Cooler to cold, damp to wet. It’s all a matter of degrees. After the rain yesterday the temperature dropped 20F and the wind picked up. 52F, damp and windy, feels pretty darn cold here in Houston. Today should be pretty cool too.
I did some pickups, mainly to meet with the auctioneers. I got a squishy commitment to take some more of my stuff to the local auction where I did very well. Then I went by my secondary, moved a couple of things around, unloaded some stuff from my truck, and came home.
Dinner was leftover crock pot carnitas, but with bread and veg, instead of tortillas and rice and beans. Worked pretty well. Pork shoulder is cheap, $1.79/pound and even less when on sale. You can prep on a budget, even putting away protein, if you shop carefully, and eat the food poor people traditionally eat.
I guess I moved enough stuff out of the house because my wife put the tree in the stand, and set it up in the “play room”/ library. There is a truckload of stuff in the foyer now, but I’ll deal with some of that today if the weather is clear. It was too wet to decorate, so we’ll do that today. Some of the other inside decor went up, and the house smells like the tree. It’s beginning to feel like Christmas to me.
Peter over at BayouRenaissanceMan has been reminding people about inflation, food shortages, and the need to build up pantries. Some commentors sound like they’re in good shape. Peter suggests people get to 30 days of food. I think that’s a great start but you better have a whole bunch more, if only to supplement whatever you can find, if things go further pear shaped. And y’all know I think they will. If the situation with fertilizer shortages causes changes in plantings, and subsequently reduces the food available next season, prices will go up further. Scarcity will increase too and this comes on the heels of the floods and reduced harvests of a couple years ago. Stockpiles are reduced already. Everyone eats, so food insecurity is a very destabilizing thing. Make sure you have options and choices. I was thinking yesterday about the government cheese of my youth. I loved that stuff and would love to have a couple of those giant bricks in my stacks. I suspect that there are a lot fewer warehouses full of .gov stockpiles than there were in the 80s…
Desperate people do desperate things. Plan ahead and prep so you don’t have to.
Stack it up.
nick
@Nick
“I was thinking yesterday about the government cheese of my youth. I loved that stuff and would love to have a couple of those giant bricks in my stacks.”
My grandmother used to get a brick of that ever month. Far more than she could use, so whenever you visited you came home with cheese. Good quality cheddar.
“You know, the last person that I want to see “reboot the internet” is Jack Dorsey. He will only allow those of us whom he approves of on the intertubes.”
The crypto dweebs and dweeb wannabes want to make their “currencies” the only way to pay the toll to get online.
All of those arbitraged graphics cards in the basement mining “coins” on their Griddy powered rig will pay off someday.
I posted some thoughts on an alternative to prepping here and here. (Same essay on each site.)
We were watching a 1950s TV show, and my wife commented on how thin everyone was compared to today. Seems to be plenty of food today. Maybe some shortages could return us to previous norms.
Less fast food and fewer TV choices.
And fewer TV choices also meant that Hollywood had a lot more control of what Americans saw on TV in terms of body image.
Mass hysteria!
We're a few days away from peak darkness in the UK so the schadenfreude machine has kicked into high gear.
I’m imagining, “It is a good thing we live in England, where everybody takes their jabs as they are told.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10324045/Omicron-cases-double-overnight-Variant-confirmed-45-states.html
"Look at how skinny everyone was" is one of Bill Quick's recurring remarks.
I'm not sure that simple shortages are enough to return most Americans to a healthy weight. That is, a lower weight while still being healthy. Practically all processed food might as well have been specifically designed to make you put on fat. There's evidence suggesting that even the ingredients — a pound of beef or a bag of cornmeal — are unhealthy to eat because of the drugs or chemicals used in raising it or genetic alterations for the plants, though that evidence is weaker and contradicted by other evidence so I haven't decided anything yet.
Even getting the same ingredients as fifty years ago wouldn't magically solve the problem. Most Americans can't cook beyond heating up something from a can. Some don't have cookware. If you took away their packaged food and take-out and gave them a box of meat, potatoes, and flour, some chunk of them would starve in a month. (Which, per my essay above, would not necessarily be a bad thing.)
EDIT: Per Greg’s comment, it wasn’t only movies which showed (almost) only skinny people. Compare a random street or beach photo from 1971 to one from 2021. (But get a barf bucket handy before looking at the 2021 beach photo.)
Well, it's sunny but it's 48F this morning! That is chilly willy.
WRT people being thinner, I recall someone saying that the fat cells you grow during childhood are then present for the rest of your life. Kids were more active, and under intense pressure not to be fat. If they don't have the cells, they won't swell and grow?
Another issue is the USDA and the poisonous food pyramid. Those people grew up before the industry inverted the pyramid to put grains and carbs at the top.
Add in HFCS and soy in everything and you change body chemistry.
I don't know about any benefit to eating vinegar, some people claim there is, and fermented things, but people in the 50s ate a lot of pickled and cured by fermentation foods too. If you look at old ads and old recipes, it's an astounding amount of pickled food, (and gelatin dishes too.)
n
Follow stevef for more recipes!
n
I didn't say to eat the useless! Eww. Not that I have any principled objection to cannibalism, but "you are what you eat" means that if you eat the useless, you will become useless.
Unless the pictures were stored in carefully controlled environments, "random" photos from 50 years ago don't exist anymore, especially color prints. The consumer grade print papers were terrible.
Flour was an early "shortage" at the beginning of the pandemic fun. My wife speculated that most of the bags which disappeared into households around us from the local HEB probably got thrown away by the end of the Summer last year.
The first weekend the local “champagne brunch” restaurant reopened in … May? … for takeout only last year, the pickup line of cars stretched for half a mile, easily.
Yeast vanished too. There were a whole lot of people who thought they'd finally try baking bread. What makes home more comfortable than the smell and taste of fresh bread?
There might be deeper psychological reasons too, but seeking comfort and control are probably high on the list.
Doesn't take many loaves to use up a 5 pound bag.
n
WRT old photos, in 50 years nothing will be left. All the file formats will be long obsolete, readers for the storage media will be rarer than VHS to DVD conversion stores are now. No one will know who is in the photo without really good facial recognition as no one writes notes on the back of thumbdrives…. geo tagging and file names will nail down where and when though.
And it's easy enough to take a single shoebox of photos to gramma and look thru them. Not gonna happen with 4 terabytes of shots, mostly very similar, and mostly of food and doorknobs.
n
added- they were precious memories because they were FEW.
Nostalgia.
Kids are watching "8 Bit Christmas" and I am making coffee. It's the story of a guy getting a Nintendo for Christmas in '86 or '88. He's telling it thru flashbacks to his young daughter.
Anyway, thinking about it, I suddenly remembered the SMELL of the Radio Shack store. I spent a lot of free time there, typing stuff into their Model 1 computer, Hello World programs mostly, and looking at radios. The 80s Radio Shack had a particular smell… acrid but not unpleasant. Their electronics from the era STILL have a strong and distinctive smell. Really takes me back. And kids today won't have that.
That's probably part of why Disney spends so much on the smell of their locations. To bring those memories crashing down on you later.
n
I took this yesterday. With a little cropping, could be a banner…
https://www.ttgnet.com/journal/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/20211218_131730-scaled.jpg
n
Back in the day the typical photo op was one photo and another "just to be sure" or "Billy, no more faces!". Get the whole roll printed after being in the camera for weeks, then toss the bad photos and take the rest to the next family gathering.
Polaroid was out there, SX70 was awesome, but it was expensive instant gratification.
Few people shot rolls of film and then selected the best to print. I used to reliably get 36 exp rolls to yield 37 or 38, and was happy if I had three good shots. Remember bracketing exposures?
Now I have more photos in a year than I shot in 5 years with an SLR. And so few actually printed. Why bother? Show someone a photo, they like it, and you text/email to them.
When I shot lighting in theatres, I felt really good if I got 3 usable shots from a roll. I was very lucky, or the subject was easy to shoot, I might get a couple extra that were "pretty good" which was enough to maybe give them to someone, but not to print them. I was shooting ISO 32 or 64 and "pushing two stops" in processing, bracketing, and doing it all manually on an old AE1.
I shot slide film for that and used a color copier with a 35mm slide adapter to "print" them. The prints looked great from straight on, but the differences in gloss made them look funny at an angle. I still have some framed 'prints' from 1990 and they look great. I wonder if the slides look good.
n
>> Doesn't take many loaves to use up a 5 pound bag.
Says the man who has 100 lbs of flour and three bread making machines in his stacks.
Looks like Manchin just put a nail through plugs' Build Back Worse.
The ProgLibTurds are using the tiresome mantra of "How can one person run the country….". To them, Manchin has just doomed the entire planet to extinction due to Climate Ejaculation. How arrogant can you be to think spending trillions of US tax dollars will save the planet.
What difference, at this point, does it make? COVID gonna kill us all.
I can't wait for plugs' big speech on Tuesday on "living with COVID". I'm sure he will blame the *unvaxxed* for his shitty Presidency.
Ah, pure SteveF. From a purely sociopathic POV, he's not wrong.
Serious question: what can society *really* do with an unskilled, uneducated, unemployable underclass? Inner-ciety schools passing failures on grade-by-grade, until they hold a diploma they cannot read. Home schoolers who don't – school, that is – whose kids also grow up illiterate and unemployable. What do you do with the resulting human detritus?
Too many carbohydrates, too little physical activity. A friend of mine in Austin had a simple diet that she recommended: the "eat like a human" diet (as opposed to like a pig). In German, the equivalent is the "friss die Hälfte" diet: eat whatever you want, but eat half as much as you usually would. Add physical activity. Problem solved.
Easier said than done, of course, especially when under stress…
Sourdough is a thing. Once you have it going, it isn't even hard. Of course, since I brew beer, there is always a pile of beneficial yeast floating around, but someone, somewhere will be brewing beer. Even in hard times (perhaps especially in hard times) people will want alcohol.
I prefer the word "pragmatic".
I would offer a basic living stipend to anyone who submitted to total, irreversible sterilization. Cancel it if they engage in criminal activity, but generally allow the useless to laze around being useless, knowing that they won’t pass it on.
That’s the “kinder, gentler SteveF” approach. The “real me SteveF” approach is to cancel all gun control laws (all of which are invalid in the US anyway), cancel all welfare and other safety net programs, and let the useless die violently or of starvation.
“Bread starter” for non-sourdough is a thing, too. You need a bit of yeast to get it going, then you can keep it going forever by feeding it and pulling off pieces as you need it.
The practical problem is: that unemployable underclass is more accustomed to violence that the average productive citizen. In a pear-shaped scenario, it's not so clear who would have the upper hand, even if the productive people are better armed.
I associate jet fuel smell with Disney. When Eisney World first opened, Orlando Airport was a trainwreck, and to force the issue of upgrades at taxpayer expense, the Mouse ran small jets and prop planes to the property, landing on the runway still visible east of the main parking.
Orlando and Osceola County got the message when The Mouse started planning an airport on the part of the property where Celebration sits. The nuclear reactor was slated for where the “Mickey” power pole now dominates the landscape.
When the power pole went up in the late 80s, we joked that it was a reminder of what Mickey could do if he so chose. “Nice county you have here. It would be a shame if we irradiated it.”
The “wedge” between I-4 and US192 is still empty, but Disney gave up their rights to the reactor just recently in return for some concession from the State of Florida.
Each attraction used to have a distinctive smell. IFI? worked with them on it. Somewhere there is an article. Some was accidental, like the smell of hot rubber on the boat ride with all the conveyor belts.
Last time I walked into a trading post at Ft Wilderness, it smelled exactly like it did in the late 70s, early 80s. That isn't an accident.
n
Thank you Joe!
Saved us (so far) from wasting $1.75 Trillion on pork.
Stand your ground.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/manchin-says-he-cannot-vote-for-build-back-better-ive-done-everything-humanly-possible.amp
87 was the big Nintendo Christmas year in the US, when the company seriously underestimated demand. I remember because I was working at Service Merchandise and had to spend an afternoon cutting apart the static Nintendo NES promotional display to prove to a proto-Karen mother that the console inside the display case did not have any circuit boards which allowed it to be a working system. Store manager’s (an old Monkey Wards guy) orders.
God only knows how much money that display would fetch today from collectors.
Nintendo has always been about You Ain't Got No Ice Cream in the first year of their consoles/handhelds, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that year that they really did underestimate.
From the 1st gen Game Boy on, they have no excuse IMHO.
Manchin wants something. W VA gets all kinds of pork, an old tradition from Grand Kleagle Byrd's days in the Senate.
Again, 11,000 GA Libertarians "voting their conscience" are the reason we have this mess.
three bread making machines in his stacks.
—only two atm. One on the counter, one in the storage 🙂 I'm not sure how much flour I've got but it's probably more than 100 pounds. It comes in pretty big bags, and I've bought a bunch of them over the years. Before RBT convinced me to extend my planning horizon, I didn't stock it because I really didn't use it much. Same for rice. I still don't stock dried beans. I've got a couple of flats of canned beans though.
–back is flaring up today. Hands too. Temp is all the way up to 54F and I'm guessing the barometric pressure is up dramatically, or down, whichever brings the clear weather and joint pain.
n
rice and flour and a couple of buckets = very cheap food security.
n
One of my stops yesterday was to pickup a solar panel and charge controller. They had already left for the day though.
I'm ok on panels, batteries and inverters, but very short on charge controllers.
n
IFF. International Flavors and Fragrances. At least, that used to be the name of the company.
Disney got the referral from McDonalds. Or vice versa. I don't recall which way it worked.
Don't make any assumptions about the hot rubber smell being an accident. The Goodyear logo used to be prominent on the belts taking people up to the gift shop at the exit of the Disney World "Pirates" ride.
He (and Sinema) have been pretty consistent. No BBB bill that isn't honestly paid for by tax increases. Honestly in that the span of time for the spending and taxing have to be the same. The bill is full of 3 year spending and 10 year tax increases – planning on renewing the spending when it runs out.
Both sides have played this game, but the Democrats tend to spend more, the Republicans tax less.
The RNC just got handed even more clips to make into ads. Fauci says we will be wearing masks on planes forever. I guess he wants the Republicans to take back both the House and Senate next year.
Nothing Fauci says is relevant for political ads run by Republican. People are still scared silly or the mask kabuki would have gone away long before now … along with Fauci.
2022 already started locally. The same mediocre candidate who challenged our walking corpose Congresscritter in the last cycle pulled her billboards from 2020 out of storage and started posting them.
Donna Imam. “Engineer for Congress”.
https://www.votefordonna.com/
She even recycled her platform starting with Medicaid For All.
the mask kabuki would have gone away long before now
—in a lot of places it already has.
what I don't get is why a New Yorker would stand in line for hours for a test.
n
The New World Order of communism. Throw out "Our poor Veterans.." won't get her elected in Texas. Free/cheap everything for everybody.
"I'm an engineer, I'll fix everything."
She should get together with *Doors* and primary plugs.
I think the greatest difference in our diets now is variety. Not only was it local and seasonal 70 years ago, but it was all the same. The same meats and veg and starches cooked the same ways week after week after week, pickled beets and sauerkraut every week if not every day, 3 or 4 jars of different pickles on the table at every meal, and the same kind of jelly or jam with breakfast. Even the hot sauce was just tabasco peppers with vinegar poured over them.
There were lots of rich, delicious foods, but it did not change, and thus didn't lure people into eating more just because it was there.
However, it's likely that most of weight is genetic, and when I look at my family photos going all the way back to my great great grandparents (born circa 1870) on different sides, we can see which body shapes each of their descendants inherited – some children inherited the slender body of their father or grandmother, others the barrel shape of paternal grandfather, their siblings equally distributed between the German Farm Woman shape of maternal grandmother and greatgrandmother, or the mother's father's side with tiny bones, short stature, and shapes to match.
Ours is the same Congressional district that "Doors" tried to win in 2018 before running for Senate last year. I think the CA money people realize that she is a lost cause.
If Williamson County had received its own Congressional district, a Dem would probably win. As is, the district stayed split between Bell County and Wilco.
The Wilco Sheriff was deposed last year. I'm not going to even pretend to call that an "election".
[ Achoo ]
Oh! My! Gawwwd! I might have Covid!
I need a test right away!
Aren’t a lot of the restaurants/theaters still closed or, at the very least, require a jab?
When using the last of the can of Auguson dried sliced potatoes, either add extra fluid (water or milk) or sift through a colander.
It turned out fine, just very thick.
We were watching a 1950s TV show, and my wife commented on how thin everyone was compared to today. Seems to be plenty of food today. Maybe some shortages could return us to previous norms.
Everybody smoked back then. Instead of eating something, people would smoke a ciggy.
When free home tests are readily available, I bet no one will accept them as proof of no COVID. Only *agencies* approved by goobermints can give you an *approved* test.
Already happening.
I refuse to go anywhere or be witnessed in doing Chinese Bioweapon test. Send me the kit and the paperwork and I'll do it in private at home and mail you the results. If it's good enough for voting, it's good enough for everything else.
That's how it works now. The Paramount in Downtown Austin will not take a home test, only one from an authorized vendor like CVS.
The test I took at CVS was kabuki. I swabbed my own nose while the nurse looked at her computer, trying to figure out how my appointment was "lost" when it was staring her in the face under my home phone number.
I'm considering getting regendered. I'll get back to you for stipend when completed.
I'm pretty sure SteveF meant he'd offer OPM for the stipend.
As a matter of policy, it might be a government program that had a positive payoff. Especially if you encouraged low-IQ and convicted violent felons.
Only if the borders are closed, though.
Yes. It was an "if I were in charge" statement.
If I were in charge, illegal aliens would have no civil liberties. No human rights. They could be killed on the street and the killer would face at most a littering citation.
I'd be happy if we just put them on a bus south.
Instead, as I witnessed in action in South Texas on July 4th weekend, we give them a "notice to appear" and Catholic Charities provides gift cards to Motel 6 and Whataburger.
And that applies to the illegals that get past the land mines and machine gun towers at the border. Either border… walking in from Canada isn't an exemption.
But…. my theory (worth all of what you pay me) is that all the wetbacks will leave when the economy crashes into Great Depression Two and all of the welfare stops.
@paul:
To an extent, I agree with you, as applied to UK. But there's a lot more of the "it's safer here. No-one's shooting at me" attitude. Which I have some sympathy with. But they get that anywhere in Europe. Why come all the way to UK, crossing the English Channel in the process? The answer to that is, UK is seen as El Dorado. And they're right.
If I was in charge, anyone who couldn't produce official paperwork to attest that they were here legally, would be shipped back to point of origin… cattle class. I don't go as far as SteveF, but I don't see why the indigenes should pay for for every Tom, Dick and Muhammad who gets in.
G.
Or Americans go back to work once the JoeBux direct deposits stop.
Doesn't the tax credit stop at the end of the year?
Few do, more's the pity.
>> Instead, as I witnessed in action in South Texas on July 4th weekend, we give them a "notice to appear" and Catholic Charities provides gift cards to Motel 6 and Whataburger.
At least they're not clogging up the lines at In-N-Out when I need a Double Double with Animal Fries.
>> Doesn't the tax credit stop at the end of the year?
Yup, the extension is in the BBB bill.
In-N-Out isn't down that far south.
South of Corpus Christi in Texas, on what will eventually be I-69, there's a whole lot of nothing until you get near the border.
In-N-Out isn't down that far south.
— newsflash, the illegals are everywhere, including Montana.
I worry that the organized gangs/cartels will see an opportunity and the guns will come out once the economy crashes. Better to be warlords here than campesinos in SA.
n
Got most everything I want to do decoration-wise done today.
I can run with what's there if I don't add any more.
Chilly day. It's still just 54F.
n
from David Weber:
What do you call an elderly Kodiak who forgot his dentures?
A gummy bear!
Where 4 out of 5 doctors recommended Camel cigarettes. I wonder if Fauci was alive then and one of the four doctors?
LSMFT.
"The Blackwing War" by K.B. Spangler
https://www.amazon.com/Blackwing-War-K-B-Spangler/dp/B08ZVWPHB7/br?tag=ttgnet-20 />
Book number two of a two book space opera fantasy science fiction series. I read the well printed and well bound trade paperback self published by the author in 2021 using Amazon's printing service, CreateSpace. My book was printed in Coppell, Texas on 19 June 2021. The author is stating that there will be two more books in the series.
Tembi Stoneskin and the other witches of Deep are desperately trying to stay out of the war between the Blackwings and the other humans. The Blackwings are Earth normal humans, the other humans are biomodified for their terraformed planets. The Blackwings are winning by systematically murdering the biomodified humans across the one thousand planets in the Milky Way Galaxy to keep the human race pure. But the Deep has not picked a side yet.
This book is grim, very grim. Genocide is horrible. And prevalent in today's world.
The author has an excellent webcomic, "A Girl and Her Fed", that she has been publishing on her own website for over a decade, since 2006. She has also written several books related to the webcomic. This book is not related to her webcomic.
https://www.agirlandherfed.com/
My rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars (191 reviews)
Too young, but Fauci was part of the bungled early AIDS response.
Much like with Covid, Fauci believed surface transmission was far more likely than was actually the case, and he supported finding a vaccine first before funding the development of the therapeutics.
The practical problem is: that unemployable underclass is more accustomed to violence that the average productive citizen. In a pear-shaped scenario, it's not so clear who would have the upper hand, even if the productive people are better armed.
Don't push the better armed people up against a wall. You might not like their reaction. For example, see the USA in WW II.
Tree is up and decorated.
Last of the eggnog is drunk.
Radio is silent and kids are headed to bed.
n
In the U.S., I'd estimate that the portion of unemployable underclass that is accustomed to serious violence is greatly outnumbered by the portion of productive citizens who are military veterans and have experience with serious violence on a whole different level.
Particularly so when you consider that about 1.5 million of the bad guys are locked up at any given time.
The latter does raise another question: If things go truly pear-shaped, what happens at the prisons?
>> The latter does raise another question: If things go truly pear-shaped, what happens at the prisons?
We send SteveF in dressed like Jack Reacher.
what happens at the prisons?
—in fiction they are either locked in and die in their cages, or set free.
IDK about any real life cases. I'd certainly consider that some might be let free, while some should just be shot in their cages.
n
added- in commie and socialist revolutions, they recruit from the prisons
The progs here are trying to convince the government to let in another contingent of several thousand refugees from Afghanistan. That country is well and truly screwed, no question. However, I'm not seeing how a new bunch of refugees from the Middle East are going to integrate any easier than the past bunches. Islamic culture remains fundamentally incompatible with the West, and it's going to take generations to digest the last wave of immigrants from that area.
What we need to avoid: is getting so many people from the same basic culture (here: Islamic) that they become an indigestible lump that will never integrate. I could see taking in refugees from somewhere completely different – say, the Ukraine (when that war goes hot) or Taiwan (ditto). But no more from the Middle East or Africa – we have as many as we can handle from that area.