07:54 – I’m getting very tired of this Bruce Jenner thing. Why should anyone care, let alone waste newsprint or electrons talking about it? The morning paper had a big article with a 20-point headline to tell readers that whoever created his new hairstyle is a former Charlotte resident. Geez.
As a scientist, I understand that there’s no ambiguity about a person’s sex. If you have one X and one Y chromosome, you’re male; if you have two X chromosomes, you’re female; if you have some other combination, such as XYY, you’re a monster, in the literal rather than the pejorative sense of that word. I don’t care if Jenner cuts off his genitals and self-identifies as a kumquat. He’s a male person, period. A pretty strange male person, but a male person nonetheless. DNA defines it.
As a male person, Jenner should have all of the rights of any other person, male or female, but he should be granted no special consideration just because he believes he’s a female kumquat. The guy is clearly mentally ill and it’s appropriate to pity him, but that’s as far as it goes.
10:15 – I’ve read literally scores of non-fiction prepping books, but one prepping item I’ve never seen mentioned is useful bacteria. We store shelf-stable containers of many useful microorganisms, but as far as I’m concerned the top two (other than yeast) are Rhizobia, a soil bacteria that helps legumes fix nitrogen, and ABE bacteria, which ferment starches to a 3:6:1 mixture of acetone, n-butanol, and ethanol.
Both types can be prepared for long-term storage either by lyophilizing (freeze-drying) them or by preparing a dilute mixed suspension of the bacteria in phosphate-buffered saline (PBS), where the bacteria remain in stasis (suspended animation) until conditions are again favorable for growth. You can reactivate them simply by adding a small amount of the culture to a suitable growth medium, such as dilute chicken or beef broth with some table sugar dissolved in it.
You want the Rhizobia to use as an inoculant when you plant legumes, such as beans. The inoculant hugely increases yields, typically doubling them but sometimes by an order of magnitude. The ABE bacteria allows you to ferment starches to provide liquid fuel. Yes, you can use ordinary yeast to ferment ethanol, but pure ethanol is problematic as a gasoline replacement, not least because it sucks moisture from the air. What you really want is the 6 parts of n-butanol, which can be separated by fractional distillation and is a drop-in replacement for gasoline. Any engine that can burn gasoline can without modification burn n-butanol. And I can think of a lot of long-term emergency situations where I’d be happy to trade 10 or 15 pounds of turnips for a gallon of gas.
The uproar around gender identity is very much a “first world problem”, and seems to be driven by narcissists. They need to understand: “no, it really isn’t all about you.”
Uninvolved people don’t (or, at least, shouldn’t) care how a person identifies or who they have sex with. I see literally hundreds of people in my classrooms each semester. I have zero interest in their sexual identities, and I’ll thank them for keeping that information private, because it is simply not relevant to our interactions.
After I posted that, I realized that I had committed a “minor aggession”, or maybe not so minor. Oh, my.
I do wish that all of the SJWs in the world would just eat shit and die.
Oh, I’m sorry. The proper term is “microagression”, at least this week.
Not only will you accept Caitlyn, you will worship he/she/it and pay reparations for all the negative thoughts you WHITE! RACIST! folk have had. I just sent mine via PayPal.
The libturd progressive agenda is what makes this issue go on and on and on….
Like you you said, Dr. Bob, who cares? I’d say who the FUCK cares but that would be another microaggression.
F-bombs elevate that to macro-aggression
I thought that required a C-bomb or greater.
Ah, but he gets the Arthur Ashe Courage Award. After all, it takes balls to have a gender change.
it takes balls to have a gender change
Such change is more common that one would think. Fag boy Jenner is not the first, nor will shim/herm be the the last. Why it deserves so much press is beyond me.
We had to modify our database to support gender changes. We have an indicator that is used when people have gender changes. Some of them got upset when mail arrived as “Mr. ….” and they wanted “Ms. …..”. Yeh, we support titles and name changes. But it was confusing in other areas when dealing with members.
Out of about 500K members we have 13 with known gender changes. Whether these were outies to innies or innies to outies I don’t know although I could determine reversal. These people are quietly living their lives, not bother others and certainly not seeking the attention of the press.
Well Ray I’m not sure that term is correct (but rather derogatory). By his own admission he states he’s is not gay, but in light of his change I guess he’s a lesbian now.
As to being just tired of the whole media circus well what do you want? Real news? As my SIL stated yesterday when I expressed my weariness of it, “They stop talking about it when people stop watching”. Well we rarely agree but in this case it’s true. I need to just turn it off.
The law should be color blind but I really am offended that others think I should acquiesce to their terms.
@RBT – do you include the world of yeasts in your bacteria discussion? I feel that there are 3 essential yeasts: sourdough, vinegar mother, and brewers/beer yeast. And I suppose you could add wine yeast.
My comments on BJ: He is a washed up now useless celebrity. He needed something to get himself back in the news and what better way is there than to do a reality show. He still has his twigs and berries so this gender change thing is just plot for the reality show where in the final episodes we will get to vote on whether he goes all the way or just decides to grow old gracefully. Anyway, who wants to cuddle with a 60-something tranny.
BJ is a distraction to further mushify the brains of those who like to be uniformed and only want to deal with the trivial in life and not the reality.
I’ve got more important things to do, like watch the live-stream of the Apple WWDC starting soon. Rumors are there will be some female keynote speakers. Next year who knows how far this openness/fairness will go. Dogs and cats living together?
“…I really am offended that others think I should acquiesce to their terms.”
See MrAtoz post above; you can contact him for the PayPal reparations info.
“Oh, I’m sorry. The proper term is “microagression”, at least this week.”
All these new words; isn’t it wonderful?
Here’s another: “manspreading.”
I plead guilty.
Incidentally, that’s also a microaggression.
Me being flip about all this is another.
Me stating that last is yet another.
OFD is right, it’s all just a diversion from what the man behind the curtain is doing.
But it seems to work every time.
Celebrity news, professional sports and beer are just the modern bread and circuses.
Here’s a timely one by Jim Goad over on Taki’s.
http://takimag.com/article/revenge_of_the_goths_jim_goad
In the ever-ballooning Persecution Management Business that keeps so many otherwise useless government workers employed, one must always expand the definition of crime in order to prolong the existence of one’s job. So now the “hate crime” umbrella has expanded not only to protect those with “innate” qualities—i.e., you can’t magically stop being black—it will now also shield and nurture misguided teens who dress like Bela Lugosi and cry themselves to sleep.
I had to ask about this too.
Apparently s/he’s related [Jenner] in some way to the Kard-ass-ians. They are famous for being famous, which started when one of them made a sex tape that got out to the internet. As far as I can be bothered to figure it out, the only reason anyone cared was that her father was OJ Simpson’s lawyer (who had since died from some nasty cancer) and was some sort of Hollywood big shot.
[regarding the Kard-ass-ians]
I’m not opposed to a little ‘meat on the bone’, and everyone has what they like, but I’m really sick of being told that her big ass is the height of feminine pulchritude. And it is killing and injuring the weak-minded (prob not a bad thing, but still saddening) who are distorting their bodies to look like her.
They do seem to generate a lot of click thru’s and TV money for the demon worshipers in the media industry. In the attention economy, in the vast sea of people screaming “look at me!” they stand out.
Particularly concerning is the sort of ‘nudge nudge wink wink’ given to the exploitation of the underage one. People have gone to jail and had their lives ruined for doing what gets a landing page mention and a sly comment in her case.
As it is, I only know anything about it because I like the UKDaily Mail for breaking web news. As a tabloid, they will break stories that the other sites won’t touch until much later, if at all. They had good, if sensational, coverage of the Ebola outbreak and continued long after the media suppression czar got the other “news” outlets to stop covering it. Also their fascination with America and guns has them covering many stories that don’t get coverage at all in US media, like the knockout game and other black on white crime. The writing is horrid, and sensational, but at least the story is out there, and there are usually pictures.
nick
How long before Caitlyn is on the new Wheaties box as hero of the decade or sumpin’? Like there are no other trans that came out before he/she/it. There is a buck to be made.
There is a lot more than a buck at stake. I read in several places that, potentially, Jenner could take home $500 million.
Becoming filthy rich is all about chasing ad revenue these days.
@DadCooks
Yeast are fungi rather than bacteria. There are many different species of yeast (they actual cover two phyla), but basically, yeast as we think of yeast is simply Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Bakers’ yeast, brewers’ yeast, whatever type, it’s all S. cerevisiae.
“Is It OK for Microsoft to Push the Windows 10 Upgrade on Users?”
https://www.petri.com/is-it-ok-for-microsoft-to-push-the-windows-10-upgrade-on-users
No.
Not just NO but HELL NO.
It’s MY machine, not theirs.
nick
Yes, but it’s not your software. You license it rather than owning it. And Microsoft is allowed to do whatever their agreement with you specifies, which I’d be willing to bet includes involuntary “upgrades”. If you don’t like that, run Linux as I do.
Well Ray I’m not sure that term is correct
I use Fag Boy for anyone that is off their rocker and seeks media spot light to further their cause.
Yeah, I know, license. Not sure of how that got started, but it sure needs to end.
It’s continued existence encourages others with IP to try it too. Books, magazines, visual media.
Maybe back in the day computers were the magical mystery machines and needed a special new way of doing business, but now they are just machines. Are there any other machines or appliances you buy that don’t work unless you also buy or license an os? Even with the proliferation of code into our appliances we don’t have this.
My car is a unit, my washer and fridge are also units. Neither will run without the included code, but I own them… I can resell them. I control access to them.
My computer should be the same.
nick
(I am aware that there are a bunch of licensed bits of code in those things. QNX, linux, etc. but they don’t insist on being updated, nor do they restrict what I can do with them after purchase, and any “licensing” exists because of the model used for pcs.)
Actually, yes. GM and probably other car companies are arguing in court that car buyers don’t own the cars they paid for because those cars require software that is only licensed. That may sound like a joke, but it’s anything but. Car makers claim that only their authorized dealers are qualified to work with those cars and that if independents are permitted access to the software that they may cause the cars to become unsafe.
Yep, I’ve heard that about the newer cars. Lots of software in there, and them thinking about using the DMCA circumvention provisions to prohibit end-customer access. The excuse is: you don’t want some hacker mucking about with peoples cars and causing safety problems. The real reason is to guarantee their dealers the repair revenue stream.
The reason why the software industry does not transfer a license is that the user would then own it and be able to resell as many copies as they want. Yes, people have done that. Just about any intellectual property consisting of tortured electrons has this issue.
“Daunting Days of Winter (The Kyle Tait Series Book 2)” by Ray Gorham
http://www.amazon.com/Daunting-Days-Winter-Getting-beginning/dp/1505471206/
Book number two of a two book series. I do not know if there will be a third book in the series.
When we last left our hero, he had just walked in 77 days from Texas to Montana after the double EMP event over the USA killed all electronics including the power grid and automobiles. Turns out dealing with all of the issues at home were just as bad as walking 1700 miles. The main subject in the book is all the bad people running around the place, robbing and killing people for food, ammo, sex, and transportation.
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars (175 reviews)
I’m at the point where I’m going to start giving one-star reviews to any PA novel that involves people traveling long distances for any reason. It’s just a cheap way to avoid having to come up with a real plot.
I did finally buy Rawles’ Patriots and just read the first 20 pages or so. At least it seems that he can write.
The reason why the software industry does not transfer a license is that the user would then own it and be able to resell as many copies as they want. Yes, people have done that. Just about any intellectual property consisting of tortured electrons has this issue.
Not really. You buy and own books but you can’t legally make copies and sell them. Software should be just like that. Add in an activation code and it’s even more secure but you should still own it and have the right to sell it second-hand, just so long as it is the only one.
I’m at the point where I’m going to start giving one-star reviews to any PA novel that involves people traveling long distances for any reason. It’s just a cheap way to avoid having to come up with a real plot.
People do travel extensively nowadays. Two million people per day travel on planes in the USA. I have no idea how many people jump in a car or truck and drive somewhere more than 100 miles away but I suspect at least another million per day. Maybe five million, I have no idea. For instance, my parents drive to Houston usually once per week at 110 miles each way.
http://www.transtats.bts.gov/
My problem is the EMP events in the stories. I can see the electrical grids going down with severe damage. But I really doubt that electronics, especially electronics that is not running, having permanent problems that a reboot will not fix.
People travel a lot while things are *normal*. No sane person sets off on a walking trip across several states, usually for nonsensical reasons. It’s just a cheap and cheesy way to avoid having to plot a novel.
I’m with RBT on that device being overused in rubbishy end-of-world fiction. Development of characters also leaves a helluva lot to be desired, in my experience. Ditto the dialogues, usually unrealistic. Bracken’s trilogy is OK but needed RUTHLESS editing, and is also an illustration of how gear and weapons tech described in these writings is almost immediately out of date.
I don’t have a whole lotta time to waste on this tripe, and ditto sci-fi. The daily nooz and history are weird enough for me. If someone told me forty years ago that Bruce Jenner, Olympic star, would be Granny Tranny on the cover of the major nooz mags now I’d have laughed in their faces. Or that we’d have a President named Barack Hussein Obama and elect him TWICE.
As for history, I learn something new every day; I hadn’t known that the Brits sent Black-and-Tan murdering thugs to do more mayhem in “Palestine” back in the day after their fun times in Ireland. And Mrs. OFD hadn’t known jack about their successful repression of the commie insurgency in Malaysia during the 1950s, the only such success I know of to date.
A lovely day. At least it’s a dry heat.
From NOAA
Fair
105°F
41°C
Humidity 14%
Wind Speed NW 14 MPH
Barometer 29.73 in (1005.7 mb)
Dewpoint 46°F (8°C)
Visibility 10.00 mi
Heat Index 101°F (38°C)
Last update 08 Jun 3:54 pm PDT
If a long journey by foot is good enough for Huck Finn and Frodo Baggins, then it’s good enough for Joe Survivalist, by gum!
People travel a lot while things are *normal*. No sane person sets off on a walking trip across several states, usually for nonsensical reasons. It’s just a cheap and cheesy way to avoid having to plot a novel.
In this book, the author has the hero traveling 300 miles via horseback from Montana to Idaho to visit his parents. As justification for the trip in January, he was told to leave home by the militia captain “for a while” as a young lady was murdered under very suspicious circumstances while the hero was guarding her street.
Ah, the fun of engineering programming. Today I am writing some code to convert FT-LBF/LBM/(FT3/MIN)^4 to ‘FEET/(FT3/MIN)^4’. Or if you are of the metric persuasion, N-M/KG/(LIT/MIN)^4 to METER/(LIT/MIN)^4. One of the very few circumstances that English dimensional units are better than metric dimensional units. Hint, the difference is that 1.0 LBF = 32.174 LBM-FT/S^2 whereas 1.0 N = 1.0 KG-M/S^2. And I am assuming that gravity is 32.174 ft/s^2 or 9.80665 m/s^2.
“At least it’s a dry heat.”
Ah yes, where have I heard that before…
…so one is slowly mummified instead of steamed alive in the wet heat…
I’ll stick with our ice, snow, wind, fog, etc. At least I can always get warm somehow.
“If a long journey by foot is good enough for Huck Finn and Frodo Baggins…”
We have noted your rayciss reading pastimes accordingly. The Huck Finn character is himself rayciss, and brought into being by a clearly rayciss author. The Baggins persona is wrong on so many levels as to beggar the imagination. A fascist and triumphalist Roman Catholic describing a differently sized person as a figure of fun and possibly homosexual to boot, while engaged in various larcenous enterprises at the behest of an obviously pedophiliac old white man.
You have been warned. Please restrict your reading to material published after 1965 which illustrates the tragic struggles involving issues of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and the continued fascist political repression.
The road story is a tried and true method to give structure to a tale, viz the illiad. It allows differing scenery, and a reason for constant change. Very hard to write an interesting tale about 4 people in a bunker. Also, most of these books are written, at least in part, as instruction manuals. The road story brings the characters naturally into a variety of situations that he wants to teach about.
Of course, some do this better than others.
The George Hill zombie books are interesting as they started as a group story online. He’s a skilled writer, but not fiction. The books started as an intentional pastiche, but end up pretty good and compelling. I wish someone would finish the series.
Wrt prepping, I did get my antenna up, but not connected, and I built the gutter system for the rain water collection, but didn’t get it hung. Ran out of time.
Typing this on my phone at my child’s first swim meet. Very tedious to input text even with Swype. Word prediction is much better than android default, but still quirky.
Nick
These two guys boogied the other night from what the locals call “Little Siberia” just across the lake from us:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/08/us-usa-newyork-prisoners-idUSKBN0ON0LY20150608
First escape from there since 1865.
Big question is how did they get power tools in their cell. Besides, of course, where are they now. And who else helped. Both considered armed and extremely dangerous, probably get shot on sight by the cops whenever. We doubt they’ve tried to cross the lake over to Vermont as the water is icy and treacherous right now for swimmers and boats and the couple of bridges are swarming with cops. Choppers also overhead.
They left a funny little smiley-face for us all, pretty humorous guys for cold-ass murdering scum.
@Lynn, but gravity isn’t constant on the face of the earth. Are you going to use their location data to get it right to some large number of places? 🙂
I joke since the approximation is gone for almost everyone.
It does put me in mind of an anecdote. Seems an oil company was having a winter road built, and the cost was much higher than expected. The construction company billed (and built) the road from point a to point b. It was just longer than expected. Turns out, the job was designed and estimated using GIS data in British feet, but built using US feet. (Or the other way around.) Very small differences add up in real world distances. Ditto for GPS having to correct for relativistic effects.
Hurray race run, on our way home, w 2 third place ribbons.
Nick
@Lynn, but gravity isn’t constant on the face of the earth. Are you going to use their location data to get it right to some large number of places?
Nope, gravity is constant enough for me. Besides that, my real worry is that NASA is going to use my software to model those big monster pumps at the bottom of the space shuttle that feed the rocket engines. Just in case, I am printing the Polytropic Head curve constants in both torque/mass and elevation.
Typing this on my phone at my child’s first swim meet. Very tedious to input text even with Swype
@nick, how old are your kids? I figured that you are an older fart like the rest of us.
Although, I have a friend at church who is 72. He has a 16 year old son and a 12 year old son. He married his wife while working in the Venezuela oil fields 20+ years ago (first marriage for them both). She is Brazilian and was a Portuguese teacher in the schools there.
Just put a line in the license that your software is not to be used in the design of nuclear or astronautic equipment.
When I consulted at Knolls Atomic Power Labs, on something I can’t talk about, they had to get special authorization from Sun to use Java because the Java license said it was not to be used in several domains, including nuclear stuff. (Whether Java was the appropriate choice is another matter. At least at the time it was ver-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-ry slow when handling large arrays of floating point numbers. Yes, it was quick and easy to put together a GUI front end, but the processing at run time was slo-o-o-o-o-ow. One other guy and I got fed up and (completely unapproved by the incompetent control-freak manager) coded the array-mashing in C++ and integrated with the Java front end. We got a 100x speedup, showed our work to the others… and got severely bitched out. -sigh-)
Just put a line in the license that your software is not to be used in the design of nuclear or astronautic equipment.
Too late. For both. No big deal, we are used to anything.
The one that really bothers me is the XXXXXX company designing building the mustard gas reactors in XXXX.
@Lynn,
My kids are just turned 6 and 4. I married late. I’ll be on SS when both are in college, which is vague enough to preserve SOME mystery for this persona. I think I am 5 years younger than you if my memory serves from another post.
I was a child of the 80’s culturally, but probably due to a large number of older cousins and being reasonably smart, my friends were always older. Still are. It’s actually kind of funny that those older guys put up with this geeky socially inept kid. Also I think some of it has to do with being part of the last generation to grow up “free range” and with an 18yo drinking age. I’m trying to set up my life and my kids so they can at least get a taste of the freedom we had when I grew up.
As to being an old fart, I’m certainly well on my way to the attitude. I’ve got the grey hair, soon I’ll be bragging about how cheaply I got my shoes….
nick
Hell, I’m almost 62 and brag about how I ain’t got no gray hair. Wait–you can afford shoes??
Yo, I’m a child of the late 1950s and 1960s before it all turned to shit. When the drinking age in the Commonwealth of Maffachufetts was 21, I easily bought booze at age 15-16. 6’2″ then, I’d wear a black leather jacket (borrowed from older ex-jarhead ‘Nam vet), slick my hair back and wearing shades and smoking a ciggie, just saunter on into the packy and buy whatever, nary a question ever asked. Those were the days.
Hey, kids, remember voting?
“…voting is practically worthless. “In principle, it is a great privilege,” Aldous Huxley recognized. “In practice, as recent history has repeatedly shown, the right to vote, by itself, is no guarantee of liberty.”
We live in a secretive surveillance state that has virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. As Jordan Michael Smith, writing for the Boston Globe, concludes about the American government:
There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy.
How many times have the various politicians, when running for office, lied about all they were going to do to bring hope and change to America? Once they get elected, what do they do? They do whatever the corporate powers want. Yes, the old boss is the same as the new boss. The maxim: power follows money.
Moreover, voting is a way to keep the citizenry pacified. However, many Americans intuitively recognize that something is wrong with the way the electoral process works and have withdrawn from the process. That’s why the government places so much emphasis on the reassurance ritual of voting. It provides the illusion of participation.”
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/06/john-w-whitehead/escaping-the-matrix/
Of course, if you don’t vote, you’re responsible for Obummer being in there for two terms when you coulda had Field Marshal McCain. Now if you don’t vote, you’ll be responsible for Field Marshal Rodham when you coulda had one of the dozen or so clown Repub chickenhawks instead.
OFD, our trick at age 15 was to buy a case of beer, and a bottle of Jack (green label of course, we were kids with no money). Dumbasses would go in to buy a sixer or singles and get carded every time. You have to make the risk worth it for the store, since I’m certain they were not fooled about our age.
First time I could buy legally, I wasn’t even carded. It was a bar in the aisle of the mall in Milwaukee. No railings or fences, just a bar serving in the middle of the mall. Walk up, get a drink, and keep shopping.
The crusaders have managed to demonize drinking and smoking far worse than any Puritan ever did. They’re going after regular food now too. And while doing so they have eroded the rule of law and destroyed the Constitution.
F’n busy bodies.
nick
A bar in the middle of a mall? What a disgrace! (no worries, I’m being sarcastic).
Seriously, I never understood the laws against drinking alcoholic beverages in public. Why is that supposed to be a problem? If you have a bunch of drunks making a nuisance of themselves, you can always arrest them for “disturbing the peace”.
Here, it’s not unusual to see someone with a beer on the train, decompressing after a stressful day at work. I’ve been known to take a beer along when walking the dogs in the evening. Not sure why that should be a problem…
I believe that alcohol, tobacco, and recreational drugs in general should be just as tightly controlled as guns.
I could never have passed for being of age when I was a teen, mid sixties. No problem, we would just go down to the area around the SP rail yard and get a bum, a drunk, a homeless free spirit to buy for us. Those guys were actually honorable and never cheated us and we’d give them a buck. Cheap beer like Coors was less than $4 a case back then. Oddly we never had issues with the cops either. Every once in a while some underage kids would get caught and all the cops would do was take the beer. Wonder what they did with it.
Typing this on my phone at my child’s first swim meet. Very tedious to input text even with Swype. Word prediction is much better than android default, but still quirky.
Have you tried SwiftKey? I like its ‘smart’ prediction.
We used to have an expression, for when someone was over reacting– “Don’t make a Federal case of it.” Even kids would say this.
Now, everything is a Federal case.
That’s the heart of the changes here. The farther you move from local authority, and discretion, the less value you have as an individual, until, in the Progressive wonderland, everyone is exactly the same, and no one is better than them.
There is a deep seated insecurity in the Progressives. They are always afraid that someone will be better than them, smarter, more successful, and that CAN NOT BE ALLOWED. You see it in the online social media culture too, where everyone is always yelling “Look at me!” It comes from having no real accomplishments, and no contact with the real world of people and work, which leads to no true feeling of self worth and a constant need for outside validation. Just a couple of generations of “participation trophies”, and an emphasis on group belonging, and this is the result– a deeply neurotic society.
nick
@alan, I’ll try it out. I like swype but the word prediction can be bizarre.
nick
RE: Travel in PA Fiction
I would suppose that in a Post Apocalyptic world that at some point just surviving must transition to “this is the new normal” and people will again start traveling, trading, forming civilizations, establishing a new social hierarchy, and the like. At some point, long after the shit hits the fan, traveling several hundred miles to visit kin wouldn’t be so ridiculous. Think America before the railways.
I’m not talking about local trading and so on, nor am I talking about after the danger is largely past. The travel is gratuitous, and simply a cheesy way to avoid constructing real plots. For example, in The New Homefront series, we have a reasonably stable small group with all essential skills represented and who are self-sufficient in terms of growing food and raising everything from chickens to beef and dairy cows. So, for some inexplicable reason, they decide they need to do a bartering run. What’s on their list of essentials they’ve run out of? Things like coffee, roofing for sheds (!), and other stuff they could easily do without or make themselves. So, off go six of their adult men (i.e., most of their group’s defenders) on this excursion into the unknown, in the process leaving their families very poorly defended against the raiders/looter/killers/rapists that are know to be present in the area. As I said, even Dudley Do-Right wasn’t as dim-witted.
Even the way they have their “homefront” group organized is pathetic. There are roughly two dozen adults in their group, so anyone with any sense would put the whole group in one location, build that location’s defenses, and control the surrounding arable land. Instead, they distribute the group members over a large area, putting one couple in one house, another couple in another house a mile or more away, and so on. This author is simply stupid.
By the way, before railroads, very few people traveled hundreds of miles to visit family. Very few people during their entire lives traveled even tens of miles to visit family. In fact, before railroads, probably less than 5% of the population had traveled even 10 miles from where they were born. When someone moved Out West, they were as gone as if they’d moved to another planet. No contact at all.
There it is.
Even nowadays, with jet travel, it’s a royal PITA and expensive to have to travel across the continent to visit family. Only reason Mrs. OFD can do it sometimes is because of her job and timing the assignments with visits in a nearby area. As it is, we gotta drive down to Massachusetts this Thursday to pick up a car for Princess and it’s five hours each way, and staying overnight. A PITA, but Princess has to work her summer job so we gotta do it. And this will mean she’ll quit using our vehicles and beating the shit out of them all over the Northeast for her jaunts. I got the Toyota back from her with brakes that needed fixing, all four tires replaced and the interior was a mess of rubbish. So she’s been using wife’s Saab convertible and the other day wife discovered a nice big dent in it, that evidently she wasn’t gonna tell us about.
But yeah, the superfluous travel b.s. in these tales hardly constitutes the literary level of Frodo’s or Huck’s journeys, let alone Odysseus or Virgil. It’s a cheap-ass ploy to fill space and cover up the writer’s grievous lack of skill and cleverness. I gotta say, Bracken’s has been the best I’ve seen so far, and that’s mainly because he writes OK and has a lot of useful information. Still, not Virgil and Dido, or Odysseus and the Cyclops.
Yeah, none of these compare at all favorably with work from real writers, such as Pournelle’s and Niven’s Lucifer’s Hammer.
I’m revising my opinion of Rawles downward. He plops checklists of items in the midst of his narrative, for Thor’s sake. If you want to write fiction, write fiction. If you want to write non-fiction, write non-fiction. And all of these guys, from Bracken to Konkoly to Rawles to the large group of writer wannabees, are focused way too much on firearms. As it happens, I’m already pretty familiar with firearms, but even with that knowledge I find the level of detail mind-numbing. I didn’t really need to know about AKM variants and their different types of actions, let alone about how later variants of Soviet-issue 7.62x39mm ammo used a different bullet style to increase the size of the wound channel. That’s just gratuitous.
nick wrote:
“You have to make the risk worth it for the store, since I’m certain they were not fooled about our age.”
I was carded in Falls Church, Virginia, age 45. I kid you not. Just buying some wine for friends who’d hosted me on a visit to Washington.
I was carded in Falls Church, Virginia, age 45. I kid you not.
Not unusual. Because the police like to grab the low hanging fruit, conducting sting operations on places that sell spirits is an easy task and generally results in some violations and fines (cash for the local rulers). So many places have simply adopted a policy that everyone gets carded regardless of how old they look. That way there should be no mistakes. Violation of the policy generally results in termination.
They card us all up here at the supermarkets if we buy booze or friggin’ cough syrup. Yo, foolz, dat hoss done left the barn ages ago. It’s like the airlines still making derps take their shoes off. Theater.
“…work from real writers, such as Pournelle’s and Niven’s Lucifer’s Hammer.”
Ya know, I can still remember scenes and imagery from that book and I only read it once many, many years ago. I can’t say that about much else in that genre.
I believe that alcohol, tobacco, and recreational drugs in general should be just as tightly controlled as guns.
+1
My kids are just turned 6 and 4. I married late. I’ll be on SS when both are in college, which is vague enough to preserve SOME mystery for this persona. I think I am 5 years younger than you if my memory serves from another post.
How do you have the energy? I can barely get out of bed and I am only 54.
@nick – SwiftKey also supports swipe-style entry.
The one that really bothers me is the XXXXXX company designing building the mustard gas reactors in XXXX.
Hope you don’t get crosswise with the Export Control people at State.
Hope you don’t get crosswise with the Export Control people at State.
1978 or thereabout. XXXX was our good friend at the time right up until he invaded one of his neighbors.
We actually had an export license for Iran from 1990 to 1995 when President Clinton canceled it. We just had to disable all of the chemical reactor models in our software (we’ve got about a dozen).