Cool and clear. Like yesterday. After all the predictions, it ended up clear with a blue sky. Hopefully today will be the same and I can get a bunch of work done.
Did my running around yesterday. Picked up a kayak. Strapped it to the roof rack. It kinda cuts through the air, and it’s kinda like a brick being pushed at 70mph… My Ranger can’t quite find a gear at the speed limit with the brick on top. So I could drive 10 under, or 10 over. I chose over. Well, until I got on the dark country roads. Then I was happy to go slower.
Given that it is a DWI enforcement weekend there were a surprising number of idiots driving VERY fast. And more than usual pulled over. The cops have something new, a white light bar on the front to light up the scene, and it’s FRICKEN bright. In fact I found a lot of bright lights shining in my eyes making it hard to drive. I can’t be the only one that thinks super bright LED parking lot lights shouldn’t be pointed at the freeway. And yet.
Today I’ll unload the truck, and maybe do some carpentry. There are some support posts that need to be replaced under the patio roof. I’ve had everything I think I need in place and ready to go, just lacked the time to start a project that has to be finished before I can move on. We’ll see how it goes. And if not, there is a long list.
Always be working…
and stacking.
n
coffeeeeeee…
I’ve been up since 0230. Don’t know why. Probably retards drag racing on the highway less than a half mile from my house, but the noise was gone by the time I was awake enough for cognition to happen.
I’ve encountered quite a few female martial arts students who were getting mighty full of themselves. They should be called “fancy dance students” because none of them had any experience with getting hit. I’ve also encountered a number of young men in the same situation, like tai kwon do black belts who’d never been in a full-contact spar or a real fight, and who where absolutely stunned when I rushed in and knocked them down when they wound up for a fancy high kick.
Exactly none of the instructors did anything to provide reality checks. They didn’t want to scare away their monthly income.
The quote is Robert Preston’s money line from “SOB”.
Yet another film I don’t think could be made today. Blake Edwards’ creative group was at the top of their game, with his editor, Ralph Winters, having semi-secretly fixed “Caddyshack” the year before.
I usually have a tolerance for shitty genre (read Star Trek: Discovery), but even I couldn’t take Batwoman. I think I made it to the episode where BatLez opened a gay bar across from a restaurant that dissed her gayness. Then going from lez WHITEY! to lez BLACKEY! BatLez was so bad, that even the comic nerds on YT completely trashed it.
An increasingly popular junk medicine practice is for women to get low dose T-therapy to increase sex drive. This results in the usual “roid rage” problem, but it is often dismissed in the last decade or so with the meme, “Men can’t deal with strong women.”
Combine the T-therapy with “edibles” and the result can ruin lives, but no one dares do the studies right now. A friend is learning the hard way via divorce court about the consequences of keeping quiet while his wife mixed hormones and THC.
There all types of places. Ours was a club (very common here), so no profit motive. All instructors were volunteers – quality varied, but we had a couple who competed seriously.
Then there are the idiots in the world. I visited a dojo in Albuquerque where the sensei said: when doing a hold-down, be sure to grab a junk of flesh, to make it really hurt. That’s just being an asshole.
We gave up on “Discovery” after they blew up Book’s home world.
“Discovery” will get one more season and then that will be it for Alex Kurtzman “Star Trek”.
Paramount is quietly up for sale, and a nonstop rumor on the “Star Trek” geek sites is that the studio bowed to pressure from the merchandise licensees and commissioned a proof of concept for a new series set in the Next Generation “current day” timeline ~2400s without any involvement from the people running things for the last few years, including Terry Matalas.
I believe the “Those Old Scientists” episode of “Strange New Worlds” is far more important than it seems on the surface. If no more live action “Star Trek” TV gets produced after “Discovery” by Kurtzman, that hour fixes a lot of problems introduced into the storyline by the recent TV efforts, particularly with regard to the impact on continuing Stage 8/9 era canon beyond the last season of “Picard”.
Stick a fork in Ahhhhnold. “Screw your freedoms” will haunt the Governator for the rest of his life.
https://news.yahoo.com/arnold-schwarzenegger-suddenly-everywhere-comes-130000501.html
Two college admission packets arrived in the mail yesterday for my daughter – one for SCAD (not happening) and another for UT Dallas.
As much I hate to be Bad Daddy at a time when that meme is still fashionable, but SCAD would involve lots of debt and we are not signing Parent PLUS loan papers.
Still, the kid will be a grown a** person in another month when she turns 18, and the student loan debt would be her decision in the face of 120 hours of tuition fully paid in Florida and parents willing to cash flow a state school in Texas with scholarship help.
My preference would be UT Dallas. She’s also applying at TAMU which we wouldn’t nitpick.
Maybe Batman is a transvestite and LLM AI a simple monkey trick.
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-new-ceo-who-is-mira-murati/
The last week has been … weird … at work.
66F and sunny, mostly clear this am…
Got a good night sleep. My plans for the day changed. Of course. This is the “Christmas in [BOL TOWN]” street celebration. Should be food, vendors, crafts, etc. So family is going to check that out.
Rory Miller and Mac something are guys I read for a reality based look at violence and self defense. They have stuff online, but I ended up buying their books too.
I try to keep my girls aware of the limits of reality when it comes to self defense and fighting.
n
No need has commented on it, but the Starship launch was glorious. The first stage performed flawlessly, until after seoaration. It failed retrieval, but that was secondary. There are already pretty solid theories for what needs fixed/changed.
The second stage succeeded with hot staging, and was flawless through more that 90 of the planned burn. Then it was destroyed by the flight termination system – reasons not yet clear. Still, it achieved the primary objectives, namely, separation and burn.
The Swiss news is really annoying: “Starship blew up again”. That is accurate, but utterly misleading. I have a feeling that no one there understands what is actually going on, namely, “move fast and break things.”
Oh, and the launch pad seems to gave survived with little or no damage.
Or else it’s spiteful glee that someone, who is doing better than them, stumbled a bit. I don’t know if the Swiss media would do that but the British, French, and German media certainly do, at least regarding ventures by Americans or the US.
Swiss media is a bit leftist, but generally reasonably fair. I’m willing to bet this is just ignorance.
re: journalists
Mark Tapscott, via Insty
“Osama bin Laden worship has to be the bottom, right?”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/patriotism-unity/osama-bin-laden-worship-has-to-be-the-bottom-right
“On TikTok this week, thousands of videos began to circulate of social justice warrior-type college students , replete with piercings, Kool-Aid colored hair, and the faint whiff of wealth, making the case that Osama bin Laden was in the right all along.”
You have got to be kidding me. Are all of the kids delusional now ?
From SRW in the Fort Bend Journal:
“It is what it is”
“You call it eating five boxes of Girl Scout cookies alone. I call it supporting young female entrepreneurs.”
Pictures from the local high school in a quarterfinal playoff game. The team in black beat the team in white by 20-13 two weeks ago. This time the score was 13-20 in favor of the white. The white team advances in the playoffs. The two schools are separated by 5 miles. Many of the kids on each team are related, go hunting or 4-wheeling on Saturday after knocking the snot out of each other on Friday evening.
http://www.raymondthompsonphotography.com/Coalfield
For another time sink.
“Netanyahu’s Surprise Admission: Israel “Not Successful” At Minimizing Civilian Casualties”
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/netanyahus-surprise-admission-israel-not-successful-minimizing-civilian-casualties
It is a war. Minimizing civilian causalities goes out the window on the first day. That is why there are refugees.
Hey…it’s Florida…Trump tho…
Donald Trump opens up stunning THIRTY-NINE point lead over Ron DeSantis in GOP rivals’ home state of Florida
The last week has been … weird … at work.
It is weird everywhere right now. It is like people are waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Speaking of weird, keep your gas tanks full right now. Especially with with Turkey Day coming up.
I see crap like this and get even more freaked out. “”Huge Smoke Plume Billowing From US Base Near Irbil, As Iranian Media Touts Strike”
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/huge-smoke-plume-billowing-us-base-near-irbil-iranian-media-touts-strike
The USA has not been hit in the continental USA in a LONG time. So long that the idiot kids do not remember what 9/11 was like. The kids think that they are safe.
Hey…it’s Florida…Trump tho…
Donald Trump opens up stunning THIRTY-NINE point lead over Ron DeSantis in GOP rivals’ home state of Florida
The question is not can Donald Trump win the Repuglican primary. The question is can he run the board with all of the fraud by the dumbrocrats ?
Minimizing civilian casualties is a difficult Israeli objective when Hamas has an objective of MAXIMIZING civilian casualties, to the extent of placing ammo depots inside, or underneath, hospitals and mosques.
“Permission Slips”
https://areaocho.com/13682-2/
“I’m sure that all of you have seen the video of the LA homeowner who was trying to enter his home when armed robbers attempted to force him to allow their entry into his home at gunpoint. The homeowner produced his legally carried CCW and got in a gunfight with them, driving them off and protecting his family.”
“That can’t be allowed in the f***ed up failed state of California. No, the city of Los Angeles has revoked his concealed weapons permit because, according to them, he was rude to the arriving police officers.”
“What really happened was that he was openly critical of the poor response and sloppy police work of the LAPD on local and national news channels.”
This is just another violation of the Second Amendment.
The area around the launch pad was trashed when we drove out there in July.
The FAA was under tremendous pressure to approve another launch.
Even the Saturn pads at Kennedy are not spec-ed for that much rocket, and those numbers were crunched by Von Braun and his fellow SS rocket nerds.
The Saturn V was not an iterative development process. Apollo 4/SA-501 was stack it up an hope the math was right for the vehicle and LC 39A.
SpaceX was just guessing that their mitigation techniques would work.
The FAA was under tremendous pressure to approve another launch.
DOD. They need a heavy lifter yesterday.
Can you imagine what a three star Air Force General in the FAA offices can do ?
We were out at the Texas Renaissance Festival all day.
If the economy is circling the drain, you wouldn’t know it based on all the high end trucks and SUVs we saw in the parking lot. Lots of Grand Wagoneers.
Even Tonymobiles despite the somewhat remote location.
Inside the Festival, lots of food, alcohol, and even weed were being consumed openly.
“WaPo Clauser Climate Crisis Damage Control: “There is a skeptical streak in the physics community…””
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/11/18/clauser-climate-damage-control-there-is-a-skeptical-streak-in-the-physics-community/
“He won a Nobel Prize. Then he started denying climate change.”
“John Clauser shared the Nobel in physics last year. Now he’s a self-described ‘denier’ of the overwhelming scientific consensus on a warming planet.”
“Clauser bragged that he met privately with President Biden in the Oval Office last year, when the 2022 Nobel Prize winners were invited to the White House. He said he criticized Biden’s climate and energy policies, to which he said the president replied: “Sounds like right-wing science.””
Sounds like Biden is a True Believer. I figured it was just the ultra left wing lefties twenty somethings that he hired for the White House staff that were busily shutting down the USA economy.
long day but a good one. Details tomorrow, I’m going to try for an early bed… (no fire tonight, dew point has been reached and everything is wet, including the fire I laid earlier, and my chair.) 54F and sodden.
n
(short version is- Christmas festival was nice, didn’t get much work done.)