Category: OCF

18JUL2021 – OCF Update – Yalta II

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So yesterday was a small get together with some folks on our side of the aisle.  The guys came over with the wives.  And Camera Girl and I hosted a barbecue and food fest.  One of the guys is really expert at grilling rib-eye steaks.  And he did the honors to a tee.  To her credit Camera Girl bought the biggest, tenderest steaks despite her anger at the outrageous prices.  She is a frugal woman which is good since I’m a notorious wastrel.  Between the various hors d’oeuvres, desserts and side dishes I ate myself into a semi-coma.

But it was worth it.  It was a great time.  We barely mentioned politics and instead spent the time catching up on personal stuff.  I enforced the segregation by sex.  It was the boys on this couch and the girls on that one.  And that was how nature intended it to be.  Of course I always keep one ear pricked up in case Camera Girl starts spreading seditious propaganda against me.  She is a mutinous wench.  But she behaved herself for the most part.

So today we’ll catch up on stuff we put aside for the party prep but things will go smoothly now.  Speaking meteorologically the endless torrential rain has continued I’ll have to drain another 3 or 4 inches of rain from yesterday and last night.  Between the pounding rain and the lightning and thunder, the dogs are demoralized and despondent which seems okay by me but Camera Girl is sad.  The hounds are her babies and she dotes on their every need.  Bah!

I think I’ll do some movie reviews this week.  There’s something to be said about being happy.  Yesterday reminded of that.  Sure it’s important to fight back against the Leftist Losers but you’ve got to make time to live your life too.  A friend said I should review another Nick Cage movie called “Pig.”  Apparently Cage is a man of the land in this movie and he uses a pig to hunt truffles for sale to rich people.  Somehow he is wronged by someone.  Hopefully he goes on a rage-fueled rampage of vengeance against someone or other.  Well, that’s what I hope anyway.  But we’ll see.

So stay tuned I should have content up today.

 

16JUL2021 – OCF Update – Busy as a Bee

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Camera Girl is a harsh mistress.  Like some kind of antebellum field slave I’m in the trenches finishing up my chores.  What I have discovered is no matter how many times you buy a tool if you need it you’ll find it has disappeared.  This is the second time in a week I’ve needed a 5/8″ socket and it’s been gone.  I think I’ll buy two dozen of them and sprinkle them around the house like seeds on a field.  Maybe they germinate and a 5/8″ socket tree will grow for me.

I’ll try to get back to work on the site later today but even tomorrow will be effected because of the barbecue.  Apologies and hand wringing.

Wayne’s World

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Ah, the joys of domesticity.  Today, in anticipation of the weekend barbecue, I am working my way down Camera Girl’s list of chores.  I have swept and mopped the front deck, washed the windows, cleaned the lawn furniture, bought a new toilet seat, bought some stuff I needed to install a couple of air conditioners, bought some stuff to clean the cars and dug out my ladder to clean the first-floor gutters.

Yesterday unexpectedly, the roofer, Wayne, showed up out of the blue after three weeks of radio silence and said he was ready to look at those couple of shingles that had come loose during an EF5 tornado that had moved the house onto my neighbor-across-the-road’s property.  The neighbor’s been real good about us living on his land.  Of course bringing the plumbing and electrical services under the road cost me a good deal but I was looking for more interaction with the neighbors anyway so it’s been a great experience, all in all.

Anyway, Wayne (by the way all roofers in my experience are named Wayne) came over with the ricketiest wooden ladder I’ve ever seen and set it down against the house.  Now, the spot where he wanted to climb slopes at about a 45-degree angle and he proceeded to even it out by piling a couple of boards under one of the ladder’s feet.  I’m looking at this and thinking, is this guy insured?  Wayne’s assistant has the job of putting tension on the rope attached to the ladder.  Looking at this I’m trying to form a diagram in my head of the forces at play in this little scene.  Wayne’s weight, Bob’s tension on the line, the frictional force between the boards and the soaking wet grass underneath them and the absurd angle of the ladder and the ground and the force of my blood pounding in my veins watching this insanity.  I felt like I was participating in a Three Stooges routine in real time.  I suspect I was Moe but I wasn’t completely sure.

Miraculously every one walked away alive and intact including my repaired roof shingles.  Wayne charged me a paltry eighty bucks and I felt like I had gotten off easy in the lottery of life but vowed to find another Wayne in the future.  Unfortunately, Wayne’s perambulation on top of my house woke up my granddaughter who was taking her mid-day nap and this didn’t endear either myself or Wayne to Camera Girl.  We already had a previous roofer named Wayne that she despises due to various offenses against the code of acceptable contractor conduct.  So this only reinforced her hatred for contractors in general and specifically roofers named Wayne.  I will say in defense of the earlier Wayne that he is a staunch fan of Donald Trump and even placed an enormous Trump sign on the side of his work truck.

Of course the danger with outside work in New England is you invariably discover some new and worse damage to home and environs.  I am always fighting a losing battle against snow and moisture damage.  I recently replaced and painted some external woodwork (stairs and railings) and already I saw rotted sections.  But not being someone who quits easily, I am formulating a plan that involves wrapping these areas with waterproof tarps during the winter months.  This seems kind of crazy but the alternative is to replace the wood with something impervious to snow and rain.  I’m guessing concrete or stainless steel are the only sure bets and that would be very expensive.

And walking around the yard I noticed the deer finally put me out of my misery by eating every last one of the daylily flower buds that were growing in one of the more remote beds.  Blah, blah, everyone has to eat, blah blah.  I’m going to move those damn things this autumn and put them within stone throwing distance of my house.  I hope they bring wolves back to New England and they eat these deer into extinction.  Yes I do.

So today was a useful day.  And doing outside work kept me from thinking of Dementia Joe and how badly our country has been damaged.  Tomorrow I’ll return to contemplating the end of western civilization.  But today I got the chores done.

14JUL2021 – OCF Update Mid-July Report

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This will be an outrage free day.  Even though Bastille Day is not my idea of a holiday worth celebrating today is a joyous occasion in my house.  I will therefore accentuate the positive.

I think I will initiate a series of posts devoted to various facets of Western Civilization.  I’ll range over history, culture, ethnography and geography.  I’m tempted to start from ancient historical and geographical facts about the region and then move forward through time introducing the various actors as  they appear on the scene.  Now do I start with the Neanderthals?  Finding out they were red-heads means the Irish may want to claim then for their own.

I will include information on the Yamnaya who appear to have been the mythical proto-Indo-European tribe that expanded East and West and spawned the languages that now dominate half the planet.  Not bad for a bunch of bronze age horsemen from the steppes.  I’d like to touch on especially some of the lesser known nations of Europe, the Georgians, the Lithuanians, the Letts, the Finns and others.  this will serve the dual purpose of allowing me to produce interesting and upbeat content and at the same time satisfy my curiosity about things I’ve always wanted to know.

But just to show I’m not an Indo-European chauvinist, (well actually I am), I’ll include information on the Basques.  These seem to be the descendants of the oldest inhabitants of Europe from a time before the Indo-European ancestors came on the scene.  Or at least before their languages began to dominate.  And I won’t neglect our neighbors to the east.  The river valley civilizations of the Near East were the source of agriculture that was the basis for organized human life on the planet.  So I’ll throw the Sumerians in just to show I’m a sport.  Do I have to include the Egyptians?  I guess I might.  Without them we wouldn’t have had those mummy movies.  Well, we’ll see.

And I mean to trudge on through the third season of Star Trek.  I’ve been dragging my feet because it is a terrible season.  But I’ve promised myself I’ll finish it.  As I’ve mentioned I intend to review Jackie Gleason’s classic 39 episodes of “The Honeymooners” series.  But I probably need to at least start into the Star Trek work to allow myself the reward of watching something fun like the Honeymooners.

The endless rain here in New England continues.  I’ve adapted to the annoying reality of it but I do hope that the second half of July returns to the normal hot dry summer I prefer.  Well, we’ll see.

So this may be a slow day.  I’ll write what the mood provides and enjoy a dinner out for once.  I’m bringing Camera Girl to our favorite Chinese restaurant and we’ll embrace the Orient for a change.

12JUL2021 – OCF Update – This ‘N’ That

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Another very rainy day!  But I decided to make necessity a virtue.  Camera Girl has given me a list of chores to get done before the party on Saturday (or else!) and first thing was bring out the trash pails to the road.  Apparently, the holiday weekend caused us somehow to miss the pick-up last week and a mistake now would be catastrophic, so out I went.  I had rain pants, rain coat and rubber boots.  After moving the trash and putting the mail in the box I was free (for the moment) and outside of the reach of the female of the species and took the grand tour.  I have never seen the grass and the shrubs so green in the middle of July.  I feel like I’m somehow in Brazil along the edge of the Amazon jungle.  I half expected a caiman or an anaconda to spring out of the undergrowth and clamp its jaws on my shin.  The world smells warm and alive and I expect the rabbits and the deer will take this occasion to eat some more of my daylilies even in the middle of the day, curse them.  I went looking for that young mantis I saw near the pool, but he was gone.  The rain seems to be keeping the deer fly from attacking me or maybe that’s just the rain gear.  Either way it was peaceful and invigorating to be out in the pouring rain.  Camera Girl’s vegetable gardens are lush and growing.  Some of the plants could probably do with a little more sunshine but so far nothing has drowned.

My attempt to grow elecampane (Inula helenium) from seeds three weeks ago may not have failed after all.  I put a packet of seeds in two different gardens and in five or six cardboard flower pots in a raised bed.  None of the seeds on the ground did anything and I presume they are dead.  But I think two or three of the little pots may be growing something.  It’s a big yellow (of course) flower that I’ve wanted to add to the garden for years but could never find for sale.  But with the advent of the internet, things like obscure plant seeds are just a mouse click away.  It turns out elecampane is a “medicinal herb” that can cure evil humors if applied to the patient by a Gaian shaman or crone.  “¡Ay Chihuahua, cuantos Apaches, cuantos Indios sin huaraches!”  But anyway, they may be growing after all.

The blueberry bushes are actually weighted down with unripe berries.  I fear that the deer are just waiting to swoop down and devour the whole crop just as it ripens.  Ah well, as Camera Girl says, “Everybody’s gotta eat.”  Whatever.

I was reading the ZMan’s Monday posts at his site and Taki’s.  They were depressing takes on bugmen like David French and their pernicious embrace of critical race theory in the schools.  It made me think that what will be needed is instruction in the true story of Western Civilization.  Parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts who are interested can point children to older books that reflect the actual story of how we got here.  The history books from two generations ago are full of the true stories of our ancestors and the adventures and tragedies that make up western history.  The Greeks, Romans, Celts, Germans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings and the other peoples who have collided and mixed and fought and produced Michelangelo and Mozart and Newton and Maxwell and Edison and all the things that they have created.  Biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, medicine, electricity, engines, nuclear weapons, space travel and computers.  Imagine being ashamed of the people who made these things.  The absurdity of the midgets who want our children to prefer the cultures of people who lived in mud huts and ate each other for dinner.  We should be ashamed of ourselves for even tolerating these people who are ashamed of the civilization that made their lives rich beyond the imaginations of people only a hundred years ago.  I’ll have to start identifying old books that can be used as resources for teaching the young.

Anyway, it’s going to be a busy week.  As I say I have a list of chores to perform before the party and Camera Girl will brook no nonsense from me.  She’s not concerned with my crusade to save America.  She wants the porch swept and the chairs cleaned off.  My ambition is to clean off the grill.  I have some rib-eye steaks to cook on Saturday and I’d like them not to taste like old hamburger grease.  But I promise not to neglect the site and I’m sure I’ll have outrages to comment on and sage advice to distribute to the world at large.

08JUL2021 – OCF Update

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All the stuff about Tucker Carlson has got me sort of bummed out.  Sure, I knew they did all this stuff.  But they’re not even trying to pretend they’re not doing it.  Hell, they’re bragging about it.  They want to us to know they don’t even care if we tell the world.  Basically, they’re taking a victory lap.  All the stuff they did in the Russiagate operation they are now doing openly.  Not a single one of them suffered any consequences for the treason they committed and they can now do it completely openly because they own the Justice Department, the Presidency and the Courts.

Intellectually I knew all of that already.  I guess viscerally it’s hitting home.  This is East Germany, this is North Korea, this is Saddam’s Iraq.  Elections will be 100% assured, the security agencies will arrest the right people and more importantly will not arrest the left people, the people in charge will live very comfortable lives, everyone else will shut up and take what they are given.

I guess the part of it that’s so depressing is how docile the millennials are.  They’ve been bought off.  They’ll take their guaranteed income and live in their basement apartment with their three roommates and slowly shrink to nothing, evaporate or sublimate as if they never existed.  Not with a bang but with a whimper.

Well, anyway, the power’s been off for about ten hours.  The thunderstorm must have taken down a powerline or zapped a substation.  Probably the former.  The generator is humming along.  The guy who installed it and the transfer switch is sort of a crazy guy but he knew his business.  It runs on propane and is relatively quiet, a little quitter than my lawn mower.  It’s a quiet day here and I already cut the lawn before all these thunderstorms dumped about four inches of rain on us recently.  It cooled off today.  It went from ninety to seventy and that’ll give me a chance to get some outdoor stuff done without getting fried.  I took a few pictures this morning.  The deer have eaten most of the daylily buds but with a little luck I’ll get a few to shoot.  The blueberry bushes are very full of fruit.  Maybe I’ll get a few pints of them.

Camera Girl will soon provide me with my list of chores for the upcoming parties.  And that’s okay.  I like playing the host.  The summer is going well.  I’ll try to enjoy all the things that there are to do.  Even in Stalinist Russia people still tried to enjoy life right up until the KGB knocked down your door and dragged you off to the interrogation cell.

Which is worse, living as an outcast, a third-class citizen in your own country or being a stranger in a strange land?  I guess that’s the choice I’m struggling with.  In a way it feels like I’m already living in a foreign land.  All of the customs and familiar parts of life are being torn down and reviled.  The people in charge are strange creepy weirdos and criminals.  Could it be any worse in Argentina or Singapore or Hungary?  I wonder.

Post Update – 2pm and the power’s back on at the street.  Maybe that’ll lighten my mood.

26JUN2021 – OCF Update

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As you can tell I’ve been spending time doing some of these macro focus stacking projects.  It’s a weird thing and much less fun than just taking photos.  But it does allow me to make images that would be impossible otherwise.  But it’s fussy and time consuming.  I’ll be doing some flower shots soon and I’ll see what else I can think of.

Camera Girl has abandoned me today to learn how to paint pictures.  She left my lunch in the microwave.  I will have to feed the dogs and push the button on the microwave and talk to myself for several hours.  I told her this was a dereliction of her wifely duties.  She narrowed one of her eyes and I think she was thinking bad things about me.  Luckily I think she lacks psychokinetic powers.  Unluckily she makes my food so you never know.

Camera Girl has become a voracious reader of fiction.  It’s mostly crime novels but recently she read a book that was recommended by a friend.  Based on the quality of that book she picked up another one by the same author.  Yesterday she told me that the plot of the book involved a black maternity nurse who gets involved in the death of an infant whose father is a white supremacist.  He even has swastika tattoos on his head.  Apparently, in the story the hospital is punishing the nurse out of consideration for the influence of the swastika guy.  I told Camera Girl I thought this was quite a stretch of the imagination.  “How many white supremacists are out there who have the local district attorney prosecuting black nurses?  I’m thinking the number is slightly lower than one.”

I tried to browbeat her into abandoning her book but she never drops a book until she finishes it, no matter how bad it is.  Well, this prompted me to remind her why I don’t bother to watch most television and movies that have a Leftist slant.  She rolled her eyes and nodded.  I told her I’ll have to find a Dissident Right author for her to read as penance for the indignity I suffered through knowing she was reading this piffle and she made a disparaging noise that was sort of a guffaw mixed with a cough.  Women!

Anyway, I’ll have some stuff up later and we’ll see how the day goes.  It looks nice out so I’ll be at play in the Gardens of the Lord.  Enjoy your day.

High Summer

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Sunday, June 20th was the Summer Solstice this year.  That was the longest day of the year.  And Thursday, June 24th is Midsummer Day which is the traditional center of the growing season.  And that is called the beginning of High Summer.  That is the finest time of the year and unless you are afflicted in either mind or body, you’ll probably be feeling your oats about this time of year.  The Old Farmer’s Almanac says that it is the Feast of St. John the Baptist and that “the dew on Midsummer Day makes young girls beautiful and old people look younger.”  Well, it’s worth a shot.

And anyone familiar with Will Shakespeare’s, “A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream,” knows that faeries and goblins celebrate and cavort in the forests and wild places that night.  Well, we’ll see about that.  But I expect that the fireflies will make their appearance and that will suffice as far as magic for me.  I’m hoping to keep my little two-year old granddaughter up past her bedtime one night soon to see the fireflies for the first time in her young life.  She’s had so many books about them read to her.  It’s time she saw what all the hype is about.  I think she’ll be impressed.

I’ve got a couple of parties coming up, one for family, one for friends, and just thinking about them makes me feel like a kid waiting for his birthday or Christmas.  And it reinforces what I’ve been thinking about all the crazy things going on in this world we live in.  What really counts is the people you care about.  Being with them and sharing the small rituals and celebrating the things that are happening in their lives is infinitely more important than what that meathead in the White House mumbles at us on tv.  Sure, he can make our lives worse and he can help other evil men attack us but that’s no different than a lot of the other dangers that lurk in this world.

So, the world keeps circling the sun and wobbling on its axis.  We keep being born and growing up and bringing new people into this world.  All this other nonsense about white privilege and transphobia and gay marriage is all mental illness that we have to hold at arms’ length so that we don’t miss the fleeting joys that this life holds.  Be honest with your kids and grandkids.  Don’t be afraid to tell them what you believe and why.  Otherwise, they’ll assume you believe in what the teacher at school tells them is true.  Tell them what the important things in life are; family, marriage, children, work and fun.  Whether we ever reclaim our liberty in this “land of the free” is uncertain.  But stopping your life waiting for it is foolish.  Sure, pay attention to the politics and how it affects you but ruining your life fretting about defeats in Washington is madness.  You can make a much bigger impact on the world by acting on your local reality.

So, this Fourth of July I am declaring my independence from Washington.  They are a foreign power and I renounce all loyalty to them and deny their legitimacy.  I know what the Constitution says.  Those are my rights.  Anyone who denies that I have those rights isn’t an American and has no business governing a free people.  I will work to make my life meaningful and help the people that I care about.  If I find people who agree with me then we can find common cause and maybe my horizons broaden.  That’s how politics is supposed to work.

But if it comes right down to it even our side doesn’t have a claim on us unless they prove that they’re more than just talk.  Republicans have been lying to me my whole life and other than a couple of exceptions they haven’t saved a damn thing worth saving.  If they want my support then they need to support me.

So that’s my thesis.  I’m going to put summer to its highest and best purpose.  I’m going to enjoy the intensity of summer at its peak and celebrate my life with the people that matter to me.  I hope you enjoy your summer too.

12JUN2021 – OCF Update

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As you may have noted, my daily photo is now solidly past photos of summer 2020 and into the fall with autumn foliage colors and leaves all withered and sear.

Juxtaposed against the very verdant summer outside my window I find it stimulating to enjoy the contrast.  And it reminds me not to waste the chance of getting out in the world and soaking up the summer air and sun.  It’s turned cool and rainy today and we’ll have a bit of cool weather for a few days but with any luck global warming will come to my rescue.

After the elation I described in conquering the lawn mower repair I bragged that I was looking for new worlds to conquer with my newly minted mechanical aptitude.  Well, pride goeth before the fall and Camera Girl reminded me that I had promised to fix a leaky drain line on the kitchen sink.  I was going to call a plumber.  The line is one of those new-fangled plastic lines that have invaded our piping systems of late.  And I’ll bet dollars to donuts it will require all kinds of fittings and adhesives that I do not possess.  Well, what can you do.  My pride won’t let me call the professional now.  Well, not until the water gets too deep.

Tyler Cook of the Portly Politico and I have decided to cross link on our reviews for the 2019 movie based on H.P. Lovecraft’s story “The Colour Out of Space.”  We both thought this movie was awful but we thought that readers should enjoy the nuanced differences between the reviews.  Actually what you’ll see is our two styles.  Tyler is a witty and intelligent writer and I like to rant.  This exciting literary event will occur at 6:30 AM Monday, June 14th 2021.

On the politics side we are firmly into the Silly Season lull but there are stories emerging that indicate that the “Great Reset” is a partnership between Woke Capital and the Joe Burden administration.  Apparently Black Rock Capital will buy up all the suburban real estate so our kids and grandkids will have to rent from them in perpetuity.  On a positive note DeSantis in Florida, Abbott in Texas and some of the other governors are starting to make noise about taking a stand against the feds and the woke corporations and fight for our rights as unwilling serfs.  Abbott doesn’t seem like a real conservative but maybe he’s smart enough to know which way the wind is blowing.  DeSantis may be the real deal.  Time will tell.  Maybe we actually aren’t licked yet.

Anyway, plenty of fun stuff to write about.  Stay tuned.

10JUN2021 – OCF Update

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Today is a disrupted day due to errands and visits.  But also I have to watch the Nick Cage movie of the H.P. Lovecraft story “The Color Out of Space.”  Tyler Cook of the Portly Politico and I have agreed to each watch this stinkeroo and then review it to the best of our abilities.  He has watched it and assures me it’s awful.  So today I will bite the bullet and watch it before Camera Girl gets back from weekly shopping.  I am dreading the experience already.  The things I do for my art.