Tomorrow is the flight. In fact, I’m heading out the door in eight and half hours. So, the era of radio silence is upon me. I’ll try to monitor the news in case Creepy Uncle Joe morphs into a giant cockroach or centipede or something. Or if Joe and Kamala resign and Nancy Pelosi takes up residence in the White House. If that happens, I’ll have a lot to say. But short of that I’ll probably be incommunicado for most of the trip. I’ll post pictures as well as I’m able and I may put up some posts with my impressions of the mountain west. The daily photo and quote are already loaded and scheduled for the whole trip.
I hope everybody’s summer is progressing as planned. Unless I’m eaten alive by a grizzly bear, I expect to re-emerge on July 21st revitalized and rededicated to insulting leftists whenever they say stupid things, which is always. I’ll check on the comments so feel free to leave them. This the longest I’ll be away from the site in six years so I’ll probably suffer withdrawal symptoms out there in the wilderness. But it’s probably good for me to unplug and deal with life without the internet for a change.
So Camera Girl had me back in the salt mines. Well, literally, she had me turning over some of her vegetable garden with a pitchfork. And while I was working on a section I started noticing that the ground started moving! I flipped over a piece of vegetation and saw this:
Apparently a rabbit somehow built a burrow inside the garden, which is surrounded by a 4 X 4 lumber rectangle. Is there a tunnel from somewhere outside the garden? Beats the hell out of me.
Camera Girl and I took a morning stroll around the grounds and it was encouraging. Cone flowers are blooming, daylilies are about to pop and the first few eggplants and squash are on the vines.
The weeds and crab grass are growing at a prodigious rate and the local hawk has been picking off mourning does at the pace of one every other day. Black-eyed Susans and Shasta Daisies are everywhere and the milkweed is in bloom and feeding a new cohort of Monarch butterfly caterpillars.
Basically, life is exploding everywhere I look. Which means I’ll be busy watering, weeding and cutting grass for the foreseeable future.
I am on record as saying July is my favorite time of the year. But this year I’ll be away on a trip from the 11th to the 20th. While I’m away I’ll be viewing and photographing bison, grizzly bears, wolves, elk, moose, geysers, mountains and other items that usually don’t feature into life at the Compound. And doubtless that will be exciting. But in a way I’ll be sorry to miss the little milestones that happen here every July. In July I’ll find the first praying mantis.
Me and My Shadow
In July I usually see the first fireflies. And in the middle of the month, I always celebrate my birthday with a party. Well, you can’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs.
I’ll try to post from time to time but I expect before, during and after the trip there will be disruptions. It’s been a busy month and I haven’t had a chance to cache a bunch of pictures and quotes for the interregnum. But I’ll do my best to provide some content. Hopefully I’ll be able to put up some interesting photos during the trip.
What is becoming clear to me is that after the trip I’ll be revising my writing schedule to facilitate my fiction writing. It’s just too difficult to write between posts. It’s got to become the opposite, posting between writing. Reading about the output that Nick Cole produces filled me with envy and shame. So, things must change.
As for the latest news of the day, why, it’s chicanery, skullduggery, buffoonery, imbecility, failure and ruin as far as the eye can see. As the cities descend into howling chaos, hyperinflation bankrupts us and the economy continues to sputter into recession, Dementia Joe moves full speed ahead to usher in WWIII. I guess since he’s finished off the Democrats’ chances in November, he figures he might as well go out with a bang. It will be interesting to see if his brinksmanship ends up causing an actual war or just destroys what’s left of this country’s military reputation.
Well, I shouldn’t let this devolve into depression. There are plenty of good things happening too. There’s plenty to do and not enough time to do it in. So, let’s see what I can do to keep some copy up on the site and try to keep it on the light side. Enjoy the glorious weather.
Here at the Compound we have a species of deer fly that is specific to Dunwich. They are known to transmit lycanthropy and a horrible syndrome known locally as Biden Brain which afflicts almost twenty percent of the population.
Because of this I have adopted a form of passive aggressive self defense, the sticky hat.
The wonderful thing about the hat is the waves of schadenfreude that envelope you when the flies are stuck on the glue but keep flapping their wings trying to escape. The feeling of revenge is very sweet indeed. Currently I have eight deer fly and some random black flies and mosquitoes.
I like to think as I walk around with the hat on that the flies recognize a cousin or a brother and experience horror and murderous anger and that that is what drives them to join their brethren on the Hat of Death. Notice the bits of vegetation on the hat. These occur when I stupidly walk under low hanging tree branches. Eventually the glue stops working and I break out a new strip and start the fun all over again.
Today I had to bring my car into the local Dunwich auto shop for some routine maintenance. I dutifully signed my name to the work invoice without pricing and shuffled over to the waiting area with its free coffee station, now coffee-less because of COVID and the free popcorn which is likewise sans popcorn.
They’ve got a hi-def 80-inch tv that plays millennium talk shows endlessly so I knew to bring a book to read and sit in one of the chairs facing away from the screen. But unfortunately, it was a technical book that required pretty serious concentration to follow the thread of the argument and what I found was the tv was horribly distracting. I could hear these three voices jabbering and crooning at each other in a patois that I assume was hip-hop speak. I tried my best to tune it out but the tv was blaring at 80 decibels and these three bozos were shouting at the top of their lungs as if what they were saying was some life and death matter.
Finally, I gave up trying to read and I figured I’d just vegetate and that way the tv wouldn’t be such a nuisance. But I couldn’t do that either. Now I couldn’t even distract myself with the hopeless task of reading the book. Now I couldn’t help hearing their moronic conversation. And the true stupidity of what they were saying hit home. They were a popular culture review program. They were reviewing things like some kind of hip-hop award ceremony and the associated red carpet activity.
The descriptions were hard to understand because it was larded with words that, though English, were being used in senses that you could not find in a dictionary. Although maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the urban dictionary was invented for these meanings. As an example, they were describing the probably pornographic outfit and “dancing” that one female rapper was wearing at the afterparty and they were full of approbation for this sight and they kept saying that she was “always giving.” And I couldn’t quite imagine what “giving” referred to. I think it involved not covering up her primary and secondary sex organs but I wasn’t completely sure.
I did understand what twerking was. That detail was something that Miley Cyrus explained back in 2016 when she was campaigning for Hillary Clinton. Now it appears to be as routine a part of hip-hop activity as to be the equivalent of saying hello. Anyway, the awfulness of the discussion never got better. And I found that I was becoming increasingly aggravated by listening to these cretins. So, I got up and turned around to see who these people were and who was watching this crap on the screen.
The three “hosts” were somewhat young. There was a black woman, a Latina and a gay black man dressed in spandex with a bow in his hair. Then I looked at the audience. There were four guys between the ages of about forty and sixty. And they were sitting there with glazed over expressions. I read my audience and acted. I went over to the side of the flat screen and hit the power button. The screen went black and the voices ended. All four men looked up at me surprised. But then one guy smiled and said “Thank you.”
I got back to my seat and started to read my book. But I half expected someone to turn the tv back on and was resigned to waiting outside in the hot noon time sun just to avoid listening to any more of that drivel. But it never came back on. And I couldn’t concentrate on my book. I was thinking about the putrid level our culture has reached. And it wasn’t even just the perversity of the subject matter. It was the abysmal level of the discussion. These people weren’t just vapid. They were clearly morons. Communicating with them would be like trying to discuss politics or morality with a cow or a horse. Absurd.
I sometimes feel that the Dissident Right exaggerates the falling off of intelligence in the new America. After all, the baby boomers had their weird and moronic cultural moments when they were young. No one could claim that watching “The Monkees” was an intellectual pursuit. But this is different. This is the victory of stupidity. This is the mainstreaming of dimwit chic.
Well, I did get to see something of the world today. But it wasn’t good.
Yesterday and Today (and if I’m being honest the last week) has been crammed with responsibilities that have wreaked havoc with my site responsibilities. Even the sacred “photo of the day” and “quote of the day” have been negatively effected.
I beg for patience today while I’m away from the Compound on a mission of the highest familial importance. I promise to catch up tonight and set all omissions straight. In the meantime I wish everyone to have as good weather as we are currently enjoying and spend the time “at play in the fields of the Lord.”
Well, here we are. The longest day of the year. And every minute of daylight is already spoken for. We’ve got a party coming up on Saturday to celebrate my grandson’s high school graduation. And Camera Girl has a list of chores as long as my arm!
Cut the lawn, install air conditioners, clean the barbecue grill, buy some gasoline, weed the garden, and on and on and on. Normally I like to set aside the solstice to quiet contemplation of our small place in the limitless grandeur of the cosmos. But I guess instead I’ll be scraping grease off of a barbecue rack. I don’t suppose Aristotle had to put up with this kind of stuff.
But that’s alright. The party isn’t the only thing on the list. I have to get some supplies for the Yellowstone trip and this is the week when I have to figure out what lenses to pack. And that means I have to do some testing of lens quality. I have to decide whether I can just bring the manual 10mm Voigtlander lens or do I have to take the 12-24mm Sigma too. Autofocus is not very important for landscape lenses but having the long side of the 12-24 might be useful under some circumstances. I’ll have the 35mm 1.4 along but there’s a big difference between 24mm and 35mm. I’ve decided to leave the 200mm macro and the 135mm 1.8 at home. The 90mm macro is much faster and brighter than the 200mm and the 200-600 lens will cover all the telephoto requirements. If I’m being honest there’s a good case for taking the 10mm, 35mm, 90mm macro and the 200-600mm lenses and nothing else. But something tells me I’ll drag the 12-24mm along just for the sake of completeness.
Camera Girl has been kind of upset over a hawk that’s been killing the birds that come to her feeders. So far, it’s done in two mourning doves and a chipmunk. And insult to injury, it plucks the feathers off its victims before taking them away. I’m sympathetic to her feelings for the birds. She really enjoys watching the various species that are attracted to the feeders. But my sympathy doesn’t extend to chipmunks. They’re just striped rats in my book. They’ve dug a couple of tunnels on this hill on one side of the house and have had a population explosion. I’ll gladly pay that hawk a buck apiece for every chipmunk head it delivers.
I saw that DeSantis had a press conference where he countered the White House’s complaints about his administration not ordering vaccine for the 6 month – 5-year-old Floridians. DeSantis very reasonably stated that the evidence that the regulators were pointing to for approving the vaccines for such young children was extremely unconvincing and so just as with the 6 to 11-year-olds, Florida wasn’t recommending people vaccinate their children. He also wasn’t preventing it. It would be a private decision between parents and their physicians. Once again DeSantis comes away looking like the only grown-up in the room.
I guess we’ll have to wait a while longer for the Supreme Court to spill the beans on their decisions. It will be interesting to see if Roberts manages to frighten any of the conservative justices away from overturning Roe v. Wade. I’m also interested in how the Second Amendment case turns out. These are very important cases. A lot depends on their outcome especially with the mid-terms coming up.
In my post I said, “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.”
Now here’s something from Lipson’s post, “Take inflation. The former administration spokesperson, Jen Psaki, initially denied rising prices were a problem. When that became laughable, the administration reframed the problem as a temporary one.”
What the hell! When I want to talk about an idea that someone else has written on, I always give attribution and cite the work and put a link back to the original article. But this Lipson guy did none of these things. What the hell!
I challenge you Charles Lipson, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Chicago (if that is your real name!) to do the right thing and give attribution to Orion’s Cold Fire and apologize for your scurrilous behavior. Have you no sense of decency sir? Have you no shame, at last? There you are at your fancy university in your la de dah city of Chicago taking the food out of Camera Girl’s mouth. I challenge you to a debate. Who is the greater pundit thee or me?
Well, I feel better now. It’s good to get this thing off my chest. Okay, let me go see what I can “borrow” from someone else now.
Sunday is the family jollification (or shindig) so I have once again been a virtual serf to Camera Girl. She had me getting the pool and the pool accoutrements brought up to her standards. This involved extraordinary amounts of cleaning, water chemical treatment and just plain stoop labor. Then I had to sweep and clean the deck and first floor and organize all the “stuff” that would be in the way. In many ways she is reminiscent of Ivan the Terrible with her fondness for the cat-o-nine-tails and branding iron. But somehow I have performed the herculean tasks she set me and I now can look around at the happenings of the day and see if I have anything salient to opine.
With respect to the school shootings in Uvalde the Left, as expected, has lived down to expectations and beat the gun control drum endlessly. Beto O’Rourke has demonstrated his vile self-serving callousness by crashing a meeting for the grieving town of Uvalde to grandstand his stupid gun control act.
An interesting phenomenon seems to be occurring. It looks like the usual leftist press outrage over mass shootings or abortion don’t seem to have the usual Republicans panicking as they typically do. I think the public is outraged out and even the spineless GOP cowards are figuring it out. When you have inflation emptying your bank account and crime running rampant in the streets it’s hard to come up with additional outrage to care about the New York Times’ talking points on some tragedy. So even though the Left is trying to talk themselves into some kind of narrative where Roe v. Wade plus school shootings equals salvation for the Dems in the mid-terms I don’t think the polls are even budging. Good.
I noticed that Dementia Joe’s Approval Rating has taken another hit. On Tuesday Reuters had him at 36% Approve / 59% Disapprove. The Real Clear Politics average (below) has him at 40.5% Approve / 55.2% Disapprove. And that’s because even NPR has him 40% / 56% and Politico has him 42% / 56%. These are in the tank fellow mouthpieces for Biden and even they have to admit he’s despised by the country.
My theory is that when his approval rating stays below 35% for a month there will begin to be a move by the Dems to find his replacement. But to be fair I’m sure they’ll wait till after the mid-terms before they start baying for his blood.
Polling Data
Poll
Date
Sample
Approve
Disapprove
Spread
RCP Average
5/2 – 5/25
—
40.5
55.2
-14.7
Rasmussen
5/23 – 5/25
1500 LV
42
56
-14
Reuters
5/23 – 5/24
1005 A
36
59
-23
YouGov
5/21 – 5/24
1332 RV
44
51
-7
Politico
5/20 – 5/22
2005 RV
42
56
-14
Harris
5/18 – 5/19
1963 RV
41
55
-14
Quinnipiac
5/12 – 5/16
1421 RV
38
55
-17
Gallup
5/2 – 5/22
1007 A
41
54
-13
NPR/PBS
5/9 – 5/13
1213 RV
40
56
-16
NBC News
5/5 – 5/10
790 RV
42
54
-12
Monmouth
5/5 – 5/9
751 RV
39
56
-17
I’m curious to see how Juneteenth goes this year. I’m guessing it won’t get as much play as last year. It doesn’t feel like a winner to me and right now the Dems are looking for some wins. Maybe they’ll rediscover the Fourth of July for some reason and start waving the racist Stars and Stripes. Should be interesting.
Well, we’ll see what new horrors await us tomorrow. But I’ve got some fun ahead of me this weekend so I’m sort of content. See you tomorrow.
Many years ago, when Camera Girl was just a simple housewife. This was before she became a jet-setting companion to a high-powered photographic dynamo; me. One day while I was at work, I got a call from home. She informed me that the fire department had to be called because our electric stove had malfunctioned and burst into flames. The highly professional volunteer firemen had heroically dragged the stove out of the house and it was lying on the driveway like some stricken beast brought low by forces beyond the control of nature. And she further informed me that the meat loaf was still in it and unless I wanted to try carbonized beef we would need to eat out. Now, I know for a fact that she’s always disliked electric stoves and ovens. She claims that only gas stoves provide the kind of temperature control she needs to cook food correctly. I’m not saying she sabotaged that stove but it is true she was glad to get a new one. Even if it was also an electric model.
Well yesterday lightning struck again. At about 4 pm I heard a loud crackle of electricity like something out of the Frankenstein laboratory scene coming from the kitchen followed by Camera girl screaming something incoherently. I ran into the kitchen to find smoke pouring from the oven. I shut the power to the oven and turned on the vent fan above the stove. Then I took the smoke alarm off the wall and put it where it wouldn’t go off.
Sure, enough for the third time in her career as chief cook and bottlewasher in “Chez photog” the heating element in one of her ovens failed. This time I was there so the fire department wasn’t needed. I could see the element was cracked and the sound I’d heard was power arcing over the gap. After gently coaxing Camera Girl off the ceiling fan, I comforted her in her terror and convinced her that all would be well once we got our local appliance store to send a serviceman to install a new element.
But when I called them, it wasn’t as simple as that. After providing them with the stove’s model number they informed me that they would have to order this critical part. And when I asked them when they would be able to send someone to install it the pleasant young fellow on the line said, “In three or four weeks.” I dared not tell Camera Girl that her stove would be out of service for a month so I asked the guy how difficult would it be for me to install it myself. He thought it would be quite simple and foolproof. So tomorrow morning I’ll go and pay fifty bucks for this replacement part and spend some part of the day installing it.
Obviously, this is a double-edged sword. On the up side, I get to save a hundred fifty bucks in service call charges and appear to be a competent and self-sufficient alpha male. On the down side if I louse up the installation Camera Girl will mock me mercilessly.
Well, there’s nothing to be done about it. I must rise to the challenge. I was thinking of watching some episodes of the Honeymooners tonight to see if I can get any pointers from Ralph Kramden’s technique handling Alice’s bouts of sarcasm. What’s the worst that could happen? Where did I put that fire extinguisher?
