We Once Had No Prisons In Many Places

Colin Kaepernick apparently thinks we should abolish prisons.

Like everything he says, he's not thought about it very hard.

There was once a time when there weren't prisons.

Without the option of confinement to punish someone for their crimes, punishments were less ephemeral.

Branding.

Dismemberment.

Death.

Normally meted out at or near the scene of the crime and without all the niceties of an impartial judge, or legal representation for the accused.

No lengthy investigation to even determine if the right person is being punished.

There're many reasons civilization abandoned vendetta and ad hoc justice.

There's history books on the topic.

I doubt a sportsball player would ever have had to read them.

Dental Hello Jean

I admit, I've taken terrible care of my teeth over the years.

I have also be very lucky to have had as few dental problems as I've had over the years.

After watching The Lovely Harvey and Marv spend metric money getting fake teeth of one form or another, I resolved to actually do that whole brushing and flossing thing.

The first thing that hit me was all the blood.  Holy shit did my gums bleed when insulted with the floss and brush.

But that didn't last very long.  A couple of days.

The next thing was noticing that I could smell things that I couldn't before which was accompanied with being able to taste with more sensitivity too.

These things I sort of expected.  I'd read about them.

What took me by surprise was the pain that started about two weeks in.

I recognize this pain.  It's the pain of healing.  My gums are coming back to life.

I am not dissuaded by this familiar pain, I'm encouraged.

I hope my breath is less demonic than it used to be too.

Scribbles To Myself

The primary purpose of this blog is really to talk to myself.

It just occurred to me with the crab-boat thing that it's not going to be clear to someone reading my scribbles that the entire point was to see if I could still do the math and calculate the difference in weight from replacing seawater with crabs.

That I could still think in metric when I wanted to.

I totally forgot that someone WOULD be reading it.

A thousand plus of you every day.

I remember being giddy about 100 visitors a day.

I offer my apologies for being cranky about the topic of the crab boat because it came on the heels of reading abject morons hurting my mind with their explanations of why a crab-boat on a treadmill couldn't take off with 500 thousand pounds of crab added to it.

Displacement

Traveller ships are expressed in dTons.

That's a displacement ton.

The volume of one metric ton of gaseous hydrogen.

For a ship that spends most of its time in vacuum.

It's not displacing anything... it's just a unit of volume.

Can you "displace" vacuum?

Buoyancy is an issue that's arisen in Traveller a couple of times.

Buoyancy is a function of weight and volume and thus density.

Traveller has a physics shredding device called contragravity.  This machine allows you to reduce the weight of anything wrapped inside it's field.

Dial the weight to zero in an atmosphere and you're going to rise because you're now displacing the gas of the atmosphere with the zero-weight volume of your ship.

Yes, it's handwavium magic, but it's canon.

What contragrav doesn't do is affect the mass of the ship, it's not going to shoot off the ground because it still has inertia.  But it's going to rise faster and faster... then slower and slower as the atmosphere gets thinner.  But eventually it will pop to the top of the atmo and float there.

I never bothered to calculate how fast because, in game, you dialed it to zero floated up a bit, pointed the ship the desired direction with the reaction control system then kicked in the (also physics shredding) reactionless motors to power to orbit.

Contragrav hurts a lot of practical brains because the only "material" we have with no weight, also has no mass.  Vacuum.

Where I learned my first lessons in buoyancy was from using vacuum to displace air.

Make a balloon filled with vacuum.  In reality any container which can hold back the atmosphere against your vacuum will be too heavy to float in air.  But what if you could "fill" a normal sized balloon with vacuum?  It'd have a lot of lift, wouldn't it?  A lot more than a balloon filled with hydrogen because vacuum has no mass.  As an aside, that mass is why you can make a hydrogen balloon and not a vacuum one; the gas provides pressure to hold the light enough to float container from collapsing against the atmosphere.

Another aside, doing buoyancy calculations of heavier than air things is MUCH easier to wrap your brain around than lighter than air things.  One tends to think that lighter than air things don't have weight.  You can't put a helium balloon on a scale, can you?

That whole scientific STP deal sometimes works against us because it gets us to assume a set of conditions that makes other scenarios counter-intuitive.

A Matter Of Perspective

Seeing as I have no paying job, I get labeled a lot.

I am a bum.

I am a mooch.

I am not a man.

People.  Dear people.

You've got the terms all wrong.

I am a man.  A kept man.

Anyone who disparages that is just jealous they didn't manage the deal.

GRIN!

Where Were YOU Born?

I've seen several screeds demanding we end Columbus Day and celebrate indigenous people's day.

 

The thing is, not even the indigenous people in America are indigenous to America if you go back far enough.

 

The "indigenous" people displaced by European settlers were merely the most recent residents of the area, not the first settlers from the Siberian land-bridge migrations out of Asia.

 

How long do you have to live someplace before you're indigenous?

 

The Sioux didn't live in the Black Hills during the written history of the place, yet they're considered indigenous and not the tribes they themselves displaced.

 

How long is long enough?

 

Me, I consider myself to be a native of this land.  Indigenous.

 

I didn't move here from another nation.

 

My father didn't.  My mother didn't.

 

My father's father and mother didn't.

 

My mother's mother didn't.  My mother's father came here from Italy.

 

We were born here and are as native as someone who traces their ancestors to pre-historic and pre-columbian times.

I Woke Up Without A Headache

Can't live pain free...  To social media!

I'm reading a thread where someone asks:  "If you add 500 thousand pounds of crabs to a crab boat; is it 500 thousand pounds heavier?"

There's some genuinely funny responses, but it's the people trying to be serious that are hurting my brain.

People don't have any understanding of weight, mass, displacement, ballast, stability...

People who are answering authoritatively, but are not accounting for things you'd know if you'd watched a couple of episodes of The Deadliest Catch.

But since I have to figure it out, because I'm me...

The average density of crabs is 1.27.  So crabs are 1.27kg/l.

500,000 lb. of crab is 226,796.2kg of crab.

226,796.2kg of crab is 178,579.7l of crab.

178,579.7 l of water is displaced by the crabs and that weighs 393,700.85 lb.

So the boat is 106,299.15 lb. heavier.

 

Update:

 

178,579.7 l of seawater, being denser and thus heavier than regular water weighs 403.543.44 lb.

 

So our boat gets 96,456.56 lb. heavier when we toss all that crab into the holding tanks and the boat settles a little deeper in the water.

 

Commenters:  One of the givens is "crab boat" confine your rebuttals and criticisms to that.

 

Clearly it's an obscure fact that the holding tanks are full of seawater on a crab boat and that as crab is added, it displaces water overboard.  That's why adding 500,000 lb. of crab to a crab boat doesn't add 500,000 lb. of weight to the total assembly.

 

Crab boats do not sink when they stuff those holding tanks with crabs which are heavier than the water they used to carry.  No more than a canoe sinks when you put the cooler in the middle and it displaces the much less dense air that previously occupied the space inside. 

Crab boats do not operate anywhere but Earth, so quibbling about 1g is just being...  put in what will insult you the most here.

I Don't Believe In The No-Win Scenario

The Antifa cells are talking about how they are keeping things at a simmer to create a no-win scenario for the conservative and law-enforcement side of things.

If law enforcement cracks down, they win and claim their rights are being suppressed.

If law enforcement does nothing, they win and can claim victory.

If a citizen defends themselves against them, they can point to how violent the right is (while their fellow travelers at the DA's office rapes the citizen).

They've overlooked a win scenario for the right.

The conservative side kills them all.

 

Their model depends on the right following the rules the left is exploiting to keep the right from flat out murdering them in case lots.

Raising the black flag and slitting throats is starting to look more and more like what's going to be necessary to stop this shit once and for all.

If the switch gets flicked to "kill every last one of them" then nobody is going to CARE what the other side thinks about them.

 

They're not hard to find and figure out where they hang-out and live.

 

Doxxing works both ways if it's decided to start doing that.

It won't matter how much money their supporters have in the bail fund, nobody's going to be calling the cops.

In fact, it'd be a damn poor idea, on law enforcement's part, to get in the way this late in the game.

Honestly, they've done such a shitty job of protecting the rights of the law abiding so far, why would we care if they were collateral?

Still time to stop it before the switch gets flicked.

Nobody wants what comes after, but it's becoming apparent that it's a genuine self defense situation coming and it's going to be illegal to defend ourselves from the anointed brown-shirts.

The cops could get ahead of this and start knocking some heads in while making arrests when they know the DA will just turn them back loose.

Or, they could stand aside while violence is answered with violence.  Lord knows they stand aside to allow violence against anyone not on the left.

I don't WANT a civil war, but I don't think I'm gonna get a vote.

But, unlike a lot of youngins, I know its measure.

There's a lot of people who still feel bound by our service oaths and remember that domestic part of enemies.

PLEASE!  Law Enforcement, give us another option.

PLEASE!  Federal DA's, press some damn charges and lay on some billionaire crippling bail.

PLEASE!  Keep the switch to off.

Update: Changed the wording because it sure sounded like I was making threats that I wasn't intending to make.  I'm not threatening anyone, just trying to point out that one side is pushing the other side into fight or die territory.  Never push someone with nothing to lose into a no-win scenario.

What Has Less Pigment Than Albino?

Minnesotans.

A car full of them were behind me today and they are so damn PALE.

Minnesota is a land the sun forgot.

Where "that garlic is too spicy!" is a real thing.

They're going to melt down here.

When The Colors Change

 It's fall, time to put the foliage green furniture back on Kaylee.

Also a good time to test captioning in the *NEW* "improved" Blogger.

 

Demonstrably Better

I don't cotton to racism.

I hold that if it's racist for a white person to do it, it's racist for a minority to do it.

I believe in equality.

But I don't believe in forced equality of outcome.

My bro, Newt, is definitely someone with "velcro hair and enhanced melanin" (his own description).

You can call him CENSORED all day long and he just giggles.  He doesn't care what he's called.  Insults and slurs don't phase him a bit.

There's others who match his physical description who'll fly into a blind rage if a white person sings along with a rap song.

This dichotomy dispels the underlying argument from OSU.

In essence, because white people are better at not overreacting to insults, it's OK for black people to fling racists slurs.

Yes, their assumption does boil down to white people are better than black people.

"You see, you can't expect them to behave like civilized people, they can't control their emotions like you and I.  Just like chillin's they are."

That's a core tenant of the antebellum South, it's the underlying structure of Jim Crow, it's the basis of Affirmative Action.

 

The real problem isn't black people are (fill in blank).

 

The problem is we're not holding them to the same standard as everyone else.

 

Have you noticed that your black friends who do adhere to that standard are just as successful as the white people around them?

 

I've certainly noticed, thanks to The Shitheel Saga, that white people who abandon these norms are also unsuccessful.

 

It's not racist.  It's culture.

 

And my culture is superior the ghetto, white trash and victim subcultures.

But to be equal, you have to pass the same tests I do.  Passing an easier test means that you aren't my equal.

Getting a bye on tossing about racial slurs means you aren't my equal because I'm expected to be civilized in the face of such hate, and you're not.

We can fix it.

It will take a lot more work from your side, because I'm already a member of my culture.  It's a welcoming culture to those who conform to its rather loose rules.

Join me.

Do it for your grandkids.

GIGO

I've mentioned before that I've been keeping a spreadsheet of Florida's Wu Ping Cough numbers.

 

They didn't update yesterday.

 

Apparently they got hammered with 400,000 results from various labs and they're trying to sort out the duplicates.

Why are the labs sending duplicates?

Is this because the samples were sent to multiple labs?

They don't say.

It's the lack of saying why there might be duplicates that breeds doubts to the veracity of the results.

Explain It To Me Again

I remember that the whole reason we fucked up gas cans was to keep fuel vapors from escaping into the air and poisoning Gaea.

Well...

How much fuel vapor is escaping into the air and poisoning Gaea from dumping a quart onto the side of the car because half the time you can't get the nozzle in the filler neck without spilling?

 

How much fuel vapor is escaping into the air and poisoning Gaea from dumping a pint overboard because the clever little check-valve thing in the nozzle wouldn't close again when you withdraw the nozzle from the top of the funnel?

How much fuel vapor is escaping into the air and poisoning Gaea from pouring into a funnel instead of having the nozzle inside the filler neck?

It's constantly obvious that the people mandating these changes don't actually have to use the stuff they've caused to change.

Day Of The Solicitors

For some reason, every hour yesterday was a knock on the door and someone looking right at the "No Solicitors" sign on my door asking if I wanted to buy something.

I started polite, but got more exasperated as the day progressed and the interruptions continued.

Last one got, "I can see from you writing in your clipboard that you can fucking read.  WHAT DOES THIS SIGN SAY?"

The one around noon kind of gave me the creeps.

He rang the doorbell and when I looked out the peep he was far to my right, nearly out of sight.  I didn't respond to him ringing again and he had a funny gait walking away.  Not sure how to describe it.  Like he'd talked himself up to doing something that wasn't going to happen and now he had to work it off.

But that could just be someone who's not good with talking to strangers doing a door-to-door sales gig.

Hiding around the corner when you knock is a good way to get shot in the Gunshine State.

Pro AND Anti-2A

This election Florida is giving us more stupid gifts in our retarded Constitutional amendment process.

 

Ballot amendment 2 is to raise the minimum wage to $15 over an unreasonably short time and then automatically increase it against a suspect cost of living metric.

 

For a state based on tourism, service industries and fixed income retirees...

 

Not a good plan.  It's a topic I've written on before.

 

Some history needs mentioned every time Florida's retarded amendment process comes up.

Florida's much altered constitution is barely older than I am, being ratified in 1968.

The Reconstruction constitution was scrapped because it was found to be politically impossible to get state senate apportionment to compliance with the Civil Rights Act.

Because of the state senate's refusal to make amendments to fix that in the old constitution, ballot amendments were added to bypass the state congress when necessary.

Like so many things, rather than being the rarely used last option used only in direst necessity, it's become the first choice at skipping over the congress and using the low information voter to do the bidding of the rich and persuasive.

The use of poll taxes and ballot tests to exclude blacks from voting got us the 24th Amendment.

It was an over correction.  Throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

 

The 24th, though, doesn't actually ban a skills test to vote.

A ballot test, the SAME test for everyone, could at least rid us of the low information voters.

Since we've managed to ban Baby Jeebus from the courthouse lawn using a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to a Danbury church and incorporated into legal precedence, we should take another extra-Constitutional quote and treat it as an Amendment; "The cornerstone of democracy rests on the foundation of an educated electorate."

 

Hit them with the questions from the Citizenship test to get their voter ID.

 

Scrupulously make sure that everyone gets the same test regardless of features.

 

Print it in English so everyone is getting the same test.  Foreign citizenship candidates take the oath in English, so I know this passes "discrimination" muster.  Additionally, it gives incentive to the huddled masses to get a working knowledge of English.  Knowing the realm's Common Tongue is never a disadvantage.

The asshole in me would have it printed in ancient Greek, a language virtually nobody speaks, just to apply an additional handicap to the uneducated and to make sure it's equally indecipherable to all.

Shoe On Other Foot

Senate Democrats upset that Senate Republicans learned from their example.

Senator Coons is essentially upset that the Republicans learned when the Democrat "majority is willing to change the rules and is willing to insist on moving ahead when it is demonstrably unsafe, unwise and unprecedented to do so, there's nothing the minority can do to stop them," that when it's a Republican majority they can alter the rules to suit them as well.

I remember Republican minority leaders warning you that this would come back to either haunt or bite you.

 

You guys really believed that you'd never be in the minority again, didn't you?

I'm having a nice hot cup of schadenfreude.

Makeup Day

On Memorial Day, I've a tradition of hitting a strip club, having a beer and tipping a dancer.

It's a strange sort ritual honoring Fred Gabow.

I've mentioned Freddy before, his ex-wife is in prison for conspiring to murder him.

A successful conspiracy, which is why it's the Fred Gabow Memorial Lap-Dance.

 

The reason why is a, "You had to be there with us," for it to make sense.

Wu Ping Cough closed the clubs for Memorial Day.

They've recently reopened.

The question is should I just wait for next Memorial Day, or should I hit one soon as a make-up day?

Tyrannical Process

This is getting to be a recurring problem.

Someone does something that's legal, but with a gun, the cops on scene say, "legal," detectives assigned to investigate the incident say, "legal," the Chief or Sheriff says, "legal," then...

The people who don't think owning a gun should be legal, let alone using one to protect yourself from their political fellow travelers, demand that the person who used their gun to protect themselves be arrested.

 

Corrupt district attorneys, who are always Democrats, file charges against the gun-owner and the gun-owner is arrested by a police force that didn't find enough evidence to charge them in their own investigation.

Then, after being arrested, sometimes thousands of dollars in bail and definitely many thousands of dollars in attorney fees... a jury agrees with the cops on scene.

Very rarely is it someone who has thousands of dollars to spend on their defense.

Bonus!  Once they've successfully defended themselves from the weaponized process, they get to be doxxed and harassed by the True Believers even further.

Something needs done and meekly purchasing insurance-but-not-insurance isn't a solution but a band-aid on a sucking chest wound.

If we could get a fucking judge to allow we have standing; this is definitely a chilling effect on the use of the civil right to self defense and protection of real property.

OH! They're Earbuds!

I've been watching several YouTube vids and I was wondering why the person had cigarette butts sticking out of their ears.

Finally someone turned their head so I could see what they really were.

I'm always the last person to know.

Party Of Lawlessness

Dems vote against condemnation of political violence.

There's no way that will ever come back to haunt them.

Updated An Old Post

Ever realize you'd forgotten the picture?

This post needed one.

I added this picture to it:

Remember, in GURPS π = 3.00

Hollywood Wants Bailed Out?

Dear Dancing Monkey Masters and Organ Grinders,

This is why you don't pick sides.

Because there comes a day when your opponent holds the purse strings when you've got your hand out.

Unlike, say, automaking; entertainment is not actually an essential industry.

It's something that anyone can make from materials at hand.

It might not be "art" but it does serve to pass the time.

Now you're facing the fact that the movie theaters, whom you regularly skin rather than shear, cannot remain open while you keep delaying the release of new product for them to sell to the customer.

They're in the state they're in because of how you "sell" your product to them.

It's why there's only a couple of theater chains instead of many locally owned venues.  The margins have been squeezed so tight that the only way to have a theater showing new-run films is to be able to take advantage of economies of scale.

Perhaps things wouldn't be so dire if you didn't skim off all the cream and overpay the monkeys to dance.

You brag so much about how many billions you rake in from the box office, put some of that money into keeping the places that collect it for you alive.

Of course, I've long felt that the DOJ should look into Hollywood Accounting, ENRON executives went to jail using far more open and honest accounting methods.

No Van Halen Reunion

Eddie Van Halen has shuffled off the coil mortal.

 

When I was growing up, his music was inescapable.

 

It was also tainted by being popular and thus beneath the notice of we dirtheaded punk and metal fans.

 

Rest in peace, Eddie, you were a damn good guitarist and cancer sucks.

Like Watching A Spider

Watching The Lovely Harvey pay out rope to The Boy's former school is like watching a spider build a web.

They've done fucked up in several particulars and she's taking notes.

Like possible felony charges against them for multiple violations of Florida's disabled people laws.

If they skate on those, we've got a solid case for discrimination against a disabled veteran and failures to have clearly marked and available handicapped parking and building access.

We're shopping lawyers now, but the consultations are "you do seem to have a case" from them, with two recommending a different one who specializes in what we're complaining about.

The two main points against them with regards to the ADA is their parking their buses in the two marked handicapped spots all day, everyday and the sign-in/out sheet being kept in the front foyer with only stair access.

The Florida side is going to pivot around the lack of a designated pick-up/drop-off area when they've made a requirement for a sign-in/out for self transportation.

They took the state funds, so they get the state rules.

Those rules favor us disgruntled guardians and they've goddamned well disgruntled us.

How is it discrimination?  I demanded the damned rules and they banned me from their property.

Just like asking for a job application, they have to cheerfully supply the information regardless of how big an ass I'm being about the question.

They had no grounds to ban me from the property and now that they've changed WHY they banned me from the property three times...  Their defense is crumbling as they buy more rope.

What's the first rule of holes again?

You Can Do What Now?

Reading a thread where someone is pulling the motor from their 4th Gen Camaro.

They've gone through all the work, with pictures, to get the engine and transmission out the top.

They're justifiably proud of this, but...

Someone just noticed that they have a lift.

"I see you have a lift, did you know you can unbolt the drivetrain and just lift the body off it?"

No.  They did not.

Surprising First Time

I have watched, for the first time, Gone With the Wind.

This is not to say that it has never been playing in my presence for the past five decades or so.

My mother watched it whenever it was on broadcast and she wore out more than one video tape and would probably have worn out her DVD had cancer not vetoed that idea.

She was also a fan of the book.  She was a bit disappointed that her son, the avid reader, never picked up the thing and read it.

While it was often on at my house, I never actually watched it.

Thanks to the controversy over it recently, I have.

It's a darn good film.

I don't think that any racism was intended, and I'm getting from my old-west research for Sabers that the racism that is shown, both overtly and by stereotype, is essentially period depictions of it.

More than one black character is given a pivotal role to play and not as a villain.  Hattie McDaniel deserved the accolades she received and Butterfly McQueen even defended the movie from accusations of racism at the time of its release.

This is very significant because black actors had not been playing black people all that long in 1939 and so very rarely as anyone who could be respected or sympathized with.

Different Kind Of Embed

Reading Warpath and Bivouac: or The Conquest of the Sioux by John Finnerty.

I'm in the opening couple of pages and something hits me about how much journalism has changed.

He's being sent by The Chicago Times to join General Crook's column.

They funded his trip and purchase of his "outfit".

What stands out, "My next care was to purchase arms and a riding outfit..."

The embed brought his own gun and the newspaper he's working for paid for it.

The Past is a different country.

Snobbery

I have used many brands of tools over the years.

Only rarely has the cheapest piece of shit failed to do the job.

Most of my tools say Craftsman on them and that's simply because of that no-questions warranty and Sears being a mere mile from home when I bought them.

A long time ago...  decades.

Something that rubs wrong is the snobbery of the folks who've dropped starter home money into Snap-On.

They act like you're making do with other tools and that Snap-On turns that bolt better.

I've had the exact same number of failures with Snap-On as Craftsman.  2.  Both were 1/4 drive socket wrenches.

Both were cheerfully and swiftly replaced once I'd gotten to the vendor.

An hour for Sears.  A week of stalking the truck for Snap-On.

Snap-On is a lot better when they stop by your place every week, but when you're not a commercial customer... a huge pain in the ass.

 

I am acutely aware that I don't use my tools to the same duty cycle as a professional, so that extra quality and price just don't come into play very often.

 

Especially considering the tools most likely to break are often the most likely to grow legs.

Altered States

Character creation is still ongoing for Sabers and Sorcery.

I've a much better handle on the Indian Wars and what I'm changing from actual history.

Magic is falling into place better.

Something that made it awkward was the high-inertia weird parallel losing it's inertia when thaumaturgists figured out how the Indians had gotten off their reservations.

The differences in the start positions will now allow history to diverge.

Everyone has magic.

Everyone's magic works differently.

Western magic is provably better.

I'm getting there.

Thanks?

The American Rifleman has put up a review for the Lipsey's / Glock P80.

Thanks guys.

You do know those things have been sold out and are at scalper's rates at places like Gunbroker now, right?

They're just a month late to this party.

 

But it could mean good things to those of us who want one.

 

People who get their new product announcements from The American Rifleman, and there's lots of them, will be hitting the gun shops going, "do you have?" and being told, "No."

 

That will lead to feed back to Lipsey's and further feedback to Glock.

 

It could make it a regular catalog item if there's a strong and steady demand.

Active

I've been recording the daily Wu Ping Cough numbers in a spreadsheet since they started publishing daily number.

 

Something that Florida has not bothered tracking is recoveries.

 

I've created something of a proxy for it.

 

Not very precise, but a ballpark.

 

It runs its course in 2-3 weeks, so I've taken the running total of cases, minus the running total of deaths then subtract the running total of cases from three weeks ago to get a ball park of active cases.

 

I figure that everyone who had it three weeks ago either got better or died.

 

It's illuminating considering the media and the state are blasting that there's 714,591 cases.

 

If you remove all the deaths and cases older than three weeks we drop to 38,392 people still sick who've been tested and found positive.

 

The peak active cases using my (admittedly) inaccurate speculation was at the end of July with 219,392.  That was when the running total was 470,386 positive tests.

First Full Moon

This year is kind of nifty for a Halloween lover.

Not only did we get this beautiful full moon at the beginning of the month...

We're also getting a blue moon for Halloween itself!

Pretty neat if you ask me.

Lurn Wat Wurds Meen

If I am stodgy and narrow minded in my explanation and acceptance of something, I am being pedantic.

If I explain something as if to a child, I am being didactic.

Found!

Found: Chinesium 1/4 drive 10mm socket.

In 2020, no less, I have found TWO 10mm sockets.

Prior to 2020 it was all losses.

It's Literally A Zoo

The Lovely Harvey took her mom and dad to our local zoo.

Pa had never been to a zoo in his life.

Harvey is currently looking at the membership rates at Lowry Park Zoo and finding that it brings free admission or 50% admission to zoos all over the nation.

Surprisingly, that includes the Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines.  I wonder if membership there gives a reciprocal free admission here.

It looks like the break-even point on an individual membership is about three visits.

The couple membership pays off in 2.5 visits on admission alone.

I am curious if admission being free will entice me to go more often than the once every 20 years I'm rocking at present.

I enjoy zoos.  I just take them for granite (geek reference) granted and never visit.

I think I need to visit the Killer Manatee exhibit.

I'm So Old That...

I remember when the Democrats held the idea that someone could be Catholic and still hold a higher office in the US.

But then, I read history and I read about the controversy over John F Kennedy's religion and the idea that would be handing control of the US to the Pope.

I see that, as always, that only matters when it's a Democrat or liberal candidate and not a Republican or conservative one.

Sniffles

Considering the overall survival rate for Wu Ping Cough, I am not particularly concerned that The President has caught it.

Hell, I'm near convinced that my close friends and family had it back at the beginning of the year when it was out and about, but not yet identified.  Several of us had a flu-like sickness that defied getting better for a couple weeks.

Get well soon, Mr and Mrs Trump.

Clean With Dramatic Lighting

I always love this view of The Precious when she's clean at this time of day.

I got to wondering if I could capture what my eyes see with the M50, and I think I did a good job.

It helps that a parked car is a cooperative subject.

Setting Change

The default mode in Blogger's new composer puts the text in "Paragraph" mode.

 

It used to default to "Normal".

 

Now that I've noticed this.

I can, once again, type single space when I want.

 

Or double space if I desire.

Cue Sad Trombone

ULA's Delta Heavy failed at the last second again.

 

How embarrassing for them.

Marv says it takes a week just to replace the sparklers on the pad for another try.

Proving how catty he is, "Space X should turn around a Falcon booster in 7 days just to rub ULA's nose in it!"

On the plus side, I got some decent pics of a couple of constellations while I was outside not seeing a rocket clear the horizon.