Hot and humid in Houston. Whoddathunkit? The rain did cool things down a bit, for a while, but it’s summer, and summer is hot and humid. It would be nice if it stayed below 100F and 89%RH
Yesterday I tidied up and headed home from the BOL. I have a pickup truck bed full of scrap iron used as rebar. That will go to the scrap man later today, if I get to it. And I’ve got a tire to run by my tire guy to find and fix the link. It’s small and slow, but I really don’t want to get stuck changing it somewhere in 110F sun.
But first, I’ve got my non-prepping hobby meeting. Meatspace. One of the guys who is also a ham is supposed to be giving me an antenna at the meeting. And we’re planning for our regional tradeshow/swapmeet/convention which I should attend as I’m a committee chair this year. In other words, stuff to do.
So I won’t be sleeping in, trying to clear some of the fuzz out of my head. The intense focus and effort of the past two weeks has me stumbling around and not thinking straight I’m so worn out. Maybe tomorrow. Or maybe I’ll sleep when I’m dead.
I also need to shop. I’ve been gone for 2 weeks, took about half the fresh stuff in the house up to the BOL, and no one does any real shopping while I’m away, apparently. Nor do they restock the bathrooms even though they have been walking past the bale-o-TP for a month. So I’ll be stacking this weekend. If not tomorrow, then Sunday, at least the non-Costco parts. I don’t go in there on weekends if I can help it.
So stack some stuff, lest you find yourself with empty refrigerators, and no wipes for your bottom…
nick
Denis, thanks, but I’ve got it handled. I’m just tired and irritated.
Sunny, humid, coffee and donuts time..
n
@Nick
Sounds like you tried to stay hydrated, but it wasn’t enough. How does the pee look?
Your electolytes may be out of balance, and you should check your blood pressure.
Nine pounds of pork loin going into the komado cooker tomorrow for low and slow.
Wish I had mom’s potato salad to go with. Does either Sam’s or Costco make a decent one?
@Nick: Sometimes you just need a day off, or at least with only light work. We ain’t as young as we used to be…
For here, it’s hot at nearly 30C (mid-80s) I did a bit in the garden, but otherwise it’s an inside day.
Oh, there was a “beer fest”, but only two craft breweries were there. Others who should have come, canceled.
One of the breweries had good stuff, but I already know their products.
The other has just started. Their beers…meh. Fancy web site! Fancy labels! Um…with incorrect ingredient lists. I don’t think they’ll be around long…
Do you have any BBQ joints nearby? Get some potato salad to go.
I usually say “I’m older now than I ever have been before.” or “I’m older than I was the last time I did this.” or similar. People usually just nod along. Once in a while there’s a double-take and they realize that I was wise-assing.
@paul
Lot’s. Problem is that potato salad for so many is an afterthought.
I had two fried egg sandwiches for breakfast and opened a new bottle of sriracha mayo. Now I’m thinking that maybe I should look for a red potato salad recipe and add a secret ingredient . (That phrase always makes me smile remembering Everton adding Daddy’s Sauce [Chef! with Lenny Henry])
I frequently say “I used to be young and foolish. I’m older now.” I always expect a laugh, and seldom get it.
But I still find it funny.
Hang in there! The offer stands – to you all. Sometimes, we need to let off steam… I spent a couple of days this week harvesting firewood with and for a friend. Better and cheaper than therapy, and healthy exercise too. I did discover a few new, or forgotten, muscles, though.
Potato salad. Are you mayonnaise or vinaigrette lovers?
Where I come from, potato salad is with mayonnaise and spring onions. Mrs Denis prefers a vinaigrette dressing (cider vinegar, sunflower or rapeseed oil, mustard, salt, sugar and pepper). If we have cooked a “Schäufele” (southern German cured and smoked shoulder of ham), some of the flavourful liquid from cooking it goes over the salad too, along with spring onions.
Usually I compromise, making the Mrs’ style of potato salad, but some coleslaw with carrots and mayonnaise too.
Chef! Was a super show, and that was a brilliant episode.
I’m a afraid I am the BBQ joint. Anyway, if you mean real, Texas BBQ, and not just grilling…
WRT solar panels reliability;
https://cowboystatedaily.com/2023/06/27/baseball-sized-hail-smashing-into-panels-at-150-mph-destroys-scottsbluff-solar-farm/
Remember what Confucious said: “What go up must come down”. Including water vapor going up and then hail coming down.
Baseball-sized hail will destroy darned near anything…
whatacrocKoVf$hit153mayshellVIInf8b8
my password up to rule 11 – I don’t play wordle
Thanks BP
https://borepatch.blogspot.com/2023/07/picking-strong-password.html
I looked and I don’t see an option to close my account at the HEB CU. I sent an e-mail asking how. I’m sure they will make it difficult and somehow charge a fee.
Why? It’s my “pain in you know where” to get the money from. On purpose, just so I have $5400 stashed for the day the well pump dies.
But…. for the last quarter I made all of 68¢ interest. 0.05%. I might as well vac-seal the cash and bury it in a mason jar under the house.
Did you see USPS is raising rates? 66¢ for a First Class stamp.
Frost Bank is paying 1% on savings. This is a no-brainer.
If I have to go to the shared CU branch on 183 near 1431, that’s cool. There are two Frost branches near and well, you have to go to the bank to open a CD. ←- “saving gas”.
Ally Bank is paying 4.15% on savings. I have no issues with Ally and can easily transfer money back and forth between my CU account and Ally.
Most CUs will offer 4% or better on certificates. I dumped some old certificates before their maturity as the penalty was made up in two weeks with the higher rate.
Even the Apple savings accounts are paying better than 4%.
Frost is giving 4.78% on a 90 day CD. I have the money from Mom’s house sitting in Savings. I intend to drop 60 grand into a CD…. tho I need to find out how it rolls over and self renews and what if any fees there are. I mean, I hope a CD can self renew. Driving to Austin every three months to do it manually sorta sucks up the interest earned just for buying gasoline for the truck.
Not the HEB CU. If a “Term Share Certificate” is the same as a CD at Frost, they pay .63% for three months.
>> whatacrocKoVf$hit153mayshellVIInf8b8
my password up to rule 11 – I don’t play wordle
I gave up after Rule 8, wasn’t going for the roman numerals multiplication.
Was already annoyed when Rule 7 wouldn’t take a lowercase “v”.
Qwerty55555may@Vpepsi
I looked at my truck today. This is the only Nissan I know anything about. I have a V6. 4 liter. The main fan is powered by the engine. There is an electric fan also. That’s on the side of the radiator that has what looks like an oil or transmission cooler. A towing package thing perhaps.
The owner’s manual says to change the oil every 5000 miles. The sticker on the window says my oil change is due 1/22. I’m nowhere near 5000 miles.
I don’t drive the truck the mile to the mailbox. I drive it far enough so it gets totally warmed up.
My Dodge Stratus said for “severe” use change the oil every 3000 but otherwise, every 7500. Yeah. No. I did every 4000 miles with Delo 10w30.
From Mental Floss:
46 Books that Changed the World
And no, haven’t read them all.
I have uploaded all the pictures from the Europe trip. There is a lot, almost a thousand. For those with time on their hands the pictures are at:
https://www.raymondthompsonphotography.com/Europe/
A time sink.
Generally CD’s will renew at the current rate for the same maturity period as the original issue without any action on the user. Most also have 30 days after renewal to change, or withdraw, without incurring a penalty for early withdrawal.
Ray, thanks for sharing the pictures.
Wish I had mom’s potato salad to go with. Does either Sam’s or Costco make a decent one?
HEB makes a great mustard potato salad. It is a little short on diced onions though. My mother-in-law ate onions like apples and heavily onioned everything to my liking and her daughter’s dislike. Miss her a lot, she passed when she was 58 due to a congenital heart condition.
My wife went to the Taj Mahal restaurant mentioned in the episode back in the day.
Alas, it is no more.
“A History of the Future: A World Made By Hand Novel” by James Howard Kunstler
https://www.amazon.com/History-Future-World-Made-Novel/dp/0802123724?tag=ttgnet-20/
Book number three of a four book apocalyptic fantasy series. I read the well printed and well bound trade paperback published by Grove Press in 2015 that I bought new on Amazon. I have bought the fourth book in the series.
In this alternate reality, oil well fracking was not invented and the world started running out of crude oil in 2008. Then somebody popped off a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles and somebody popped off a larger nuclear bomb in Washington DC. And the world slowed down and the USA moved back to the 1800s over the next several decades. We were back to times that the flu and encephalitis killed significant portions of the population. This series is set roughly in 2030 or 2040. The books are page turners with short three to five page chapters.
The town of Union Grove, New York has decayed significantly over time. No cars, either buy a horse or walk where you are going. No electricity and the farms are worked by hand now. The population is maybe 20% of what it was at the turn of the century so there are houses standing empty all over town. All of the older people remember cars, airplanes, antibiotics, and air conditioning but the young people don’t.
It is winter now and things are doing better. There is plenty of food if you work. Robert Earle’s son Daniel came back from his two year journey across the eastern seaboard and great lakes and into the Foxfire Republic in Tennessee. But his friend Evan did not make it back with him.
The author has an active website at
https://kunstler.com/
Warning, the author’s website is fairly crude.
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars (652 reviews)
“All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries, 1)” by Martha Wells
https://www.amazon.com/All-Systems-Red-Murderbot-Diaries/dp/1250214718?tag=ttgnet-20/
Book number one of a seven book series of science fiction novellas. I reread the well printed and well bound hardcover published by Tor in 2017 that I bought new from Amazon. I purchased the hardcover since it was cheaper than the trade paperback. This novella won the 2018 Hugo, Nebula, Alex, and Locus awards. The series won the 2021 Hugo for the best series also. I have all six books in the series and am eagerly awaiting the seventh book to be released in November 2023.
Murderbot is a SecUnit, similar to a T-800 Terminator with a cloned and severely modified human head. There is a human brain in there but it is run by the AIs embedded in its genderless torso. There are lungs, there is a blood mixture with a synthetic, there is human skin over the entire body, there is a face. Everything else is machine. Somehow, the blood is enriched with electricity as there is no stomach or intestines. But, there are arteries and veins to keep the skin and brain alive. All of the major arteries and veins have clamps to stop bleeding in case of damage. There is a MedSystem computer with an AI, a HubUnit computer with an AI, and a governor module that can force the SecUnit to follow orders using pain sensors in the brain. It has a energy gun in each arm and several cameras, all directly wired to the brain. The SecUnit can sustain severe damage to everything but the head and still survive.
Murderbot is a self named SecUnit due to an unfortunate circumstance with 57 miners on a remote moon. It has hacked its governor and no longer allows the governor to give it orders or inflict pain. It prefers to internally watch its 35,000 hours of downloaded media such as episodes of “The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon” and “Lineages of the Sun”. Even though it has a face, it does not like to interface with humans, yes, very introverted. It will follow human orders if it see fit to do so.
Murderbot is on security duty for a group of scientists from Preservation planet that are considering buying into a new exploration planet. There is another group across an ocean also looking at the planet but they are not responding to their calls. So, Dr. Mensah takes a few people and Murderbot to investigate.
Quotes from the book:
1. “Yes, talk to Murderbot about its feelings. The idea was so painful I dropped to 97 percent efficiency.”
2. “I hate having emotions about reality; I’d much rather have them about Sanctuary Moon.”
3. “The sense of urgency just wasn’t there. Also, you may have noticed, I don’t care.”
Warning: The violence is graphic and extreme. Murderbot also has a potty mouth. Books one through four are a series of novellas, not regular length books. There is a short story “Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory” between books four and five. Book five is a regular length novel, book six is back to the novella, and book seven is a full length novel due out in November 2023. You can buy collections of the first four hardbacks or all six currently available hardbacks.
https://www.tor.com/2021/04/19/home-habitat-range-niche-territory-martha-wells/
The author has a website at:
https://www.marthawells.com/
There is a wiki for Murderbot including various episodes of “The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon”:
https://murderbot.fandom.com/wiki/Murderbot_Wiki
and
https://murderbot.fandom.com/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Sanctuary_Moon
My rating: 6 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars (40,197 reviews)
“Figures Don’t Lie, but Liars Figure”
https://areaocho.com/figures-dont-lie-but-liars-figure/
“In this editorial piece disguised as news and statistics, Yahoo tells us that there are only about only 16.7% of Americans actually own firearms.”
“So their claim is that 44 million people own all of the guns. That is complete and total bullshit, and I can prove it. Let’s use concealed weapons permits as an estimate of the number of gun owners. Florida alone has approximately 2.6 million active concealed weapons permits. With 12% of all Florida residents having a concealed weapons permit, this would mean that three in four gun owners have a CWP. That would be a very high percentage, indeed.”
Unreal.
@drwilliams
“supposed deaths connected to a COVID virus”
Is the contention that no death occurred, or that “Covid” listed on the death certificate under cause of death does not mean what it says?
Sorry, I mistyped. I should have written “supposed deaths connected to a COVID vaccine”. I plead jet lag. I got back from a cruise to Norway, Iceland, and Scotland earlier this week.
What I wrote still stands. There is no evidence that the CDC didn’t put COVID vaccine as a contributing cause of death, because there were so few that they don’t show up on a search of WONDER in order to preserve privacy. My actuary friend ran into this when doing queries on drowning deaths. Some states had so few per year that they don’t show up in a WONDER search.
LIke all lies, this one is based on a nugget of truth, which is then twisted and abused.
I know several gub owners, and only a couple of them have 2 or fewer gubs.
I would say that most of the hobbyists, who actually enjoy shooting and collecting, own more than 10, whatever they tell their wives.
I”ve been considering winnowing down my collection to my practical ones, and the sentimental ones. Then I take them out of the safe and realize they all fit into one category or another. This one was my dad’s, this one was my brother’s, this one was the first I ever bought myself, etc. This .30-06? I may go hunting one day.
I didn’t read the article, but the mathematician in me says they are unlikely to have a good idea what the actual count in circulation is. Taking percentages of a made-up number is a fool’s game. Then I skimmed the areaocho link, and see that it was based on survey data.
So, basically, a lie made up of whole cloth.
The Mental Floss list is very interesting. Clearly compiled by a group schooled in lefty and progressive politics and social issues, it is nevertheless hard to argue with most of their choices. The commentary on each choice is revealing. VERY short entry on Silent Spring, completely failing to point out that it was mostly bullshite.
From another point of view, it’s easy to see how fickle, and easily led policymakers are, almost as if they had a direction they wanted to go, and then were given a gift that motivated people to allow that… HUGE number of government agencies and interferences created in the wake of emotionally driven popular writing. Kinda like the gun policy driven by Hollywood gangster movies, or NYFC disastrous anti-knife policies driven by West Side Story…
—————
Boy did I crash hard. Got home from my meeting and went back to bed, for a short nap, but woke up 5 hours later. Even my friends at the meeting noticed that I was stumbling.
n
I know you don’t mean it this way, but whenever I see this phrase, my gut reaction is to say “because no one looked for it.”
There is no evidence the bag of cocaine belonged to Hunter Biden.
There is no evidence Joe Biden took money from Ukraine and China.
There is no evidence Bill Clinton committed acts of sexual assault.
There is no evidence of election fraud.
What you say may be true. How you said it triggered my gut. I haven’t been following that particular discussion thread.
“Alan Arkin (1934-2023)”
https://locusmag.com/2023/07/alan-arkin-1934-2023/
“Alan Arkin, 89, died June 29, 2023. Though best known as an actor and director, Arkin also wrote SF, including stories “Whiskaboom” (1955) and “People Soup” (1958) in Galaxy, “The Amazing Grandy” (2001) in F&SF, and novel The Clearing (1986).”
Who knew ?
@ech
“Sorry, I mistyped. I should have written “supposed deaths connected to a COVID vaccine”. I plead jet lag. I got back from a cruise to Norway, Iceland, and Scotland earlier this week.”
Hope you had time for some peat-infused libations.
I figured later that it was something like that, but at the time on the small screen I couldn’t figure out what you were trying to say.
“What I wrote still stands. There is no evidence that the CDC didn’t put COVID vaccine as a contributing cause of death, because there were so few that they don’t show up on a search of WONDER in order to preserve privacy. My actuary friend ran into this when doing queries on drowning deaths. Some states had so few per year that they don’t show up in a WONDER search.”
In my original comments I cautioned that more work was needed with the data.
HOWEVER, the origin was the State of Minnesota, which was cooking the books (see earlier contemporaneous links to posts by Kevin Roche and John Hinderaker.) and behaving badly (John was cut off from the regular state briefing and had to file suit), and even the small amount of data present in this episode smells highly of statistical manipulation (aka, hiding data). Governor Walsh and his team have the dubious distinction of ranking second or third in murdering seniors with their lockdown policies.
Greenie B.S. artists are not all lefties by any means:
https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/08/think-twice-before-drinking-from-the-tap-federal-study-finds-forever-chemicals-may-be-poisoning-your-water/
“Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism.”
Let me guess: No chemistry in college, just, perhaps, a semester of the watered-down version in high-school. No statistics except, perhaps, a watered-down version in college almost certainly based on the computer packages popular on the left side of campus and used to justify calling something which is not a “science”. Same for math: one semester. Fully qualified as a journalist, i.e., not shy about writing about topics he can;’t understand, which he does by mostly stringing together quotes from scientists whose main agenda is to get more grant money by stirring up FUD in the populace.
Not yet playing near me:
https://awfulannouncing.com/mlb/director-sean-mullin-on-yogi-berra-and-it-aint-over-he-was-criminally-overlooked-his-entire-life.html
For Paul,
To get a better rate on your savings, go take a look at TreasuryDirect.gov
I have been buying 4-week Treasury Bills. The rates are good right now. If you wish, you can have them roll over when they mature. You have access to your savings every four weeks. There are longer maturities if you wish, or you could stash a little at different maturities. I have two staggered so one matures every two weeks.
https://home.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/interest-rates/TextView?type=daily_treasury_bill_rates&field_tdr_date_value_month=202307