A Pome Of Humorous Intent

Red Baron fought the Wolfman,

The end was clear to those who knew:

For one of them could loop-the-loop

But the other was Loup Garou!

     ...You're welcome.

Wore Myself Out Yesterday

     And I didn't even do all that much!  I had to discontinue the anti-inflammatory, which was doing terrible, terrible things to my digestion, so I get pretty creaky.

     Nevertheless, I had some heavy trash to dispose of, then worked with local ham radio guys, changing out the repeater that lives up at the North Campus -- and then home, to clean half the gutters and reseat the X-frame support that carries part of my ham radio antenna over the peak of the roof of my house.  The thing has become lighter over the years, and some combination of wind and fallen branch caught it and turned it through 90 degrees!  (It's due for a replacement and possible upgrade later this year, as is the "LineDragon" that carries the open-wire feedline up and over the gutter.)

     Roof work at Roseholme Cottage is demanding, as the roof has a very steep pitch.  Working right at the edge is slightly dangerous, a constant trade between sufficient friction to not slide off and getting a good angle to dig wet leaves from the guttering.  I can still do the job but I can see that in a few years, I'll need to either get a tall stepladder to work from or hire others to clean the gutters.  Maybe this should be the summer I install leaf screens.

     With the worst gutter mostly clear and the X-frame back in place, I climbed down off the roof, put away the ladder, went inside, took off my Carolina Pole Climbers (calf-length lace-up linesman's boots, which need toeroom-stretching), sat down to watch a movie and kept dozing off.  Roused myself to make a little supper and realized I was all rubber-legged and out of it, and still sleepy.

     I finished dinner, started the dishwasher and staggered off to bed at 8:00 p.m.  Ten hours later, the alarm went off and it felt like fifteen minutes.

Computer Woes Again

     I'm back to "camping in the back yard" with my Surface Pro again.

     My "new" (refurbished) desktop Windows 10 computer is acting up, reporting "low memory" with only one app running, slow, crashing Firefox and the new Microsoft browser, etc.  So it's hosed in some way, maybe just cheap RAM, maybe it needs reseated.  I'm finding out.

     --Make that, "I thought I was finding out." Letting Windows check itself via Microsoft's suggested procedures is like shouting down a well: you don't get much back.  Resource Monitor sees rather a lot of "hard faults/sec," which points back to some kind of hardware unhappiness.  Huck, fetch me a screwdriver!

Low Melting-Point Brains

     Trump Derangement Syndrome hit The New Yorker magazine early and hard; they coasted into the election confident that adopted New Yorker Hilary Clinton was going to grab the White House, a comfortably old-school feminist explanation point to the Dem's Long March through the fed.gov, and instead they got a different New Yorker, crass and loud and clearly Not Their Sort. 

     The election knocked them off their center and the magazine still hasn't recovered.  This makes me sad; the level of writing to be found in The New Yorker is refreshingly high, at least in general, and anyone who aspires to tell stories well benefits from reading the good stuff.  I enjoy Lester Dent but he'd be the first to tell you that he wrote as quickly as possible, with little attention to style or, sometimes, even grammar.  He told wonderful stories -- even within painfully formulaic plots, Dent maintains consistency and keeps the action going in a manner few other writers manage -- but he never told them quite as well as he would have liked.  Late in his life, he turned out a detective novel that reads like proto-John D. MacDonald, but he was never satisfied with it, feeling his ability to write really good prose had been impaired by a career-long habit of speed.

     The New Yorker has a different problem these days: they tell -- in the finest of style -- dismal, paranoid stories fixated in horror on President Trump, stories that jar with one another, in which the President is a moron on one page and a scheming, unpredictable madman on the next, and elsewhere, he's plotting to loot the nation's coffers, as sure as sunset.  Apparently, one of the effects of Trump Derangement Syndrome is to render the victim unable to grasp contradiction, leaving the magazine tottering along in a kind of senile concern about what that loud fellow in Washington (or Florida) is really up to while unable to discern any of the reality at the heart of the shouting.

     It's sad, really, but perhaps it only reveals a lack of perspective that had been in place for years.  Alas, the magazine that introduced the work of Charles Addams to the world isn't at all what it used to be.

The Galactic Overlord Expanse

     Tam and I have started watching The Expanse together.  It's a second time through for me and I'm still enjoying it.  Oh, it's space-opera; travel times are laughably condensed, radio conversations don't have any speed-of-light lag, and so on; but it's good space-opera, engaging tales well-told within a larger story arc that unfolds slowly.

     There was something familiar about the general outline: the big threat, the cliffhanger endings, the matter-of-fact treatment of space travel and associated tech--

     In Robert A. Heinlein's juvenile The Rolling Stones -- one of his best, despite just about every part of it having been swept away by subsequent developments in the real world -- Roger Stone and, later, Hazel Stone finance the family's haring off into the far reaches of inhabited space by writing an ongoing science fiction drama (probably radio, possibly some form of TV).  Science and sociology howlers in the series-within-the-book come in for occasional criticism among the characters, as does the melodramatic nature of it, but the series is obviously popular among the public and sounds like great fun if you don't get too picky about plausibility.

     And that's The Expanse in a nutshell.  There's way too much unused volume in the cabins of those spaceships; they haven't got room for the amount of reaction mass they must use, and so on and on.  Nevertheless, it's great fun, and does the best job of building a lived-in future seen on television since Firefly.

Hello, Dali

     What did I just watch...?

     A local TV reporter lead the 6:00 a.m. news today, standing in front of a not-yet-opened Dollar General store, covering, well--  That's the problem.  She was reporting on something which clearly involved police, one of whom had, at some point during the night, discharged his sidearm, possibly in the general direction of a suspiciously-lurking man, about whom it appeared there had been a 911 call, for reasons that were not made clear but presumably having to do with the lurking and the suspiciousness.  No one, it seemed, had been shot or hurt, but "the caller had given a detailed description of the suspect, which the officer matched," which was about the point at which I lost the thread entirely.

     It was word salad.  Mind you, the reporter had strung together all the usual words -- indeed, most of the usual phrases -- but not in a way that made coherent sense.  I'm fond of relating thoughts in an unusual manner, filled with allusions and complex sentences, and I know when I'm in over my head.  This reporter had drowned several times over and gave no sign of grasping her lapse into nonsense.  I fulled expected to see a police spokesperson with doors or windows, or an elephant-giraffe stilting by in the background, on legs slender as threads.

Soylent What?

     So, this morning I'm cooking a sausage for breakfast, and I look at the label:

Polish Sausage

25% less fat than beef or pork sausage

     That's it.  Doesn't say if it's made with turkey, chicken, tilapia, TVP, nope, nothing.  Just "Polish."

     It was delicious.  But I'm still kinda worried.

Finally, A Garden...?

     Not quite.  After a year (a year!) or tarping-over the raised bed in front of the house, I laid down permeable barrier cloth and began to commence to start over -- about two bags of topsoil short of the mark!  There was enough to start the solitary herb that will live among the flowers (rosemary) and to cover most of the barrier. 

     Tamara, who already provided the rosemary, will pick up a couple more bags of topsoil today and with any luck, I'll be planting mixed-wildflower seeds this evening.

     Meanwhile, the hostas and ditch-lilies flourish, the stonecrop is doing well (and I'd like to add to it, more stonecrop and possibly tall yarrow at the back) and the wild violets are running wild and the little white flowers that carpet the front yard have passed their peak.  The little patch of mint is doing all right but might like a bit of the topsoil to help out.  This is gardening-by-default: I'm growing what grows mostly on its own.  The stonecrop and mint are additions that have worked out; the rest was already here.

     First mowing of most of the front yard was last week and the rest of it it will have to be tonight or tomorrow night, ahead of predicted rain Wednesday.  I'm always reluctant to get too aggressive as long as the little wildflowers are blooming; grass and weeds are one thing but it seems wrong to be buzz-cutting flowers.

Return To Peru

     To the Peru Hamfest, that is -- it's an amateur radio swapmeet, officially the North Central Indiana Hamfest, organized by ham radio clubs in Cass, Maimi and Grant Counties and the city of Kokomo, which includes a lot of my "old neighborhood," neighborhoods being kind of large in rural Indiana.

     It's always a good one, not huge but full of interesting items.  I passed up a few I probably shouldn't, like big variable capacitors and roller inductors, but I came away with several vacuum tubes (6BG6s, a kind of 6L6 with a plate cap or an 807 with an octal base, a "sleeper" beam power tube that is often overlooked) and a wooden-boxed Western Union-tagged AC voltmeter built by Daven, with a nice Weston meter.  If the meter itself is still good, it may be a useful item.  If not, it'll at least be decorative.

     Here's the meter.

     One the way back, Tam and I stopped off at the Grissom museum.  Grissom AFB (formerely Bunker Hill) was a big SAC base, now AF Reserve, and the little museum there has a nice assortment of unusual aircraft -- including one of the odd-looking drones intended for the SR-71!   Tamara got a lot of photographs before we proceeded onward to Kokomo and dinner at a chain steak joint,* and the on to a good-sized antique mall on the south side of Kokomo.

     I found an interesting device -- while the little buzzer/light/code key toys aren't uncommon, this one is, an "Official Scout Signaler," with a wrinkle-finished metal case.

     Good luck trying to signal a Scout with it: Boy Scouts haven't been required to lean the code in decades and from my experience, Girl Scouts never were.  The water-slide decal is starting to curl and I'm not sure what to do about it.

Tamara Keel photo

     I also bought a set of full-sized "gas burner pliers" in good shape.  Small ones are still made and either size has two or three sets of jaws milled into the gripping end, intended to grip round surfaces.  They're pretty handy.  The same seller had nice small green-shaded hanging lights, fully restored.  I bought one for my hamshack and it looks like it will be a better fit than some of the ones I have looked at in the past.

     A fun day!  We got home around 4:00 p.m. and I laid down and promptly fell asleep for four hours: quite a lot of driving, and it does wear me out.
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* The Amish place across from the museum looked pretty darned busy. Plus I think Tam harbors a secret fear they'll kidnap her to a life of children, kitchen work and the church.

No One He Knows Voted For The Guy

     Adam Gopnik at the venerable old New Yorker magazine can, on a really bright day, almost see himself in a mirror -- but he still can't see what's over his shoulder.  In this regard, he has less vision than the late Pauline Kael, who was self-aware enough to muse, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”

     Mr. Gopnik seems to feel only outraged disappointment at the voting public, and pure outrage not only at Mr. Trump, but at any reporter or commentator who looks for the least scrap of Presidential behavior by the current President.  --Where Mr. Gopnik was when then-President Obama responded to a critic with, "We won," I don't know, but cheering from the sidelines is probably a good bet.

     I was hoping for balance and what I got was a screed; I'm no fan of Mr. Trump (and was far less a fan of his opponent) but like Mr. Obama, he did indeed win.  Screaming and whining, especially under the headline, "The Persistence of Trump Derangement Syndrome," communicates only one thing: TDS is here to stay.  I already knew that.

     On the wider stage, Presidential Derangement Syndrome has been with us for at least decades and probably longer; it is easier for most people on the losing side of an election to believe the current President is a scheming thug than admit that, state by state, a majority of their fellow citizens* made a choice they dislike.  Yeah, well, they do.  They have been doing so all my life.  Get over it and move on, or continue to be led by addled commentators.  Commentators like...ahem.  Oh, hi, Adam.
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* "...state by state, a majority..."  This is how the Electoral College works.  It's how it has always worked. And it's okay to dislike the outcome; you are not also obliged to disparage the process simply because you don't like the current results.

Oh, The Dentistry!

     Yes, I'm up at oh-dark-thirty because I'm due -- overdue! -- for a cleaning and exam.  I try to schedule these things outside of work hours, helped by the fact that I start my work day after the bankers (but it ends well after the cows have come home).  All the dentist had available was the very first appointment of the day, and her day starts before the rooster crows.

     Which is why I'm up so early, and perhaps explains why this odd mix of livestock and bankers are milling around in front of my mind's eye.

- - -
     On another medical note, maybe the prescription anti-inflammatory is doing something. It had better; since all I can take is acetaminophen and I'm trying to stay at 50% of the maximum dose so I have some reserve capacity if things get bad, I'm out of OTC painkiller options.

Physical Security: It Works

     They say, "Locks only stop an honest man," but down at Bradis Guns, on the southwest side of Indianapolis, locks, block walls and a stout door stymied would-be thieves, who tried to use a couple of stolen cars to ram their way into the building and then tried to shoot the lock off the front door.

     It didn't work.  They drove away empty-handed.  Police are looking for a black Hyundai Accent, presumably a bit dented.