09:19 – There were 1,468 visits to this blog yesterday, a record. The former all-time record was 1,401 in one day, back in early December of last year. Well, “all-time” since I started keeping a WordPress blog. Back 15 years ago when I had static HTML web pages, my record for a day was over 30,000, and it wasn’t uncommon for me to see 125,000+ per week or half a million a month. Nowadays, 125,000 is about four months’ worth.
USPS showed up yesterday with a heavy box. When we hauled it into the kitchen, I told Barbara it had a gift for her inside. She knows me too well. She asked, “Is it farming gear or kitchen gear?” She said she was turning into a farm wife, cooking and gardening all the time except when she was doing kit stuff.
It was actually a Lodge LCC3 Pre-Seasoned 3.2-quart Cast-Iron Combo Cooker, which is basically a pair of 10.25″ pans, one shallow and one deep, either of which can be used as a lid for the other. Using both together turns it into a small Dutch oven. It gets my vote as the best purchase for anyone interested in getting started with cast-iron cooking.
But Barbara is right: she’s doing nearly all of the cooking, except that I help with the baking. So, I’ve decided to start cooking at least one dinner a week, using recipes from Jan Jackson’s 100-Day Pantry. Whatever I turn out should at least be edible, and probably not bad at all. I do have to be careful, because Barbara doesn’t like food with a lot of seasoning.
Speaking of cooking and baking, we were baking bread yesterday afternoon. The recipe calls for 450F, so that’s what we set the oven pre-heat to. When it dinged to indicate it was ready, Barbara checked the oven thermometer hanging from one of the racks, which said it was only 350F in there. We’d noticed that some of the other things we baked seemed underdone, so we suspect that the oven’s temperature gauge is off significantly. We ended up re-doing the preheat at an indicated 500F, which got us up to 450F according to the oven thermometer.
That got us talking about eventually replacing the oven. Like all the appliances that came with the house, it’s a Frigidaire, which as far as I’m concerned makes junk appliances. I asked Barbara how she’d feel about replacing the oven and eventually the cooktop with propane versions. She said that’d be fine with her. She cooked on a gas range and oven until she left for college, and actually likes gas better than electric. She also commented that having propane appliances would allow us to continue cooking and baking if the power went down for a long time.
So I called G&B Energy in Sparta to ask some preliminary questions. Although their website says they sell propane appliances, the lady I spoke with said we could just buy a gas oven and cooktop at Home Depot or Lowes and get a propane adapter for it. G&B will install a propane tank and has technicians to run the propane line(s) into the house. She said they recommended a 120-gallon tank for cooking, but also carried larger tanks for people who were heating their homes with propane. The 120-gallon tank rents for $48/year, but that charge is waived if you use at least 100 gallons during the year. They can also link two of those tanks for 240 gallons total. Their next size up is 330 gallons, but she said that one is too large to be placed right up against the house. Legally, it has to be set off some distance, presumably to keep the fire marshal happy.
Fortunately, the kitchen is above the unfinished basement area, so running propane lines shouldn’t be difficult. For that matter, the den is over the unfinished area, so if we want to rearrange furniture and install a propane radiant heater in the den it wouldn’t be difficult.
I have a bunch of questions to ask them, many of which I haven’t even thought of yet. How do we determine how much fuel remains in the tank? Do they have a minimum delivery amount, or can we top off any time we want to? Can the tank be located at the side of the house with the propane line feeding into the house down around back? (We don’t want a propane truck trying to get into our back yard.) How many devices can be run from one tank? (I believe a smaller tank may be able generate enough gas pressure to feed only a couple of appliances.) Can they install drops without any devices connected until we get around to replacing, for example, the cooktop? Can they install a drop for our Generac generator (assuming that we can get a propane adapter kit for it)? And so on.
Just for my own reference, a gallon of propane weighs 4.2+ pounds, contains about 91,000 BTUs, and is equivalent to about 27 kilowatt-hours of electricity. G&B Energy currently does a first tank fill for $1.80/gallon and subsequent fills for $2.20/gallon, so the latter translates to just over $0.08 per kW-hr. I think that’s about what we pay for electricity, so it’s not bad at all. With the fracking revolution, I don’t see the price of propane going up much in the foreseeable future. I think we may have a decent size propane tank in our future.
Heh. I just got a spam with the subject line “Someone paid me to kill you.Get spared,You only have 72hours to pay $4000.”
I was seriously tempted to reply saying that I’d get the cash immediately and to please meet me in downtown Sparta. But the days when I’d actively seek out confrontation are long gone. Too bad this asshole didn’t send this message to SteveF.
You should report that to the appropriate Federal Government Agency. Spammers and the Federal Government deserve each other.
IMHO there is a Trojan Horse that is sweeping the internet and smartphones: Pokémon Go.
This “game” has already had instances with malware infection. People are acting like idiots doing all sorts of stupid stuff. But watch the other hand, this is going to not end well for our infrastructure. There are instances of death, injury, and theft tied to Pokémon Go (just search Pokémon Go Accidents).
One of my nephews (who is 35 and should know better) is a computer programmer and web site developer (and Pentecostal Preacher, go figure) has already had an incident that he traced to Pokémon Go. It installed a key logger and destroyed some files. His company lost 2-days of work and has more work to do to clean some customer systems.
There are reports of a fake version for Android as well as reports that the “legitimate” app had a bug that allowed the publisher to access your emails.
This is one app that I’m definitely going to skip. Not to mention that I don’t care enough about Pokemon to put the accent over the e, let alone give it a minute’s thought.
My MIL replaced her all electric range a few years ago with a combo unit. It has a gas (NG) cooktop and an electric convection oven under it. It’s wide four burners in various combinations and the whole top is cast iron grates including a round removable section over the largest burner for a wok. The oven is also wide. Don’t recall the name brand but it’s very well built, all stainless front.
FYI…
Today is Amazon Prime Day
https://www.amazon.com/
Hopefully it’s not a dud like last year. So, you may want to go check it out and see if there are any deals to be had on things you want.
Thanks. We want both the oven and cooktop to be propane. This isn’t an urgent project. We’ll take our time. It won’t be that expensive. The only real costs are for the appliances themselves, installation of the gas lines, and building a pad and concrete block shelter for the tank. Still, that might run $4K or more, depending on which oven and cook top we choose, so I want to make sure to explore all the options before we proceed.
At our age, we’re in the “this may be the last xxx we ever buy” mindset, so it pays to go for quality and reliability.
You can’t fairly blame this on Pokemon Go.
In my day we got our death threats in person! By large, smelly men named Guido! And it was uphill both ways! With broken legs! And we were grateful!
Funny, the honey-do project I’m involved in at the moment is replacing my oven/microwave combo. The house came with a decent JennAire set (almost all US appliances are now made by the same company in the same factory, but the traditional better brands are made with better/thicker materials.) It is getting long in the tooth (the microwave occasionally trips out if you use it too long) and looks dated, but is otherwise a solid unit.
BUT on my last trip to reStore, they had a Miele oven and microwave/convection oven combo for $500. It’s only 3 years old and in perfect condition. Snatched that up, and viola, wife is getting new oven in beautiful stainless german engineering.
Removed the old unit, and need a plug for the new, so ATM I’ve got a big hole in my cabinetry and no oven at all…..
HOPEFULLY, that will be remedied by the end of the day.
nick
(for range or cooktop, I prefer gas, for ovens, electric, except for the prepper aspects)
Even if you get a propane oven good luck on that working without electricity, albeit much less than full electric. The cook top is okay except for having to manually light it.
Yeah, that was one of the items on my list of questions. How to get the oven going with no electricity.
The cooktops I was just looking at come in electric, electronic, or manual start. I assume the manual start models use a pilot light, but if not we can always use a lighter.
I remember my grandmother’s gas oven had a pilot light, and I was assuming that pilot light models would still be available.
Our oven/range is natural gas, but electrically ignited and computer controlled.
In a power outage, the stove burners can be lit with a match and work fine.
The oven is completely under the control of the computer and doesn’t work at all without electricity.
The computer spazzes up fairly often. It’s easily reset by either unplugging the range from the wall (standard 120V outlet) or cycling the breaker. Still a nuisance, though.
I haven’t seen a new range with a pilot light in ages.
Manual start is probably a push button which snaps and makes a spark.
The way modern gas works is the pilot light valve opens(via electric signal) and the electric ignition starts sparking. Once the pilot flame lights it has to heat the thermocouple up before the main gas valve will open and the burner is lite by that. The pilot and main valve are just like they used to be and work on pressure and very little electric. Older systems had no electric at all but of course the oven valve was manually turned. All that is the same system used when pilot lights were standard. Safety as no large gas flow opens with out sensing a flame.
No continuous pilot for energy efficiency.
I doubt we’re gonna screw around with a new gas or propane stove/oven here; we have a glass-topped electric stove and oven and if the juice cuts out, we’ll be using the wood stove in the cold weather and/or the grills outside otherwise; one of them, the PK grill, can work as a smoker and sort of oven. The space on the rear corner of the house that might have taken a propane tank will be dedicated, eventually, to a dual-fuel generator.
On the whole, though, we would have preferred a gas stove.
Sunny w/blue skies; gonna work outside while it’s not too hot. (sorry, TX’ers; hot for me is above low 80s). (cold for me is single digits)
I’m discovering that 30″ gas wall ovens are pretty hard to come by, particularly if I insist on one that’s usable with the electricity out. I did find one that might be suitable, but it was $9,000.
I’m with you. We can cook on our woodstove in the winter or outdoors in the summer if the power goes down. I’m going to put this project on hold for now, since the cook top is fine and the only problem with the oven is that its temperature setting/display is apparently off.
Well, if you are putting it off to the future, you have time for a project!
If it were me, and my goal was propane wall oven, no electric needed, I’d start looking for a CAMPER oven. For WAY WAY WAY less than $9k you can get a trailer in poor condition, and just take the oven. BTW, if you salvage a trailer, you can get a small hot water heater, some tanks, a pump, and often a 12v – 120v inverter too. Maybe you even get a propane powered refrigerator. Lots of value in an old mouldy trailer, if it has appliances. I know it’s not YOUR style, but I mention it so others can think it thru.
It was very common just a couple of decades ago to have a small ‘summer’ kitchen in the basement. Just a range and sink, it gave another place to cook when large parties were planned, and was cooler than using the normal kitchen in the summer.
Put the wall oven, a small sink, and a counter in the basement, and you are your father’s brother….
nick
(this is not the best choice for a primary oven as camper appliances, despite their high price new, are not built to hold up to everyday use.)
There was a canning setup in the unfinished area of the basement, with a sink (still there) and an electric range, which the former owners took with them. I may check around locally for a used gas range to put in the basement or garage, or even buy a new one. New Whirlpool gas cooktops run as little as $300 or $400, so I may get one of those installed.
With propane at 91,000 BTU/gallon and gas cooktop burners ranging from 5,000 to 17,000 BTUs max, and my SWAG is that we might average having 9,100 BTUs going at a time, so we’d get 10 hours of that per gallon of propane. Assuming we have a burner going for an hour a day, that means the cooktop would use only 36.5 gallons of propane per year, not counting whatever we used for the range in the basement or garage. On the 120-gallon tank, there’s a 150 gallon/year minimum. If we fall below that, we pay a $48/year tank rental, which is obviously no big deal, but it significantly boosts the price of the propane we do use. And I really want more than a 120-gallon tank.
We don’t really have anywhere to put a radiant propane heater in the den, or I’d get one of those in a heartbeat.
It’d be interesting to see Mrs. OFD’s reaction if I parked a mouldy old trailer in our driveway; on the one hand she’d freak out and scream bloody murder. OTOH, she might praise my secondhand scrounging and using toolz to break out useful appliances and suchlike. But I don’t believe I’ll take the chance; as was discussed recently here, though briefly, domestic harmony is a wunnerful thing.
Pedantic and tedious note: the recovering English major just looked up “mould” and “mold” on the suspicion that “moldy” would be more correct but finds it all inconclusive and one is probably as good as the other, based on Indo-European word origins in the medieval and “Early Modern” eras.
Yep, women are small, weak, and slow, so they have to use other means of making a guy’s life miserable when necessary to get what they want. That’s why we’ll soon be spending a bunch of money to get our perfectly good gravel driveway paved.
It’d be interesting to see Mrs. OFD’s reaction if I parked a mouldy old trailer in our driveway;
I know what MrsAtoz would say! No good words word flow from her lovely mouth.
How about those New Black Panthers? “We’re going to open carry at the GOP convention.” Why? The only reason I can think of is to assassinate tRump. We might have a shootin’ war coming up with BLMers.
Stuff you can’t make up about Obola:
“I’m your best hope,” Obama remarked at one point, according to the Fraternal Order of Police’s James O. Pasco, one of the meeting’s attendees.
only problem with the oven is that its temperature setting/display is apparently off
Might be as simple as replacing the thermostat housing and cable. Generally not too expensive and not difficult to do once you have access to the back of the stove. I have done it a couple of times without issue.
Yes, domestic harmony is a wonderful thing.
@ofd, sometimes I pick the UK spelling just to confuse the issue …
And I think the “ould” spelling and sound is more evocative of the nastiness of the mold…
n
Gotta spell check ‘defence’ every time….
n
I wouldn’t know.
I edit American, British, and Australian authors. There’s a bunch of words I need to look up every stinking time because correct spelling is different in different places. And don’t get me started on dialectical issues (“was sitting” vs “was sat”, “different to” vs “different than”) and slang.
“When Persuasion Turns Deadly”
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/147247313346/when-persuasion-turns-deadly
“Some of you watched with amusement as I endorsed Hillary Clinton for my personal safety. What you might not know is that I was completely serious. I was getting a lot of direct and indirect death threats for writing about Trump’s powers of persuasion, and I made all of that go away by endorsing Clinton. People don’t care why I am on their side. They only care that I am.”
“You might have found it funny that I endorsed Clinton for my personal safety. But it was only funny by coincidence. I did it for personal safety, and apparently it is working. Where I live, in California, it is not safe to be seen as supportive of anything Trump says or does. So I fixed that.”
“Again, I’m completely serious about the safety issue. Writing about Trump ended my speaking career, and has already reduced my income by about 40%, as far as I can tell. But I’m in less physical danger than I was.”
“If you didn’t believe me that I endorsed Clinton for my safety, perhaps the recent shooting of police officers changed your mind. That’s the sort of tragedy you expect to happen when Team Clinton frames the national debate as a race war.”
Sad.
Yeah, I’ll also sometimes use the UK spellings, just for kicks. One of the great things about English is you can have fun with it. I don’t think that’s as true for any other language.
“Might be as simple as replacing the thermostat housing and cable.”
That’s the thing; you get tired of paying money for guys to come out and fix stuff so you work on chit yourself; I had to do that with the electrical plug config on our electric stove. Now the problem is the annoying beeper alarm goes off sometimes and the oven won’t come on; allegedly steam from pots on the top gets into the vent/dashboard, also on top-rear and shorts something out. It’s not a huge deal but can be a PITA if we’re cooking up multiple dishes, like on holidays.
““If you didn’t believe me that I endorsed Clinton for my safety, perhaps the recent shooting of police officers changed your mind. That’s the sort of tragedy you expect to happen when Team Clinton frames the national debate as a race war.”
“Sad.”
Memo to Scott Adams: Move. GTFO of Kalifornia, for starters. You run your comic strip empire entirely on the net; books likewise; blog likewise. You can live ANYWHERE. (so far as we know; maybe you have a situation out there that forces you to stay, but it would have to be pretty serious to take precedence over your physical safety and loss of nearly half your income).
“She cooked on a gas range and oven until she left for college, and actually likes gas better than electric. She also commented that having propane appliances would allow us to continue cooking and baking if the power went down for a long time.”
Personally, I’d want a much better reason to replace an oven than just a faulty temperature reading, which you can easily correct.
My house in Canberra (completed in 1978) had electric everything. By the early 2000s two of the four hotplates had failed, as had the spring that held up the oven door when open, as had the oven itself a few years later.
I tried to get a replacement set of hotplates, but nobody made such a large substrate anymore. I couldn’t find an oven large enough to fill the hole in the wall, so eventually I had the kitchen remodeled just so I could get a freaking new oven/hotplates. Talk about a PITA.
So what I’m saying is if it works don’t “fix” it.
Here in Adelaide I have gas for the water heater, cooktop and one heater, and electricity for the rest. No tanks, I’m in the suburbs so we have mains gas. I’m considering getting an outside BBQ run off tank gas.
Appliance repair is generally simple, cheap, and very satisfying. As we slide down the slope, it’s a skill that will be good to have in a reuse, recycle, repair, do without economy.
Very few problems are the “first ever”. In other words, there is almost always a youtube video of someone fixing your problem, or a site that will help diagnose it.
Since major appliances are built from modules, replacing the defective part is usually straightforward mechanics. Parts are widely available online (at wildly varying prices, so look around.)
As part of the quality triangle (good/fast/cheap, pick any two) if you have the time, you can do the repair and save money.
I went from not really ever cracking open an appliance to repairs on the following:
-replace burner ignitors on gas range (more than once, these are an expendable part)
-replace control board on furnace/ac unit (after first temporarily solving the issue by replacing a burnt diode)
-replace fan motor, 2 different AC condensers
-replace starter capacitor, AC condenser
-replace blower fan AC unit
-replace main board refrigerator
-replace defrost temp sensor refrigerator
-replace pump unit washing machine
-replace gaskets, dish washing machine (after diagnosing and fixing the jam)
-replace valve assy, dish washing machine
-replace basket roller wheels dish washing machine
-replace cooker element glass top stove
-replace mainboard, oven
-added- forgot the dishwasher door spring 🙂
Then there is simple electronic repair like recapping power supplies. Modern power supplies are commodity items and built very cheaply. If something goes wrong, it’s almost always failed capacitors. They are straightforward to diagnose (bulging or leaking) and easy to replace.
-computer monitors x 6 or 8
-flat screen tv’s x 6
-tivo
Replaced power supply module
-55″ LCD tv, free, now in my bedroom
-32″ LCD tv
Replaced inverter for CCL backlight on lappy
That’s just the stuff I can think of off the top of my head. It represents savings of thousands in service calls or replacement appliances.
It’s worth trying, especially if your problem is well documented.
nick
(doesn’t include stuff I fixed like tools or things I knew were broken when I got them)
^No continuous pilot for energy efficiency.^No continuous pilot for global warming.
FTFY.
BUT on my last trip to reStore, they had a Miele oven and microwave/convection oven combo for $500. It’s only 3 years old and in perfect condition. Snatched that up, and viola, wife is getting new oven in beautiful stainless german engineering.
Mr. nick, have you seen a Jenn-Aire downdraft 30 inch natural gas cooktop in black in perfect condition there ? Sears Appliance Store wants $1,800 for that bad boy and I want one for the house to replace the electric cooktop that we are using.
Safety as no large gas flow opens with out sensing a flame. No continuous pilot for energy efficiency.
Makes sense, in a way, but it is a problem if you have no electricity. Is there any work-around? Maybe one should go with an Aga? There are also wood-burning equivalents.
@SteveF: Don’t you know, it’s “different from“. My high school english teacher drilled that into be very thoroughly. He hated illiterates who write “different than”. But then, I also still say “I have mown the lawn”, and use other unfashionably correct grammatical constructs. Oh, and get off my lawn.
Re Scott Adams, I have no idea why this guy lives in California. As y’all said, he could run the Dilbert Empire from anywhere. That said, he’s a smart guy, but he does have his blind spots. I expect, frankly, that his wealth gets him laid regularly by hot CA groupies, and the hormones interfere with higher intellectual functions. Which might be worth it, if we were in his shoes (or something), but since we’re not…California? WTF?
@Lynn: “Downdraft Cooktop”. My wife drools over these. My engineer’s instincts say “that can’t really work”. I mean, hot stuff rises – to suck it down is either impossible, or requires one hell of a blow, which will have problems like cooling the very stuff you’re trying to cook.
Am I nuts? Does this really work?
re oven temperature. You might check how it is some time after the ready ding. We have an old oven at our “new” house that seems off even farther than yours when it indicates it has reached temperature, but if left for a while after that reaches the correct temperature and remains stable where it belongs.
“I expect, frankly, that his wealth gets him laid regularly by hot CA groupies, and the hormones interfere with higher intellectual functions.”
Hopefully better looking than Alice.
“Well, “all-time” since I started keeping a WordPress blog. Back 15 years ago when I had static HTML web pages, my record for a day was over 30,000, and it wasn’t uncommon for me to see 125,000+ per week or half a million a month. Nowadays, 125,000 is about four months’ worth.”
I may have asked this before (but forgot due to increasing senility and decrepitude) but why would there be such a vast difference?
Barbara just brought home another hanger oven thermometer. We set it to preheat to 450, but when it dinged ready we waited 10 minutes before we checked. Both thermometers read 450. But as Barbara said, that doesn’t explain why parts of the frozen casserole I baked the other night were still cold after 80 minutes at 375.
Back then I was writing about more interesting stuff.
“But as Barbara said, that doesn’t explain why parts of the frozen casserole I baked the other night were still cold after 80 minutes at 375.”
Temporary work-around; take it out about halfway through and stir it well. I’ve had the same issue with solidly frozen stuff.
“Back then I was writing about more interesting stuff.”
Gee whiz, I think it’s MORE interesting NOW. Plus there are some entertaining CRAZIES on here! That guy with the FLASHLIGHTS; that other guy with the drones and zombie strippers; and we’re getting WOMEN on here now (well, dipping their toes in the wotta and then probably running back screaming at the madness).
Your course of action is clear: cat pictures. Lots of pictures of cute cats doing cute things. Puppies, too.
@Lynn: “Downdraft Cooktop”. My wife drools over these. My engineer’s instincts say “that can’t really work”. I mean, hot stuff rises – to suck it down is either impossible, or requires one hell of a blow, which will have problems like cooling the very stuff you’re trying to cook.
Am I nuts? Does this really work?
Works like a champ with two fan speeds, hurricane cat 1 and hurricane cat 4. The cat 4 fan speed kills any conversation in the kitchen though. The fan outlet pipe on these is six inches.
“Your course of action is clear: cat pictures.”
And “unboxing” videos. Yuuuuuuuge!
Every time a package of something you ordered arrives, set up the vid cam and load it up here.
Back then I was writing about more interesting stuff.
Your course of action is clear: cat pictures. Lots of pictures of cute cats doing cute things. Puppies, too.
I wish we could post pictures here. But Mr. RBT’s bandwidth requirements would go through the roof. I would like to post a picture of my water racks but I do not want it coming from my website. I have already violated OPSEC enough here.
You could always email it to him. If you take it with a smart phone, be sure to strip off any metadata from the photo first. It would really suck to post pictures of your preps with GPS coordinates attached.
The GIMP is your friend. You can not only strip out metadata, you can add metadata of your choosing… such as putting in the GPS coordinates of someone you don’t like. Presumably Photoshop does the same, but I don’t use it so don’t know for sure.
Get a free Dropbox account and post links. Slow, but it works. As all have said, remove metadata.
Pictures are unnecessary. They would distract from the imagery formed. Talented writers paint a more vivid picture than Kodak ever could.
That, and some horse’s hindquarter would post a real picture of Cankles and we’d have to gouge our eyes out for real.
You’re overstating the case. It’s like with antibiotics – a dose of whatever-cillin kills maybe 50% of the bacteria, but only the weak ones. Similarly, a picture of Hateful Hillary with her wattles flapping would kill half of Daynotes’ readers, but only the weak ones.
Just as pharma companies work on perfectly lethal antibiotics that have a 100% kill rate against the targeted bacteria, some of us are working on the perfect photoshop of Hateful Hillary which will kill 100% of viewers. Er, I mean, not us but, you know, bad people. Because a photoshop of a naked Hateful Hillary tied spread-eagled on the bed while naughty-nurse-clad Huma probes her deeply with a blaze orange Dominator-model dildo, would be something a bad person would come up with.
You don’t say.
Speaking of Cankles, the commies have officially joined forces today:
““Hillary Clinton will make an outstanding president and I am proud to stand with her here today,” he boomed. “Together we have begun a political revolution to transform America, and that revolution continues.””
Guess who???
And they’ll make colleges and universities free for the middle class and working class and also universal free health care!
Translation: free college mis-education for special snowflakes to be indoctrinated in commie ideology and reverse racism and loathing for their own culture and nation, plus trigger warnings and safe spaces galore. The universal health care will be Zimbabwe-level for us serfs and gold-medal quality for the elites. We’ll pay for ours, theirs and the incoming waves of Turd World peasants and people who want to kill us.
Wife’s reaction when this comes up tonight during our phone call? I’m guessing “….still not as bad as Trump.” Then I’ll say: “But Trump hasn’t gotten anybody killed yet, so far as we know, and doesn’t need to rob us blind like she’s been doing her whole evil rotten life.” “crickets”
In any case, I’ll write in Patrick, per usual, and Generalissimo Franco for VP.
And count me in as a counter-revolutionary.
Mr. SteveF wins the day, I think.
Excuse me while I gouge my metaphorical eyes out.
and also universal free health care!
But the anesthesia is extra cost !
And Bernie followers are rampaging on Twitter and other SM. I hope they vote for somebody other than Cankles. Cankles losing the election could kill the Klinton Krime Family from holding office again. Spawn of Cankles just doesn’t have the killer instinct.
Bernie is a pussy just like all commie pinko bastards.
She said they recommended a 120-gallon tank for cooking, but also carried larger tanks for people who were heating their homes with propane. The 120-gallon tank rents for $48/year, but that charge is waived if you use at least 100 gallons during the year. They can also link two of those tanks for 240 gallons total. Their next size up is 330 gallons, but she said that one is too large to be placed right up against the house. Legally, it has to be set off some distance, presumably to keep the fire marshal happy.
Did you ask her about filling the tank(s) ? It is my impression that they will only refill the tank(s) to 80% of capacity.
My ideal propane setup is two separate tanks, one in use and one full. But then you have to switch them out when the tank in use runs out. Or, right before it runs out is preferable. Sounds painful though.
“Spawn of Cankles just doesn’t have the killer instinct.”
Various insider tales contradict you; staff and subordinates at the media places and foundations where she’s “worked” almost unanimously liken her to her super-bitch mom. Very arrogant, nasty, ill-tempered, and ENTITLED. Has zero clue about how money and finance work but expects to be swimming in it always. Real world doesn’t exist.
I have no clue what Bernie followers will do now; if I were them, I’d feel betrayed. I certainly know that feeling well from decades in the Repub Party and former mil-spec experiences.
What SoC will not have is BJ Klinton. He will kick or become incompetent before she can run. Cankles is up for Queen Biotch of the World only because of BJ. Just being a biotch won’t work.
Bill Clinton is competent now ?
I stifled the urge to mention a few British spellings and
phrasings that I tend to use, since allegedly one’s writings
can be used to ID one.
I trust youse guys, and you know who you are, but I do
not want to provide any extra info to those guys.
“Who are those guys?” — Butch & Sundance, repeatedly.
Wha’d’ya mean swim? The fall’ll probly kill ya.
At risk of turning the topic back to computers,
do any of y’all use a hosts file which blocks ads
and such?
Seems to be working quite well for me.
Still a good idea to cut across hard rock, but I’m not so
sure about ditching one of the horses.
I edit my Mac hosts file for, er, other reasons on occasion. I use Gasmask for Mac.
re Hosts file: I used to use one, but since switching to TOR Browser Bundle for most of my web surfing, and with scripting blocked by default, Flash not loaded, and HTML5 videos explicitly disabled, what little advertising I see is tolerable.
re IDing people by writing style: Yes, to some extent. It’s not as good as hyped — try to control your surprise. It works well enough if they suspect an unknown writer is you and they have a corpus of your text and the unknown writer’s text. Matching a few chunks of writing against a large population? Very unlikely to get them anywhere.
OdoucheNozzle is being mocked on SM for saying at the Dallas memorial “it’s easier to get a Glock than a book.” Talk about a lying liar. How can people buy this shit? Are they really that dumb. I’m surprised a bunch of cops didn’t walk out giving him a raspberry for politicizing the memorial.
“re IDing people by writing style:”
I was very interested in the sub-field of textual analysis back in my grad skool days with English literature, particularly with authorship studies in and around the “School of Night,” the Stratfordian Shakespear, and the deVere circle. I was looking to use computers for these capers but my master’s thesis was busily gobbled up by messing around with Dante’s Virgilian characterizations of father-son relationships, instead.
A couple of peeps here have picked up on my crappy writing style when they’ve seen it on other blogs; it would be hard now for me to try to fake it. Vocabulary is a huge part of it, naturally. The person who wrote the Shakespear corpus had a monster vocabulary, not only for his time, but ours as well.
re Hosts file: I used to use one, but since switching to TOR Browser Bundle for most of my web surfing, and with scripting blocked by default, Flash not loaded, and HTML5 videos explicitly disabled, what little advertising I see is tolerable.
So, Bro, you download all your porn via torrents?
“How can people buy this shit? Are they really that dumb. I’m surprised a bunch of cops didn’t walk out giving him a raspberry for politicizing the memorial.”
Politicians are almost always raving psychopaths, and lying comes as naturally to them as breathing does to us; only the Klintons and Obola have taken it to new levels. It’s like Hitler said, the bigger the lie, the better.
Also, last I knew, I could buy books off Amazon or at the bookstore downtown and they didn’t run an instant check on me. (of course they might pretty soon, given some of the books I buy, lol).
But for Obola to deliberately politicize with a hot-button issue at a MEMORIAL simply illustrates his complete lack of a heart or soul. Just like Cankles, who would most assuredly do the same thing. These aren’t people; they’re fucking evil automatons.
Damn, I’m, like, so busted.
Although… that gives me a great idea! Instead of torrenting porn down, I’ll make my own porn! And the economy is so bad* that I can probably get actors for cheap. Thanks for the idea!
* Despite the lies coming out of government agencies
“I’ll make my own porn! And the economy is so bad* that I can probably get actors for cheap.”
Hey, if you need fugly fatties for that subset of the male clientele who dig that, I’ve got two right here and they’ll probably JUMP at the chance! Well…maybe not jump, exactly. Jiggle a little…maybe. You can probably get them to do anything if you supply enough ciggies and a wireless connection for their pixels.
“I’ll make my own porn!…
I thought he meant Starring, Written By, Produced and Directed.
Ehhhhhhh………
Most of that? Nah. I’d probably write the scripts myself. It’s not like a one-armed, crack-addled monkey banging randomly on a typewriter couldn’t do better than the scripts of what few porn flicks I’ve seen. Well, that was about three decades ago; perhaps the state of the porn art has advanced to the point that the screenplays are better than those of the typical Hollywood blockbuster. Not that that’s a high bar to hurdle.
A lot of Hollyweird flicks and cable tee-vee series are just barely outside the line of being porn, and certainly would have been considered as such thirty years ago.
I know it when I see it!
In reference to the Lodge cast iron cookware, I find that the pre-seasoned cookware is not a good as the old cast iron cookware. The pre-seasoned stuff, from Lodge or others, does not have the smooth surface of older cookware. This surface is left rough so that the soybean oil used to pre-season it does not drain off prior to firing.
I would suggest getting old cast iron at garage sales or flea markets. Check that they are flat and not warped. Don’t worry about surface rust as that can be removed via a number of processes. I set up an electrolysis tank using a battery charger and washing soda.
I would stick to US made cast iron and names like Griswold and Wagner. A little research online will help you to identify pans with no names imprinted like the Birmingham Stove and Range ones. I suspect there are a lot of BSR cast iron pans available for bargain prices around there.
The current production cast iron with the rough surfaces can be improved with the judicious use of an angle grinder and flap wheel. Once smoothed to a proper surface and then seasoned with soybean oil or, if you can stand the smell, food grade linseed (flax) oil, you will have a superior cooking implement. These oils are high on the iodine index. Canola come in third place. I use soybean oil as it costs less than flax and does not smell as bad.
There is a lot of information on cast iron cookware on the Internet and specifically on YouTube. There is also a lot of garbage too.
“” re IDing people by writing style: Yes, to some extent. It’s not as good as hyped — try to control your surprise. It works well enough if they suspect an unknown writer is you and they have a corpus of your text and the unknown writer’s text. Matching a few chunks of writing against a large population? Very unlikely to get them anywhere.””
I referred to you-uns as “youse guys” and “y’all” so I guess I’ve done enough
obfuscation for today.
No, wait. Add “you guys” which is from a region quite separate from “youse
guys” I reckon.
@OFD re: “One of the great things about English is you can have fun with it. I don’t think that’s as true for any other language”
Not quite. Spanish can be really hilarious.
I was having a stroll with my wife and one of my kids -a baby at the time- and we happened to meet a Chilean person on the street. During the conversation she remarked: “Que rico que es el guagua”. That phrase made no sense in Argentinean Spanish at first. A first pass quick interpretation would translate to something like “How tasty is the dog” since quagua sounds like something you would associate with a dog. Given that no dogs were present and that she had been looking at my kid the interpretation of guagua has to be made that it is referring to a kid. (It is indeed a word derived from local Chilean indigenous people). The word rico has several meanings but it is not used as pretty or lovely in Argentina. And this anecdote is coming from a conversation held by people from two countries that are side by side and use the “same” language.
Having said that, this is the “funny” side of things. On the other hand, very innocuous everyday words are used as very rude words in other countries or even in other regions within a country so that if you happen to be in conversation with a person that is not from your locale you can end up with either stares or a laugh and an explanation.
You would probably enjoy Spanish.
@ Marcelo
Looking up Concha y Toro winery (Chile) I found some mention
that concha is somehow rude to say to or about a woman in
Argentina. Translation(s), please ?
Back when I was trying to learn Spanish, mostly in my late teens-early twenties, I had a terrible time. I’d learn something, then use it in conversation and get corrected. The use the corrected version with someone else and get corrected. It took me years to figure out that every region south of the Rio Grande has its own version of Spanish* and every resident or expat of that region considers that to be The One True Spanish. And all those are distinct from Castillian Spanish, which is barely intelligible to South Americans.
So I eventually said to Hell with them all, learned enough Castillian Spanish to muddle my way through literature if I were so inclined, and limited my spoken Spanish to being able to insult people on the off chance that I’d feel the need.
* Excepting Brasil. Stop being pendantic.
[snip] There were 1,468 visits to this blog yesterday, a record. [snip]
Is that 1468 unique visitors, or does the count increment each time OFD drops by to add one of his cut & past screeds?
[snip] We’re going to open carry at the GOP convention. [snip]
What’s wrong with that? Isn’t the right to a firearm God given Natural Law, enshrined in our Constitution as a warning to those who would oppress us?
[snip] every region south of the Rio Grande has its own version of Spanish [snip]
My oldest niece’s fiance is a native of Columbia, and claims that the Columbians speak the purest dialect of Spanish in the Western Hemisphere. When niece #3 spent a year in Spain as a high school exchange student, she was told early on that she spoke ‘Spanish like a Mexican’ which was considered a very harsh criticism. She quickly improved, and is now most comfortable in Galacian Spanish, because that’s where she spent her year.
That’s views rather than visitors, but it doesn’t count views by me, Nick, or Dave Hardy.
Our daughter spent a year in Brazil and told us a funny story one time along these lines from when she was learning Brazilian Portuguese on-site. I’ve forgotten what it was exactly, but her new little Brazilian friends thought it was funny and she learned from that mistake.
“Is that 1468 unique visitors, or does the count increment each time OFD drops by to add one of his cut & past screeds?”
“Cut and paste screeds”??? Why I’ve never been so insulted in my life!
cut to old Benny Hill sketch: “Well you should get around more, then, shouldn’t ya!”
Re: “… and every resident or expat of that region considers that to be The One True Spanish.”
and re: “… a native of Columbia, and claims that the Columbians speak the purest dialect of Spanish in the Western Hemisphere.”
There is obviously only one true Spanish and that is the one used in Spain as there is also only one true English and that is the one used in England (as any loyal subject like me would argue). Both languages were used and evolved in the conquering countries and bear the association of the language in their names. All the rest are just “forks” of the original at a given point in time. 🙂
I would actually argue that Argentinean Spanish is the closest to the Spaniards Spanish. Argentineans evolved much more closely with the European Spanish, French and Italian countries than any other countries in the world and they received a big fresh influx of natives from them after the world wars. Nevertheless, it will always be a derived language although, in my view, an improved language. ( As you could argue that the US version is an improved version of the Queen’s language). 🙂
There are many more variations of Spanish than there are of English given that the Spaniards conquered a lot of land with indigenous people and they “interacted” with them more assiduously than the British therefore picking up many more indigenous words. This is a boon for the Spanish Royal Academy scholars that “control” the evolution of the language and incorporate new terms as accepted words for use in different regional areas.
I am afraid that with the globalisation of things and with the move to using English as the foremost language for international communication that English will be suffering even more than Spanish has already suffered. Care to understand English coming out of India, Philippines and even Japan? 🙂 And please also remember the gutting that has taken place in most English speaking countries over a couple of generations with the use of phonics and the banning of teaching grammar. 🙁
Still, I have to say that the use of English for international communication has been a benefit for all involved. It is easier to learn than other languages and can withstand a lot of bastardisation and still be useful to convey what is required whereas other languages are not. I will definitely never even attempt to learn Chinese if it were to try and evolve into its replacement. 🙂
Well, may I just say, sir, that you write very nice English indeed, better, in fact, than much of what I’ve seen written over the past several decades here. And also made several very cogent points, with which this recovering English major agrees entirely.
As you no doubt know, we have many regional dialects of English here in North America; mine is derived largely from 17th-Century East Anglia and has been a source of amusement many times over the years for people from other parts of the country.
So, in fact, MINE is the One True English, used by SHAKESPEARE himself! And the first Queen Elizabeth!
@mr lynn, there is a very nice gas cooktop with down draft at the Jones Rd reStore. It’s 36″ though, which is why I left it there. The cooktop that came into the store with the Miele set was a Viking. They recognize the Viking brand and put $2000 on it. Still a bargain. Can ‘t believe they didn’t bother to look up the Miele brand, but really glad they didn’t.
We’ve currently got a Dacor glass top electric, with the pop up downdraft. As a splatter shield, it’s pretty effective. As a vent, well only really effective on frying pans or other low pots. Anything taller that the pop up part gets into the air. And yes it does cool off your cooking. My exhaust pipe is 10″ across. Freaking huge, and like a cyclone on high.
My sister the spanish major, did a semester abroad in Spain. In Catalonia.
.
.
.
.
Where they don’t speak spanish at all, they speak Catalan. So the joke was on her, hah.
My spanish is southern californian. It’s distinct from other spanish, including mexican. Most of the spanish speaking workers in our shop in LA were not from Mexico at all, but El Salvador, Guatemala, Ecuador, etc. One of those has a ‘hill billy’ accent that is VERY lispy and sounds ‘muy guapo’ or ‘gay.’ (not handsome) It always surprises spanish speakers if you (white boy from the suburbs) can accurately place their accent. (TX has immigrants from all those places and more, and I do hear the accents other than TexMex.)
Sometimes the funniest things are the littlest. One of the hispanic guys I used to ride with every weekend (superbikes, on the street) saw me shaking the last drops out of the fuel nozzle and burst out laughing. ??? “I thought only Mexicans did that!” Nope, POOR people do that! There is really not a lot of real exchange between the cultures, we move thru the same spaces, but don’t really intersect.
nick
Speaking of “intersections,” here’s one:
https://westernrifleshooters.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/cnnkzrexgaatbre.jpg
I’m just peeved that these candidates weren’t around when I was finishing high skool; I coulda gone to college free of charge without having to work for Uncle and get the G.I. Bill, and my parents’ and my medical bills would be all taken care of to this day. It’s really a shame that the Twelve Years of Reagan-Bush messed all that up, plus my fellow dastardly white male cis-hetero patriarchs ruining everything.
Yes, yes, MrAtoz, I forgot knuckle-dragging, Cro-Magnon, hairy fascist, Bigfoot, etc., but the list gets longer every day.
And here’s our latest used-car sales huckster:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/expd/27651624954/in/dateposted-public/
Like that, kids? Ready to sign up with the next commie whore? Yeah, I thought so.
Oh, by the way? How did that hopey-changey thang work out for y’all….?
As far as I’m aware there are two dialects of Spanish in Spain:
1. The one where gracius is pronounced gracius, and
2. The one where gracius is pronounced grathius.
South America follows the first pronounciation, but I was told in Spain that the second is more correct.
Myles, there are several issues with your short comment. : -(
I will assume that you meant gracias which is the translation in Spanish of thank you. If not, then my comments may sound like gibberish…
I will also assume you intended for Catalán to be the dialect.
If that were the case then, I can say that gracious in Spanish is not the correct word.
I have often receive mail from Japan using gracious instead of gracias and it grates. For that matter the one word that is often used and was very popularised in Terminator by Mr Arnold is “problemo” when he says: “No problemo.”. That statement is really jarring. In theory, we could say “No problema.” since problems –as everybody knows- are always feminine in nature but you would never phrase it like that. We would probably phrase it as “No hay problema” which would strictly translate to There is no problem or No problem in short.
Back to the original issue. In Catalán (from wiki) the translation is actually either Gràcies or Merci. Spanish accents are all acute so the first word is meaningless in Spanish even from the spelling point of view. 🙂
Catalán as well as Vasque are distinct languages even as Gaelic is a distinct language from English. Consider also that even as the predominant language in the UK is English, the predominant language in Spain is Spanish and you get an analogous scenario.
History, languages and nations all go hand in hand. I am hopeless at history –my memory was never good to start with and is even worse when it comes to things I do not really care about. I am not that familiar with things strictly related to Spain in itself so you should take my comments with a grain of salt the size of the Peñón de Gibraltar. I just speak the language.
@Spook: I put in a hosts file for our network to block some ads. But this is a problem: the servers used for ads are continually changing, which means you have to update it. Which means installing a script to automatically download and use a list from somewhere.
Which I really dislike doing, for various reasons. First, some entries turn out to be problematic (example: the lists often include Google servers that are necessary for our company use of Google services). Second, I don’t like automatically downloading and installing content from the internet onto a server – what security hole am I opening?
So our list contains only entries that I put there (based on some original list I went through by hand). Which means it really contains only the most egregious stuff, and is pretty out-of-date.
– – – – –
My wife and I have been taking Spanish lessons for a couple of years now, because we like to vacation in Spain. The lisp in Spain is, depending on the region, quite pronounced. I read somewhere that this goes back a couple hundred years to some king who truly did have a lisp, so this became the stylish way of speaking. Other sources claim this is an urban legend. In any case, our teacher comes from Peru, so we don’t lisp when we speak.
After re-reading the original post and my response I am afraid I was quite correct with respect to my gibberish statement. Where did my Reading and Comprehension skills go? Myles was talking about pronunciation and I made a comment about languages. 🙁
Pronunciation is a different issue altogether as well as other ways in which we use the language.
You will find pronunciation differences in all languages and even in areas within a given city but the Spaniards do really talk weird. 🙂
There is also the issue with the use of the language in terms of familiarity or formality. Argentinean Spanish uses the most familiar way of speaking and writing the language to the extent that other Spanish speaking countries refer to them as che and vos which are quite distinct terms in characterising the use of the language. The Spaniards use the formal way. Most latin-american countries are much less formal than the Spaniards in the use of the language.
Just a thought: Human nature is intractable. I am informal when I speak in Spanish and a bit more formal when I write in that language. I am very formal writing in English (or think I am) and normally just formal when speaking it. I can’t even start to understand myself…
I haven’t used a hosts file for adblocking since the 20th century.
I’m also a bit more formal when writing than in speech as well. I introduce myself as Dave, but always put David on paper for some reason.
Me, too. I always use my full name in written communications. Barbara and our friends call me Bob.
My formal, written name is totally different than what people call me, but that’s totally their fault. There’s no good reason except laziness that people can’t call me His Dread Majesty, God-Emperor Steven the Magnificent.
I’ve tried to get Barbara to address me as Grand High Exalted Majestic Ruler, but she’s not having any. In fact, when we got married, she insisted on removing “obey”, so all she promised to do was “love and honor”. I, on the other hand, am faced with She Who Must Be Obeyed.
It’s normal for wives to be difficult, but I’d think that everyone else would cooperate with my preferred form of address. Even if my coworkers were to use the full name, my teenage sons at least should have used my full name. -sigh- I guess I just don’t understand people.
SteveF wrote:
“His Dread Majesty, God-Emperor Steven the Magnificent.”
he he he.
I used to work for a guy we called (amongst other things)
“His Royal Omnipotence God Phillip II”
Yes, he was arrogant, but also very smart.
I worked with a chap with a last name of Bates. We added master to the front.
Marcelo, I don’t consider Catalan to be Spanish.
I think you’re right about “thank you”. The coach driver on my tour of Spain and Portugal in 1993 used grathas, but I was told gracias was more or less universal in South America and some parts of Spain.
WRT getting a Glock easier to get than a book or a computer:
Obuttwad knows that his home boys can’t find the lie-berry where they can find free books and computers. In the hood you can get whatever you want on any street corner, why walk to the lie-berry.
Obuttwads disgraceful and disrespectful speech (only mentioned himself 45 times) in Dallas on Tuesday was bad enough when I listened to parts on the radio, but then I saw the video this morning. Another carefully selected group of drones that automatically applaud at the start of every statement he makes (the guy/gal/it with the “clap” sign must have been reading ahead). IIRC Obuttwad mentioned the names of all the darkies recently killed by the police, but none of the police killed in Dallas.
I tend to fluctuate between using David when it’s just my first name and Dave Lastname when I need both. Just the way it flows I guess. OTH lots of my friends address me as Davo.
Yes, yes, MrAtoz, I forgot knuckle-dragging, Cro-Magnon, hairy fascist, Bigfoot, etc., but the list gets longer every day.
Proto-ape, sir, proto-ape.
During my first trip for Uncle to Korea, I was named S4 (logistics) Officer for the battalion. The guy before me was fired for being a useless drunk. We called him “Lord Pym, Keeper of the Black Eye Sockets.” A real mess of an individual. He was cashiered while I was there.
@mr lynn, there is a very nice gas cooktop with down draft at the Jones Rd reStore. It’s 36″ though, which is why I left it there. The cooktop that came into the store with the Miele set was a Viking. They recognize the Viking brand and put $2000 on it. Still a bargain. Can ‘t believe they didn’t bother to look up the Miele brand, but really glad they didn’t.
Thanks but I will pass. Shoehorning a 36 inch cooktop into a 30 inch space would be problematic at best. And, I can get the Jenn-Air cooktop for that $2,000. BTW, that cooktop vent is not a popup but is in the middle of the four burners so it draws across all burners. Works very well at getting the smoke out.
https://jennair.com/appliances/details/JGD3430BS
Our first home in Sweetwater, Texas came with a 48 inch free standing white enamel natural gas stove. There was six burners on top, a griddle on top, a large oven, and a smaller oven with a rotisserie in it for slow cooking meat. My wife hated leaving that behind when we moved to Carrollton, Texas.
-blink- Sheesh, he must have been a mess, considering the number of non-sacked drunks I ran across. (Not “ran over”, more’s the pity.) And the number of completely useless or outright corrupt officers and NCOs, ditto.
Miles, now I think we are in sync. Grathias would be the way it sounds from somebody coming from Galicia. 🙂
Most Spanish speaking people say that the Gallegos are the Irish equivalent in the British culture and worthy of the jokes made about them. 🙂
“And the number of completely useless or outright corrupt officers and NCOs, ditto.”
Almost always REMFs, too. Saw plenty of them in my short time working for Uncle between Bangkok and Bangor.
There are a bunch of Spanish dialects. Pure Castilian Spanish (the “official” Spanish) is the lisping one, since at one time the king had a lisp. Mexicans are famous for speaking very, very fast. Chileans sound different from everyone else. Central Americans have a distinct sound. My wife and I were on a cruise in the Med that started and ended in Barcelona. The cabbie from the airport to the port spoke Castilian and Spanish, but all the signs were in Castilian. We had lunch with a couple from Madrid one day and I could tell they were Spanish by their accent. They could tell my wife had grown up with Central American Spanish and that I had a strong American accent.