A donor, who shall remain anonymous but is awesome, just hit my tip jar. (If you’re reading this, I’m grateful and you rock! I’ll send a thank you note as soon as I figure out the e-mail features in my new cyber-bunker. Also this means I coded the tip jar properly. Whew!)

Suddenly I don’t feel like such a chump going through all this web gobbeldygook and wordpress-ology. Someone cares!

Recently I discovered there is (or was) an Abba Christmas album.  My thoughts were swimming! Imagine the power of Swedish Disco and Baby Jesus as wielded by amoral sexist lesbian squirrels!

Let me repeat that last sentence: Imagine the power of Swedish Disco and Baby Jesus as wielded by amoral sexist lesbian squirrels!

The mind boggles.

My dog eyed me with that look it has when I’m about to do something stupid. It always knows when I’m skating on the thin ice of inspiration. I had an idea:

“I must buy the Abba Christmas album and experience it for myself. This will inspire me to continue the saga of Lesbian Squirrels.”

The dog replied. “You are an idiot.”

Man’s best friend indeed. “It’s a ‘muse’ thing.” I explained.

The dog was all business. “If you play that album in the house, everyone in the family… including me… will try to kill you.”

Undeterred I sifted through the web doing “research”.

It’s like a trainwreck. You want to look away from the colors… but Abba cannot be denied.

Fortunately for everyone (including me), I couldn’t find a modern version of their Christmas crap. All I found was this (which seems sketchy but purports to include Abba):

Upon inspection it’s a solid “don’t buy”. In fact it’s a solid “Amazon should delete this right now”. It costs $50 (or more!) and apparently includes Elton John. Elton John speaking to squirrels? Absolutely not! There are some ideas too dark to countenance.

By the way I encourage everyone to click my links and buy stuff on Amazon but that doesn’t mean you should buy shit! Regardless of what you choose I get a small kickback (and it costs you nothing) so find something cool. Please, please, please don’t but a $50 piece of shit with Elton John. I can’t have that on my conscience. (You can also hit my tipjar and skip Amazon entirely.)

Alas, Christmas carols are their own form of brainwashing and in a zombie like state I kept shopping. I found a “classic” that appealed to me. It seemed familiar and I associated it with pleasant memories. I love the jazzy soundtrack to old Peanuts! I added it to my shopping cart:

I totally recommend Charlie Brown Christmas. You might be thinking of Peanuts as a kid’s cartoon, but the soundtrack is actually sweet (if mellow) jazz. Good stuff. Put all thoughts of Abba out of your head and listen to the Vince Guaraldi Trio instead!

Then, I remembered something I’d left on a wishlist months ago. Might as well grab that too. There had been a good sale on these:

Unfortunately, the damn price has changed. They were cheaper a month ago. Ugh! I do this to myself when I buy airline tickets too. Fuck it, ammo cans can wait.

I decided to order the cheap Peanuts CD and get away from the computer. Just before hitting checkout I asked Mrs. Curmudgeon if she wanted anything while I was logged in. She glanced at the screen and (without a word) swished out of the room. Soon the stereo was playing excellent jazzy Christmas songs and she was standing in front of me holding the jewel case from the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s Charlie Brown Christmas. No wonder it sounded familiar; we’ve owned that CD for at least a decade.

I hurriedly logged out but not before Mrs. Curmudgeon saw what I was blogging:

“You were blogging about stuff you were going to buy for Christmas?” She arched an eyebrow.

“It’s a muse thing…”

“…and you wrote a blog with links to Amazon specifically telling people not to buy what you’ve linked to?”

“…I’m an honest man. I recommend nothing I wouldn’t buy for myself.”

“Like a duplicate of a CD you’ve owned for a decade? Apparently you studied at the ‘New Coke’ school of marketing?”

I grumbled “This is why I don’t buy things for Christmas!” and closed the laptop lid. Mrs. Curmudgeon chuckled and wandered away. The dog watched me as if to say “I told you so”.

The Vince Guaraldi Trio really is beautiful. In fact, everything is peachy. I’m an idiot but I didn’t spend a penny and I’m not listening to Abba. I’m truly blessed.

Hat tip to Never Yet Melted.

P.S. I know it’s unusual (for me) to put up a photo and only a few words. I’m posting wily nilly trying to get a handle on the new blog host. Eventually I’ll get back in the groove and post a carefully wrought, six part, 5,000 word series on how I tried to open a tuna can and how it relates to quantum mechanics and Trump’s hair.

P.S. 2. There is an Abba Christmas album! I had no idea!

Since I’ve set up this new hosting site I ought to christen it with something deep and thoughtful… Nah!

Instead I present this ridiculous story from the land of Vodka: Dead Pole went from morgue back to pub. I’d pay good money to have a chat with this fella’. (Then again he’s 25 and drinking Vodka… weren’t we all immortal under those conditions?)

Hat Tip to Knuckledraggin My Life Away.

A real redirect page is supposed to go to the new destination automatically. I haven’t pulled the trigger on that yet.

The new location is the same on the outside but has a better engine under the hood (or at least that’s the theory). Please click below:

Adaptivecurmudgeon.com

I mentioned in an earlier post I was moving beyond “free blog hosting”. It bears repeating that wordpress.com hasn’t pushed me out of the nest. They (assuming they have actual employees) have been fine. Their software is limited but it was adequate (barely), it was rarely “down”, and they never gave me shit. This lulled me into a false sense of security.

Now I’m finding out how much of a pain in the ass it is to do all stuff which wasn’t necessary in the “Fisher-Price” sandbox of wordpress.com. At the new location, I haven’t yet got the email server to serve email, my PayPal tip jar exploded, an alternative (Patreon) may or may not work, and I briefly deleted all of 2015. Nor have I figured out how to set the new spam filters on “execute everything” where they belong. (I’m just ignoring new comments on that site for now. When everything is running I’ll tell ‘ya.)

Everything was slowly moving ahead until I was talked into creating a F***book page to go with the new blog. A few hours running around F***book nearly convinced me to chuck the whole project and become a monk. (Monks drink beer right?) I know some folks experience the internet as F***book itself but I found the experience repulsive. It’s like my whole body rejected the electronic probing of that little snitch factory. If I want someone to crawl up my ass and collect data I’ll contact a proctologist and not Mark Fucking Zuckerberg! Alas, I’m told it’s more or less necessary. Perhaps I can leave that little cancerous outgrowth dormant and it’ll bother me no more? Time will tell. (I can always delete it if it causes issues.)

Since I’m trying new things, I’m also trying to find someone to sketch out bowling pin chicken (freedom duck!). It would be a cool Christmas present to have a “freedom and stupidity” sketch!

The new blog will/does reside at adaptivecurmudgeon.com. You can go over there and kick the tires. It’s not fully functional but it’s getting there. It looks the same as the old blog because I’m not out to change things so much as to get my data out of its current playpen and under my control.

I also have one success to report. If you’re “following” Adaptive Curmudgeon I have already transferred you to the new site. After a brief period of chaos, you’ll get the same service you’ve been getting. At least I think so. I’m going by the “there was no smoke coming out of my laptop” diagnostic.

Stay tuned as I approach this project with the delicacy of an orangutan with a hammer.

Bill Maher is a dick but even an annoying clock is right twice a day. Mike Rowe was on his show and gave the best analysis of the American education “system” I’ve heard in years. Fast forward to 3:40 if you’re in a hurry… or just read this:

“We are lending money that we don’t have to kids who will never be able to pay it back to educate them for jobs that no longer exist.”

Brilliant!

Mike Rowe hits one out of the park. If I had my way, there would be a Nobel Prize for common sense and Rowe would get it.

Ideally all high school kids should watch this video. Twice.

A hearty hat tip to The Silicon Greybeard for this post. For those of you who don’t read Greybeard (you fools!) his is a blog that gazes deeply into the errata of such things as upgrading the Z axis stepper motor of his CNC or how the upper left hole in the bespoke fabricated housing for the apparatus is 0.002″ off center; often followed by an examination of the ramifications of this situation.

I love that sort of shit. In a world where people “just sorta’ feel like it ought to be this way” I can’t get enough of someone building stuff. Keep it up Greybeard; the world needs ya!

“Now it’s time to come forward about my little problem.  Everyone knows there are “fad diseases” that get lots of attention and become big celebrity fund raisers.  Anything that has a ribbon associated with it, from breast cancer to autism. I don’t have one of those.  Everyone has heard of Attention Deficit Disorder, ADD.  I don’t have that; I have its opposite, Attention Surplus Syndrome, ASS.

ASS is not as widespread as ADD, and there are no drug treatments for it.  ASS is characterized by paying extreme amounts of attention to things.  ASS sufferers tend to be involved in extremely intricate tasks that, simply stated, require the amount of attention only those with attention surplus can provide.”

Survivalists (a word I “cling to” over the less agressive term “prepper”) communities talk like they “swing for the bleachers”. There’s a reason for this; stories about “Bert Gummer and his six truckloads of ammunition” is flashier than “Adaptive Curmudgeon manages to keep the chicken water thawed”. However, we live in the real world where “small ball” is the wiser path to freedom.

Time for another small step on that path. First some background and navel gazing:

In 2008 there was a kerfuffle about the IRS withholding tax exempt status from conservative causes as part of the “elect Obama or die trying” mood of the times. It’s a serious offense which (in my eyes) was never rectified. (As an aside: This may be a root of the left’s current post-election freak out. They weaponized bureaucracies without considering someone like Trump might someday be in charge. Right wingers are fools if they create powers they wouldn’t want operated by Al Gore. Left wingers ought to ponder every regulation as it would be implemented by Dick Cheney. Socialists should have imagined Obamacare as implemented by Darth Vader.)

Conservatives moaned about the unfairness of it all. They were missing the point. The first thing organizations claiming to “fight for liberty” did was request bureaucratic acceptance? If you’re going to “stand up to the man” why whine when you don’t get tax favored status from “the man”? Consider it your first skirmish in a glorious career of “standing up for stuff”.

It’s unfair that the “The Al Gore Glee Club and Obama Worship Fund” got instant tax-exempt status while “Monster Trucks for Jesus” and “The Republican Guns for Orphans Fund” got hosed. Life isn’t fair. Any “movement” that shits itself when it discovers that the IRS is mean needs to nut up.

I mentioned 2008 because I wanted to segue into 2016. All year the folks that run/own/manipulate “social media” proved they aren’t to be trusted. Everyone (on any side of the aisle) should limit exposure to “untrustworthy entities”. Nobody wants to fall for sudden yet inevitable betrayal. Here are a few instances of note:

Twitter: during the election cycle, Twitter introduced me to a new word; “shadowbanning”. Another enterprising fellow proved changing a single word from white to black changes Twitter’s reaction to an identical sentence from “hunky dory” to “hate”.

Solution? Don’t count on Twitter. Fuck ‘em. If you’re not of the anointed class you’re now fully informed that Twitter can and will stab you in the back. Learn it, know it, and behave accordingly. I don’t use Twitter so it’s an easy call for me.

Google: Google images for Hillary’s faceplant on 9/11 were buried behind a plethora of public relations headshots. I don’t know who performed what act on whom to get that kind of preferential treatment but they certainly got Google to salute! Forgetting about politics, if you Google “American Inventor” you’ll wade through the cast of Roots before you bump into Edison or Bell. The top “American Inventor” is Lewis Latimer. I’m not making that up. I’m sure Latimer is awesome but “an improved toilet system for railroad cars” seems less exciting than human flight or curing polio. Solution? Presume Google is full of shit because it often is.

Facebook: So many examples it’s too goofy to even mention. If you think Facebook is your friend you’re probably a gay, vegan, poet, in Los Angeles who’s never had an unpopular opinion on anything. Solution? I haven’t used Facebook in years.

WordPress: WordPress is a corporate entity that could wipe any blog they host from the face of the earth with the flip of a bit. Solution, don’t use wordpress for… OH SHIT!

My blog is hosted by wordpress.com. It’s a vice with a firm steely grip on my balls. Bad image in your head and bad practice for me.

Let me start out by saying WordPress has treated me well. I’ve never heard a peep out of ‘em. For all I know it’s all running on a 486DX in a closet in New Jersey and they’ll never mess with me. I write verbiage and they paste ads near my crap and we don’t piss each other off. I have no ill will toward wordpress.

It’s just that I am dependent on them and dependency is Latin for “eventually dumb blogger will get deleted”. WordPress can randomly decide talking to trees is a hate crime, owning a chainsaw is punishable by banishment, or crackpot theories about Abba are threats to civilization.

If they decide to “off” my blog I can’t do Jack shit to stop them. What kind of idiot would entertain such dependency after the lessons of 2016? Could any larger hint be possible?

Thus, Adaptive Curmudgeon will soon to go to a new hosting service. (Not yet… I’m still working on it.)

Don’t worry, it’ll be seamless to the six readers who care. How do I know this? Because someone smarter than me is handling it. (We both agree that any man who’s experienced a tractor fire in his garage should not play with advanced features in the blogging software.)

When the time comes, I’ll put up a redirect page on adaptivecurmudgeon.wordpress.com. I (or rather someone smarter than me) will move every post and comment from the last 6 years. (Who am I to deprive the world of my bullshit?) There may be fewer ads because wordpress’ ad system will go bye bye. There may be more because web hosting ‘aint free.

This is my Christmas present to myself (and you… if you care). What better present than peace of mind? Hopefully you can keep reading about lesbian squirrels forever.

Preparedness isn’t all MREs and tactical nukes in the basement. Sometimes it’s as simple as switching hosting services before I piss off a faceless corporation.