to.  I had to set priorities in order to keep doing some of the things I wanted to do.  It's like the old saying goes:  "You know you're old when work is not as much fun as it used to be, fun is more work than it used to be, and it takes you longer to rest up than it took you to get tired."

I never made any money with my music. I barely broke even on "Hold Back the Dawn".   I never intended to make a career out of it, I just did it for fun, and when it stopped being fun, I stopped doing it.  I don't remember ever doing a whole set by myself at the festival or any of the associated events.  There were a couple of times that I was on the stage with several other people, and we took turns, but mostly I would fill in between while one act was clearing the stage and the next act was setting up.  Okay, there was "Tellebration", which was mostly a storytelling event interspersed with some music.  We did that for 15 years before it was discontinued for lack of attendance.  It was quite popular at first, I guess people just got tired of it, or maybe they developed other priorities.

musical careers

 In our waning days of Old Gage Park they set us down in the auditorium and passed out test booklets.  But this was no brainbusting SAT to sweat through in hopes of getting into some snazzy college which would lead to a snazzy job which would lead to a snazzy house in a snazzy neighborhood.  This was a test to show us what our inclinations were.  I remember it very well on every page were three pictures: a guy ironing clothes, a guy driving a steamroller, and a guy rolling out pizza dough and you picked out the activity that most appealed to you.  This was the case with every page.

And I always picked out the guy strumming the guitar or banging on a piano or blowing into a horn.  It just seemed magical somehow, you just plucked, or banged, or blew and out came sweet sweet music.  So cool, so much what I wanted to do.  When the results were tabulated my optimal career would be as a musician.  

But I had no talent whatsoever.  In our Kindergarten band some kids were given big thick sticks to bang together while the more talented had thin tapered sticks.  I banged my thick sticks as hard as I could hoping to be promoted to the thin stick crowd, but instead my sticks were taken away and I was told to just sit there and smile.  Likewise when it came to singing I was told to just move my mouth. 

They had these salesmen coming through the neighborhoods in those days selling musical instruments.  If your kid did not take up an instrument at this formative age, they might well never develop their hidden musical talent and their grown-up years would be well unmusical, likely forlorn, and it would all be your fault.  Much better for everybody for the kid to be spending an hour of those carefree summer hours stuck in a sweaty room making ungodly noises.  I foolishly chose the piano accordion, which not only did you have to plunk keys, you had buttons to push on the other side and you had to squeeze the damn thing in and out all the while.  That thing where you plunked and pushed and squeezed and out came sweet sweet music was not happening for me.  After a couple years my lack of talent got me out of it, when the teacher declared me hopeless.

The Bliss Fest does not seem that rock and roll to me.  Jazz is pretty arty but not very rambunctious, world is pretty poppy but also folky.  And so what if they had other kinds of music, it's not like they forbade folk music.  Couldn't you live and let live?  Tell the story again, as I have noticed folks aren't listening near as closely when you are talking about yourself as when you are talking about them.

Did you have like a set at Bliss?  Did you write other songs that never made it to Hold Back the Dawn.  Do you ever find yourself picking up the old guitar and serenading the creatures of the freehold?

Music in My Blood

My father was not musical, but my mother was.  She sang in a choir called "Musichorale", an amateur group, but a very dedicated one.  She encouraged me to join when I turned 16, which I did for one year.  I enjoyed it, but I lacked the dedication of all the other members.  When they scheduled their big Christmas concert on opening day of deer season, I handed in my resignation.  Before that, I took piano lessons for a couple of years, but experienced the same lack of discipline and dedication.  I sang in the church choir at Elsdon, but not during hunting season.  We sang in the Boy Scouts and in elementary school, and I thought everybody did in those days.  I used to sing along with the radio and our records, especially once the neo-folk revival of the 60s got underway.  When I was in the army, one of the guys taught me a few basic guitar chords, I soon bought my own guitar and a Bob Dylan song book, and I was on my way. 

The first Bliss Fest was held in 1980, but I didn't find out about it till 1984.  My wife, daughter, and I dropped in for a few hours to check it out the first two years, after which my wife dropped out and my daughter and I started camping for the whole three days.  In 1987 we came out a day early to help them set up tents and stuff.  The festival lost its Bliss Township venue in 1988 and moved to another farm in neighboring Redmond Township, but they kept the Bliss Fest name.  About that time, I started hanging around on Monday to help with the take down and clean up, and also to attend what we called the Survivor's Party on Monday night.  Being in no shape to drive home after that, I camped one more night and finally packed it in on Tuesday morning.  Sometimes I had to work at the paper mill one or more of those days, but I stayed the whole five days whenever I could.  After the mill closed down in 1990, I totally immersed myself in the Bliss experience, including all the extracurricular activities that take place throughout the year.  The last time I attended was in 2007, for reasons I have previously explained.  I lost touch with the Bliss folks after that.  

is winning everything?

 If you wrote that song at the time you recorded your LP that kid would now be 30 very likely with a toddler of his own, and the raven-haired beauty 44, possibly has a 2 year old grandson.    Do you still know either of them at all?

I don't remember you as a musical guy in high school, so I am wondering where you picked it up.  And what of Bliss Fest?  Was it there before you, or were you a founding member?  

But wait, why quiz Beagles who at this very moment is likely securing the freehold against the approaching cold snap when the winged steed of Google is standing on the balcony chuffing his hoofs waiting to hie me to the wonders of the lower peninsula?

Hum, no wiki page, kind of a bad sign, somebody really ought to get on that.  And it seems that like Bob Dylan, Bliss does not look back.  No history of the fest in the three pages of responses I perused.  Everything is aimed at promoting the upcoming Bliss Fest.  It seems as if it is honoring its roots, no mentions of that awful rock and roll, though jazz and world music are mentioned.

 But ho, what is this, a hundred bucks a head, and a hundred eighty for a bigger head?  And 18 food booths and arts and crafts.  Is it possible to imagine Old Dog with his Bake-O-Rama booth, and Uncle Ken peddling his junk and perhaps giving tips to aspiring artists on how to deftly use burnt sienna?  Well not likely, but you never know huh?

And what is this?

• # of Exhi­bitors: 45
  Juried: yes
  Prize Money: na

I don't know, it seems to me, that if the exhibitors are going to have to put up with being judged, there should be a little pittance at least for the winner.  And what the hell, why not one of those little plastic Participant trophies for the losers?  

Looking up what those trophies I came across well a lot of stuff, that frankly I have been thinking about for some time: Winners and Losers.  What is this American obsession with this?  Healthy, Unhealthy?  This will be discussed tomorrow.

Oh and there is a fb page for Blissfest in case Beagles wants to take a peek.

The Manitou Waltz

 This is a true story with a little dramatic embellishment, but not much.  The Club Manitou is a real place near Harbor Springs, although it has since been sold and renamed.  The Bliss Fest people usually held a "cabin fever concert" during February or March, and last I heard they were still doing it.  This time they chose the Club Manitou as the venue, and the owner was happy to allow it because it was a slow time of year for his business.  It was a big place and we packed it, resulting in the sale of much food and drink, which made the owner so happy that he asked us to do it again and again.  All told we spent a dozen or so Sunday evenings there, and then had to quit because we had lots of work to do preparing for our big festival in July.  The owner wanted us to come back after the festival, and I brought it up at a meeting, but our director was against the idea and my motion died for lack of support.  The toddler in question and his parents were well known to us all, as was the raven-haired beauty who slipped him some lettuce.  She had just finished her meal, and had some lettuce left over which she offered to the kid.  Once the kid started munching on the lettuce, he forgot all about dancing.  

I composed the song over the subsequent week and presented it for the first time during open mic on the next Sunday evening.  Our director asked if he could join me on the stage, to which I agreed.  He said, "What are we doing?", to which I replied, "Generic waltz, key of C".  He then proceeded to add a mandolin part, which he spontaneously composed on the spot.  Several people commented on it later and found it hard to believe that we had not rehearsed the number together.  

Speak speak, Author author

 This friend of mine who died unexpectedly a couple years ago was a writer.  A real writer, he had published a book about the environment https://www.amazon.com/Signals-Heartland-Tony-Fitzpatrick/dp/0802712606 and worked as a science writer at Washington University in St Louis.  He also had a couple novels, and a bunch of short stories.  He got a few of the short stories published in minor magazines but he had no success in shopping them to publishers.

He had a about a dozen short stories taken from his experience growing up, together they would make a slim book, and I remembered urging him to self publish it.  It would be distributed to his friends and it would be around, maybe exchanged, maybe part of some estate sale, who knows where it would go, but it would be around and maybe somebody would pick it up out of idle curiosity, and maybe it would become a hot best seller and made into a movie staring the Brad Pitt of the day.  Well probably not that, but just the idea of somebody reading it maybe a hundred years from now, just tripping along with the words you wrote, well that would be something.  So maybe Beagles has accomplished something like that, and I salute him. 

Beagles sent me one of the cassette tapes maybe ten years ago, and I had to dig through my archives to find a tape player but I found a tape player and listened to it a few times.  I didn't recognize the voice, but then I hadn't heard Beagles speak in fifty years and he would have been still a teenager then.  But also there is a singing voice that is different than the speaking voice, and all and all, not bad at all.

1994 I see and I was thinking that was not that long ago, I was working for the state then and two years into my condo.  But this October I will have lived in my condo for thirty years come October, so that makes it 28 years ago which any way you look at it is a long time.

I remember that Beagles left Blissfest when it changed its playlist from folk to pop including that awful rock and roll.  And these songs are certainly folkie.  Listening to Manitou Waltz  I remembered that there was a reveal in it and then I recalled that the ladykiller was a baby, but then the talk went to lettuce and I thought maybe I was mistaken and he was some kind of gerbil although how that would work out on a dance floor I don't know, and then it turned out that it was a toddler after all.  But I have to ask shouldn't it have been ice cream or cake or something, or did lettuce just work into the rhyme thing?  

But I quibble.  My own goal in my little taste of fame at my openings when I am a pretty big frog in an awfully tiny pond is I get to talk about my paintings, you know just why I did this and how I did that, and folks stand around and pay attention.  Of course I know that I can't go beyond five minutes without losing most of my crowd, but that's okay.

So I wonder if Beagles wants to partake of his five minutes of fame and give us a little spiel of how and why he did this and that.

A Blast From the Past

 Carl Bednar (Blissfest) "Hold Back The Dawn" Full Album, 1994 - YouTube

I got a phone call the other day from one C. A. Harvey who is affiliated with the BlissFest Music Organization.  He had found a copy of the tape I made back in 1994 and asked permission to put it on his YouTube channel.  He was particularly interested in the Porta-Potty song, and I got the impression that was the only one he was going to post, but he apparently posted the whole album.  He did a professional job of it too, considering what he had to work with.  He must have found a couple of old photos of me at the festival and worked them into the visual display.  

This was a studio recording, but being unemployed at the time, I bought the cheapest package they had: one recording session, one take, one mic, one track, and one beer when we were finished.  I found out later that the pros only record one song a day and keep doing it over and over again until they're satisfied with it, but I never claimed to be a pro.    

a discourse on art and on other sundry subjects

 Very nice digs Old Dog.  Spacious and light and airy, and hardwood floors, many people, my sister among them, swoon at the thought of hardwood floors.  And well-kept which I know to be the nature of Old Dog.  I am guessing that the bedroom is off to the left and the bed is so well made that a nickel would bounce from it.  And wait, what is that on yonder wall?  Is that a precious piece of deathless art?  Ties the whole apartment together in my humble opinion.

I did take sort of a drawing class at the Cultural Center.  There was no teacher but there were three hours with a nude model, which may sound good but this was at a senior center and our models were age-appropriate, and us old folk, we may be chock full of wisdom, but we don't look so hot with our clothes off.  

I didn't do it for fun.  I only did it because I thought it would be good for me.  The people in my watercolor class are always complaining about how they would like to be looser, which is not my problem at all. I need to be tighter.  And I guess it had that effect.  I took the course with my sister and at first we were like totally embarrassed to be in the company of such fine artists, and would attempt to cover up our miserable scribblings whenever one of the old masters strolled by.  

Eventually we got better.  Or what actually happened is not that we noticed our scribblings getting better, as we noticed that the work of the old masters no longer seemed so good to us, so that must mean we were getting better.

I guess I will stick with that thing about trying to make the image look better.  Before I touch brush to paper I am thinking of what changes I will make, and then as I paint and I fuck up and things get out of control I just go with the way the painting is going and never try to steer it back to the original image.  

People in class are almost always working from photographs and sometimes there will be some dark splotch in the background, could be a boat, maybe a truck, maybe a mountain. and I am all like leave it out.  Nobody knows what it is, nobody cares, it adds nothing compositionally.  But they are like afraid, they think the photo is beautiful, but don't seem to know why so they are afraid to leave out any part of it, and when they are done there is that dark splotch and they haven't even tried to make a boat or a truck or a mountain out of it, it is just their best rendition of that dark splotch, makes me crazy.  I would like to come up behind them and slam my cane, make that a Louisville slugger, on their table and oh, I don't know, bawl them out in front of the class or something.

I like Beagles' thing about what an artist is. There are a lot of those high faluting definitions of an artist like they are these visionaries blah, blah, blah.  I think it is just show biz.  If people like those big eyes paintings or Elvis on black velvet then go for it. Like back when grown-ups were on our case for reading nothing but comic books and some kindly aunt or uncle would come to our defense, Well at least they are reading.

Linguistic fun fact.  As I was getting ready to publish this post I saw one of those annoying squiggly red lines under faluting so I got into the googlemobile to find the correct spelling and it is falutin and not only that it is all one word: highfalutin.  Why?  Because it is that's why.

No, Really

 It's like the old saying goes, "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like."  I took one semester of art in high school, and the only thing I remember is the vanishing point.  I know there are different schools of art, like Impressionism and Surrealism, but I don't know the names of them all or even how many of them there are.  I mostly like the kind that is realistic looking, but I try to keep an open mind about that.  I wasn't so sure about Uncle Ken's stuff until he explained it to me.  It isn't exactly realistic, but it isn't abstract either.  What he told me was that he starts out with a subject from real life and then tries to improve it, and that made sense to me.  When he posts something on Face Book and his friends comment on it, however, I usually don't know what they are talking about.  

I do have a theory about artists, not just painters, but sculptors, photographers, music composers, poets, and story tellers.  I don't remember where I learned this, and it's possible that I made it up myself:  An artist is somebody who notices things that we don't and tries to point them out to us.  Two people can observe the same thing, and one of them notices something about it that the other doesn't.  Once it is pointed out to him, however, he notices it too and wonders why he never noticed it before.  Another way to look at is, you already knew about it, but you couldn't put it into words or otherwise describe it.  Then the artist comes along and expresses it better than you ever could have, and you think "He nailed it!" Does this make any sense?

I have never done any serious ice fishing, mostly because it happens the same time of year as rabbit hunting, actually snowshoe hares.  After feeding my hounds all summer I wanted to get some use out of them in the winter.  Rabbit and hare season in Michigan runs from September 15 to March 31, but the prime time is after deer season when there is snow on the ground.  I used to fish a lot in the summer, but I hardly do anything anymore.  My wife has health issues and doesn't drive, so I have to do all the shopping and errand running, in addition to much of the housework.  I am no spring chicken myself, and everything I do takes me longer than it used to.  I'm not complaining, you understand, it could be worse, a lot of people my age are dead.   

Old Dog barks at length

...but I can't make a whole blog about that.  I don't know enough about art to critique Uncle Ken's paintings...

Hogwash!  Or, to use a new word that Uncle revealed to me, BUSHWA!  You know exactly what is going on with his work; you simply lack the vocabulary to articulate your opinion.  That's my opinion, and I'm sticking to it.  I've had the benefit, or curse, of formal training in the fine arts and the path was strange.

I started college with the lofty goal of engineering; the college had a program where you spent three years there and then transferred to Purdue for two years.  At the end of those five (!) years of undergraduate study you had a B.A. from one place and a B.S. from Purdue, at which point you entered the workplace making big bucks.

Looked good on paper but that program was a ball-buster, 18 semester hours; I think the average academic load at that time was 16 semester hours.  I don't have the transcript handy but I was lucky to eke out mostly Cs and I was ready to bail out.  Since I was 17 by that time I was all set to join the Army, like a certain esteemed gentlemen of my acquaintance.  My folks talked me out of it, telling me to hang in for the rest of the school year, which I did.  

Things improved the second semester and I decided that the pre-engineering program was a definite no-go but I could continue as a sophomore with the ever reliable "undecided" major, possibly business, and knock out all those classes required for graduation.  Not a lot of room for electives but I managed to take two classes to help me decide what should come next if I decided to stick with college: Drawing (the artsy-fartsy type) and Mechanical Drawing (T-squares, etc.).  

The Mechanical Drawing class wasn't difficult and I learned some good stuff that I found useful in later jobs.  But the Drawing class was a nightmare, taught by a ceramics guy (they call themselves "potters" BTW) who had a cane and walked with a limp.  I was amused when Uncle Ken talked of the many years of watercolor "classes" he's taken.  Sorry, but it seems like a joke to me.  Our drawing classes met three times a week, I think 3 hours a class, from 1:30 to 4:30.  Very rarely did the class end at 4:30; around 5pm he would ask "What time do they quit serving meals in the cafeteria?"  Uh, oh...gonna be a long day.  The class would be dead quiet, everyone fervently drawing this pile of junk on a table for a still life; contour drawing, gesture drawing, now without lifting the pencil from the paper, now without looking at the paper, and now using charcoal, chalk, conte crayon, maybe combining a bunch of those things.  That rat bastard was relentless, keeping the pressure on.  You'd be so focused on your drawing that you didn't notice him sneaking up behind you until that cane crashed down on your drawing board, the sudden noise giving everyone a jolt.  Jeezus H. Christ!  Then he hissed, so only you could hear him, "You're not looking."  I was very proud of myself for getting a C in that class, there may have been 2 As; you simply could not skate through.  But, by god, I loved that class and learned to draw like a motherfucker, and became almost friends with the rat bastard.  And second semester we had a nude model, which was nice for this young pup in 1967.

Anyhow, in the middle of the second semester the guy asked me, "What's your major?"  I replied that I wasn't sure, maybe business.  "Why don't you become an Art Major?"  Well, I didn't have any answer for that so WTF, why not, and that was that.  There was a price to be paid, though.  Since I was behind in the art curriculum I had a lot of catching up to do during my junior year, with shitloads of studio classes: Basic Design, Painting, and Graphics (serigraphy, woodcuts, etc.), all very time consuming with expensive materials.  That 3rd year of college wiped me out, completely depleting whatever inspirational resources I had at that point of my life.  No point in returning for that final senior year, the well was dry.  At that point I did the only sensible thing, that same thing which I had planned to do a couple of years earlier: dropped out and joined the Army.

-----

Whew!  That went on a lot longer than planned, that's for sure.  So go ahead, Mr. Beagles, speak your mind, give your opinion and if anyone doesn't like it you can tell them that The Old Dog says they can piss up a rope.

Sometimes I think Mr. Beagles is being ignored on this forum but no worries; I'm keeping a running list of things I want to ask him about, without being too intrusive.  Typical stuff for me to be curious about but may be boring or routine to him, like how's the ice fishing been this year?  I've never done it myself but it sounds like something worth doing, even if one time is enough.  And then there are many questions about paper, a material that gives me endless fascination.  Lately I've been deconstructing paper shopping bags, soaking them in water and carefully unfolding them.  Amazing how they are made, and how different in quality and thickness the bags from different stores are.  Plenty of uses with those big sheets, Kraft paper, I think it's called.  Old newspapers are fun, too, once they get wet and dry out; they lose that smooth flatness and gain a subtle texture, quite pleasing in my opinion.  I'm still thinking of what I'll be doing with them but there's always papier mache.  This is where baking bread comes in handy; plenty of flour available for gluing stuff together.  I believe wheat paste is the gold standard for archival purposes in libraries and museums, but I'm not sure.

-----

Uncle Ken has asked about my new digs and I will have more to report in the future, but for the time being I'd like to present what I am calling my official Beaglesonian portrait.  The title is "The Goofball in Quiet Repose."  To give you a sense of scale it is 22' 6" from the camera to the chair I'm sitting on.

 

 

dead of winter, nothing to say, no drums to play

 I have never seen bongo drums outside of a movie, and I have to ask Old Dog why does his friend ask?

The sun is rising one minute earlier than it did yesterday.  This is the first time that has happened since the solstice.  A few days from now it will rise another minute earlier and the process will accelerate, but then we have all been through this process many times.  

We got hit pretty hard by this latest cold snap, and like those tiresome snowbirds that can't wait to put photos of their daffodils on fb to show their former neighbors, I switched my weather map to Cheboygan and I have to say I was disappointed that you guys weren't all that much colder than we were.  In fact I have noticed that friends who live two hundred miles to the south have much warmer weather while those who live two hundred miles to the north, it's not that much colder.  Lake effect I guess.

January 6th CNN devoted the whole fucking day to last year's January 6th, and I had to wonder why they bothered.  All the people outside of Trumpland already know his perfidy and all those inside would never believe it if they saw it, which they won't anyway.

Kind of interesting stuff going on about collusion between Trump and Hannity and Tucker is doing the deep end thing, but that's probably only interesting to political nuts like me.

Checking In

 I'm still here, and I'm not mad at anybody, I just haven't felt inspired to write lately.  Uncle Ken's photo of the lake in winter and Old Dog's photo of the Chicago skyline were impressive, but I can't make a whole blog about that.  I don't know enough about art to critique Uncle Ken's paintings, but I like them, so what more can I say?  I haven't found anything in the news lately to write home about, it's just COVID, COVID, COVID, Trump, Trump, Trump, and Putin, Putin, Putin.  I got tired of those topics a long time ago.  

There's always the weather, at least that's something that changes often.  We haven't had much snow yet, not that there's anything wrong with that.  We've had considerable blowing and a couple power outages, but it could have been worse.  It's supposed to get down to zero tonight, but back up to the 20s tomorrow.  I can live with that.  We went down to -8 the other evening at our place, but the official Cheboygan temp was +2.  That was only for a few hours and then it started inching back up. We usually run a few degrees warmer in Beaglesonia than they do in town, but we tend to go lower on a clear night like that.  

Bongo fury

If any of you guys play bongo drums, I'd like information about your experiences and pitfalls related to this hip percussion instrument.  Asking for a friend, of course.

old friends

Old Dog would not touch facebook with a ten foot pole even if he was sinking in quicksand at the time and only the grip of some old high school buddy or some workmate or long ago beer drinking buddy could pull him from an agonizing death underwater.  Beagles joined only because he wanted to keep track of his daughter and possibly other relatives. He never comments, and I think he only looks through it on weekends where he drops likes here and there.  Myself, posting my works of deathless art get a prim like for each one, but I feel like he is only being polite,

There are plenty of people who are heavier users of fb than me but I have to admit I am a pretty heavy user.  One of the things I love is getting in touch with people I haven't heard from in like fifty years.  Just something I would like to know.  Fellini's 8 1/2 ends with a scene where the central character meets every woman he had ever known in his life.  I would like to have that and what the hell, all the men too.  

And that is what it is like when you first join fb.  You friend a couple of people, probably the ones who urged you to join, and likely friends of theirs know you too, and friends of friends and it is a little like that last scene in 8 1/2.

Well that is how the Institute was born.  I friended some of my Champaign buddies and then other Champaign buddies saw that I was on their friends' pages so they friended me, and so on.

And somewhere in there was Suzie who was a waitress at Chin's.  And strangely enough she had an older brother who I had attended high school with.  We didn't hang out together much, but when time came for us to fly the coop, there was strong pressure from the school to go on to college and make something of ourselves and Carl was one of the few who refused.  I didn't think it was a good decision,  but I highly approved of him standing up to The Man.

And then I got his email and it turned out that he was a crazed right winger, but that was ok with me because I like to argue, and then we exchanged emails daily and then Beagles got the blog and so on and blah, blah, blah, and I have told this story many times before, but, you know, people aren't always listening.

There are a lot of shellfish that start out life as a free swimming organism, seeing the world free as a breeze but then at some point attaching themselves to a rock and growing some kind of shell and that is where they will be the whole rest of their lives.

I think it's true with people too.  We have our free swimming youth, a time when anything could happen, and at some point we settle down and nothing much happens till the day we die.  Well not exactly like that but pretty close I think.

Last Friday I got one of those friend requests from an old Champaign pal who I haven't heard from in over fifty years is what brought this all up.  But I have to move on this morning, more later probably.

Meanwhile at the Lake

 

Still wasting time

Somebody said something about liking a red sky?  Today's start of a deliciously cold day, at 06:35:32.

 

Boxer speaks and the third insurrection

 First of all we have three comments from our latest author who I believe is working his way up to doing a full-blown post.  Not that the rest of us Authors blow. but just a figure of speech.

For the third comment he has chosen the Institute nom' de plume of Boxer, so now we have three Dawgs.

For the second comment, Thankyewverymuch.

For the first comment thankyewverymuch again and I wonder if the upper part of the background looked like the sky to you, with like dark strings of clouds in front of a reddish sky?  Actually nobody else in my Saturday watercolor class did, but it's not so important, the thing I wanted to do with the stripes getting broader as you go away from the lower left was to make it look more like the murder hornet is approaching you and thus more menacing.

As for that riot vs insurrection thing, what would you call the storming of the Bastille or the Czar's palace?  Isn't this how you begin a revolution?  Certainly the Proud Boys, and likely the Three Percenters, and maybe the Promise Keepers and who knows how many of those weird groups with weird names had something like this as their fondest dream.  At the highest level things get murkier because they are all such a bunch of fucking liars.  Seems like you had this one group who was trying to push Pence to do something he couldn't legally do, and you had Der Sturmper openly calling for the capitol to be sturmed.  So I am sticking with insurrection, but if it makes you happier to call it a riot so be it.

As for a mob, I would have to agree with that.  Probably about half of the sturmers just went there to show off their Maga hats and insult decent people, but then they got caught up in the spirit.

Thinking back to the sixties, I really didn't approve of all that bombing especially when one of those killed a janitor and I happened to be working as a janitor at the time, but when we had our campus demonstrations which were mildly violent (bottles vs tear gas), I often showed up as part of the crowd just to show my support or something.

The guns.  Why did those second amendment swains who feel the need to sling an AK-47 over their shoulders to amble down to the corner Subway to get a footlong baja turkey avocado sandwich, decide to leave their guns at home when they stormed the capitol to hang Mike Spence from the old oak tree?  Well they do stand out like a sore thumbs.  What of handguns?  We really don't know since we had little chance to stop and frisk, also, they likely knew they could get in deep shit for having one and maybe left them at home for that reason.  The cops would have to have been ordered to shoot, and well, tactically it was probably the best decision not to shoot.

It could have been way worse, but that does not mean that it wasn't really, really, really bad.

Of Rubbers and Riots

I just looked up "condoms" in my old- fashioned dictionary, you know, the kind that is made out of real paper.  It says that the origin of the word is unknown, but that it has been part of our language since the1760s.  Funny that I never heard of it until the 1960s, but that wouldn't be the first time that I was a day late and a dollar short about something.  I posted that old propaganda poster from World War II to show that rubbers were called "prophylactics" before they were called "condoms".  Although it did not exactly prove my point, I posted it anyway because I thought it was better than nothing.  I am now willing to concede that rubbers have been called condoms for a really long time, maybe even longer than they have been called either rubbers or prophylactics, but not by anybody that I knew.  

Politics and other belief systems are kind of like that.  As the old saying goes, "Birds of a feather flock together".   When you hang out, either online or in real life, only with like-minded individuals, you come to think that everybody believes the same way you do. It's like when that kid on my school bus said, "That's the way everybody is."  I responded, "Everybody in the world or just everybody in Michigan?"  After a brief pause, the kid said, "Everybody in Michigan."  I came back with, "Do you know everybody in Michigan?"  The kid admitted that he did not, but I'm not sure that he got my point because he was shaking his head as he got off at his stop. 

Although the media keeps referring to the January 6 incident as an insurrection, I still think it was more like a riot.  An insurrection would have been more effectively planned, and they would have brought their guns.  I think it started out as a peaceful demonstration and then, as often happens with peaceful demonstrations, mass hysteria set in, and it escalated into a riot.

Speaking of guns, why didn't the cops use theirs?  I think that any court in the land would have ruled that it was justified because a reasonable person in their position would certainly be in fear of death or great bodily harm.   

insurrections

 I don't understand this obsession with condoms but very well.

Why are Hitler and the Japanese gent holding hypodermics (dripping with what we, in that man of the world manner of teen boys, called The Syph), and Mussolini is holding what appears to be a hooker doll?  What is with the hooker doll?

And who is the Japanese gent?  Could be Hirohito, the emperor who, like George Costanza, would have preferred to be a marine biologist, or Tojo who was the main man who wanted the war?  They both had moustaches so it's hard to tell, but I am going with Tojo, because that seems to be the name one hears most often watching WW II movies about the Pacific.  Doing my research I came up with this fun fact:

After recovering from his injuries, Tojo was moved to Sugamo Prison. While there, he received a new set of dentures, made by an American dentist, into which the phrase "Remember Pearl Harbor" had been secretly drilled in Morse code.^[

Writing about the weathermen in the last post, and reading Emma's autobiography, and just yesterday afternoon hearing that the tribunal of justice will be wanting to hear from Hannity. got me to thinking about the last three American insurrections.

Emma Goldman, and many of her fellow anarchists and socialists were champions of the working men who were working those long hours in the smoking factories and dark mines and places of that ilk.  Herself she was from that ilk and it seems most of her compatriots were too.  I am about halfway through and she has been in prison a few times, and spends much of her time in meeting halls giving rousing speeches, and there are magazines and debates with other radical groups because they had all these different theories, but it strikes me that there is not much talk about what to do when they achieve their goals, what sort of government they thought to replacing the one they overthrew.  Well many of them were anarchists, so they didn't believe in government, but there has to be something doesn't there?  Were they dreaming of some libertarian eden, some Galt's Gulch from sea to shining sea, only without so many fatuous rich guys?

She didn't think of much of democracy because she thought the masses were too easily led by silver tongued devils, and she didn't care for mere reform because she thought it would blunt the revolutionary spirit.  And maybe she was right because about one hundred years after the forty hour week are we not in another gilded age much like the one she deplored.

I always think of the revolution of the sixties as the perfect storm, all those baby boomers, and all those illegal drugs that made outlaws of much of that generation, and of course The Unpopular War that we were called to fight in.  We were largely a generational thing, we never really connected to the workingman.  We had the Black movement on our side, but they had their own interests.  Most of us were white middle class, the children of privilege, and really all we wanted was to legalize dope and end The Unpopular War, Hey and don't make me cut my hair Man, and I reckon we would have been happy enough.

But the bombings stand out, what was with that?  Even as a rank and file hippie and generally in favor of those radical guys I wondered why are we doing that.  Did we think that this was going to end the war or legalize dope.

And I wonder why there are no bombings from the Trumpists and their allies like the Proud Boys and their ilk who talk a pretty violent game but generally just want to bump chests with antifa.  Where we had our weather underground they have their Qanon, but those guys just seem to talk to each other, and that's about it.

But it all seemed to come together January 6th huh?  They got to stand up and fight, only instead of fighting antifa and feminists and gays and minorities they were fighting cops who they profess to love with all their hearts.  But maybe they have something that the other insurrections didn't.  Neither Emma's ilk, or the sixties ilk had a clear goal of what to do when they took power, but the Trumpist's do.  It's Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump forever.

A Rubber by Any Other Name is Still a Rubber

Sexually transmitted infections[edit]

U.S. propaganda poster Fool the Axis Use Prophylaxis, 1942

Sexually transmitted infections (STIs), such as syphilis and HIV, are common but preventable with safe-sex practices. STIs can be asymptomatic, or cause a range of symptoms. Preventive measures for STIs are called prophylactics. The term especially applies to the use of condoms,^[45] which are highly effective at preventing disease,^[46] but also to other devices meant to prevent STIs,^[45] such as dental dams and latex gloves. Other means for preventing STIs include education on how to use condoms or other such barrier devices, testing partners before having unprotected sex, receiving regular STI screenings, to both receive treatment and prevent spreading STIs to partners, and, specifically for HIV, regularly taking prophylactic antiretroviral drugs, such as Truvada. Post-exposure prophylaxis, started within 72 hours (optimally less than 1 hour) after exposure to high-risk fluids, can also protect against HIV transmission.

Preventive healthcare - Wikipedia

Apparently, prophylactic or prophylaxis can mean any number of methods used to prevent disease including, but not limited to, rubbers.  According to Wiki, Uncle Ken is correct about rubbers being around long before they began making them out of rubber.  Obviously, then, they couldn't have been called "rubbers" in those days of old when nights were bold, but I doubt that they were called "condoms" either.  I just can't picture Sir Lancelot explaining to his lady fair that, before he can tend to her needs, he first must slay yon sheep so that he can make a condom out of its guts.