[A collection of random thoughts gathered during my Independence Day weekend.]
First of all: AMERICA ROCKS! I fuckin’ love Independence Day!
I didn’t do anything particularly exiting. I mostly hung around the homestead drinking beer, doing routine maintenance, and being free. Then again freedom is pretty damn exciting when you think about it.
Someone told me the US Women’s Soccer Team just won the Women’s World Cup/Superbowl/World Series/Master’s Cup. Sounds like they won hard. I care not one little bit about “metric football” but was inclined to salute their hard work.
Any sane athlete, at such a juncture, would be blasting “We Are The Champions” by Queen and dancing drunk on a table. Instead, someone got all political and bitched about Trump. What a self defeating move! Your greatest lifetime achievement is a chance to whine about an election result? It’s a juvenile way to rob yourself of your own joy. Sit home and weep in your pillow if you must, but don’t drag your teammates down. Nobody smart cares about the geopolitical ideals of a person who plays a game as an adult job.
Bad mosquito season this year. I suppose I could blame global warming, demand a Federal program, and sit in the house pouting. But I don’t roll that way. I geared up with Permethrin, DEET, and Thermacells. That shit works! Better living though chemistry! I have treated clothes and I highly recommend them. Used as a system it’s damn near a suit of armor. (Also it’s much lighter on the “chemistry” that the old days of 100% DEET and nothing else.)
In a second round of irrelevant sportsballers, some dude who’s (I think?) no longer a quarterback got bitchy about the original 13 star flag on a sneaker. This is news? It’s the opinion of an unemployed dude (?) about a fucking sticker on a sneaker.
Can you imagine how awesome we are? We’re so prosperous and fortunate the press invents issues about sneaker adornment to have something to be upset over. First world problems indeed!
Further rumination: This is a classic example of the hive mind acting like a school of fish. Fish make ostensibly independent decisions but school fish make decisions almost entirely based on their relationship to their spatially adjacent peers. They do this very well. Most fish wont break the pattern unless hard pressed (for example by a solid wall of coral in their space or a shark bludgeoning into the school). However, when one fish makes a change in direction the “choice” (i.e. “swim left”) cascades through the populace. Every other fish tries to move exactly in “the new direction we’re all swimming now”. It appears as if the entire school all jointly chose to “swim left” at once, but that’s not what happened. What really happened is one fish made a motion and the rest followed unquestioningly and instantaneously; puppets with scales.
How is the flag kerfluffle du jour like a school of fish? Easy! One unemployed sportsballer made one choice and it cascaded through like minded thinkers very fast. In days or even fractions of days a 243 year old flag went from “patriotic” to “racist”. That’s not people making personal decisions, it’s fish in a school.
Additional rumination: I submit that the hive mind is changing their opinion so fast and so unthinkingly that virtually anything that is “common sense” today is likely to be racists/sexist/oppressive/triggering sometime in the future. Anything you believe now… even if you’re a goddamn saint… is likely be used against you in the future.
One way to track it is to watch things change in 4-8 year cycles of presidencies. It wasn’t racist when Obama used the “Betsy Ross flag” at his inauguration in 2012 but it’s “triggering” on a sneaker in 2019. Seven year window to make the opening, one weekend for a sneaker salesman to “swim left”. (Read the Snopes analysis, they really go out of their way stretch that 7 year window into a voyage of navel gazing justifications. I miss Snopes but they’re woke as shit now.)
Other examples? Obama was opposed to same sex marriage right until he changed his mind. A grown ass man is allowed to change his mind. More power to him. However, the millisecond he changed his mind, everyone who held the common view just a few days before (opposing same sex marriage) went from “mainstream” to “raging homophobic douchenozzle”.
One of my favorite examples was when folks went on a tear in 2016 over “America first”. Then candidate Trump said he’d represent “American’s First”. This didn’t surprise me. I’m from earth, where the sky is blue and the sun rises in the east. I’ve always assumed that the Prime Minister of Lithuania represents Lithuanians, the Prime Minister of India represents Indians, and the President of the US represents Americans. This idea would’ve been unremarkable in pretty much anytime in history. It was no big deal from Ancient Greece until 2016 when it Trump was “unspeakably crass”. He suggested the dude elected by American citizens to lead the country of America should represent Americans and all the fish swam left.
Then again, I wear leather boots and not sneakers. No little stickers on my footwear. So what do I know?
Not all thoughts involve sportsballers and the people that inexplicably listen to them. This weekend I stacked another face-cord of wood. (Can’t wear sneakers for that kind of work!) One face-cord is all I could manage but all progress is some progress. I’m pleased.
Conditions weren’t great. It was hotter than hell. I was downing two bottles of Gatorade per tank of saw gas. There’s smoke in the air from a minor nearby forest fire and that didn’t help. I did what I could and now I’m up to about 5 face cords (1 2/3 full cords for those of you keeping score). Big win for the day was field testing my “anti-tick clothes” and finding out the the Thermacell range covered most of my chainsaw work. I worked in a damn cloud of the blood sucking bastards (mosquitoes) and only got a few bites. Also, no ticks at all!
The wood’s good stuff, it’ll be bone dry for the winter. Stacked firewood is money in the bank!
My lawnmower is still broke. The lawn hasn’t been mowed in 2 weeks. This shouldn’t matter but it does look pretty ugly. I’m working on a solution. That said, I chose preparing firewood for the winter over enjoying pretty landscaping now.
The world is offering a lesson: “To which purpose will you expend your labors?” Keeping in mind there will be a final exam sometime around January, I believe I chose right. It’s hardly the end of the world if my lawn looks like shit.
These are the sorts of decisions folks had to make in the “good old days”. These are also the sorts of choices one can’t make in a city.
I packed my little sailboat and drove to the lake but the wind wasn’t right. I bailed on my plans. Shit happens. More camp / boat adventures will be posted soon… I hope.
Independence Day was awesome. Fireworks and beer… and I didn’t give a shit if my lawn got a little scorched either. Freedom is wonderful!
From the news this weekend:
Wednesday: “Trump wants an Independence Day parade and a tank. He’s politicizing everything and the tanks are just like Tienanmen Square. This could be the end!”
Thursday: Huge party, people love the parade. Trump gives a speech that has nothing about him. (Which surprises even me.) The tanks (Bradley Fighting Vehicles?) parade and then go home.
Friday: The Curmudgeon asks “Um… since it was ‘just like Tienanmen Square’ how many dissident students did Trump’s tanks kill… just give me a round number. Two hundred?”
Saturday: The Press reports: “Forget what we said Wednesday. Wednesday never happened. We have more real news now; the Betsy Ross flag is a symbol a of slave-holding elite cretins and sneaker decorations are important.”
Also, why don’t we have an Independence Day parade in DC every year? Why not?
The milkweed are coming along OK. A bit late due to the cold spring? No monarch caterpillars sighted yet.
I rode my motorcycle 100 miles to get an ice cream cone. It was nice! Last winter kicked my ass and I’m very very very very very very happy to have summer.
If they invented motorcycles in 2019 the DMV would never “allow” us deplorable idiots to put that newfangled deathtrap on the road. Like many joys, motorcycle are old ideas that got grandfathered past the sourpusses. FREEDOM!
My neighbor was touching off Tannerite over the weekend. MORE FREEDOM!
Is it soon to be squirrel time???
I really apologize for going all R.R. Martin and making people wait. I promise I’m not dropping the story… it’s just real life takes time too. I had to cut firewood… but the story is outlined in my pointy head and it’ll come out… I promise.
Many good points, AC.
“smoke in the air from a minor nearby forest fire”
You mean Canada? We can see the smoke ‘way down here in Southern WI.
I have no idea where the smoke is coming from. It’s about the right season for forest fires so that’s my assumption. (It’s also the right season for the media to flake out about “unprecedented fires caused by global warming”.) It’ll disperse with a new weather pattern so no worries eh?
“so no worries eh”
Unless you’re in Canada. The Nat’l Wx Service said so… (this could be your springboard for a rant on “nationalized services vs. private enterprise” or something).
And, firewood takes time. Much time. Way too much, sometimes.
Even if you are in Canada no worries. From my limited sample, Canadians don’t seem to go apeshit over forest fires? They seem to know that trees are flammable.
True story: one wilderness trip I was on the Canadian side and I saw a plume of smoke indicating either something was on fire or there’d been a nuclear war. I kept a watch eye on the horizon and kept fishing. A few days later I emerged from the brush and asked at the local cafe “What’s with the smoke?” Everyone was blase. “It’s a forest fire. No biggie.” The next day I crossed into the US and the press was freaking out. “This is the biggest fire in the history of the universe… we’re all gonna’ die”. Same fire, it might have even crossed the line. But there was a vastly different reaction. I also noted that the American side seemed to be eagerly trying to bury the fire in money while our neighbors to the north seemed to be chillin’ out. “It’s a forest… they burn… have a beer.”
Small sample size but a true experience.
Yah, the news (of whatever-it-is) is portrayed in a vastly different light depending on which country is reporting it. I built a Heathkit shortwave receiver as a youngster and was amazed to hear the different version of the same event as portrayed by Radio Moscow, the VOA, and the Chinese. No wonder I’m confused.
Re the Skeeter Vac: is it available using one of those five-foot-high fans used by dairy farmers? Better yet, a big honkin’ radial engine from a B-17! I hate skeeters…
P.S.: UW Madison is working on using bacteria instead of permethrin, DEET, etc. to kill the suckers when they land on you.
On the topic of mosquitoes, I have a decent bit of acreage and a deep, abiding hatred of the suckers. I got a mosquito vacuum and damned if it doesn’t do a great job of cutting down on the bloodsuckers. (Not endorsing a product but this is the one I got: https://www.amazon.com/Flowtron-PV-440-Power-Vac-Mosquito-Coverage/dp/B0007QLU2E)
There are still mosquitoes, sure. But it does a great job at killing a lot of them, and I get a visceral joy out of emptying a huge pile of dried bloodsucker dust out of the collection bin.
Good info. I’ve been messing around with treated clothes and small protected areas; essentially armoring myself to travel in enemy held territory. You’re simply killing them in box lots… which is definitely the more awesome approach.