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.