Month: May 2022

A Great Victory for the Muse of Home Repair

photog Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner ,

Forsaking my usual patron deity, the great goddess Atrophia, I made a burnt offering of 2X4s and a mitre box at the altar of  Δόμος Επίδοσις, The Muse of Home Improvement.  The smoke was propitious.  An eagle flew from left to right across the sky and dropped a 3/8″ hex head socket at my feet which I took as a sign from Zeus that all was well.  Filling my chariot with lag bolts, drill bits, pry bars, extension cords, two throwing spears and a two-ply bull-hide shield I thundered onto the plain of battle prepared to perform mighty deeds of valor.

My enemies fled before the baleful fire that flashed from my eyes.  I grabbed my weapons, jumped from the chariot and attacked on the run.  Within an hour I was victorious.  All my enemies were vanquished and I raised a trophy of the spoils of war.  Epic bards and rhapsodes will sing the praises of this day for millennia to come. Go pound sand, Achilles.

Translation:

That fence post support worked like a charm.  The post is straight and solid as a rock.  And the steel should last long after I’m mulch in the ground.  But there was no parade.  No hecatombs  burned in my honor.  Sometimes it barely pays to be a demi-god.

Silly Season 2022 – The Search for Intelligent Life on Capitol Hill

photog Current Events, Science, Science Fiction / Fantasy ,

As I reported yesterday summer has come to Dunwich and right on cue the media “silly season” erupts into life.  That’s right UFOs are back in the headlines.

“The House Intelligence Committee will hold the first open hearing on UFOs in more than 50 years.”

With apologies to the author of this article and in sympathy with all of my fellow science fiction devotees having the US Congress investigate UFOs is fraught with existential peril.  Imagining Nancy Pelosi presiding over a debate as to whether evidence of hypersonic maneuverability is terrestrial or extra-terrestrial without her invoking either Steven Spielberg or George Lucas seems impossible.  Maybe there are a half dozen congress critters with enough intelligence to weigh the kind of evidence that the Defense Department, the Intelligence Agencies and the Space Force will bring to the table but they will be drowned out by barnyard noises emanating from the majority of the denizens of the House of Representatives.  Imagine AOC and the rest of the “Squad” jumping to the defense of the little green men based on their evidence from the movie, “E.T., The Extraterrestrial” that government intent toward aliens is racist (or at least species-ist if I may coin the term).

The author finishes off this article with a demand for Washington to come clean on all their secret knowledge about UFOs.

“Top line: We don’t know what the most extraordinary “other” bin UFOs are, who or what is operating them, what their intentions might be, or how they operate. Maybe they are many different things with many different origins and intentions. Regardless, science demands we find out. This is no longer the early Cold War. The public can handle this subject with the seriousness it deserves. So also does our national security demand as much. Again, if another nation figures out how to replicate the way these most extraordinary UFOs operate before the U.S. does, we’ll have a problem.”

Well, we can’t even get the FBI and the courts to stop arresting Americans for trumped up charges of insurrection.  If the government actually had proof of extra-terrestrial life and technologies what are the chances that the CIA and the Defense Department would tell us the truth?  Slim and none would be the optimistic answer.

Luckily we can fall back on a very important source of information on UFO research.  I leave it for your consideration

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xngFNtzMf3s

 

Summer All in a Day

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner ,

Someone here in Dunwich flipped the Winter/Summer switch and now instead of shivering under a mountain of blankets at night I’m throwing off the sheet and turning on the ceiling fan.  Well, that’s as it should be.  Summer is brief and anything in the eighties is okay by me.

Camera Girl and I have been planting vegetables and a few flowers.  But today I finally ordered some thornless red raspberry plants for her.  She is a thrifty woman which I guess I should be grateful for but sometimes it paralyzes her if prices outrage her internal value measuring mechanism.  Somehow, she thinks people shouldn’t charge money for plants.  When this hesitancy goes on for too long, I step in and buy whichever choice I think she’d like to have the most.  Otherwise, she’d end up missing the season and be unhappy which would go against my internal value measuring mechanism.

Currently I’m studying the vagaries of lag bolt, pilot hole diameter as it relates to the designation of hard vs. soft wood.  I have been collecting the hardware I need for the latest battle in the war on decay.  Current my side is losing.  If the rain holds off tomorrow, I will venture out with sledge hammer, drill, hex driver and steely determination to set the world straight again.  Or at least several fence posts.

I consider this foray a proof of concept.  If successful, this will pave the way for a permanent solution to my fence problems.  If it fails, I must contemplate drastic measures involving steel posts and concrete which would be expensive and extremely time consuming.  But, ever the optimist, I refuse to even consider the possibility of defeat.

Camera Girl has been spotting critters around the yard.  She and the hounds have cornered some frogs and toads.  And yesterday she spotted a snake in her garden.  Her description was puzzling.  It was about a foot long and relatively thin but she said it was solid yellow.

We had a complete lack of garter snakes in the yard last year which was highly unusual.  I theorized that a warming event in the middle of the winter might have awakened the garter snakes and caused them to fail to survive the subsequent cold snap that followed.  Anyway, Camera Girl’s description sounded like an extremely unusual color and pattern for a garter.  I speculated that it was some kind of aberrantly light phase of the brown snake of which we have a generous number here.  I claimed skepticism of her description but she reminded me that I’m color blind so I deferred to her chromatic superiority.  I will search out this strange creature at some point.

So, I’m mostly enjoying the Summer of Dopey Joe.  Despite suffering through the annoyance of dealing with unreliable appliances from China and shortages of spare parts due to the “supply chain breakdown” I am still mostly cheerful.  Of course, if rolling blackouts become the outrage of the month in August that would tick me off.  But it would also give us a shot at winning some of the New England states in November.  And that would be an especially sweet cherry on top of the schadenfreude parfait.  There are hints of congressional and senate seats that might flip.  These would be transitory gains.  New England is permanently blue.  The people live at the center of the Cathedral.  But if just for a moment, as some sort of involuntary reflex, they vote for a Republican it would be a barometer of the depths of incompetence of the Biden Administration and a harbinger of disaster for the Democrats in 2024.

And that’s something I always want to celebrate.  Now where is that sunscreen?

The Five Stages of Grief – Part 1

photog Current Events ,

Lately, it’s almost as if every instinct and conscious decision that the Biden Administration exercises comes back to produce a rolling disaster that then must be explained as a random act of chance.  Nothing is ever Joe’s fault.  Think about it.  Something as basic as baby formula is unavailable in the supposed center of the global empire.  The fact that that doesn’t set off warning bells shows us just how feckless these people are.  Working women are both one of the Democrats core constituencies and also the group of mothers least likely to breast feed their infants for any extended time.  Panicking that group into thinking that their babies might starve is an unforced error of monumental stupidity.

And that is just the emergency du jour.  Tomorrow it might be organ theft gangs harvesting eyes and the day after that peanut butter shortages.  In essence it’s just comprehensive incompetence across the whole administration.  But that phenomenon has to be traced back to the source.  I’ll have to give Obama credit for telling us not to underestimate Biden’s ability to screw things up.

People say that the five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.  I think I have detected these stages in news coverage of the Biden Administration.  The Left is grieving for the loss of Joe FDR Biden’s New Deal Moment, the Great Reset, the Build Back Better Rip-Off.  If you think back to last year I remember when prices started to rise and the headlines were full of denial.  Do you remember how they claimed that the Fourth of July cookout was something like $1.47 cheaper than the year before?  And then there was the meme about inflation being temporary.

Let’s see what we have for anger.  Maybe that’s when everybody on the Left was getting mad about “Let’s Go Brandon.”  And I guess all that talk about a “Winter of Death for the Unvaccinated.”  That was pretty angry.

Lately I’m seeing a lot of bargaining in the articles.  A lot of it is in the vein of “If the Democrats do this and this and if somehow these other things happen, maybe the midterms won’t be so bad.  The latest is “If the Russian people overthrow Putin, then gasoline prices will come down.”

And just today I think I caught a good strong whiff of stage four, depression.  These have centered around the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.  Even the anger at the Right on this issue can’t disguise the depression that exists on the Left over this defeat.  But I’m looking forward to a good bit more depression in the weeks and months ahead.

Looking ahead I’m contemplating what a Politico headline will look like when they’ve reached the acceptance stage.  And when will that happen.  Maybe it will coincide with the day after Election Day.  Would it feature a Banner headline reading “Let’s Go Brandon”?  Or maybe it will skip the euphemism and read “F*** Joe Biden” instead.  Personally, for the sake of decorum the former will do for me.

So, I’ll continue to monitor the headlines to see if my hypothesis stands up to scrutiny.