Category: OCF

08JUL2023 – This ‘N’ That

photog Current Events, OCF
The Raven is a Wicked Bird

Yesterday marks a minor milestone.  Last night I posted the last of the 2022 Yellowstone Expedition photographs.  Now, this is a relative statement.  That was a first pass.  Also I have some flower photos that I’m holding off until I can identify them (hopefully).  But interstingly it marks about a year since the actual trip took place.  From now on the photo of the day will be a bit more prosaic and local.

Today is a smaller milestone.  For the last eight days I’ve been working on a very cramped schedule.  Parties, grandchildren and minor missions have prevented me from keeping up with the website.  Today is the capstone of this run.  I’ll be out of pocket and out of state for the whole day and even a part of the night.  Which means this site will be destitute.  I don’t even have the photo of the day in queue.

Horrible things could happen today.  Nuclear Armageddon, fluoridation of the water supply, even adoption of the metric system could happen behind my back and no one would ever know because I would not have recorded it.  Ah, well.

But rejoice!  Tomorrow is another day.  And I vow to do better.

Honestly it is the Silly Season and there is no real news.  Or at least the news agencies aren’t reporting anything worth reading.  Sure, there’s some war news and stupid celebrity hijinks.  And there’s always the government taking something away from us but we can wait a week before hearing that.  Even I can’t summon the usual outrage at the moment.

But the good news for us that live on the Arctic Tundra is that right now the days are long and nights are short and the air is hot and our blood is warm.  Even old codgers feel the irritability that tells us we’re still somewhat alive.  We can smell the roses, toss around a baseball with a youngster and appreciate God’s Green Earth for at least one more day.

So with your permission, I’ll exit stage left, pursued by a bear and see you a little later.

03JUL2023 – A Plea for Leniency

photog Current Events, OCF ,

This holiday “weekend” has been chaotic and fragmented by forces personal and institutional.  Saturday and Sunday were large family gatherings during which no usable amount of website work was possible.  And that is as it should be.  But just to make sure I was completely ineffective I’ve been wasting my time trying to figure out why the new Google Analytics (GA4) data was so awful.  I could see the “Realtime” pageviews but the reports that approximate the old ones were blank.  Well after hours and hours of horsing around on-line trying to tweak them into compliance with my needs, I find out the real problem is they’re time delayed.  The results can be hidden for up to eight hours.  How useless is that?  Oh well.  Now I have a completely new reason for hating Google.  They’re probably trying to save money.  The cheap bastards!

Well, France is burning.  This must be their Summer of George moment.  It sounds like their police haven’t taken a knee yet.  Who knows?  Maybe they’ll bite the bullet and fight the war they’ve created for themselves within their own country.  Or maybe not.  It’s an interesting moment.  Macron is a useless weasel.  In point of fact, he probably gives useless weasels a bad name and they’d like to disown him in order to get out from under the cloud of revulsion that he generates around him.  I wonder if this will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and throws France into the arms of the Right Wing.  After all, it’s a long summer left and things may get much, much uglier before it’s over.

It looks like Elon Musk is serious about turning Twitter into a legitimate town square.  Crippling the Big Brother bots that scrape the site for instances of bad think is very encouraging.  If instead of 900,000,000 tweets being scraped a day it’s 8,000 well, that’s a reduction of about 99.999%.  Not bad!  Seriously, he’s got a tiger by the tail and they’ll surely make his life hell but at least he’s putting up a fight.  For the first time Twitter is somewhat fun.  I even see some of the “bad thinkers” rattling around in there.  It’s down-right egalitarian.

On the local front, Dunwich has been inundated with a Noachian flood that is even frightening the fish in the local swamp.  I was trying to imagine how I would get pairs of the various species, male and female into the trunk of my car but I kept worrying about the poor transgender salamanders that might be discriminated against in the mini-port-i-sans that I would create out of household items found in Camera Girl’s recycle bin.  I was thinking that the dairy creamer bottle would be best.  I was trying to figure out what would be the internationally recognizable symbols for male salamanders and female salamanders to adorn the bathrooms.  Possibly accentuated eyelashes for the girls?  It’s so complicated.  But regardless we are very waterlogged at this point.  The vegetable garden hasn’t given up the ghost yet but the zucchini does appear slightly bilious.

Recently Camera Girl has placed a sign in the kitchen that declares, “IT IS WHAT IT IS.”  Apparently one of her sisters believes that this is one of her favorite expressions.  Now, for years Camera Girl has claimed that she invented “JUST DO IT” well before Nike trademarked that saying.  Well, I’m a little dubious of her claims and those of her nuclear family.  But looking at that sign every time I range into the kitchen I am becoming more of a fan.  I am surrounded by faits accomplis everywhere I look.  Let’s face it, almost every enterprise and government jurisdiction is a racket or a grift.  Being outraged is a waste of time and just keeping track of them is a full-time job.  Saying, “it is what it is,” is another way of resetting the situation and moving onto something more profitable.

So, most of the time I don’t bother looking for the articles decrying some outrage.  Instead, I look for one pointing to something practical like joining a boycott or finding an alternative platform for something or supporting someone who leans our way.  But I most enjoy punishing my enemies.  I’ll do far more to see Mitt Romney primaried than supporting some moderate who “will get the independent vote.”  But coming to terms with how bad things really are is liberating and it’s healthy.  Lately I feel a lot less down.  So, “it is what it is.”

I’ve got some work on both Tuesday and Thursday and an out of state trip on Saturday so there will continue to be a slightly lower throughput.  But next week is the new regime.  And I promise to do better.  So, hang in there.

30JUN2023 – OCF Update – This’N’That

photog Current Events, OCF ,

Now things are getting into the summertime social season.  We have two family parties this weekend and then Fourth of July and on and on.  This afternoon Camera Girl spotted a big painted turtle on the grass.  Turns out it was laying eggs so being the natural historian that she is she collected them and is incubating them in a sphagnum moss set up.  Apparently, they’ll be a science experiment for Princess Sack of Potatoes and then they be released back into the swamp to maintain the delicate balance between the mold and the mildew that we all depend on here in Dunwich.

I spent some more time struggling with the great GA4 project.  Half of the websites and YouTube videos are people cussing about how much worse it is than its predecessor.  Well, what can you do?

I read a bunch of critiques of the SCOTUS decision on affirmative action.  Even the Z-Man’s Friday podcast was about it.  I think they mostly reflect the feeling that this will be like pulling teeth to get the colleges to obey the law on this.  But my way of looking at it is it’s a starting point for the red state governments to force the colleges in their jurisdictions to obey.  None of the Ivy League schools will.  Their state governments will work with them to ignore the Supreme Court using obfuscation.  Well, let them.  I went to a state college and they could teach science and engineering the same as Harvard and Yale.  Maybe better.  No dirt people are going to get in the Ivy League schools so who cares anyway.

The other interesting case was the Supreme Court once again overruling Colorado in its insistence that people working in the wedding industry must celebrate same sex marriages.  That poor wedding cake baker had the Supreme Court find in his favor and then Colorado brought another case against him, this time over some trans-nonsense.  I predict Colorado will continue to harass this other woman who builds websites and doesn’t want to build a gay themed one.  They’ll find some other trumped-up case, slightly different, and go after her again.  But as I said these rulings reinforce the standing in the red states and if we can hold the Supreme Court for a while, they will provide the basis for restoring the social fabric in the red states.  After we lose the Court, it’ll take brains and guts to tell the feds to pound sand.  Let’s hope we find men who have those attributes when we need them.

It was kind of amusing reading and watching the various lefties running around in circles screaming about the affirmative action case.  There was one video with Joy Reid castigating Justice Thomas.  Now I consider Joy Reid to be one of the stupidest people on God’s green Earth.  The fact that she also graduated from Harvard is conclusive proof that this rejection of affirmative action for college admissions is absolutely necessary.  If she was admitted, a virtual cretin, to the premiere university of the United States then obviously there is no objective criterion for their admissions.  In the video she goes on and on speculating on how Clarence Thomas must have some kind of deep-seated self-hatred that forces him to wreak vengeance upon black people.  If there were any objective standards in this country, instead of Harvard she should have been sent to a group home where she could have performed chores she might be suited for, like filling sacks with sand or scrubbing toilets.  Now the unlucky viewers of MSNBC have to watch her on the screen making absurd claims about talented and serious people.  Maybe someday when MSNBC closes down, she’ll find her rightful place in society as a dunk tank clown.

So, all in all, it was an interesting day.  I will be spending considerable time at these various family gatherings on Saturday and Sunday but I’ll do my best to provide some content for the faithful.  Enjoy your weekend.

Quantitative Analysis Interrupted

photog Current Events, OCF , ,
mushroom, Sony A7 III with Minolta 200mm f\4 Macro lens

There is a program called Google Analytics.  By virtue of the largest internet surveillance system imaginable it keeps track of every link click on the world wide web.  It must be a truly massive system of mainframes buried under the Rocky Mountains and probably uses up enough electricity to power the Eastern Seaboard.  And by virtue of this horrific gathering of information, I can glean which of my posts and which of my links are most interesting to the general public.  It even tells me whether the links were based on search engine inquiry or direct input or referral from a third-party site.  And all of this information is somewhat interesting.  For instance, some days I get a link on an aggregation site and the majority of my traffic that day will be from this referral link.  In fact, on days like that my overall traffic might be ten times the normal site traffic.  And this is good because some of this new traffic might become regular viewers and show up every day.  So, the Google Analytics (GA) is valuable to more than just the FBI in their never-ending search for Americans who don’t love Big Brother.

But I digress.  So anyway, about a year and half ago Google started announcing that GA3 would be superseded by GA4 on July 1st 2023.  But a year and a half is such along time.  It might as well be never.  And so, sure enough, I ignored this warning for … a year and a half.  And who knew?  Eventually, July 1st 2023 turns out to actually exist.  In fact, it’s 15 hours, 27 minutes, 47.33 seconds away!

As is my way last night at around 1 am, I managed to get the new GA4 link set up on my site dashboard.  Of course, the link isn’t really producing any data but that could take as much as 48 hours according to the helpful scolding I receive from Google whenever I look at the output.  So probably for the next few days (and probably much longer) I won’t have GA4 telling me that anybody is out there.  Of course, the website dashboard has an access log of the clicks but it doesn’t provide a trendline and totals so it’s not as useful or convenient.  What it means is I will be forced to understand yet another new system because of the unstoppable march of PROGRESS.  Ah well.

So, the good news is that you’re all still out there even if Google’s “Eye of Sauron” isn’t hooked up to my local palantir.  The bad news is that I wasted and am still wasting precious time messing around with these absurd systems that inevitably become less useful and less convenient every time they roll out a new edition.  But the upside is that even if the whole system crashes and burns at midnight tonight, it will still be the first day of July and that is cause for celebration in and of itself.  For the last ten days it has been cloudy and raining almost every day.  But yesterday it cleared up, and the forecast for today and tomorrow is sun.  So, I’ll let Silicon Valley’s minions have their way with my analytics and instead concentrate on more promising phenomena like some macro shots of the mushrooms that all that rain has engendered.

I’m Back Baby!

photog Current Events, OCF

From approximately 1am to about 8:30 am the site was down.  It had to do with the hosting service changing an IP address and my firewall not being in synch with it.  And because my pitiful web skills are pitiful it took me an hour to get things back up after returning to consciousness this morning.

Everything should be copasetic.  Please forgive the interruption.

photg

05JUN2023 – OCF Update – This’N’That

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Probably the most significant news is that yesterday the long-discussed Ukraine offensive began.  There were several troop and tank movements in the Donetsk

“Russia’s defence ministry released video of what it said showed several Ukrainian armoured vehicles in a field blowing up after being hit.

Russian forces killed 250 Ukrainian troops as well as destroying 16 tanks, three infantry fighting vehicles and 21 armoured combat vehicles, the ministry said.”

Currently the Ukrainians have not released any statements with their take on the fighting.  From what I read the Ukrainian forces involved included about sixty tanks, 3,000 men, artillery and other armored vehicles.

This is still just a small fraction of the forces available for this offensive but it seems clear this wasn’t a feint.  It’s act one.  It will be evolving over the next days and weeks and it will be gut-wrenching for all involved.

……………………………………….

The Z-Man had an interesting post today about the evolving perspective on the dissident right about what the struggle with the Left actually entails.  Instead of the resistance of the Right to slow down the Left’s never-ending push to produce a heaven on earth he posits that the dissidents are aiming to eliminate ideology as the engine of human social advancement.  What’s being rejected is basically the Enlightenment project that gave birth to liberal democracy in the West.  In its place would be a pragmatic program based on the limitations of human society.  No more heaven on earth.  Just earth.

Pretty thought provoking stuff.

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I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about a horror movie (if that’s the genre) called Nefarious.  Apparently it’s a death row prisoner being interviewed by a psychiatrist to see if he’s sane enough to be executed.  The twist is that the prisoner claims to be possessed by a demon who wants the execution to proceed so he can escape to a new body from which he can continue his mayhem.  It’s still in the theater so they want twenty bucks to stream it at home.  Well!  I must be getting old.  I remember when twenty bucks was actual money.  I remember as a kid I once found a twenty dollar bill and I thought I was rich.  So anyway I’m stalling until it comes down in price.  It looks pretty good in the trailer.  The producers aren’t mainstream Hollywood types.  They’re on the religious side of things.  So that makes it even more interesting to me.  Maybe I’ll spring for the twenty bucks.  I’ll probably still be able to eat that week.  And supporting alternatives to woke corporations like the Hollywood studios is almost a religious obligation.  So I guess I’ll fork over the quatloos.

06JUN2023 – Coffee Walk Reunion

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

From the farthest reaches of the known universe, a hardy crew of hard-bitten desperados descended upon a tavern to relive old glories and trade lies about their exploits.  Well anyway I had to travel for an hour or so.  So, I sojourned out beyond Dunwich to consult, confer and otherwise hobnob with my fellow wizards.  Old times were remembered.  Fallen comrades and enemies were recalled and mockery for the masters of the universe that we had suffered under flowed freely.  So many funny stories.

And we compared notes on the worst of the changes that had slowly turned our former corporate home from a great place to work to a bureaucratic hellhole.  And all agreed that the problem could be described with three letters … DEI.  The most recent outrages were some of the worst.  DEI has become embedded in the goals of every manager.  But how can you advance DEI when there’s no budget to hire new people.  Surprise, surprise.  You have to eliminate white men.  And the way to do that in the zero-sum game of corporate competition is to give them bad reviews.  No matter how valuable they may be or how carefully they work to accomplish their goals it is absolutely critical to advance minorities and women.  So, the white men must be demoted.  And if you’re a normal man and that’s what you’re told to do it’s going to stick in your craw.  Eventually if you can, you walk away.

And that’s not an easy thing.  These jobs pay very, very well.  The perks include stock options, five figure bonuses and retirement plans that any peon would give his right arm to have.  But at a certain point stomaching the things you have to say and do can become too much.

Opinions were espoused about the 2024 race.  I was sort of a downer with my, “We can’t vote ourselves out of this” schtick.  But I was happy to listen to everybody’s opinion on the Trump versus DeSantis question.  And everyone laughed at Biden’s last few fails like tripping over the sandbag and wandering off stage whenever his handlers lost track of him.  And gallons of beer (no Transheuser Busch ordered at that table) were imbibed and mass quantities of meat were wolfed down.

So, we commiserated and compared notes on families and summer plans and vowed to drag the wives into a larger gathering involving grilled meat of a ribeye variety that we have agreed is optimal.  Whether all can attend this upcoming event is of course problematic.  Wives are troublesome, fretful creatures who rarely acquiesce in the expansive plans that men imagine.  Their problem is that they lack the big broad flexible outlook on life.  They want to nail down time and place and attendees and food budgets and other troublesome details that just complicate their husbands’ days.  Why can’t a woman be more like a man?  Wait, scratch that.  Maybe I’m really glad that they’re completely different from men.  Look at all the trouble Matt Walsh has had just getting “experts” to define “WhatIsAWoman?”  Let them be as different as they want as long as they stay just as they are.

So, a very good day.  Reconnecting with the guys is critical.  Camaraderie is of the essence of a normal male life.  We have to spend so much time providing for our families and interacting with the wife and kids that it’s essential now and then to escape from those twittering voices and flighty emotions and hang out with coarse, vulgar, boorish, insensitive, cruel, funny, inventive, enthusiastic and masculine peers.

Well, I’m home now.  The fun is over.  Back to chores and routine.  No more pastrami Reubens.  Just healthy food and diet.   Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.

01JUN2023 – Unofficial Summer Begins

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

In his ode to summer, “Dandelion Wine,” Ray Bradbury identifies June, July and August as summer.  And as opposed to the calendar and the astronomical basis for the definition of summer that it measures, every school boy of my generation knew it to be these same months.  And this year especially, the beginning of June is every bit as much summer as the more legitimate last week.  Today will be close to ninety degrees.  Nothing defines summer more than that Fahrenheit measure.  Ninety degrees Fahrenheit is summer.

And so, the laziness that is the glory of summer already holds me in thrall.  I have a laundry list of yard chores and yet I spend my time walking around the yard looking at flowers and bugs and listening to the birds quarrel over their nest sites and the fattest grubs.  Every once in a while, I’ll pull a weed but despite Camera Girl’s hectoring, I rarely carry the plucked plant to the mulch pile.  I usually just drop it where I found it.  Just too lazy to make the effort.  And that is the beauty of summer; giving in to the pleasure of lazy heat.  Every dog, every lizard knows the ecstasy of laying in the hot sun.  The heat bakes into your bones and the oven air scorches your lungs.  It’s remarkable.  And that is why the seashore is so perfect a summer setting.  It allows you to get that feeling over and over again.  You take the heat until it becomes unbearable, then a plunge into the cold water quenches the heat and you’re ready to do the whole thing over again.  The therapeutic effects of a week or two by the sea can sometimes offset a whole year of office drudgery and even a long New England winter’s worth of cold.

And while I’m at play in the fields of the Lord I can forget for a few moments all of the absurd nonsense that infects the present-day world around me.  I can forget the culture war and the collapse of western civilization and even the internet drudgery that I have embraced.  I don’t have to read what the pundits are saying and what the fake news is trumpeting.  I can forget about war drones following their GPS paths to destruction and watch their natural world analog as a dragonfly patrols the perimeter of the yard, as mechanical and precise as the machine but much more lyrical.

Later on, today I’ll get around to reading the awful news and the boring opinions of the pundits.  And I will have to be out and about on my list of chores.  But it was nice to be up and around early this morning and see the fields while it was still cool and moist.  All that moisture will be sucked up into the blast furnace of noon and I will take another walk to experience that too.  The grasshoppers and the bees will be about their chores and I’ll look for a good photo or two (or two hundred) and I’ll even knock an item or two from the chore list.  But summer’s begun and the living is easy.  Enjoy it if you can.