who are these people?

 I generally go to sleep with the radio on and at about 2am yesterday I woke to hear that Warnock had won and that Osoff  had it in the bag.  At first I was just glad that we had taken the senate, but thinking a little further down the line I realized that it also meant the end of Moscow Mitch's domination.

Hallelujah, Hallelujah.  Sent out some emails, made a post on fb, commented on others.  Zippy a dee doo dah what a wonderful day.  

After lunch I settled into my LaZboy for my nap, listening to the circus of the Trumpists pissing and moaning about allegations of a stolen election, dropping off as Ted 'Satan' Cruz was beginning his spiel.  But then there was a shift, a change in tone from the bleeting Trumpists and the slightly sarcastic newscasters, something serious was going on.  Rubbing the sand from my eyes I saw that the capital was under siege.  

Who were these guys?  They had an inordinate love of flags, Trump flags, confederate flags, flags with Trump dressed like Rambo blasting off some super gun, all togged up like those nutty ladies that show up at conventions decked out in flags and buttons and whatnot from the crazy store.  One thing that struck me as odd was there were a lot of fat old guys most of them accompanied by their fat old wives who were just as outraged as their hubbies.  And there were guys like the guy with the horned hat dressed seemingly like some character of folk lore, but more likely the latest Marvel superhero or villain,

Every now and then they would pause in their insurrection and when they tired of calling the reporters traitors, would explain opaquely that they didn't like the way things were going, or they felt that they weren't getting enough attention, or that they were afraid of antifa, grumpy nursing home talk.  

What did that have to do with storming the capitol?  What did they think they were accomplishing?  Well it really didn't matter,  I guess we showed them, they told the reporters.  

Trump was called on to say something to sooth the savage beasts, but he called them beautiful people and ranted about the stolen election.

The capitol police turned out to be a bunch of mall cops, and finally the real police arrived to drive them off.

This morning I read that Trump has announced that he will leave peacefully.  I don't think anybody believes that. Thirteen more days.

The Bobcats of Beaglesonia

I forgot to answer Old Dog's questions about bobcats yesterday.  Truth be known, I looked them up just the other day because I didn't know a lot about them myself.  I knew there were a few around here, but I was surprised that they came so close to the house at night.  I only saw one bobcat on the property in all my 34 years of hunting and 20 years of living here, and that one was way back in the swamp.  Anyway, here's the link:

Bobcat - Wikipedia

Thanks to Uncle Ken for the clarification about those tempera paints.  Although I remember them from school, I didn't know all that stuff about the eggs.  I had heard that egg whites can be use as a type of glue, and that they were used in the construction of the Charles Bridge in Czechoslovakia.  Legend has it that an egg tax was levied on all the villages to support this effort, and the residents of one town, I believe it was Lidice, were worried that their contribution would get broken in transit, so they hard boiled their eggs before they shipped them, which made them useless to the bridge builders.  Even unto this day, when a Czech says or does something stupid, one of his fellow Czechs may chide him by saying, "Are you from Lidice, where they boil the eggs?"

The Wonder, tempera paint, and being off the clock at the end of the day

 I do remember the family doctor making house calls.  Soltis was his name. Mumps was the disease, a disease that was part of the regimen that all of us kids was expected to go through, and then it was completely forgotten, and now it appears to be making a small comeback thanks to the idiot anti vaxxers,  I remember something called pink salve that was put on our necks and smelled terrible and we didn't like it all.  Nor did we like the doctor.  I remember being made presentable for the doc and complaining "I don't see why I have to clean up for a dirty old doctor," and everybody laughed, and I saw where I might have a chance to make it in show biz, but somewhere along the line that talent got channeled into being a wise ass.

I have vague memories of sitting on the floor of the living room and listening to this huge radio play the Baby Snooks show.  Then came The Wonder.  At first it was just something the kids would talk about coming back to school from lunch.  Uncle Johnny Coons, The Little Rascals, cartoons.  What manner of device was this?  Then the neighbors got one and we kids would sneak onto their front porch and watch it through their window.

Finally one arrived in our house,  I don't remember how the furniture was arranged in our front room before, but now all chairs were turned to the tv and that's how we spent all our nights.  

But sometimes it would go on the blink and the family would have to wait while he removed that back and did whatever.  Old Dog said it was relatively easy, but we never knew that because we never dared because of that sudden death thing.   

Tempura is a Japanese dish.  The paints we used in grade school were called tempera paints which I think is kind of a generic name for different kinds of paint.  Before oils people used to paint with egg tempera which was a sort of water soluble paint mixed with egg white.  There are two kinds of watercolors, transparent where if you put yellow on top of blue you get green, and something called gouache where if you put yellow on top of blue you get yellow.  I believe what we used in grade school was more the gouache type but of a very cheap variety.

I don't know what became of those paint spattered kids because as a sub once the bell rang and I had the kids ushered out the door my day was over.  Many drawbacks of being a sub but walking out the door shortly after the bell was one of the upsides.

I think it was a sixth grade at Washington Irving school, there was a kid I didn't like.  He was loudmouth asshole, but what I didn't like was he was picking on this girl, and sometimes physically.  Not cool.  Coming  back from something he tripped her and she fell flat on her face.  I was so shocked that "Damn," slipped out of my mouth, something that happened maybe three of four times in my seven years of subbing.  But it was quickly forgotten as I hustled him off to the office to whatever tender mercies he would be shown there.

At the end of the day I was punching out and somebody in the office told me I had a telephone call.  I took it and it was the irate mother of the bully.  I tried to explain briefly the nature of her kids's crime, but she was not interested, instead she was launching into a diatribe about me swearing a blue streak.  I looked up at the clock and told the woman that I was off the clock and hung up on her.

Do You Know What HDMI Stands For?

I do now, but only because I looked it up.  It's "High Definition Multimedia Interface".   The kid that sold me the TV and DVD player said that I would need one of those because nothing made in the 21st Century uses those old fashioned A/V cables with the three color coded jacks.  Turned out that the DVD player comes with one of those, which means I could have plugged it into my old fashioned 20th Century TV after all, but we had been considering buying a flat screen for awhile anyway.  The DVD player also has an HDMI port, but the HDMI cable was not included, so the kid was right when he said I was going to need one of those, although I wouldn't have if I hadn't bought the new TV.  The new TV, on the other hand, does not have any ports for the old fashioned A/V cables, so the HDMI was the only viable option.  Actually, the volume is adequate with most DVDs, but when the dialog is delivered with a British accent, it would be nice to be able to turn it up a bit.  My instruction sheet says that I can put an amplifier between the DVD player and he TV if I had another HDMI cable, which is something to consider.

Are they still using those Tempura paints in the schools?  We used to call them "temper paints", probably because they were difficult to work with.  They were water soluble, which was a good thing because we usually had a mess to clean up afterwards.  We were required to buy them and show the teacher that we had them on the first day of school, but I only remember using them one time, and the clean up took longer than the painting. 

Happy 2021

Maybe it's my imagination but it sure looks like there are a couple of very well fed bobcats lurking in Beaglesonia.  I bet the small rodent population is quite small this time of year but I don't know what else would make up the bobcat diet.  I've never tracked any game but after a snowfall it must be interesting to follow the animal tracks, just to see where they lead.  There's not much around here that I've noticed except for rabbits.

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Remember tv repairmen?

Jeez, that's going way back, Uncle Ken, almost as far back as the family doctor who made house calls.  Wouldn't that be great if they still did that, with none of the paperwork, co-payments, and waiting in a place where you can catch anything?  My memory of the doctor's visits is a little fuzzy but I'll never forget that little black bag they carried, just like Doc Adams in Gunsmoke.

But getting back to the TV repairman, they weren't kidding about getting electrocuted, or at least getting a very serious shock even if the set was unplugged.  The capacitors and transformers can hold a lot of juice and it can take a long time for the energy to slowly weaken.  But that was part of the beauty of those old TVs; you could actually repair them.  It looked like voodoo to a child but it was actually quite simple.  Once you removed the back panel you'd find a complete schematic diagram and since everything was out in the open it was pretty easy to troubleshoot any problem and replace bad parts.

Not so simple these days, the parts are a lot smaller and manufacturers don't want us simple folk to be able to fix our own stuff.  The technical diagrams and spare parts can be very difficult to acquire; we don't own stuff anymore, we are leasing it but that's another rabbit hole.

I can't think of a solution to the weak audio signal of Mr. Beagles' new DVD player except to suggest that there's another audio input on the TV he should be using.  Most DVD players have very limited outputs but the new TVs can have a ton of inputs.  Is there a stereo system handy that you can use to boost the line levels?  That's what I use from the days of the 20th century when I got carried away with stereo equipment.  Got to have a sub-woofer, right?  You can find them at Best Buy hidden behind the buggy whips.

 

 

a couple sub stories

 2020 is now four days away.  It appears that far from fading Trump has gone nova.  There will be the speech in Georgia tonight.  Will he try to boost the candidates, or will he air grievances and foul the republican waters?  Most likely.  Then there is the circus on January 6.  Will the dirty dozen, no make that twenty, senators carry on with their caterwauling after Trump's recent phone call?  And then there will still be two weeks after that until the Trump scraps are hauled out of the white house.  

But until then we will continue to die of the Covid.  Remember Trump's very fine program for distributing the vaccine that no details of ever surfaced so the suspicion was high that there was no such plan, and of course it turned out there wasn't.  How many more will die because of this?  A lot.  

Well I just had to get that out.  I don't have much in the tank otherwise.  Here are a couple sub stories I recently emailed to a friend.

When I was subbing there was a school for the profoundly disabled.  Some could not walk and some could not talk and some could not do either.  Some came in on these elaborate wheel chairs and just stared at the ceiling all class long.  A couple of these had elaborately coifed hair and were dressed in the latest, sharpest, kid fashion clean and unwrinkled because how could it ever get to be otherwise.

I was kind of devastated, oh those poor kids, those poor parents.  But then I thought maybe it just seemed that way to me because I had just walked in on them.  To their parents it was just another day.  This was how their kid was every day and if they felt good knowing their kid was looking good, well that was something, and maybe somewhere in the process of getting them dressed up a smile had crossed their face, maybe they had mumbled something that sounded like Mama or Daddy.  And for the more advanced kids, well if this school could teach them how to eat from a bowl using a spoon, why that would make their parents' lives considerably easier.  So maybe it wasn't so bad.

And then we had a fire.  They were having some kind of diversity pageant, something Latin I think.  They had dressed some of the kids up as figures from Latin American history and they were pulling them along on wagons or carts in front of other kids who were just sitting and staring.  I am thinking to myself this is really strange.

And then the alarm rang.  Alarms rang all the time while I was subbing, some of them were preplanned and the rest of them were false alarms.  But in the confusion after the alarms I passed by the kitchen door and there were actual flames.  Shit.  Somebody gave me a kid in a wheelchair to push and the hand of a kid who could walk but not talk and I was headed out the door.

I have to say that in my mind I felt like I cut quite the heroic figure, flames roaring (hardly) as the bold sub leads two helpless kids to safety.  I rather wished that the Channel Seven News Truck would pull up and train their camera on me and lead the 5:00 show with the heroic sub story. but it turned out that it was not much of a fire at all and soon we were all going back to the school.

When you sub you teach whatever the missing teacher taught.  If they taught math, you teach math, first grade you teach first grade, ESL for Ukrainians you teach that (they all looked like Nazi youth, but they were the sweetest, most obedient kids I ever taught).  Then one particular day I was the art teacher.

Art teacher, how swell, was I not an artist myself?  Look at all this equipment, oh I can't wait.  But all I had that day were special ed kids of the more severe sorts.  They would just sit and stare as the teachers' aides used the crayons and the scissors in front of them.  Well this was no fun at all, and then at the end of the day I got a class of (forgive me) normal first graders.  I looked into their wide and wild laughing eyes and asked "Who wants to paint?"

I never had kids myself, and I never had been around people who had them very much and I didn't know what their various capabilities were.  Maybe five minutes into the class I realized that you don't just hand out paint and brushes to a bunch of first graders, but it was too late then, the barndoors were wide open.

I had noticed briefly when their teacher had brought them in that they were especially well dressed, likely it had been a photo day, but at the end of the class they were smiling (they did have a good time) and spattered.  Their teacher looked aghast, "This will all wash out won't it?  It seems likely that grade schools would be supplied with paint that washes out, but of course I had no idea.  Oh yes, I assured her, this will all wash out completely.

The Last of the Best

 Here are five more trailcam photos from the deer scrap pile.  I don't think I'll post any more from this batch because y'all have seen the best of them.