Adaptive Curmudgeon

After the umpteenth snowstorm of the year Mrs. Curmudgeon may be getting a bit of cabin fever. The reason I know this is because she’d taken to swearing at the snow. I’m pretty sure she hates every snowflake independently and personally.

“There’s a support group for that,” said I, “it meets at the bar.”

So off we went through a gathering flurry to escape the house. After a few drinks and dinner all was well. Rather than returning home we wound up contentedly watching women’s curling on mute above the bar. A sure cure for cabin fever (or at least a treatment).

I know little about curling and nothing about the events in South Korea. What I do know is that South Korea’s skip Kim Eun-jung is cute!

That’s weapons grade cute right there.

I had a little trouble watching the action because there were two girls with giant glasses and I could scarcely tell ’em apart. Plus it was curling, which is like shuffleboard as invented by giant drunk Scottish warriors. So who knows what’s going on?

Also, why the hell was I getting all fluttery over some generic chick with owl glasses sliding a stone around on the ice? I mean what the hell wired my brain that way?

Jinkies.

It’s gotta’ be the glasses. After all, if you want to ogle like a drooling Neanderthal at  Olympic participants why the hell are you watching curling?

Hurdler Michelle Jenneke: If I posted this picture once per week my blog’s popularity would skyrocket.

I’m sorry, what was I saying? I seem to have lost track.

Oh yes. So on mute this super cute person was adorable… not on mute for all I know she had a voice like a truck driver and was screaming insults. All hail mute.

The Koreans were unlike the other team. I was too lazy to look up the actual team that was playing. I think it was Swedish but this is the first image I saw online and it seemed representative.

What is best? To drive your enemies before you!

The cute girls wearing giant glasses began to get dismantled by serious looking Scandinavian shield maidens. I usually don’t care about sports but was engaged this time. Also, uncharacteristically I was rooting for the underdog. Usually I root for the meanest looking team and am perfectly delighted by a beatdown. I normally love competition and don’t get hung up on niceness. “Up next, Tiger Woods goes head to head with the Oakland Raider’s offensive team in an MMA octagon.” (I’d pay to watch it. So would you!)

Eventually, Mrs. Curmudgeon said “They’re getting creamed and it’s snowing out, lets roll before the roads get worse.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay here and get hammered?”

“Huh?”

“I’m just saying it’s February. There’s no real reason to be sober in the north right now. You think people would go ice fishing without beer?”

She steered me toward the door. “The team you’re rooting for is doomed.”

I complained. “The last time I left a game in mid competition like this, everything went wrong.”

I continued. “It was Superbowl 2017. It went to the bar because I felt it my patriotic duty to at least pretend I care about sportsball. It was 21-3 at halftime and then the halftime show involved that twerking nitwit Lady Gaga. God I hate her! Just when it couldn’t get more lopsided, the Falcons threw a touchdown and it was 28-3. I said ‘fuck this, I’m out’ and started walking back to my hotel.”

She was nudging me toward the door. I kept rambling. “Custer had better odds than the geezer-tastic walking disaster that was Tom Brady. Why watch a man face his own Waterloo?”

Somehow I had my jacket on. I was still talking. “But the very goddamn instant I left that bar all hell broke loose! Brady did a power up, rolled a natural 20, and followed it up by playing the ‘statistically improbable comeback’ card. I missed the best 20 minutes of football in the decade. What if it happens again?”

Outside the weather was appalling. Mrs. Curmudgeon was wise to get us moving before the road was invisible.

Later on I checked on the internet and there was no Tom Brady moment. Whew. Also, somehow the American men beat the Canadians. (Which is a national tragedy to our neighbors to the north. They have my condolences. Though, when cute girls in huge glasses aren’t involved all I care about is winning. “Canada really cares about this all the time and Americans only care once per quadrennial?” “Too bad! We must show no mercy for there can be only one!” Yeah… the glasses messed me up.) Meanwhile, while looking for an image for this post, Google served up this:

What. The. Fuck?

I can’t even… I mean… UGH!

I could have lived my whole life without seeing Norwegian men in pink heart pajamas.

Fuckin’ internet.

This is what I assume the inventors of curling looked like in the summer off-season. I’m sure they don’t even wear underwear, much less pajamas.

Current obsessions aside, curling really shouldn’t be about cute owlish Korean girls or Norwegians in gay-pants. It’s a sport involving asymmetrical shoes and brooms. Obviously it was invented by drunk Scottish dudes flinging rocks around a lake. It should be played by smelly men in kilts… who are drunk. (Also, you know damn well the first time someone used a broom to clear the ice in front of a stone it created a brawl. “You’re clearing a path for the stone? Are you mental?!?” “I didn’t touch the stone Angus!” “Oh yeah? Lets settle this like men… by drinking Scotch and hitting each other with hammers!”) Doesn’t it seem obvious that brooms are some dude’s wiseass addition to the originally simpler game?

Also… fuckin’ snow. I’m so sick of the fuckin’ snow! I’m just sayin.

SWEET!

To whomever clicked my Amazon affiliate link and bought the construction supplies; you rock! Thank you! I got a kickback that adds up to 1/2 the cost of a cheap used oscilloscope. That’s the nudge I needed. I’m gonna get me that thing as soon as I’m back in town! God I hope it wasn’t sold.

To everyone else. If you click through the Amazon ads on my blog and buy anything I get a tuppence. You don’t have to pay one thin dime extra. It doesn’t matter what you buy.

If you’re going to buy something on Amazon please remember me and click from my blog. It’s not “quit your day job” money for me, but every tiny bit really brightens my day.

Thanks.

Adaptive “Mad Scientist” Curmudgeon

Update:

The oscilloscope was gone! What a bummer. Yeah, I know; first world problem but still I was pretty disappointed. Next time (if there is a next time) I’ll know to move faster.

I did score a used but solid looking 10 amp 12 volt power supply for $20. Pretty good deal and I can think of a thousand uses for it. But it only has one switch… sigh.

The buzz of bullshit is in the air. Take care. Breathe too much bullshit and you might become part of it. Nobody wants to be a carrier of bullshit. It’s best to avoid bullshit altogether but that’s nearly impossible. The best one can do is mitigate exposure to the environmental toxin of bullshit. Some methods (among many) I use to combat bullshit are introspection, bourbon, the study of history, books, reason, and endeavoring to comment on things well after the initial wave of bullshit has dissipated:

In mid-January, my clock radio, which is tuned to the strongest signal in my area*, woke me with the word “shithole”. I’m not a morning person so I hit snooze. The device went off again in ten minutes and it was “shithole, shithole, shithole”. Like most adults I don’t take to the fainting couch over language; in fact the tendency to refrain from hyperventilation over words might be part of the definition of “adult”. I briefly wondered what happened to “Russia, Russia, Russia” which has been my morning alarm most of 2017. Rather than ponder it before I’d had coffee, I hit snooze again. Another blissful few minutes of sleep and now talking heads were discussing the horrible unthinkable impossible idea that some nations (like Norway) are preferable to other nations (like places where you might starve or contract dysentery).

To me, this is like pondering the impossibility that the sky is blue or water is wet. I killed the radio and went to work. (Another thing that is part of the definition of “adult”.) By lunch I was aware the world was filled with talking heads whining about Trump and his alleged analysis of crappy countries as shitholes. (Oddly they were twerking over the unverified possibility Trump might have spoken in the vernacular of anyone over twelve.) Wow! Trump can tweak the press with the “possibility” he “might” have said something virtually anyone who’s traveled already knows! The press have marionette strings leading to their greatest enemy.

Nonetheless, it didn’t get traction in my head. Some places are shitholes; Detriot, Mauritania, Hati, a particularly bad apartment I rented back in the 1990s, WalMart at 3:00 am. If you don’t think there are shitholes then you haven’t seen enough of the world. I waited patiently while the press rolled in it. You can only be upset about a true thing for so long. (CNN literally used the word 195 times. It reminds me of a toddler who’s learned a new naughty word and can’t wait to tell everyone.)

In a handful of days “shithole, shithole, shithole” faded, as did “Russia, Russia, Russia” before it. Within a week it was “shutdown, shutdown, shutdown”, which I have to admit, is an improvement in vocabulary.

Then I dropped off grid for a while. I emerged just in time to find the press drooling all over themselves over Kim Yo-jong at the winter Olympics. Really? The unelected relative of an authoritarian dictator who grinds starving peasant masses underneath the feet of his oppressive, all controlling, tyrannical government…. she has a “nice smile”.

Oh for fuck’s sake!

Is there nothing so loathsome and repulsive that the press simply won’t go there? It’s North Fucking Korea… among the ugliest, meanest, most horror filled, black holes of misery and death on planet earth. The maniacal leader of this quagmire unearthed a human puppet that looks suntastically happy and quite likely would be killed if she failed to do so. She’s pretty compared to dour Vice President Pence and his tie. So we’re supposed to get wobbly at the knees for North Korea? No! Only a gold plated asshole would measure a monster’s sister’s smile as so pleasant that representing a prison state that will bludgeon starving prisoners to death with a hammer is somehow… OK. When you forgive starvation, misery, and torture because you really hate a generic American politician you’ve lost it.

North Korea is a horrible place where people suffer terrible oppression. It was rightly called part of the axis of evil, it’s a likely place to starve to death, and nobody should be getting a hard on for it because the evil ruler’s sister seems pleasant. North Korea is a genuine shithole.

I was grossed out. For some reason, among all the bullshit of the last few years, emoting over Kim Jong-un’s variant of Eva Braun seems uniquely awful. It’s a bridge too far. Can’t we all agree that the repressive monstrosity that is the government of North Korea is evil? I don’t mean something vague like “weighing the pros and cons of life’s path” but just plain old fashioned, irredeemable, flat out murderous and violent, starvation, blood, torture and death, evil. Look it up in the dictionary, evil is a word, it exists on earth, and Kim Jong-un is evil.

Who tiptoes around evil?

At any rate I am not alone. Many of us know shit and know shinola and aren’t too proud to say so. I took this photo a few days ago. I have no idea who created it. It’s just a silly little bumper sticker and I’ll grant that it doesn’t go into the difference between oppressed starving peasant victims and their violent dictatorial overlords; but that’s because it’s just a bumper sticker. I’m happy to see that not everyone is going to give that murderous regime a metaphorical hand job. Enjoy:

A.C.

* Throughout most of rural US, the strongest FM radio signal is government propaganda. We call it “National Public Radio” but it’s paid for by the government and it’s not 100% factual. There’s a word for biased information that’s paid for by the government. The word is propaganda. Look it up. Even if I call a carrot an aardvark it’s still a carrot. This doesn’t mean I’m an apocalyptic tin-foil hat wearing bunker dweller, it merely means I have a dictionary and pay attention to FM frequencies. Technically that means I’m pedantic and a nerd. At any rate, during my lifetime I have personally observed government funded FM radio based propaganda evolving from one scratchy voice among many, to loud and clear damn near everywhere between Canada and Mexico. Don’t believe me? Try it yourself. Get in a car and drive around. Hit your car’s “scan” feature and try and find a place in the lower 48 where NPR isn’t strong and indeed among the clearest broadcasts. Try it in cities, suburbs, plains, mountains, deserts, coasts, whatever. I’ve tried just that. From the most  boring cornfield in Nebraska, to the high deserts of Eastern Montana, to the Canyons of Utah, to the lobster boats of Maine, to the drab suburbs in Missouri, to the windy flats in Oklahoma; NPR is funded with your money, is never absent, and does not constrain itself to cellos and weather.

I’d never heard of a Hurdy-gurdy but now that I’ve seen one I like it. It sounds great in the video. From my adminttedly uninformed point of view it’s something like a steampunk autoharp-violin that appears to be a total bitch to play. It’s at least as uncommon as the tragically rare Theremin.*

Hat tip to Chicken Feathers.

*Seriously, the world needs more Theremin; possibly within a heavy metal band that may or may not include Cellos. The Dr. Who Theme and a little bit of noodling on a single Zeppelin track? (Whole lotta’ lovin’ in case you’re wondering.) I’m calling bullshit! Either the Theremin is lacking in a way some musician needs to explain to me or we’re getting screwed out of something epic.

I stumbled across a $40 oscilloscope for sale. Presumably it was only driven on Sundays by a sweet little old lady and also it functions… probably it even functions correctly. (How would I know?) Right now it’s hooked up to a TV and is happily making groovy waveforms to the soundtrack of Kung Fu Panda. I have no idea if $40 is a good price but the guy wouldn’t go any lower. He didn’t know what to do with it either. It’s at a music store that’s going out of business. Soooo many dials and knobs…

It. Looks. So. Cool. Pointless, but cool.

Nothing says “mad scientist” like an oscilloscope but I have no earthly idea what I would do with one. Help me out folks. If anyone can come up with an excuse why I need to buy it, tell me. Or, if they’re a dime a dozen and $40 is way too much and they’re not fun to own, I’d like to know that too. Anyone anyone, Bueller?

He was the worst kind of criminal; the exceedingly rare and almost legendary monster that’s literally too rapacious and violent for organized crime. He was effective, no doubt about that! But no good for a team. You could see in his eyes, his dangerous inhuman eyes, that no one was safe in his presence. The regional narcotraffickers compromised by forming a sort of alliance with him. Anything shipped along Route 2 in Sonora was deliberately and carefully routed directly into his sphere of influence; Cananea, Sonora. There, he took his cut. He grudgingly reciprocated by moving it on down the line. The narcotraffickers, in control of virtually everything for hundreds of miles, wisely decided “the Cananea tax” was a better investment than the all out, scorched earth, devastation Cananea’s ruler would surely unleash should things get out of hand.

For their part, the residents of Cananea, simply endured. Chairman Mao, Stalin, Caligula, all these men had come and gone and some portion of the humanity around them had simply endured. So too would they. Cowering for a time in the shadow of a monster. Also, they had biology on their side. They felt confident that he wouldn’t live long.

It was an uneasy truce but any truce is better than none. Unfortunately, all bets went out the window when Tyrone Woodruff appeared. Sporting a shaved head, numerous tats, a modest convertible sedan, and the kind of attitude that only an American refugee from Chicago could muster, he simply arrived one day. No one knew where he came from. All he offered was a vague reference to Chicago and an insistence that you quit asking stupid questions. He paid in bitcoin, had a trunk full of machine guns, there were bullet holes in his passenger side door, and he was obviously fearless.

Everyone knew this was going to lead to trouble.

Cananea’s Ruler woke early that day, like he did every day. As soon as the sun breached the horizon he was strutting around screaming at everyone in sight. “Get up you asshloes! There’s shit to do!”

He was always in a hurry in the mornings. He ate a huge meal, ran off to his harem to urgently do things that would make Harvey Weinstein cry, and returned slightly ruffled and ready to go out and kick some ass. He summoned Pedro, his servant.

Technically he had hired Pedro to be his bodyguard but that’s like hiring a bodyguard for a tornado. Mostly Pedro ferried him around, made sure he never ran out of beer, and functioned as a translator. He liked Pedro, but of course sooner or later Pedro was going to die. He was just too damn vital and excitable for anyone, even Pedro, to be in his presence for too long.

It had been a busy morning. He’d checked on the narcotraffickers shipments (and taken his cut of course) and followed that up with some extortion, a little bit of arson and, when he ran out of ideas for interesting crimes to commit, he jumped around vandalizing cars.

That’s when he met Tyrone. Tyrone’s car was the only vehicle in Cananea he didn’t recognize. As soon as he spied it, cruising around looking for a decent body shop, he ordered Pedro to pursue it. It was a lively chase but eventually they cornered Tyrone in the parking lot of a defunct Blockbuster video.

“I’m thirsty Pedro,” he grumbled, “cervesa! Now!”

Pedro, as always, had a beer in hand. “Here you go boss.”

He drank deeply. It was hot out.

Pedro continued, “Should I explain things to our new friend?”

He nodded.

“You see, we come to say hello and you run away. That is not good. You give the boss some money. That’s how you show respect see?”

Tyrone couldn’t believe his eyes. “Shiiiiiiiiiit.” He drawled in an accent more southern than Chicagoan. Then the Chicago dialect kicked in “Get the fuck away from me ya dumbass redneck shithead afore I shoot yo balls off.”

The boss had already noticed the firearm. Indeed, it was pointed directly at Pedro’s family jewels. Then again, he had known all along the Pedro was at best a temporary hire; it looked like his days were up. Pedro, for his part, hadn’t noticed the firearm but he wasn’t one to overthink such things. He’d seen the boss tear apart so many challengers that he assumed the gringo would be dead as soon as the boss finished his beer.

The boss thought the same.

Tyrone had a different opinion. He didn’t shoot his way out of Chicago’s meanest streets to get hassled by a dimwit carrying a chicken. He’d pop a cap in Pedro and his dumbass livestock in the time it took either one to reach his door. Tyrone’s specialties back home were armed robbery, and conveniently for his current situation, carjacking. Tyrone knew precisely what threats he could and could not handle from the wheel of a car. He slid the transmission into park. He hoped he could finish this without putting another hole in his door. It was always a hassle repairing shot up doors.

“A rooster.” Pedro corrected him, as if reading his thoughts. “And he is almost done with his beer…”

Knowing where things were headed, they all mentally prepared. Tyrone breathing deeply, getting in the zone for a good old fashioned throwdown. Pedro grinning, ready for the show. The Boss, anxious to add another to his long list of bloody victories.

And those are the circumstances that led to what came to be known as “The Pollo Loco Shootout of Cananea”.

Behold this magnificent image. Just look at it. Look! At! It!

So much is happening. So many questions. What could possibly be happening? Why was the chicken thirsty? Is it also cold? Did it need a beer after a hard day? Is the gun loaded? Is the chicken a fugitive? A carjacker? There’s a story here. I lie awake at night thinking about it.

Challenge accepted! My next post will explain everything.

For now bask in the glory of this photographic conundrum:

Hat tip here.

Hat tip to Daily Timewaster.

I’m working in a building where the elevator floor has some sort of synthetic tile laid down. So far, so good. But you’re supposed to grout that shit! It’s like standing on an artfully placed pile of old broken plates. I know, I know, first world problem and all that. But I just hate seeing an incomplete job. What happened? Were they working along installing tile when someone said “fuck it, workday’s done” and then they skipped town? Did someone pay a contractor in advance? (Also, one of the tiles is already broken.)

This is irrelevant and I don’t know if it’ll show up on the photos but trust me, there’s a 1/4″ gap between every damn one of them. It pisses me off and I’m not entirely sure why. I’ve half a mind to buy some materials and finish the job in a clandestine grout application attack. Possibly while wearing a cape. It’s  bird, it’s a plane, it’s GROUTMAN!