All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
So, I’ve been talking for a few months about Trump’s new term. But it occurred to me that it would be interesting (to me) to find out what other folks think. I’ve decided on two questions to poll.
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Loading ...You can pick multiple choices and use the comments for whatever I’ve left out. Have at it.
After a little fuss and muss Speaker Johnson is Speaker Johnson again. Okay.
And I hear the judge in New York City is going to sentence Trump right before his inauguration. Who knows, maybe he’s going to try some dirty tricks like locking him up for the inauguration ceremony. Maybe the Supreme Court Justice will have to swear him in from Ryker’s Island. Yeah, yeah, whatever.
Okay, so we’re dealing with mental cases everywhere we’re supposed to have sages and scholars. Well, what can I say. These are fallen times and we have to expect idiots to drool on themselves quite a lot of the time. But things continue to fall apart apace. Some percentage of our veterans harbor homicidal tendencies toward the United States. Well, they have lowered the standards for mental fitness so this should be expected.
But this is going to continue while Donald Trump begins to assemble and deploy his cabinet and they get to work terminating the deep state. I won’t be surprised if some disgruntled former FBI agents decide to take pot shots at him going forward.
But I have bigger fish to fry. Camera Girl was complaining about the foaming soap dispensers that I bought a bunch of years ago. It seems they weren’t working smoothly. The pump would get jammed. So, I took one apart and tried to figure out what was wrong. Well, there wasn’t much there so I washed the components and put them back together and tried it out again. Well, now it wasn’t jammed but the damn thing didn’t work. Nothing came out. So now I was getting mad. I took another one apart and cleaned it up and still couldn’t find anything wrong. And when I put it back together it didn’t work. Nothing came out.
So, I stopped taking them apart and since the internet is our friend I did a search for foaming soap dispensers and found this cool exploded view of the mechanism and noticed something. There is a tiny ball that acts as a check valve. This ball allows soap to be sucked into the valve but not pushed back out. And I couldn’t remember seeing such a thing in the two pumps I disassembled. Well, the stupid thing is only an 1/8th of an inch in diameter and transparent plastic so when I cleaned out the pump, I must have washed it down the drain both times.
Now this was very annoying. I have since ordered fifty 1/8th inch polypropylene balls and a tube of food grade silicone grease. With these invaluable supplies I intend to restore the two dispensers back into functionality. Moreover, I will grease all of the pump pistons with the silicone and thereby satisfy Camera Girl’s original complaint about my equipment choices for the various sink areas of the house. There are currently six of these dispensers in the place and each one will require this overhaul.
I wonder if she appreciates how lucky she is to have a technical individual of my caliber at her disposal twenty-four/seven? I doubt that she could have gotten the quick response and analytical acumen that I provided in this foamed soap crisis from just any regular husband. Far from it. The only thing I regret is that because of the critical nature of the crisis there was not time for me to send out RFQ’s (requests for quotations) to three qualified bidders on the project. Business, after all, should be conducted in a businesslike manner.
At this dawning of the rolling year, it is more than normally desirable that we make some slight provision for improving our behavior. Some people try to lose weight or stop smoking. Others look for a better job or start a hobby. I’ve vowed to finish my book. And to accommodate that effort I will be clearing the mornings for writing and editing the book. This may impact my posting schedule (from time to time) but I think it’s necessary. Time slips by too quickly if there are too many competing priorities.
Now I don’t intend to abandon the website. OCF will have its daily photo and quote. And whenever something needs my approbation, scorn or explanation I will promptly respond. And I will link to anything that I think interesting or thought-provoking. But when there’s a slow news week and I’ve already gassed off about the usual suspects I may just take a pass. On days like that maybe I’ll link to a song I like or a clip from a movie that makes me smile.
And from time to time, I’ll put up a chunk of my story to get feedback from the readers here. And I’ll write about writing sometimes!
So, none of this is dire. With Trump entering the White House in a couple of weeks I’m sure I’ll have all kinds of stimuli for posts that will make it impossible to do my fiction writing work. After all, the world is drifting into troubled times and that is sure to goad me into taking to my little soap box and barking out condemnations and propounding simple-minded plans of action.
But I do see that I’ll have to prioritize writing if I ever hope to finish that darn book. I do think there is some writing in me. And I won’t know how hard or easy selling books is until I give it a good old American try.
As for the news today, we’ve all been watching the attack in New Orleans and then listened to Biden try to string a few dozen sentences together without sounding like Max Headroom (and failing). I love how he tells us the guy is a follower of ISIS but not to jump to conclusions. So, because he’s a Moslem whose parents came from the Middle East and he’s declared jihad on America we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that he’s an Islamic terrorist? Would that be insensitive to the various followers of the religion of peace? Well, never mind. Biden is so laughably irrelevant that he might as well have started to read from a Dr. Seuss book as the words of that speech his handlers handed him. More interesting would have been a statement from Trump advising the federal law enforcement agents not to destroy any of the evidence before his team has a chance to see what really went on. Well, this is a small part of what I expect at the border for the foreseeable future. So, it barely merits comment. Let’s pray nothing bigger is in the wings.
And just to show that my heart is in the right place, I’ll put together a few things that might lighten your day.
Year end award ceremonies are usually pretentious and subjective. This leaves the viewers angry and jaded. Not to be outdone by Hollywood and the mainstream media I am announcing and presenting this inaugural edition of the Orio’s. Named for the website and embodying the timeless desire of all photographers to fill up space on his blog I am stepping forward and picking the five best photos from the last three hundred and sixty five “photo of the day” submissions. I have absolutely no objective basis for my selection other than first impressions as I rapidly scanned through the shots from the last twelve months. Well, here they are.
This aptly titled work captures the essence of water fowl floating on a freezing pond. I will say that Mrs. Mallard seems to be giving Mr. Mallard the stink-eye for something that he is pretending he didn’t do. There’s no way he gets away with it.
2. Come into my Parlor Said the Spider to the Fly
What is there to say about the visceral appeal of this stunning visual statement? The drama of a lion bringing down a wildebeest on the Serengeti is (sorta) on display as arachnid faces off against the disgusting metallic sheen of the bottle fly. Is there really any winner here?
3. The Wheel of Time
This fossilized ammonite shell reminds me that most of my life has been spent going around in circles. Is it really about the journey if you end up in the same place you start from? Oh well.
4. Oh My Stars
I can’t think of any snarky wise cracks for this one. I just like the way it looks.
5. Make a Wish
Regular readers probably know that I kind of like the way that milkweed seed pods look after they explode. Nuff said.
So that’s it. A whole year will elapse before we find ourselves here again to rate and praise the best of the best of the best! Well, save up your excitement and the seconds will pass like seconds. Thank you for your attention and hopefully all comments should be equally light-hearted.
So, Camera Girl works double time for a week and I just spend two days eating thousands and thousands of calories of delicacies over the long holidays but I’m the one who’s exhausted and complaining! I guess we each have our own strengths and weaknesses.
So, mission accomplished. Two days hanging out with the grandkids and all the rituals were observed. I even bonded with my sons-in-law. They were good sports and tolerated all of my quirks. They uncomplainingly watched my showing today of W.C. Fields classic “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.” They even laughed at several of the most absurd scenes of Ambrose Wolfinger with his cellar full of singing burglars, his career as a “memory expert,” his criminal adventure as an unlicensed manufacturer of apple jack, his passion for professional wrestling and his trials and tribulations dealing with his truly awful wife and her mother and brother.
The kids fell right in with the silliness on display. The only protest came from my six-year-old granddaughter who recognized both Fields and the actress playing his wife from the previous showing of the other Fields movie where they played a husband and wife, namely “It’s a Gift.” Princess Sack of Potatoes wanted to know where the son and daughter in that previous movie had gotten to in this movie. I explained that even though Fields and the actress were playing husband and wife again they were different characters. I think this situation didn’t sit well with her. Apparently, she felt that her suspension of disbelief was being abused and she wanted those interesting characters returned. I did my best to smooth over this outrage but it took half the movie to return her to willing participation.
And as everyone was heading home, I was thinking what a strange world we live in. All the silly rituals and behaviors that we associate with happiness and family. Three generations of people playing penny ante poker or watching movies from ninety-some-odd years ago or eating peasant foods from a country none of us has ever lived in. It’s all just a hodge-podge of things that make up a stream of experiences that we all share together travelling down the years.
And for me, those are the realest things in the world. All the other things I read about “on-line” and the important progress that is being made by artificial intelligence, global convergence or whatever else they call what they are doing with government money are utterly fake. Watching my two youngest grandchildren trying for the first time to master the silly game of getting a wooden ball on a string to land in a little wooden cup was more meaningful than listening to two physicist talking heads debating about whether dark matter was faker than modified gravity. These high powered (we hope) intellects should be concentrating their efforts on solving the world’s energy problems. The physics they need to be studying is defining the criteria for engineering a safe fission reactor. Humanity needs to snap out of its stupor and produce an ecosystem of abundance and prosperity that fosters human happiness and maximizes human intellectual potential.
It’s amusing to hear people who “believe in science” stating categorically that there is no God and that the universe and life are just meaningless accidents. And their proof is “The Big Bang.” They declare confidently that the universe began x number of billions of years ago with all the matter and energy of creation appearing out of nowhere and all of that creation is still expanding at an ever-greater acceleration into empty space with entropy leading to the heat death of this universe in y billions of years from now. But if you ask them where the big bang came from, they just shrug their shoulders and say that is unknowable. In essence they are saying they don’t know anything about the beginning and end of the universe. So basically, they’re saying, “and then there was light.”
I tend to think life is not an accident. From my point of view, what I experience in my small piece of the universe is the point of the whole thing. A little kid playing with a ball and cup toy is the reason for the big bang and everything else that has been put in motion. Now prove me wrong.
It’s at this time of the rolling year that we think about what matters most in our lives. Just as Charles Dickens designed into his story we think of the past, present and future. And at this point in my life these become very distinct groupings.
When I think back to my childhood and youth it’s as if I’m looking out on a different world. The America of my past was like a fantasy world where opportunity and optimism was omnipresent. And Christmas was the epicenter of that sense of optimism because children are the center of Christmas and America was arranged around providing the next generation with a future of limitless opportunity. And that culture back then was still a Christian culture and the religious and moral aspects of the Christmas story were at the very least still acknowledged. Even Charlie Brown ended his troubled search for the meaning of Christmas with Linus reciting the New Testament text at Luke 2:8-14. And all this positivity and solidarity produced a remarkably happy life for the great majority of Americans.
Now look at the present. It’s not an exaggeration to say that pessimism is the dominant sentiment among Americans of every stripe. And young people are convinced that the opportunities their parents and grandparents enjoyed will not be there for them. And as far as Christmas goes, not only is religion now almost abandoned by the young but any spirituality or even morality associated with Christmas has been drained out of it by the popular culture and the cultural institutions on the Left. Christianity is only referenced as a symbol of Western oppression or the patriarchy. What has replaced it is a confused cult of “social justice” that allows any depravity as long as it’s in the name of sexual identity.
But what of the future? I think it’s certain there’s no way back to the past I knew. But that does not rule out escaping from the desolation we find ourselves in now. We do not have to try to reclaim the lost souls that surround us on the Left. We do not even have to hate them. But we do have to separate from them. In their confusion and despair, they have taken it upon themselves to destroy our children by confusing them with their insane views. This must be prevented by any means possible. The beginnings of this resistance can be seen appearing in various parts of the country. To know if this will be effective, we’ll have to wait and see if it starts expanding during the friendlier environment of the Trump administration. And there is some hope that the Supreme Court will lend a hand. There are hints in the statements after the reversal of Roe v Wade that gay marriage may be headed for a similar reversal. As with any discussion of the future every fork in the road is a flip of the coin. But sometimes the coin comes up heads. So, there’s hope. What we’ll need to do is rebuild our culture on the durable parts of our heritage. Morality will have to be redefined to support a healthy community that centers around normal family life. Those who don’t fit into that pattern will have to be left to the other side to find a place in the world. We’ll concentrate on people who can face reality and want to build something positive for their children.
So here we are on Christmas Eve and I try to remember and point to the past as a template, ignore the worst of the present and hope for and work for a better future. Now past the roast beast and gravy and let’s get this show on the road.
So tonight, Camera Girl was unleashed on the baking supplies she’s been assembling for the last week or so. Tomorrow our daughters and our granddaughter will be showing up at noon or so for the tradition grandma-cookie baking ritual. Grandma cookies are Camera Girl’s mom’s recipe for what some people in the family call white cookies. These are lethally addictive. With a large mug of coffee (or milk for the kids) it’s almost impossible not to binge on every cookie that’s left in harm’s way. It’s hard to believe that the ingredients are only things like flour, eggs, butter, sugar and vanilla extract. There must be some cocaine or opium in them somewhere.
Well, anyway, tonight she baked alone. She baked all the other cookies for the holiday. She made oatmeal, chocolate chip, M&M and sugar cookies. And then just to make sure I won’t survive the year she made a big pan of baklava. Oh, man. Even Zorba the Greek after dancing for a week straight wouldn’t be able to finish off the portion she made. Between the butter, honey and walnuts I can see myself in the local emergency room receiving last rites as the intern on duty calls for the crash cart and the body bag.
Tomorrow I’ll be on a road trip to northern New England; to Vermont. I’m riding shotgun just as company. It should be fun. Meanwhile the womenfolk will be bonding in the kitchen and indoctrinating Princess Sack of Potatoes in the mysteries of family tradition of the female variety. All very sacred proceedings. So, the holidays are progressing satisfactorily.
But it’s not as if all is normal. After her latest shopping trip for the holiday supplies, Camera Girl was horrified at the increase in the prices of such staples as eggs, butter, flour and coffee. I felt very sad for her so I tried to cheer her up by saying that after the holidays the prices would come back down based on supply and demand. I think she could tell I was making it up but she forced a smile and we moved on.
Trump will have his hands full trying to fix the economy and deporting ten million illegals. Just doing those things would be hard enough but he’ll have to do it in the face of not only a hostile Deep State but also the Congress. The House has a razor thin Republican majority and the Senate is packed with RINOs who want to please their corporate paymasters and don’t give a damn about making America great. Yes, he’ll have his hands full.
But despite all this resistance, I am surprisingly optimistic. I was very pleasantly surprised by his victory. And because of it, I no longer assume that the Left will have everything its own way. Trump has seen a lot of the worst that the powers that be can do against him. If he’s half as smart as I hope he is, he’s going to eliminate a very large number of his enemies from the ranks of many of the the agencies that he controls, basically the whole executive branch of government. Unless he’s crazy he knows he has to eliminate large chunks of the management of the FBI and the Justice Department. Once that’s done, I expect he’ll have an easier time dictating terms to the rest of the departments. And in fact, after he has loyalists in charge of the FBI I wouldn’t be surprised if the various RINO senators suddenly become much more cooperative. All of these people must have files that are kept for just such an eventuality.
Now maybe my optimism is foolish. But the holiday is upon us and I think optimism is better for my digestion during this season of overeating. January is the time for resolutions and facing facts. So, unless a planet killing asteroid is discovered approaching Earth or I see the incoming ICBMs over Dunwich between now and Christmas I’m declaring a moratorium on gloom and doom.
I’m going to eat way too many cookies and much too much roast beast and spoil my grandkids and watch way too many old movies. I think that’s a plan.
Henry David Thoreau said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
Well, I don’t know. I’m not sure I’m the quietest (or the loudest) of individuals. And as for desperation and resignation that seems a bit much. For most people work can be a rat race but, is what we do just resignation? I hope not. Now, sure, we all have to reach that endpoint and when that gets a lot closer, desperation and resignation start to sound more fitting, more apt. But Thoreau said the mass of men. Well, most men aren’t about to face death. We get a decent shot at a pretty decent span; “three score and ten” the Bible says.
And even when the end is in sight isn’t there any consolation in reflecting on the fact that you spent your life doing what you thought was best? Maybe it’s a matter of temperament. I guess Thoreau was a product of Yankee New England upbringing. And those people have always seemed a little cold and humorless for my taste. Maybe it’s a combination of puritanism and bad weather but they always seemed like they just bit into something that tasted bad (or maybe it was their reaction at seeing me). Maybe I’m just naturally cheerful. Call it my Mediterranean predisposition but I just think that every story has a happy ending. And this even though I look around me in every direction and I see wrack and ruin out to the horizon. And sure, when it’s time to start hauling away the wreckage I’ll swear and grumble and complain. But I’ll still look forward to a lunch break and quitting time. And then there has to be some human joy somewhere in that mess.
I know some people who live the other way. And they are quite a bit better off than I am. That grim determination has its advantages. You can stuff a 401k plan with quite a lot of money if you’re grimly determined. And maybe they will have an easier time of it at that last stand knowing that everything is paid for. I guess it’s kind of the Cheops or Ozymandias option. But it still feels kind of grim to me.
So, I like to think that most of us try to live lives of quiet or not so quiet inspiration mixed with perspiration. I think the guy who said, “Where there’s life there’s hope” had it right. While there’s still blood pumping through your veins and air being sucked into your lungs there’s hope and more than hope. There’s at least a little excitement. Even if you’re a hundred there’s still the challenge of trying to get on your feet and remembering what it is you have to do to keep breathing that day. And until that gets to be too much for your spirit you have a reason to greet the day.
And if you still have anyone in your life who cares whether you live or die you’ve got a world outside yourself to think about. Maybe people call that quiet desperation. Or maybe I’m the exception. Maybe I’ve just been blessed with much more than the mass of men have. But I kind of doubt it. I’m just an average guy with the average life. Well, except for Camera Girl. She’s pretty great. But don’t tell her. She might demand a better contract.
“Donald Trump announced Sunday his selection of Michael Anton to be the director of policy planning at the State Department under the prospective secretary, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). Anton held a position on the National Security Council during Trump’s first administration, and was also appointed by the president to the National Board for Education Sciences.”
Anton famously wrote the “Flight 93” essay during Donald Trump’s 2016 run claiming that despite any personal shortcomings Republicans needed to embrace Donald Trump to avoid the disaster that a Hillary Clinton extension to the Obama presidency would entail. And in retrospect he was very right.
On a personal not Anton once quoted from an OCF post which I found very surprising. The power of the internet.
Well, best of luck to Anton in his new position. I hope he remembers the hopes and fears of people who read his words and now hope that Donald Trump’s new administration begins to apply the philosophy that he has avowed and make America great again. But at the very least they should strive to make America sane again.
We got five or six inches of really wet heavy snow last night so of course the power goes out and also the cable, internet and phone lines. The generator faithfully kicked in so Camera Girl and the dogs were warm and cozy while the male contingent was tasked with clearing the snow. Of course, the snow blower is suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome so the snow had to be cleared the old-fashioned way.
To add insult to injury the electrical failure is less than five hundred feet from my driveway and so there are the trucks and electrical crew and even some fire fighters standing around looking puzzled. I thought about going and talking to them but reconsidered. I’m guessing some of my neighbors already have and I figure the more times you bother those guys the slower they’ll fix it.
It’s about eighteen hours in and I’m sort of resigned to a world without connectivity. The only phone is an old flip phone that we keep around for emergencies. I charged it up and Camera Girl called the kids to let them know we’re alive. I called work and said I was declaring a snow day. When the driveway was clear I went to a wi-fi location and checked to make sure OCF was up today and that has been the extent of our electronic communications for the day.
No news sites, no X, no nothing. All things considered, it’s not so bad. I guess if the utility reliability continues to decay out here in the hinterlands of Dunwich, I’ll have to ask Elon Musk to provide us with our own dedicated Starlink satellite, a small nuclear power plant and maybe a spaceport. Dunwich is located at the nexus of the Terran/Great Old Ones dimensional rift so a small dedicated interdimensional port makes a lot of sense. If he’s not too busy with his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) role-playing game maybe he could get working on that.
Well, whatever the New England states have done to the power grid it doesn’t bode well for the future. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that a generator with a cut-in switch that can handle the full electrical load of a home is now standard equipment around here. You can be without power for a week in the winter at any time. So natural gas or a large propane tank is what you need. Getting enough gasoline might not be a safe bet if everyone is without power and out searching for fuel.
Well, anyway, while I sit here isolated from Al Gore’s world wide web and information superhighway, I think about how the Democrats want to cut away the last links of reliable energy we still have. The blue states are going full speed ahead to criminalize the internal combustion engine and anything else that uses fossil fuels. I guess that Trump’s term will be a decision point for some parts of the country. Without his support, all of the promised charging stations and other green energy rigamarole won’t be there to allow for the fossil-fuel-free-wonderland they envisioned. It may turn out that their deadlines are not be feasible. And if they insist on them, there may be some serious blowback from the voters. It might become quite interesting for Gavin Newsom. Instead of the bullet-train future he promised he might be leaving on a different rail, one that includes tar and feathers.