Adaptive Curmudgeon

Today’s post has three points:

1. We are currently so regulated that cool shit is lost, forgotten, or never invented. “Never invented” worries me; how can we know what we didn’t discover?
2. Nobody learned a fucking thing in high school chemistry.
3. Doing cool shit is worth it, because obviously.

Suppose you’d never seen a kitchen match. Suppose they hadn’t been invented.

Link goes to matches on Amazon. You pyromaniac!

It’s not like we’d lack the secret of fire. People started fires before they had matches. There’d be lighters and so forth. (Note: When I wander about the woods I have several ways to start a fire. I carry them in addition to matches. That said, starting a campfire with my trusty FireSteel is a PITA. It’s a good backup, but matches are easier.)

Suppose that I, in a fit of Curmudgeonly innovation, invented a heretofore unknown technology called kitchen matches. A handy device I’d love to share with the world! How would that discussion go?

“I just invented a new way to start a fire.”

“Really? Is it safe?”

“Sure is. I dipped a strip of wood in a mix of phosphorus sesquisulfide and potassium chlorate. When I slide it across sandpaper it bursts into flames. Very convenient! I’m gonna’ call them ‘Lucifers’!”

“You’re bizarre.”

“I carry them in my pocket. Here, have some. I’m giving them away as a marketing gimmick. I’m going to be rich.”

(Recoiling in fear.) “Are you mad!?! You carried them in your pocket? You’ll burn your nuts off! Also, there’s no child safety feature. Don’t you care about children?!?! And what about fumes? They’re made with the kind of shit that’s known to the State of California to cause cancer. What if these get in the hands of an arsonist? The liability is huge! Some drunk, mentally ill, minor is going to light one and stuff it in the gas tank of a Prius… then every lawyer in creation will sue you to death. Go back to using a magnifying glass like normal people.”

Luckily, matches were invented long before society lost its goddamn mind. What we think of as a common “safety friction match” is well over a century old. Otherwise, some committee would be regulating them right now.

How many cool and useful things only exist today because they were invented before the limp dick chickenshit buzzkills of today got a chance to eliminate it?

Every generation should be inventing totally new things. We’ve become stupid and risk averse. We’re largely coasting along with variations on a theme. For example, your smart phone/panopticon device doesn’t have the same level of brand new awesome experiences as lunar landings of 1969 or even a Harley Davidson in 1903. (Steve Jobs’ sweater aside, cell phones are variations on a theme. Pretty much every house in America had a phone with long distance service three generations ago; long before Pac Man was invented. Making it battery operated is a variation on a theme. For that matter, do you think the DMV would allow motorcycles on the road if they’d just been invented in 2019?)

Anyway… back to my story. Matches are one universe. I discovered the alternate universe fire starter that really pleases me.

How to start a fire while looking like a wizard, not using matches, and playing with chemicals.

Get yourself a handy dandy, somewhat nasty, chemical called potassium permanganate!

Potassium Permanganate (don’t mess with this shit if you’re a snowflake or idiot.)

[Warning: People are stupid! I tried to buy potassium permaganate locally. It should be available at a pool supply store or water treatment place, but people are so fuckin’ stupid I didn’t get far. It sucked and I got depressed. Nobody learned a fucking thing in high school chemistry and it shows. One salesdrone tried to tell me potassium gluconate (a dietary supplement) is the same as potassium permaganate (something you will only ingest once) because they both have potassium. I was offended by such concentrated dumb: “There is iron in a dietary supplement and iron in a steel bar. If I hit your skull with the steel bar will it make your diet better?” We’re living in Idiocracy! Accept that our society is mostly chimps living in the wreckage of a declining world and order online.]

Potassium permanganate is about a buck an ounce in the 20 oz. bottle (photo is a link or click here). There are many varieties but the chemical you want is potassium permanganate and nobody cares about the brand name. Make sure it’s powdered. For some reason, companies like to mix chemicals into liquids instead of powders; I don’t know why.

The bottle shown above is what I bought. It’s about as cheap as I could find and it should last a long time.

It’s a real genuine chemical. Pay attention.

STOP READING NOW IF YOU’RE A DUMBASS.

This isn’t a bullshit wuss substance like when some dweeb uses food coloring and thinks they’re a chemist. This shit will jack you up. It’s nasty in a variety of ways and if you’re an idiot stay away from it. Read the warnings, act accordingly, etc…

The remainder of this post assumes the reader belongs at the adult table. If you’re triggered or too stupid to use dangerous things, go away: browse Facebook or eat crayons or whatever window lickers like to do. Also, if you’re too stupid to use chemicals you probably shouldn’t be playing with fire regardless of how you start it. Sheesh!

OK so potassium permanganate is groovy stuff that you should handle with care. It’s a powder so it’s not going to leak but it does like to dissolve… keep it dry! It also happens to be a dye, if it gets wet and on your clothes they’ll be new and interesting colors… forever. It’s odorless, it’s pretty dense so a little goes a long way, and it does a lot of useful things. YouTube has a zillion videos of survivalist types using it start fires and treat water and (inexplicably) making some sort of solution to soak their feet(?!?). The point is, it’ll start fires.

When you want to start a fire, put down your bottom kindling (newspaper, bark, branches, whatever) and arrange a flat spot in the middle. Then carefully pour about three quarter’s a teaspoon or so in the spot. (Don’t sniff the powder into your nose for fuck’s sake! You promised you belonged at the adult table; don’t make me demote you.) Also don’t get it on your hands and rub your eyes. In fact, as a general rule don’t do stupid things.

Now, add more wood but always leave a little spot where you can see all the way down to the powder. Soon you’ll have your fire materials nicely stacked up with a teeny weeny “chimney hole” that leads all the way down to a little bit of powder.

Don’t go overboard. A half-teaspoon is way more than a match. A full teaspoon is ample, more is dumb. You’re starting a fire, not fighting zombies.

Now it’s launch time. The secret ingredient is glycerine.

Glycerine: totally harmless.

Unlike potassium permanganate, glycerine is harmless. Don’t worry about children, pets, or hippies getting into it… it’s just lotion. Like all pointless lotions, there are a million variants and you can probably find it at a local pharmacy. What you’re looking for is gel. The link above is about the cheapest I could find; $8 for the bottle which is plenty for a long time. (Note: you can also use ethylene glycol which is car antifreeze. But that’s going to smell worse, can accidentally poison pets, is a fluid that can leak, and you’ll have a bottle of that crap to manage instead of a convenient gel.)

Pop open your bottle of glycerine, aim it down the little chimney you made, and squirt a tablespoon or less onto the powder. Ideally, it’ll hit the powder and ooze off to the side. Don’t overthink it; the chemicals know what to do.

The ensuing exothermic reaction is satisfying. First there’s a brief delay. Then a little smoke. The amount of smoke is dependent on how much of the two reagents you added and how they mixed. If you somehow created a pool of glycerine on top of the powder and there was no way for the glycerine to ooze to the side you’ll get excess smoke… which kinda’ sucks. (I did an experiment with a toilet paper roll and found that out.)

After 3-8 seconds or so it’ll burst into flame. Very hot, impressive, and excellent at starting fires. You’ll get far more “oomph” from this stuff than a matchstick. Think “short term blowtorch”.

So there you have it. I’ve tested it a couple dozen times in my woodstove (the weather sucks lately). It’s easier than matches. With a match I’ve got to build the tinder and fire materials and then shove my arm waaaaaaay in there to get the feeble little match to the bottom; at which point it’s a race to light the paper before it burns my fingertips or goes out. With the “powder at the bottom of the chimney” method I  just slime glycerine from waist height and it all works out.

Also, the delay is handy. I dump the glycerine, close my stove door on unlit wood, shuffle to a comfy seat, and wait. A few seconds later it bursts into fire without any smoke getting into my living room’s air (even a match makes a bit of smoke).

The best part is it looks like I’m a damn wizard. Doing cool shit is worth it, because obviously.

Go ahead and try it yourself.

A.C.

*Editorial Note #1: This post has Amazon links because I did research to select what I wanted and I’ve tested the products listed. If you order anything from Amazon via links on my blog, I get a tiny kickback. It doesn’t cost you a penny and I appreciate it. (Keep me in mind when Christmas shopping season rolls around!)

*Editorial Note #2: Amazon is a corporation and we’re in an age of corporate madness. It’s rare for any corporation to stick to their knitting and Amazon tends to drift between “don’t be evil” and “bend over deplorables”. Living in the hinterland, Amazon is my lifeline. I crave things that are impossible to buy locally. Alas, in 2019 all companies interject politics where it’s not needed. They may someday kick me off their system for “wrongthink”. My compromise is to enjoy it while it lasts but never let the scorpion on the frog’s back. (I mention this because they hosed Claire Wolfe and that was gold plated bullshit.)

Change is simply a fact. It’s neither good nor bad.

I don’t fear change. If change is good, I enjoy it. If it’s bad, I adapt as much as possible. I don’t let it ruin my attitude; why would I?

Roll with it as best you can and you’ll probably do alright. Anything else is counterproductive. To piss and moan about change is to scream at the sky because you hate the color blue. That way lies madness.

I’ve come to believe being mellow about change is uncommon. There’s a great mass of folks who have been trained to fear change. (Perhaps they inherently crave stasis from birth and never learned the difference between what you wish and what you get?)

It goes off the rails once one of these dweebs finds their way to power. They piss and moan that things have changed (or might change). They expend energies trying to stop the world’s turning. They commandeer my resources and mess with my life trying to return to or preserve that which is ever fleeting.

Rather than descend into recent politics (which is rationality free in this age), I’m going to talk about change that happened long ago. What I’m relating are facts from before folks lost their shit and started seeing Trump (or Hillary) lurking under their bed.

Remember, this is all ancient history. There is nobody to blame. It simply… is.

One of my favorite toys was a gyroscope. (Yes, I’m a nerd.) As a gyroscope spins down it begins to wobble. Like this random image I grabbed off the internet:

That’s the “wobbly basketball” from my title. (I never could spin a basketball on my finger. I’m poor material for a “Globe Trotter”.)

You know what else is spinning down? The earth.

You heard me, the earth is not powered by magic. It’s spinning down; though on a scale humans couldn’t recognize with their senses. It’s only detectable through careful math and measurement.

The earth wobbles just like the top in the image. At times the axial tilt is one way. At times it is the other. It’s a cycle. That’s one part of the various eccentricities of the earth’s orbit which are collectively called Milankovitch cycles.

So this is all on massive epic planetary scales that relates to moon formation and stuff right? Wrong. It has (and does) affect humans (on a timescale scale that’s invisible to the uninformed).

About 5,000 years ago, depending on which source you’re reading, the world’s axial tilt cycled from more optimal for the Saharan environment to less optimal. (Optimal in this case as defined by how well it supports human life.)

The big giant dead space on earth we call the Sahara is here now, but it wasn’t the same back then. This overlaps human history. There were paleolithic humans running around a big open savanna that is now totally destroyed.

Let me repeat that. An area the size of the continental US, home to the evolution of our species, was totally, utterly, completely, unreservedly, deeply, and powerfully… destroyed. It no longer supports humans.

It happened just before the Egyptians got into the early dynastic period. The Sahara changed from savanna & steppe to “so inhospitable it’s like it was nuked from space”. (Ironically, the causality of the nuking was orbital situations… the stuff we associate with space.)

Roughly 6,000 years ago about half of what we call the Sahara desert was savanna:

The drier portion of what we now call the Sahara desert was steppe:

Due to orbital eccentricities it turned to dunes:

Compare those photos. The savanna has life. There’s grass, birds, antelope, trees, bushes, etc… It’s not a lush paradise but it’s able to support humanity. It’s not much different than what you might find in Wyoming. The steppe is also habitable. Lots of grass; a good place to raise a horse or a cow or a buffalo. It’s not much different than eastern Montana. Montana and Wyoming are perfectly fine places to live.

Look at the last photo. Dunes. Essentially, bereft of life. I see one bush and a couple tourists… just enough life to snap a photo and then hustle back to the truck and get the back to a place where it rains. The place in that last photo cannot support humans.

Humans lost a big ass piece of habitable earth.

(Source for the map is the NOAA.)

My point isn’t to bore you with talk of orbital mechanics or the prehistory of what existed before the Egyptian empire. My point is that people talk of right now as if we currently live in “the perfect environment”. They seize upon the climate they’re familiar with, the geography they’re comfortable with, the ecology that was outside their window when they were growing up. (I theorize most humans think the right climate is the one they experienced around age 9 to 13. Grow up in a drought and you’ll fret over “too much rain” the rest of your life.)

The planet is not specifically and perfectly optimized for humans. Yet folks imagine our world as some sort of perfect magic incubator meant to support us. It’s not.

If you were building the perfect place for humans you wouldn’t cover 3/4 of it with water. You wouldn’t make most of the water undrinkable with salt. You wouldn’t lock up the poles in ice. (Polar ice wasn’t present throughout the earth’s existence.) Closer in time, you wouldn’t put a giant dead spot right where the species evolved.

Good thing all humans don’t spend their time bitching about what ought to be. If they did, we’d be dead. Many humans adapt, they grow, they live where they can, using what they’ve got, to do the best they can. The rest form a committee to complain about change. Recently they’ve taken to bullying the ones who’re adapting.

There’s a deep fear underlying it all; and a missing sense of scale. The fear is that all change is bad. The lack of scale is that the tiniest change is appalling.

Consider the scale of sea levels. Folks piss and moan about potential sea level changes measured in millimeters. It’s as if you could stand there with a ruler and a change the thickness of a pencil will doom us all. Even the biggest baddest climate change doom predictions ‘aint shit compared to what’s already happened.

Here’s a map of the sunken lost territory of Doggerland:

Roughly a thousand years before the Sahara became incompatible with humans, an area the size of England sank beneath the waves. Humans lived there. We have evidence of that (as we do of pre-desert Sahara). Another big chunk of fertile human habitat that was there in the past and gone in the present. It sure as hell ‘aint a sunk just few millimeters in depth.

It’s part of my thesis that how the world is today is simply one way it can be. It’s not inherently “perfect” or “the best”. It’s just what we’re used to. And the change isn’t measured in millimeters or tenths of a degree.

I think of this sometime when people are publicly emoting over changes in a glacier. If there was no power and prestige attached to fretting over glaciers as they are right now would people be bitching at me that the way they are right now is the perfect condition? Maybe they’d be happy they’re melting. Maybe they’d be bored thinking about it? Glaciers are completely bereft of human habitability. We hate that they’re retreating (at least politically). Would we be happy if they were advancing? Chicago was once under 3,000 feet of impenetrable ice and most of what we call Canada was dead and frozen. Only the remnants remain.

Would we once have desperately wanted to preserve the beautiful glorious natural ice over a dead and uninhabitable Chicago? Does a person in the Sahara right now prefer endless dunes to a past of grasslands and antelope? Do either’s wishes actually matter?

Hard to say. But knowing about past change does calm the fever doesn’t it? Predicted theoretical modeled change somehow emerges as a regulation to limit my choice in dishwasher design and it just seems silly; or at least it doesn’t seem so urgent. Whether we’re pawns to ice ages, Milankovitch cycles, or our tragic insistence on owning cars… change will happen.

“True, social media is impressive. The internet gives us instant access to global knowledge. We are a more tolerant society, at least in theory. But Facebook is not the Hoover Dam, and Twitter is not the Panama Canal.”

Read it all. 

There are occasional bits of knowledge that I want to preserve, as much for myself as for the blog. Cramming them in the sidebars was getting unwieldy so I created a new page; Quotes & Poems. It is there that I’ll paste them, in no particular order.

Odds are you’ve seen everything there in some other venue. If not, read ’em and ponder. There’s some good shit out there and it behooves us to retain it.

I have changed my tagline. It was this:

“If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.“

It’s a wise thought by Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus. He wrote it sometime in the first or second century AD.

It was appropriate when I put it up (in 2016 I think). I posted it early in what turned out to be three years (and counting) of screaming shitstorms. Half the voting populace faced cognitive dissonance and they were not handling it well. It was time to for the wise to withdraw and maintain. I was sure the situation would abate.

I was wrong. They’ve utterly failed to work through it. I didn’t see that coming.

I expected most folks to calm down within a few months. Adults learn to deal with adverse knowledge. We suffer through death of loved ones, divorce, health setbacks, lost dreams, bad decisions, aging, and our own mortality. Who thought so many of our people would go full retard after losing the power their team had held for eight years? I thought losing power (even to someone who’s easily perceived as a jackass) would be pretty minor.

“You’re going to die.”

“Meh.”

“An Orange real estate dude from New York City won the election.”

“Rage, anger, and caterwauling. Impeach, impeach, impeach! Burn the world to ash!”

Nope… didn’t see it coming.

Heck, I could get used to rule by Martian space ninjas faster than many have adapted to the Orange Menace. I’m not saying I’d like to be ruled by Martian space ninjas, only that I couldn’t possibly freak out every damn day over it. One day I’d get out of bed and say “we’re ruled by Martian space ninjas, so what?” Apparently that’s not universal. Who knew? I truly overestimated people’s ability to adapt and grow.

The quote was my gentle reminder that drama llamas are bad for you. They can carry on just fine without your participation and it’s best to keep them at arm’s length. As your mom famously said “if all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you?” (In the last three years that question seems more ominous. Hint: the answer was supposed to be “no mom, I’m not a dumbass”.)

At any rate, keep your head and don’t let the psychos project their turmoil into your soul. Also, I was quoting a man from 2000 years ago (though I don’t speak archaic Greek) in the hopes it would offer perspective. This has happened before. It will happen again. Only the myopic think one election in one of a hundred and fifty countries in one year of several millennia of human existence is the proper and reasonable time to lose your shit.

The new tagline seems appropriate to the late phase of what looks to be a minimum of four years of raging insanity:

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

This is Voltaire. A French dude that had a lot of wise thoughts rolling around in his noggin. He died after the American revolution and (thankfully for him) and shortly before France tried their own version but went off the rails and self-immolated.

The point is, this is a 250 +/- year old quote. It’s not some Millennial nitwit that thinks history started after Pac Man was invented. This isn’t life advice from a limp noodle that can’t shift a manual transmission and has a degree in student loan accumulation. It’s a great thinker from long ago. Perspective.

As the election draws near, and to some degree in a gradual increment for as long as I remember, we’ve been told to believe stupid shit. The more stupid shit the better. We are instructed… we are ordered… to believe stupid shit so hard, so completely, that anyone who doesn’t join us in our belief of stupid shit is a science denying bastard that should be intellectually destroyed if not physically beaten.

There is only one reason to force people to believe stupid shit. It paves the way to make them do stupid shit.

Don’t believe stupid shit. Don’t do stupid shit. Especially, don’t do stupid shit to others. I would use the word “inflict”. Voltaire used the word “atrocity”.

We’re human and therefore sometimes make bad choices. If you’re going to be stupid, maneuver your bad decisions to the harmless and personal. Keep your stupid to yourself. Encapsulate your beloved stupid in your own world; where you can enjoy it in peace. Get a dumb tattoo but get it in a place that’s not going to make you unemployable. Purchase a stupid luxury if you must, but select one that won’t destroy your finances. (Yes to the $3k used motorcycle or the $60 bottle of fine whiskey, no to the $200K useless degree.) Get a new haircut, but don’t cut your dick off. Obsess over Game of Thrones until it’s a long forgotten memory, but get off the couch once in a while. Play Pokemon when you’re 30, but hold down a job too. So long as it’s harmless and personal and not irreparable you’re OK.

If you must be stupid, be stupid safely. Enjoy your stupid for it’s own merits and don’t club other people with your stupid. Other people have their own stupid. They prefer their stupid to your stupid. They’re entitled to fuck up their lives with their own choices. That’s how being an adult works.

The thing to avoid is believing absurdities and then performing atrocities. Vote as you wish. That’s just a decision. Fucking over your friends over who voted for whom is drifting toward atrocity. After the first heady rush of mob fun, you wind up in an echo chamber of like minded fools, and later… many years later… you realize you have no friends at all. You have people who shared the same stupid shit, but they’re not your friend… they’re friends of the stupid shit and not you.

Watch out, for it’s a dangerous thing. It’s insidious and crafty. If Satan is real, he wields stupid shit to get you to do things you ought not be doing. Hint: if you get a deep fiery visceral hatred of somebody over their political choices, you’re on the wrong track. You may already be trained for atrocity. Many a person in 2019 is ready to line “Trumpsters” up against the wall. They ought to read up on guillotines. This has happened before. It’d be nice if it happened again somewhere else and not here.

If you’re going to have regrets, be the old guy who decades earlier got a tattoo of Bill Gates. That’s funny. Don’t be an old guy who decades earlier put Jews on a cattle car. That’s never going to heal.

Don’t do that to yourself.

Voltaire hints at the solution; rationality is part of it. The next time you’re presented with a belief system, ask yourself “could this be stupid shit”? If you explained it to Voltaire (assuming you resurrected him and could speak French) would he look at you like a loon? Do you need detailed convolutions to hold that idea in your heart? Is part of your belief that those who disagree are retrograde troglodyte assholes? That’s a big hint!

If it’s key to your belief that those who hold other preferences are irredeemable, use caution. There’s a good chance you’re dancing on the edge of atrocity. Your human inhibitions against doing evil are wearing thin.

I put this up because there’s no likelihood of a sudden outbreak of rationality in the next 13 months. No hints of comity and good will on the horizon. Those in the throes of cognitive dissonance are speaking in tongues and spitting blood. The rest of us are horrified at the sight and recoil from them all the more. They are in pain but we cannot yet help. You can’t hug a writhing snake.

We would all do well to embrace Voltaire and if not tone it down at least stay away from the mob. Good luck y’all. This has happened before, it’ll happen again, we will all get through this. Maybe even, when it stops writhing and biting itself, we’ll have to hug the snake. If that’s what we need to do… be strong enough to do it when the time comes.

A.C.

[nerd]

Several days ago I switched from http:// to https://. This is supposed to keep monsters at bay. Ideally you didn’t even notice? If it’s an issue, someone tell me.

Also, I put up a privacy policy because someone said I ought to. It’s up on the header. It’s pretty much whatever the hosting software spewed out but it’s there. Something is better than nothing right? If y’all have constructive criticism, hit me in comments or with a private e-mail.

[/nerd]

I’m glad this movie is on its way. Ever since Gran Torino I’ve known Clint Eastwood is the go to guy for a real movie. He makes movies that are more. They’re better. Whatever Hollywood might have been (if anything), it’s just a shell now. It can’t do anything more than excrete an endless litany of whiny propaganda and childlike rehashed superhero CGI fests. Until Hollywood grows a pair, Eastwood has to fill the void.

I’m not going to go over the Jewell story, y’all either know it or can find it online in 10 minutes. What I want to note is that it remains firmly in my memory. When I live through an event of note, I make a point of remembering it. What did it feel like? What did people act like? What was the sequence of events? What was the mood in the streets? What can I learn from this?

It’s important to remember. If you lack memory, you lack a frame of reference. Without experience and history you’re a naive dipshit. You’ll fall for the next wave of bullshit because you didn’t remember the last one. There’s a reason kids drift from kindergarten to defaulting on college loans without learning fuck-all about history. It’s because people that know history are a pain in the ass. They’re a wee bit harder to buffalo. Nobody wants that. Our society doesn’t want people who say “I’ve seen this shit before and know roughly how it’ll play out”.

I remember Richard Jewell. He’s history from my own personal timeline. He was just a regular guy and I saw as he was crushed by monsters.

I remember watching it play out in the news. I remember when the press turned on a honest if a bit dull guy. A basic mall cop that did the right thing. They turned on him like rabid dogs. They did it so fast! They did it en masse. They hammered him like a generic fellow with a bad haircut was a supervillain, literally Hitler, and Satan all rolled into one.

The poor bastard didn’t have a chance. He didn’t see it coming. He’d trusted them. He was innocent and assumed everyone was as moral as he was. The press turned from “salute the hero” to “burn the witch” in a heartbeat. I remember it as just a few days. Certainly it took less than a week before Jewell was essentially friendless.

I remember too that I couldn’t understand why people were “mobbing up”. It didn’t make sense to me even as it was happening. I remember reading the news (back when newspapers were a thing) thinking “this sounds like bullshit, why am I the only guy that thinks this is bullshit?”

The press and the FBI wrecked an innocent man right in front of our eyes. This isn’t some ancient history, colonial peoples, old timey thing. It was just a few election cycles ago. There was TV reporting, newspapers (now gone), and even internet news. This wasn’t a far removed alien society.

Keep that in mind.

Witch burners are among us. Folks lemming up and run for the cliff. The inevitable half apology, if it happens at all, never heals the damage. “Mistakes were made.” “Now is a time to move on.” Perhaps a lawsuit and some money changes hands… and the witch burners immediately forget. They empty their mind and prepare for the next round of mayhem… which they’ll perform with the righteous smile of people without doubt.

A crowd is always one step from a mob. Never trust the press or government. Being innocent is almost entirely unrelated to whether you will be treated as such. These are key concepts to keep in mind in 2019. We’re in the third year of a cognitive dissonance shitstorm and witch burners are throwing tantrums everywhere you look. It behooves us all to be mindful. Watch your six and avoid crowds. There will be plenty of innocent victims, don’t be one of them.

I’m very happy Clint Eastwood is making this movie.

Hat tip to Ace of Spades.

While waiting for them to arrive, I examined my battered old checkbook. (Who writes checks in 2019? People buying firewood!) I’d written a check to my old firewood guy, the one who’s number I’d lost. A year ago, I’d paid $350 for 2 cords.

Soon I’d pay $300 for what was purported to be 2 cords. Is that a deal? Only if it’s true, which I doubted.

Last year’s delivery was rough. It came late, when it was raining and very cold. He dumped it on my lawn just in time for it to freeze to the grass and get covered with snow. It took me probably 5 weeks (working in dribs and drabs) to stack about half of it. Some of it I had to break free of the ground/ice with a sledge. (A seriously shit task!) The other half I used right from the pile to my woodstove. It was also split large. About 15% I had to resplit myself before it would fit in our stove. It was a huge amount of work. Folks have no idea buying firewood still means huge labor.

On the other hand, I wasn’t ripped off. I got a full 2 cords. Not a bit less. I measured it as I stacked & used it. I value honesty.

Stacking this new delivery meant my weekend just got booked up. If I went beast mode and powered though I’d be done but suffering by Monday.

They arrived on time. (My other wood guy procrastinates anywhere from a week to a month.)

A young adult / teenage boy hopped out of a battered truck. I shook his hand. I was wondering what it would be like to meet someone who only communicates via F***book. He seemed normal.

I eyed his trailer. “Your trailer is not hydraulic dump.” I asked. “How are you going going to unload it?”

He shrugged, “By hand I guess.” Then he started backing the trailer toward my woodshed. Ugh, I reached for my gloves. Might as well help. Two people meant I’d be at it for a while.

A teenage girl emerged from the truck. She was wearing flip flops. Bad idea. Sooner or later you’ll drop a 30 pound block on your toe. I assumed she’d stand around playing with a phone and accomplish nothing.

Another guy emerged from the truck. An older guy. The kid’s dad? He wasn’t driving. That usually means a revoked license from various DUI convictions.

He had boots and gloves. So did the both the teenage boy. Things were looking up.

I made a snap decision.

“So long as we’re unloading by hand, lets stack it?” This didn’t gain traction. Tossing wood willy nilly is faster than stacking.

“I’ll add a $40 tip.”

Bingo! Soon the four of us were stacking as fast as we could go. Burning $40 was hard on my skinflint soul but it was worth it for 2 cords stacked! Also, the girl worked just as hard as the rest of us. Excellent!

I have a woodstove. I need fuel 16″+/- long and split small enough to fit in the firebox door. This was the norm for generations. Most residential fuelwood burned in the last century in North America was about that size.

Despite generations of standardization, the situation changed a few decades ago. Possibly due to insurance concerns(?), people got into external wood boilers. Boilers can handle larger wood. Folks load their beefy personal incinerators with a heap of wet, frozen, chunky wood once a day. It smolders a lot because it’s not really stacked as a fire or maintained by a human. Smart folks set up boilers to be loaded with a skid steer. That means they can handle even bigger stuff because the puny human is taken out of the equation. They’ll shove frozen chunks of green wood the size of a city fire hydrant into a burn chamber. It’ll burn… eventually. Folks love it because it keeps messy wood out of the house.

Boilers also the benefit from hydronic transfer of heat. Hot fluid is piped directly to the slab of your house (which was poured around hydronic hose). In a properly built house it’s cozy. My house isn’t well suited to a boiler. It’s old, decrepit, and has a real basement. I have a regular stove that makes warm air in the hose and not warm water at the end of buried plumbing.

There are pros and cons. It’s messy to have wood in the house but nothing beats the ambiance of a real fire. I’d hate going out at dark thirty to hurl cold log chunks into a metal box but I’m always fretting over fuel quality (boiler folks can and do burn anything burnable). To each his own.

(*Virtually all boilers cease to function when the power is out. They need electricity to operate the pump and electronics. Most pellet stoves have a similar dependency. My woodstove will heat just fine without power.)

EPA regulations recently gut punched the boiler market. New models produce less smoke, cost a mint, and nobody buys them. (Which I suspect was the whole point.) As with other over-regulated situations (like car owners in Cuba) folks prefer maintaining old boilers to buying new. (Assuming proper maintenance: boilers last decades and stoves last forever.)

The relevance is that we were unloading big beefy wood meant for a boiler. Some of it won’t fit in my stove. I explained this and started throwing extremely large chunks off to the side. I’ll have to split them myself before they’re useful. They followed suit but I think a good third of the stack is too large for our stove. I’ll “reprocess” as needed. More labor! But I knew this. I’m committed to avoid “best” becoming the enemy of “adequate”.

Soon we were done. Four of us had made short work of the trailer. It wasn’t two cords… which is what I’d guessed.

I took the kid (who seemed to be in charge for some reason) aside to talk wood. I didn’t want to embarrass him in front of his girlfriend (?) and dad (?).

“Look, a cord of wood is 4′ x 4′ x 8′. You promised two cords.”

He nodded. He was looking nervously at the checkbook I was holding in my hand.

“If you stack 4′ tall and 8′ long that’s 32 square feet. That’s called a ‘face cord’. Stack 3 face cords and you’ve got 96 square feet.”

He looked like math was physically painful to him.

“That woodshed”, I pointed at the woodshed, “is 16′ long, if you stack it 6′ high that’s also 96 square feet.”

He looked like he was about to pass out. Lectures about the quadratic equation before he dropped out(?) of high school had scarred him.

“See the pile on the other side of the woodshed?” I pointed to the other side, where I’d stacked my own wood. “That’s 16′ long and at least 6′ high. That’s a cord… that’s a full cord.”

He glanced at the row we’d just stacked. It was somewhat less… not even a full row. There was also a crotch high pyramid of “too big to use until I split it again” wood by the door.

“That pyramid will complete the row and then some… but not enough to make a whole ‘nother row of its own.”

He looked confused. I felt like the professor telling Gilligan to quit breaking a radio I’d made out of coconuts.

“Your trailer didn’t come here with two full cords of firewood.”

He looked ill.

“But I’m sure you don’t stack wood very often, so you don’t know how much you’ve really got.”

He smiled weakly. (He definitely knows how much he’d arrived with. I’m just rare among customers in that I own a tape measure and know how to use it.)

“I’m sure you did your best and I appreciate y’all stacking it with me. That’s makes life a lot easier on me.”

I cut the check. $300 for the wood and $40 for the tip. Every penny I promised. Paying for about 3/4 of what I’d been promised.

“Here,” I handed him the check. “I’m paying the full amount, but just beware, you’re not selling two full cords unless you heap up the load on that trailer. Flat isn’t enough.”

The kid looked like he had no Earthly idea what I’d said. He probably didn’t. I mihgt as well have been speaking in Latin. He was friendly, hard working, and blanked out.

I wrote his number down. He promised if I called again he’d get smaller 16″ length wood and have a fully loaded trailer. I’m sure he intends that my next order would be perfect and full. I know, should the time come, he absolutely won’t do any better. Math is hard. Shortcuts are easy. Most customers don’t have a tape measure.

After they left I basked in the glory of my woodpile. I’ve got 4 cords stacked and a heap to split that’ll add up to maybe another 1/3 to 1/2 cord. It’s a great start (especially for September). I’ll surely accomplish more and might enter winter with an adequate (dare I hope for generous?) supply.

A.C.

P.S. Life is an economics experiment, is it not? Last year’s delivery was the full volume but I worked my ass off. This delivery was 3/4 the amount for ten bucks less. It was stacked (mostly) in half an hour. So which is better? I’m only one man. I think I did OK.