Month: September 2024

13SEP2024 – Quote of the Day

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The Last Rose of Summer

‘Tis the last rose of summer,

Left blooming alone;

All her lovely companions

Are faded and gone;

No flower of her kindred,

No rose-bud is nigh,

To reflect back her blushes

Or give sigh for sigh!

 

I’ll not leave thee, thou lone one.

To pine on the stem;

Since the lovely are sleeping,

Go, sleep thou with them;

Thus kindly I scatter

Thy leaves o’er the bed,

Where thy mates of the garden

Lie scentless and dead.

 

So soon may I follow,

When friendships decay,

And from love’s shining circle

The gems drop away!

When true hearts lie withered,

And fond ones are flown,

Oh! who would inhabit

This bleak world alone?

 

Thomas Moore

 

 

I Lost My Post

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I had an idea for a post and I wrote about six hundred words.  But by four hundred I was starting to dislike the idea.  I walked away from it for a while.  In fact, I watched a movie (“The Boston Strangler”) and by the time I got back I erased it.  It was too much.

So here I am at the eleventh hour (literally) and I’ve got to come up with an idea.

I’ll just give a slice of life.  I had to travel to the enclaves of blue privilege in the People’s Republic.  I was in Wellesley and Newton Mass.  Now I haven’t been in these Boston suburbs in years but they’re just as hilarious and nauseating as ever.  Now it’s been a year or two since I last saw a “Black Lives Matter” lawn sign but on one street there were four.  And then I looked at the bumper stickers on the BMW’s and every third one had the “We’re Not Going Back” sign or “My Body, My Choice.”  Now this was in the early afternoon so most working age people were at work but I never saw so many dour-looking old waspy females in one place.  It was like some kind of Katherine Hepburn impersonator’s convention.  I flushed two of them when my GPS sent me down a dead-end road.  When they saw my non-BMW car coming down their little Cul-de-Sac of Lost Souls, they looked like they wanted to call the authorities to put a stop to these riff-raff spewing carbon dioxide and testosterone in their little bubble.

At the offices I stopped in everyone seemed sedate and anti-depressed.  No emotions seemed to intrude and no visible life detracted from an air of propriety. Everyone followed the lines and spoke in low tones and wore the right clothes.  It was pretty creepy.

When I headed out, I took Route 9 west and at some point (maybe Natick or Framingham, not sure which) I stopped at a Dunkin Donuts.  And the people were among the living again.  Now they were still New Englanders which isn’t normal people for sure but they weren’t the pod people I had just escaped from.  They were rude, sarcastic and in a bad mood, in other words the typical Dunkin Donuts staff.  But they didn’t creep me out.  And as I drove along, I noticed plenty of Harris/Walz signs but not a single BLM sign.

Rich progressives are an entirely different life form.  They’re tucked away in their cocoon and they have no intention of ever coming out.  Their hermetically sealed world is completely shielded from Haitian refugees eating cats and geese and more importantly impervious to people who don’t think Trump is a monster.  They expect the world to one day consist of nothing but them.  How this is supposed to happen they don’t worry about.  But to that end they and all their friends send people like Elizabeth Warren to Washington to make sure that nothing ever interferes with their cloistered little existence and the measures needed to keep it that way.  It was an instructive day.  It reminded me who we work for.

Updated:

Milo Mindbender commented:

I also drift into an occasional bubble of liberalism, and they believe in free expression, but can’t contemplate someone not agreeing whole heatedly with their viewpoint. It’s not that they want to stop opposing views, it’s they can’t believe anyone doesn’t see the world exactly as they do.
This is the same thing when Martha’s vineyards declared itself a sanctuary city, until refugees showed up, then they used the authorities to relocate them just as fast as they could before it effected their real estate values.
I hope they get a real eye opener in November, and the ballot exceeds the cheat by such a margin that there is no way to consider it legitimate with a straight face.

Were or Weren’t Transgender

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Back in the stone age a boy in Brooklyn could buy a spaldeen (a Spalding rubber ball) for a quarter.  If that was too expensive, he could buy the lesser quality pensie pinkie for three nickels.  And with such a valuable artifact you could play handball, Chinese handball, hit-the penny, stoopball, punchball, slapball or sewer cover baseball for weeks.  Of course, if you used it for stickball, it would only last a matter of days before it split in half but the point is you really got your money’s worth out of this simple toy.

While looking for some toys for the kids Camera Girl informed me that a spaldeen now costs $7.88.  Of course, now it’s called a Spalding High Bounce Ball.  So that’s more than a 3,000% increase in about sixty years.  That sounds absurd.  And yet when I think of the return on investment compared to a gaming system that kids use today, I tend to think that this humble toy from the neolithic is infinitely better.

When I think of the hours we spent outside playing and fighting and running around and meeting new kids at the playground and thinking up new rules to make the games work better in the far from perfect environment of the street or the sidewalk or the public-school playground I know for a fact that we had much, much more stimulation, exercise and just plain fun than kids today.  There were relatively few fat kids back then and real obesity was unheard of.  How could you get fat when we were always running?  Baseball, softball, basketball, football, even street hockey were played in their proper season.  And tag, freeze tag, hide and go seek, ringalevio and a thousand variations that we made up filled the afternoon hours after school.  And we were always walking to go everywhere in our environment.  We could walk to Manhattan Beach (which is in Brooklyn) or see the fishing boats in Sheepshead Bay or walk down Ocean Parkway to Avenue U or Kings Highway to see a movie.  We walked for miles and we rode our bikes everywhere.

But what can the kids do today.  If you live in the suburbs there may not even be any sidewalks and riding a bicycle on country roads is sometimes very hazardous and so the kids have to be brought to organized sports like soccer or maybe baseball but organized sports don’t take up much time and to be honest, organized sports isn’t as much fun.

I guess what is needed is a common space like a big school yard that can be available to all the kids in a town with only enough adult supervision to keep really bad things like drugs and actual gang activity out but allowing the kids to develop their own hierarchy and split up into whatever groups they see fit.  A baseball diamond, a football field, some basketball hoops, a handball court or two and a little pavement would produce an environment that would allow kids to invent some games that could keep them playing and fighting for hours.

Maybe that would give them so much human interaction that they wouldn’t have the time to stare at TikTok, grow obese and worry whether they were or weren’t transgender.

Update:

War Pig commented:

Playing tackle football with 20 kids on a side. Playing baseball with 8 outfielders. Riding bikes to the park. Staying out from breakfast to street lights coming on with a break for lunch and supper. Skinned knees and Bactine. Playing in warm rains. Mud puddles. Drinking water from a garden hose or pumping it out of the well. Soaking watermelons in a net in the well to chill them, then eating them and having seed spitting contests. Hypnotizing chickens on the farm. Fishing in the creek and bringing home the “keepers” for supper. Gigging frogs for fried frog legs. Hot dog roasts over an open fire and toasting marshmallows on a stick. Climbing trees. Picking wild berries.

Me and my brother working on our paternal grandparents’ farm. We worked like clydesdales and ate like them, too. Stayed skinny, even on mamaw’s high-fat, high-calorie farm cooking.

Kids are missing out on a lot now. Fresh air, minor injuries, the odd bee sting, running and laughing just for the heck of it.

Damn, we had it good.

Master Diver replied:

And yet we lived!
(With the occasional application of Mercurochrome or Merthiolate!)

XXX Commented:

God those were the days.One other thing making ramps 5 feet tall and jumping like Evel Knievel, We built one once in Quantico Va. 5 feet tall and put it on the edge of a 6 foot drop off and got the guy every one hated to be the first, liked to have killed him but we had a laugh and moved on. I sometimes wonder if he ever got up, oh well one less momma’s boy.

TomD commented:

We had the woods with the abandoned German POW camp in it, the trees, a rock quarry where the Germans were worked. A bunch of us would be walking up Roswell Rd north of Atlanta carrying our .22’s to sit at the top of the quarry and shoot snakes. 5 or 6 kids with rifles on Roswell Rd now would bring SWAT and CNN.

I once lifted a stick of dynamite from a county work truck and worked on ways to set pieces of it off using the real M80’s.

Dodge ball and the other games. You’re right, no fat kids then. I can’t remember anyone being fat, young or old. Constantly on the move. Crayfish in the creek. Fistfights where no one was really hurt other than feelings.

Tom’s World – 09SEP2024 – Museum Aircraft – 1

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Tom | Flickr

TomD

Tired of statues and would like to jump to another topic: museum aircraft

Most, but not all, of these shots were taken at the US Naval Air Museum, on board NAS Pensacola. I’ve been to the Smithsonian, Wright Patterson and scores of lesser museums but this museum is right at the top, world wide. The Blue Angels are based out of Pensacola, so you’ll see a lot of that. The Naval Museum concentrates on Naval stuff as you may suspect but there’s other noteworthy stuff there too, like a Messerschmitt Me 262 one of the very, very few still in existence. The ME 262 was the first ever jet to be used in combat.

 

This Navy NC-4 was the first aircraft to cross the Atlantic. Unlike Lindberg, it wasn’t solo and it wasn’t non stop. But it was in 1919 when most aircraft had max ranges in the hundred mile range or so. This by the way, the actual aircraft, not just the aircraft type. Talk about a beautiful restoration.

Corsair: The museum tends to be crowded with stuff just everywhere competing for visual attention. I shot this picture and was looking at it wondering what could be done with it and somehow ended up here.

An F18 outside one of the museum buildings.

00683: A B25 Mitchell bomber. This was principally an Army aircraft but the B25 won fame in early 1942 when the famous raid on Tokyo was launched from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet.

A little humorsep

My Last Presidential Debate

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I wasn’t going to watch the debate because tomorrow is going to be an early trip and a long day so I can’t stay up late but then I said, “Ah, the hell with it.  I’ll watch the sideshow.”

Well, she wasn’t Biden.  She could string together sentences.  And of course, the questions from ABC were almost all slanted against Trump and for Harris.  But basically, it was a free for all with both of them hammering away at each other.  Parts of it were somewhat entertaining but I wouldn’t call it very decisive.

I like the fact that Trump basically stuck to using a very large part of his time hammering her on the border and the economy.  Those are the bread-and-butter topics that people really care about and I liked his closing statement where he made the main point; that all the things that Harris says she’s going to do could have been done at any time in the last three years.  But they weren’t done.

So, does this debate help Trump or Harris more?  I guess it marginally helps Harris because she didn’t stand there like an idiot in the way her boss did a couple of months ago.  She’ll get a bounce because she’s proven she’s not brain dead and because the press will claim she was brilliant.  But really this election is a referendum on the economy and the Border.

Neither of those issues work in Kamala Harris’s favor and talking about them isn’t good for her case.  Now it’s entirely possible that America will vote for Harris.  And it is possible that even if they vote for Trump that the powers that be will print off a million ballots in Philadelphia and Detroit.  So maybe this whole exercise was pointless anyway.  But it did give us a chance to see Trump and Harris side by side.  I’ll have to say I do enjoy his show.  He is unique.  He’s crazy as a loon but he’s a hell of a lot more fun than anything else going on in this country.  He’s got energy and he’s got flair.

Well, that’s my take.  Was it worth it?  Nah.  I should’ve written about something fun.  Basically, I can’t wait for this election to be over.  It’s like some kind of boring speech you have to sit through while waiting for a game to start.  What happens after November will be a new world.  All the make-believe will be over and we can start thinking about the here and now.  Maybe my focus will be on hoarding things that won’t be available in the future.  Or maybe it’s time to start working on my do-it-yourself skills for when I won’t be able to afford the costs of craftsmen and the like.  Or maybe I’ll concentrate on fiction writing and leave the punditry to Tucker Carlson and his buddies.

But whatever else I’ll be doing; I think I’ve watched my last presidential debate.  I mean, what’s the point?  If these same people are put back in the White House after four years of this then I’m in the wrong country.