Tag: Dunwich

Debate in Dunwich – Part 1

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With the death of First Selectman Cthulhu a power vacuum has formed.  But not a metaphorical one.  The disappearance of Cthulhu has caused an actual rip in the fabric of space-time and various Great Old Ones and their allies and servants have been sucked into our space-time and hurled down to Dunwich.

Sighted so far are:

  • Hastur; the polypous, ravenous floating mass endowed with tentacles, drills, and suckers, or more frequently, as the King in Yellow, a humanoid being wearing tattered, yellow clothes and a mask hiding the face. He is said to be Cthulhu’s (half-)brother.
  • Idh-yaa; A gigantic, pale, worm-like horror dwelling beneath the crust of the star Xoth. She has been Cthulhu’s first bride, and with him spawned three sons—Ghatanothoa, Ythogtha, and Zoth-Ommog—and a younger daughter, Cthylla.
  • Yog-Sothoth; The “All-in-One and One-in-All”, co-rules with Azathoth and exists as the incarnation of time in the cosmos, yet is somehow locked outside the mundane universe.
  • Shub-Niggurath; The “Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young”
  • Nyarlathotep; The “Crawling Chaos”, is the avatar of the Outer Gods, existing as the incarnation of space and functions as an intermediary between the deities of the pantheon and their cults.
  • Azathoth; Sometimes referred to as the “Blind Idiot God”, is a dreaming monster who rules the Outer Gods, created them (along with many other worlds) and thus effectively serves as the supreme deity of the Cthulhu Mythos.

With these Great Old Ones wishing to succeed Cthulhu as the leader of storied Dunwich, these demonic beings have each filled out the necessary paperwork and paid the fees to be placed on the November ballot for the office of First Selectman of Dunwich.  The Town Clerk has posted the ballot in the Dunwich Complainer and a series of debates will take place.  But not in the Town Hall as is typical but rather in an open field on Sentinel Hill where the larger Great Old Ones can more easily fit.

Due to the short window for campaigning there was not sufficient time for any of the candidates to obtain the endorsement of either of the two major parties but since the Democrats are rightly considered the sowers of chaos, any monstrous entity would more or less qualify as a Democrat candidate.

When contacted by the Complainer, only Hastur made himself available for comment.  The polypous, ravenous floating mass endowed with tentacles morphed into his King in Yellow, humanoid wearing tattered, yellow clothes and mask hiding his face form.  But before speaking he morphed into a very Trump-like monster.  He was quoted as saying, “These debates will be the greatest debates and all these other Great Old Ones will be shown to be not very great.  In fact, except for me they will all be terrible.  They will all be like Sleepy Joe Biden; very confused and very stupid.  Especially Azathoth who really is the “Blind Idiot God.”  But he’s not really blind.  He’s just pretending to be blind for the sympathy.  Very sad.  By the end of the debate all of them will drop out and I will be first Selectman.  This I guarantee.”

We at the Dunwich Complainer will follow this race diligently and will shamelessly favor whichever candidate pays us the most advertising revenue.  Stay tuned for this titanic struggle.  Winner take Dunwich.

And with Strange Aeons Even Death May Die

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“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.

In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

 

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.”

 

After yesterday’s post I received several communications from readers outraged at the manner in which such a venerable and iconic entity as the First Selectman could be allowed to leave this continuum.  Many simply refused to believe the facts such as they are and hang onto hope that Cthulhu lives.  As the quotes above attest there is a tradition that Cthulhu can remain inert for literally billions of years and still reanimate and wreak a terrible vengeance on mankind when the stars align just right (or just wrong).

Well, I will not speculate at this point on the Great Old One’s chances of resuscitation.  As Hamlet very cleverly noted, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  And if we add to heaven and earth the depths of hell, then we begin to list the span of infinities where knowledge of the First Selectman can be hiding.  And since I already miss the old villain a little bit, I’ll keep an open mind as to his chances of reintegration.  Let’s leave it there for now.

I have finally completed the herculean task to which I was yoked.  My spirit, such as it is, has rebounded measurably and I look around me to see the state of life in the here and now.  I note the same stale prattle about polls and bickering with the names Trump, Harris, Vance and Walz attached.  Frankly all of this is too tedious to even consider.  Let all of that stew for a while.

The summer wanes and school children are already frozen with existential dread at the approach of Labor Day.  But, this time of year is not without its charms.  I was forced to rise hideously early Tuesday morning and so I was out and about before 4:00 am when I happened to look up at the sky and was struck by the brightness of the stars and planets and their inspiring beauty.  If I had not been on an unavoidable mission, I might have stood there for a quarter hour and marveled at this arresting vision.  At that moment I was reminded of this aspect of reality and how these incomprehensible phenomena we call stars can be both the source of our lives and these beautiful beacons that light up the night sky that we so rarely bother to view.  So out of the most tedious and soul-crushing activities it is possible to experience a moment of primal joy and wonder.

But now I’ll spend a day or two catching up with my various duties.  Bear with me as I take up again the reins of my daily routine and restore order to my life.  I must write and trim some posts and schedule them and I must read up on any “news” I might have missed and try to draw inspiration from my surroundings and the important things that need to be said and done.

So good morning!

Wednesday’s Child Is Full of Woe

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The horror continues unabated.  Thursday will be a respite, and I will use that day to try to reestablish my sanity (whatever that might be).  We have corroded away the first inch of the First Selectman’s outer scale layer.  This will allow the boiling sulfuric acid to percolate through and diffuse into his circulatory system and act as a revivifying tonic.  This is an especially dangerous part of the procedure.  The effect of the tonic is to pique his appetite.  In years past we have lost several members of the de-lousing team at this point in the procedure.

Of course, he’s always very sorry afterward and apologizes profusely to the surviving members of the crew and speaks very appreciatively of the dearly departed and of all their good qualities; their diligence, their team spirit, their crunchiness and full-bodied flavor.  He never stints on praise.

Because of this unfortunate tendency during this part of the procedure I find myself unconsciously moving toward the First Selectman’s left side.  It’s a little-known fact that he’s blind in that eye and so less likely to reflexively snap his jaws and swallow someone standing near that side of his head.

In the big, beautiful world outside of Dunwich all sorts of unimportant things are going on.  The Olympics grinds on with no detectable interest by most of the population.  Kamala and her new running mate are making the rounds of the friendly news shows and touting their wonderfulness.  But I don’t know.  This guy seems to have a bunch of skeletons rattling around in his closet.  Did he refuse to serve in Iraq?  Did he normalize pedophilia.  This guy may be a disaster waiting to happen.  Well it couldn’t happen to a nicer gal than Kamala!

The Ukrainians have opened up a new front in their war by invading Russia on the northern front to the west of the Kharkiv area.  And some of their new F-16s have been spotted flying in the western Ukrainian skies.  There looks to be a major event in Ukraine very soon.

During a particularly slow point in the work, I was talking to a co-worker and he was talking about raising a family in the early 1980s.  A lot of what he said rang true for me too.  There were major financial problems like the very high mortgage rates but people went ahead with their lives taking risks and betting on their luck.  That’s how I remember it too.  The first time I got laid off with a mortgage to cover it was pretty scary.  But if you looked around, something would turn up even if it was only contract work.  The difference between then and now is there is a culture that discourages optimism.  Nothing can be done and nothing is anyone’s fault.  The default assumption is that it’s society’s fault and it’s not worth trying.

This attitude is a death sentence.  The world is the same as it ever was.  Effort and extending your reach beyond the minimum are rewarded.  Regardless of recessions and inflation, striving for what you want isn’t an extraordinary idea.  It’s the normal circumstance for Americans.  This has always been the land of opportunity because it’s the land of hard work that rewards the achiever.  So let the young ones you talk to know this.  Struggle and survive is the order of the day.  And they come from ancestors that did just that.

Now back to the vat.  By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.  Oh well.

31JUL2024 – The Curse Has Come upon Me.  Well Pretty Soon Anyway.

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The First Selectman Taking a Stroll

A terrible fate is creeping up on me.  Periodically, First Selectman Cthulhu has to have his external parasites burned off by soaking in a lake-sized vat of boiling sulfuric acid.  It’s uneventful but a very long process that requires someone to supervise.  From next Monday until the Wednesday of the following week I will be in a form of purgatory.  Isolated from the site and forced to endure almost unimaginable tedium I shall not be able to write my posts under my normal conditions.  Whatever output I produce will be stilted, uninspired and generated in a state of exhaustion and mental duress.  Come to think of it, you may not notice the difference at all.  But undoubtedly, the word count will go way down.  I should be able to load up the Pictures of the Day and the Quotes of the Day this weekend.  But beyond that everything will be hit and miss.

Like some kind of latter-day Prometheus bound with cruel spikes driven through my immortal flesh into the adamantine stone beneath and with a cruel eagle constantly devouring my ever-regenerating liver, I will endure all this uncomplainingly knowing that I do it for the good of all mankind, or at least for the good of the MAGA Republicans.  Maybe Trump can visit me on my mountain crag and speak words of encouragement and snide insults at the eagle.  If he has the time.

If any of you have any content that you want posted feel free to e-mail it to me and I’ll make sure to publish it as a way to keep the readers happy.  When the time of my internment is through, I shall return renewed and rededicated to the proposition that all internet links are created unequal.  That they are endowed by their content creators with varying quality based on the qualities of these creators themselves and on how hard they are willing to work to make the content entertaining.

As the hours slowly pass during my captivity I’ll try to imagine what it will be like when President Kamala Harris is the commander in chief of this formerly great nation.  I imagine how she will take the rostrum in the House of Representatives and give the State of the Union address and we’ll all applaud as she describes the glories of her electric yellow school bus bill.  This bill will require the confiscation of all private, gasoline powered automobiles and mandate the use of buses for all travel.  With a $40 trillion dollar price tag it will be the boldest and most expensive bill ever passed and it will certainly convert us into a banana republic in the image of Venezuela.

I was just listening to Trump at one of his rallies riffing on what a loser Kamala Harris is.  It was funny.  I guess I’ve missed his rally patter.  It really is quite hilarious the way he describes her failure as “border czar” and her statements on defunding the police during the Summer of Floyd.  And his equally harsh mockery of Biden is quite amusing.  I think Trump is wise to highlight the fact that Kamala kept Joe Biden’s condition as a secret from the country.  That is indeed a damning accusation against someone trying to gain the trust of the country while running for the office of president.

Today is the last day of July and I consider it the end of New England Summer.  I’ve read that measurable snowfall has been recorded in every month of the year except for July in southern New England.  If that is so then August is early winter.  I have already begun preparing for it.  I’ll begin prepping the snowblower and break out the snow shovels.  I may wait a few weeks before wearing thermal underwear but it’s almost time.  Turkey deep fried on the barbecue for Labor Day?  We’ll see.

Mowing Your Problems Away

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A few weeks ago I was introduced to the term “no mow May.”  Apparently by not mowing the lawn in May there is a theory that we allow all of the pollinating insects to do their thing and Gaia will be happier and not allow volcanoes and asteroids to kill us all.

Now everyone on this site knows of my undying allegiance to the Green Revolution.  I’ve had the “global warming hockey stick graph tattooed on my eyeballs so that I’m constantly thinking about how much danger the planet is in.  So of course, I sacrificed all other considerations and refrained from mowing the lawn.

Well, lawn would be a misnomer.  My neighbors despise me for the sheer tonnage of dandelions in my fields.  They accuse me of robbing them of the perfect lawns they lust for.  I am, in a word, a heretic against the religion of lawn care.  But be that as it may I held out all May.  And as they drove by my property and the grass and weeds got taller and taller I could feel their hate growing and the dark side of the force becoming stronger and stronger.  But I would walk about unconcerned, at play in the fields of the Lord, luxuriating in the waist high sea of grass and weeds, taking macro shots of bugs and the grass itself and whatever else struck my fancy in my fantasy of a post-Leftist Earth.

But yesterday was May 31st and Camera Girl confronted me and reminded me of that fact.  And she had that wifely look on that I could tell meant that she would brook no nonsense.  And noticing it I said, “Oh, June already, how time flies!  Well, thank goodness it’s stopped raining.  I’ve been worried I’d never be able to get out there!”

So yesterday I hooked up the ride-on mower to a battery charger and got out my new ear protection and safety glasses and gloves and gathered up the various debris that was scattered all over the property and checked under the exceptionally long grass around places where there could be rabbits, foxes and other varmints hiding and collected all the large rocks, tennis balls and dog toys that Camera Girl hurls around the yard for the canine crew.

And this morning bright and early at 11 am I went outside and began the ordeal.  Yikes!  No mow May is a tricky calculation.  Sure, it bought me a couple of weeks of sloth but what a wreck.  I ended up recutting about a third of it and the cleanup was considerable.

Remarkably, Camera Girl was so impressed by the improvement that she seemed to forget that I was the cause of it looking so awful in the first place and I was treated as the conquering hero.  At late snack there was a slice of some kind of pastry, sort of like a Danish but less doughy, that I didn’t even know was in the house.  It was served with a mug of coffee just the way I like it and all was sweetness and light.  Women are extremely unpredictable creatures.  They get stirred up about things that we don’t even notice.  And we almost never know whether it will be in our favor or not.  But as has been observed by greater minds than mine, they are the only source for producing more human beings that we have so far discovered.  So, there we are.

There’s a lot to be said for cutting the grass.  A man can lose himself for a few hours and he can find his mind wandering in and around a lot of problems that are somewhere in the back of his mind.  Alternatively, he can also sometimes forget his problems for a little while.  Today was one of those day.  I turned off the 2024 election and all the rest of the madness for a few hours and damned if I don’t feel a lot better.

The Dunwich Budget

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Farmer Cthulhu in His Fields

Here in Dunwich we had our town budget meeting and the Finance Committee asked for a 10 percent increase and there was an uproar.  The Bishops and the Whateleys demanded that First Selectman Cthulhu go into closed session with them and provide an itemized list of all the increases in expenditures.  At the end of the session the First Selectman exited the chamber.  When asked by the committee if all demands had been satisfied, he belched out a dark viscous cloud and declared, “Sure, at least until dinner anyway.  I’m always hungry an hour after Whateley.”

During the next session a group of concerned Dunwichians demanded that alternative revenue raising methods be provided.  Cthulhu suggested a 0.001% head tax be levied.  This low rate excited many of the concerned group and they asked what details would still have to be worked out if this tax was provisionally approved.  The First Selectman confided, “Well we’ll have to figure out how to decide which heads to harvest.  I favor going blind fold and just biting off whatever heads come within my grasp until I’ve reached the agreed upon total.  That seems fairest.”  It was unanimously decided to shelve that proposal indefinitely in favor of the 10% tax increase.

Democracy in action in Dunwich is a frightening but somehow clarifying process.  As opposed to other less mythic New England towns Dunwich cuts through the pretense of egalitarianism and nakedly reveals the precise power dynamic between Great Old Ones and anyone small enough to be engulfed, chewed and swallowed by their cephalopodic maws.

But to be fair, it’s not as if Americans aren’t equally at the mercy of their government.  Paying taxes and not receiving services like police protection, safe drugs, secure borders and honest representation in Washington are standard operating procedure since at least the Obama administration.

Surely, no one is surprised anymore that no balanced budget is ever negotiated, approved and administered.  Since Obama’s time continuing expenditure resolutions and multi-trillion-dollar omnibus boondoggles are the new normal.  I wonder if it is even possible to get a balanced budget enacted.  Would the administrative state just shrug it off and print more money and chalk it up to the need for “clandestine intelligence programs” above the public’s pay grade to know or even question?  I have to confess I’m curious what in the world Trump will do if he gets back into the White House.  It’s rather like being one of the fifth century Westen Roman emperors.  You have to go through the motions of giving orders to the generals but outside your window you can see the Goths and the Vandals carrying off the last of the treasury.

This beyond reckless deficit spending will eventually lead to collapse.  It has to.  Really the only question I have is whether there is a plan to handle the collapse or will the rats just desert the sinking ship for greener pastures.  Will the Obamas flee Martha’s Vineyard for New Zealand or Singapore?

Well, at least locally, the budget process is carefully controlled and all due respect is provided to the voters.  First Selectman Cthulhu is also the ballot clerk at the budget vote.  Every registered voter receives one ballot and casts it proudly.  And we’re proud of our innovations in local government.  By pre-printing the yes oval already filled in we have saved hundreds of dollars over the last few years in the cost of pens and markers.  And that way Cthulhu doesn’t have to eat any “no” voters.  That’s progress!

Tales from the Van – Part 1 – The Sisterhood

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Many years ago, I commuted into Boston for work.  And because at the time there was no commuter rail from where I lived, I took a van in.  We all paid a fee and some of us drove the van on occasion and on those days, we’d get a day knocked off our fee for the next month.  And I’ll have to say that we had a very “diverse” cast of characters.  And I mean that by every definition of the word.  Not only racially, ethnically, careerwise and socio-economically but also philosophically and by personality type.  We were a motley crew.  We even had a guy who worked for one of the intelligence agencies (or so he said).  There were a few people who couldn’t stand each other and there were some very close friends.

But even though most of us didn’t know each other “in the real world,” for an hour in the morning and the afternoon we spent our time talking about the events of the day and the latest sit-com and our work day and our home lives and anything else to pass the time.  And it’s a funny thing but to the people on the van what we thought about the world was a pretty important part of our day.  We would argue politics and social trends.  And once in a while, the guys would even get together for a social gathering.   One time I had the boys over for a poker game and sandwiches.  It was a great success, meaning no one lost too much and everyone ate too much and drank way too much beer.  And this cemented the male camaraderie of the van immensely.  Once you’ve bluffed yourself to a pot with a broken straight it’s almost like you’re boyhood chums.

There was a feminist contingent on the van too and they would provide a united front when explaining why men were the cause of all the problems in the world.  That is until they needed help with a flat tire or an angry motorist on the road.  I remember a time when I was riding shotgun while one of the most strident feminists was driving the van through Boston street-traffic.  It was an awful ride.  We were in a bumper-to-bumper jam and she had lost all patience and was laying on the horn every other minute or so.  Finally, the guy in front of us in a brand-new sports car, throws his car into park, jumps out of his car.  He’s about six foot five and comes running over and bangs on her window with his fist.

Well, this champion of female equality, jumped out of the driver’s seat and ran to the back of the van like a shot.  Which I found hilarious.  Until I realized she had left the van in gear.  So of course we rolled into the back of the sports car.  Now I had to climb over the hump and get into the driver’s seat.  The engine had stalled out and I had to nurse it back to life and then throw it into reverse to separate us from the sports car.  All the while the irate driver is hopping up and down screaming over us hitting his car.  I couldn’t think of anything else to say so I shrugged my shoulder and pointed out to him that traffic was moving and tried not to laugh.  After he convinced himself that his bumper wasn’t much the worse for the bump and realized that if he wanted to make an accident report of it, he’d have to tell a traffic cop that he had been threatening a woman driver for being a woman driver he slunk back to his car and we proceeded.

But that little demonstration had us laughing at the sisterhood for a good long time about having a concrete answer as to, “What good are men?”  But pretty soon the sisterhood had convinced themselves again that women were the only intelligent life in the universe.

There was another occasion when the gals were plotting their takeover of the world.  And they had managed to set off one of the less easy-going guys with their claim that a pack of five women could kill any man in a fight.  They badgered him for a good long time and they could see this talk got under his skin so they did it all the more.  They demanded that he tell them how he could possibly hope to fight against five opponents.  After all, they said, if all of them constantly pummeled him from all sides they’d eventually injure him enough to overwhelm him.

So finally, he said, the tactic he would use would be to get a strong hold on one woman and bash her head into the ground and then do the same to each of them consecutively.  He believed this would have a twofold advantage.  Firstly, finishing off one opponent completely would significantly improve his position in the fight.  But more importantly, he believed that psychologically women would be unlikely to continue attacking a man that had just bashed a woman’s head in.

His logic seemed to have been persuasive.  The gals gave up that thought experiment completely and the rest of the ride was very quiet.  After that they didn’t bother him about the war of the sexes, so to speak.  I think they were kind of scared of him.  What he said must have struck them as accurate.

But by the next day we had some new thing to argue about.  I think it was the Oscars.  The girls had a very long talk about that with very little help from us.  But at least things were back to normal.

Small Towns, Politics and Life

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I like to mock my small town with my stories of Dunwich.  And it’s true that nowadays even small towns are caught up in the awful consequences of the blue state policies that reach down and afflict us with all the bad practices and crazy programs that are out there.

But small towns at least have the advantage that you are forced to see who it is that has to try and make the machine work regardless of the craziness of the system.  And the funny thing is that face to face with individual people they tend to look a lot like human beings.

And this is not saying that some of them aren’t crazy.  They most decidedly are.  The woke ideas that they’ve been steeped in for their whole lives has rendered a goodly number of them certifiably mad.  They advocate for the worst programs and ideas and claim that it all makes perfect sense.  Everything about them is backwards and upside down.

And yet, they’re still demonstrably human.  They have families and friends and they have tragedies afflict them like everyone else.  And when you hear of these things it reminds you of your own brushes with mortality and fate.  And unless you’re implacably driven you can’t help but feel empathy.

So, it’s a little harder to hate people so very entirely in a small town.  You have to see their faces and talk to them when you want to argue.  Your kids and grandkids go to the same schools and fairs and kids sports with their kids and grandkids.  And sure, you also go to the budget meetings and zoning meetings and disagree about taxes and school programs and road work but it’s hard to see them as the same as Joe Biden and the FBI and the IRS.  They’re not Goerge Soros sprinkling billions of dollars to corrupt justice.  They may want to waste thousands of dollars and fund projects that you think are wasteful and possibly harmful but they aren’t trying to destroy your family.  They vote for the people that are trying to destroy your family but they don’t think these things up themselves.

And when you get the chance to talk to some of them, they’re just as distressed as you are about the price of bread and meat being up forty percent in just four years.  They’re worried that their kids can’t afford to live in their own places because rents and real estate have skyrocketed.  They know that kids have been proselytized into believing that they can never achieve a middle-class existence on their own.  They’re scared for the future too.

I mention all this because during the day-to-day existence of reading the atrocities that the Left perpetrates on us, anyone can imagine the “civil war” erupting all around us and neighbors at each other’s throats.  And maybe in a big city it’s already sort of true.  Nobody knows anyone and random violence is a regular feature that goes hand in hand with anonymity.  But in a small town you even know the “devil” himself, the leader of the progressives.  And what does the devil look like?  It’s a middle-aged woman who volunteers on two or three town committees and wants to hire an extra librarian for the high school and get a new ambulance for the EMS crew.  Not precisely Klaus Schwab.

None of this changes the fact that we disagree diametrically with the things these people vote for.  In small ways, day after day, these people are contributing to the destruction of normal life.  They are a big part of the problem.  But when they are also your neighbors and you have to work with them to keep the town going hate is a lot harder to muster.  Annoyance definitely, and even anger, sure.  But hate is a stretch.

Of Civil War and Moe the Crow

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What a beautiful day.  It hit seventy with almost constant bright sun, almost no clouds and, for once, no wind.  Walking around the yard today was idyllic.  The daffodils were mostly open and everywhere the tree buds looked ready to burst.

Now the calendar says it’s the middle of April but in New England that translates to the beginning of Spring.  And based entirely on my subjective criteria I hereby declare today the first day of Spring 2024 in the photogian calendar!

 

A raven has taken to chasing off Camera Girl’s pet crows (Moe the Crow and his stooges) and eating all the scraps that she puts out for them every morning.  Now, I’ve been a fan of ravens ever since I read a book called Ravens in Winter many years ago.  And after camping in Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, my admiration for them has increased.  Now that they have made their way to Compound, I am excited to have them around.  But I do feel bad for Camera Girl.  Moe has become a friend of hers.  When he sees her come to the water he comes down to the ground and she feeds him peanuts from the ground in front of her.  Ah, well.  Survival of the strongest.

Alright, enough of all that.  Had to get it out of my system.

I spent today catching up with some projects that had languished during my recent busy spurt.  I’ve got a contractor waiting on a contract and a check to repair the damage done by a 120-foot White Pine that flattened a part of the upper driveway fence.  A very sad story.  The highway crew cut the tree up on Friday and managed to cut the electric fence wire that keeps our canines from rampaging over the countryside.  The timing of the electric fence malfunction made it possible that it coincided with the earthquake.  But afterwards the physical evidence said, road crew.  I have so many enemies!

I saw some early reviews for the new picture “Civil War.”  The claim is that the movie isn’t just a hit piece against Trump.  I’d like to believe that but I don’t want to see it until it’s been reviewed by someone on the right side of the political divide.  I’ve been burned too often and refuse to pay to be insulted by Hollywood.  I’ve watched about ten reviews so I’m starting to believe it could just be a movie about how bad a civil war would be.  But the other factor that could keep me away is the heroes being journalists.  After all, how many good journalists have we seen in the last ten years or so?  One, two, maybe three?  Anyway, my research continues.  If anyone finds a right-wing movie review for it, please pass it along.

So, Sunday night I did surgery on my laptop.  The internal battery was dying so I had to figure out how to open the back on my computer and replace the battery without frying the system or cracking the motherboard.  As I mentioned a few days ago I bout my very own geek tool set and watched a few YouTube videos for similar (but not identical) laptop models and then bit the bullet and went in.

Everything went relatively easily until I attempted to pop the back off.  Most of it released but near one side of the hinge the damn thing was stuck.  Stuck good!  And this is just plastic so I was afraid if I put too much force on it the damn thing would crack apart.  So, I attempted to extend the pry bar deeper into the interior to give me better leverage but I was afraid that some internal component could be damaged and turn the whole computer into useless junk.  After what seemed like forever the stuck spot sprang open.  Afterwards I checked to see if I had broken anything.  I did find something that looked like part of a female coupling that broke loose.  I couldn’t find where it came from so I chalked it up to being one of those pesky “extra parts” that they put in complicate equipment and moved on.

Well, from there on everything went smoothly and the whole thing was back together in five minutes.  A few hours of charging and the thing was working flawlessly.  So now I am officially an IT worker.  I feel an irresistible urge to write a haiku in DOS.

There, I’ve gone about seven hundred and fifty words without mentioning the 2024 elections.  That feels pretty good.  I’m trying to figure out a good approach to write about the political situation strictly from a humorous perspective.  Since I have almost precisely zero practical effect on the outcome of the election, I feel that to entertain is the correct strategy.  But honestly, I’m still searching for the format and angle that pleases me creatively and would also provide enjoyment to the readers.  A work in progress.

So, I think I’ll go watch something fun.  Maybe Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes.  I like that movie.

Cthulhu Attempts to Swallow the Sun and Fails Badly

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The First Selectman was miffed about something.  Maybe his shadow appeared a little too portly or his reflection in a dank lake was a little too unflattering.  Whatever it was he attempted to swallow Earth’s star.  Luckily he’s not the Elder God he used to be.  All he got was a nasty burn around his mouth tentacles, a case of butthurt and a dose of reality.

I collected this shot at the moment of maximum effort.