All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
Hi Photog…
Here is a link to a website for a friend of mine from college…
http://www.ericpbishop.com/about-eric.html
His debut novel, “The Body Man,” will go on sale beginning on November 11, 2021.
You can either post this or not, I just wanted to get you the link since it sort of lines up with the crime dramas you mention.
Jason M
That presumes the universe can be comprehended by us. I suspect that the ultimate reality is buried beneath increasingly bewildering layers far beyond our comprehension.
We made it past Newtonian physics to Einsteinian relativity and are still wandering around in Quantum. Who says it ends there. With the colliders, every time we think we are at the base of things, entirely new classes of “fundamental’ particles are found. They are now looking for the building blocks of quarks. We’ve made it to Planck scale and declared it to be the finish line. Yeah?
I remember the quote but not where it came from. A maybe fictional religion hypothesized that the world was on the back of a turtle. A priestess (I think) was questioned as to what the turtle was standing on. Her reply was something like, “I see where you’re going with this young man but it’s turtles all the way down.”
Now there is talk that we are 3 dimensional shadows on a 5 dimensional brane. (as in membrane, not brain). Or maybe the universe is an infinite computer running a program. Or maybe every point in spacetime exists simultaneously and forever like a slide in an infinite stack illuminated occasionally by consciousness.
I think that not only do we not have a clue but aren’t capable of having a clue. So shut up and have a beer.
I agree about the movies for the most part. Until yesterday that last two movies I have watched in the cinema were Godzilla King of The Monsters and Godzilla vs King Kong. I happen to be a big Godzilla fan since childhood.
I don’t care for Disney’s Marvel Universe movies. I did, however, go see the new Disney movie Jungle Cruise. yesterday in the cinema. My nice wanted to see it so I took her as she hates to go alone. More on that in a minute.
It wasn’t a bad movie, in fact I rather enjoyed it. The Rock was better than usual in acting, Emily Blunt pretty much stole every scene and the special effects and action sequences were what you’d expect from Disney. A good time and I bonded a bit with my niece
My niece is a tall, attractive woman of twenty-one but she looks like sixteen. This frustrates her now but I told her in twenty years she’ll appreciate her youthful looks. At any rate, she went to the ladies’ room after the movie and I stood by to ensure no one with a penis entered the ladies’ room while she was in there. When she exited, we were walking to the entrance/exit and a very liberal Karen stopped us, told my niece she did not have to go anywhere with me and made noises about human trafficking. I told her just because an older man has a young woman by his side it is not always by force. That she was my niece and to kindly get out of the way. She kept it up and I told the kids at the concession stand to call the police.
The local gendarmeri4e arrived and Karen was still fuming. I greeted one officer by name and told him what was going on. Karen said we exhibited classic human trafficking patterns. The cop laughed in her face and told her to go home or he’d run her in for being a public nuisance. Then she accused him of being part of the trafficking gang. That was too much so off she went to the hoosegow to cool off.
My niece (adopted by my brother) is a tall, brown hair, blue eyed pale girl. Being half Blackfoot, my complexion, especially in the summer, is somewhat darker, My facial features also bespeak my (and my brother’s) heritage. My niece is QUITE attractive, which is why she asks me to stand outside the ladies’ room when she goes inside, in case she has to yell for help. But still, we were both laughing and talking about the movie. She was giggly but that is her nature. She likes her uncle and we have some good times together. I have taken her with me to Sandusky then onto one of the islands there where you can see evidence of the last ice age’s glaciers as they scraped the rock. She wanted some literature and photos of it for a school report.
I normally applaud any real attempt to end human trafficking, but this Karen went overboard and assumed she was right (a liberal fault). Heck, it could have been a sugar daddy/sugar baby relationship, or a grandfather/grandchild situation. I am old enough to be her grandfather.
So be careful, people in what you ASSUME to be happening. Assume makes an ass out of you and me, remember.
Guest Contributor – War Pig – East Berlin and Breaking Bread with Ivan
(photog) – War Pig, what would an American serviceman have to do to enter East Berlin? Just a frontier checkpoint to inspect identification papers?
(War Pig) – Back then, you had to have a pass, and you had to be in uniform. Military from America, Brits, French, etc. were nothing unusual in visiting East Berlin. They were rather inclined to allow you in as you brought western currency with you. Your papers were inspected at the checkpoint but I don’t remember anyone being denied entry with the paperwork correct. You could even bring in a camera as long as you obeyed the “do not photograph” signs. You were overcharged but even at that it was cheaper than West Berlin prices. As I recall, we had black beer, & roast or corned beef sandwiches on dark bread. Hearty and satisfying. Must have been corned beef as I now remember I mentioned to the Russian that the corning spices in German corned beef were different than the Irish style used in America. That led to a side discussion about our favorite foods. He was surprised that I actually like borscht. I said I liked it some ways as I had had it about a dozen different ways and I only liked two or three.
I wish I could meet him again if he still lives. I’d like to see how he got along. It really would have been a pity if we’d had to fight each other.
When I worked in counter-intel I often went to West Berlin. There about every other person you met was a spy for one side or the other. Great parties, though.
I got into uniform and went into East Berlin all according to Hoyle. I had a camera and took some neat pictures of the architecture. Of course, the polizei had to come and harass me. I told them to piss off and get a Russian officer, which was according to the treaty. The polizei weren’t squat in East Berlin if you were an American in uniform. I kept walking about and a Russian officer approached me and was polite. GRU, naturally. We chatted and sat in a bistro and had beer and sandwiches, which I paid for. We talked and both agreed it would be sad if we ever had to go to war against each other as we had more in common than with most of our allies. Rather charming fellow. We played it according to the rules and he asked what I was photographing, I told him the buildings and that I wasn’t stupid enough to photograph military things out in the open with the polizei watching me like a hawk. We both laughed. I left him with a spare Zippo lighter with a naked woman on it and two packs of unfiltered Camel cigarettes. I had already gotten the message I went in to get. He walked me to the checkpoint and had them wave me through without issues. All gentlemen and friends.
Guest Contributor – War Pig – East Berlin and Breaking Bread with Ivan – Part 2
A friend on the Old Boy network sent me this today:
“I was once willing to give my life for what this country stood for. Today, I’d give my life to protect my family from what this country has become.”
Right on, brother.
The left loves chaos. They thrive on it like ants on honey. Chaos and unlawfulness and lack of common sense is a part of their grand design. Then they put up a strong man (NOT Biden) and we have Germany, 1933, all over again. Fascism. As much as the left claims Trump is a fascist, they are the true fascists. They sic their brown-shirt militias (BLM, Antifa) on any area that does not kowtow to their plan, except for areas such as Texas who can hold them at bay.
They have said repeatedly they are coming for our guns, and they mean it. An armed citizenry is the best protection from them and they know it. Having been around the world a few times, I have seen what historically happens to a disarmed populace. It ain’t pretty. Our founders were wise beyond measure in enacting the 2nd Amendment. An armed citizenry not only guarantees failure of an invasion from without, but prevents a takeover from within. Yamamoto and the Soviet generals alike disregarded trying to invade and occupy the USA as we had “a gun behind every blade of grass”. 100 million armed Americans as guerilla fighters makes every land force look weak by comparison. 24 million of those Americans are veterans, fully schooled in guerilla tactics and IEDs. Over 350 million guns just in legal hands that are known. Depending on whom you ask, Americans have between 4 TRILLION and 14 TRILLION rounds of ammo for those guns.
Nobody wants to try that force on for size. The US military decimated both the Viet Cong and the NVA Army. We only lost because of gutless politicians who started the war, then chickened out. Militarily, Vietnam was a great victory for us. Politically, we were undone by cowardly and bought politicians and a US media who even then was coopted by the Marxists.
Tyler Cook of the Portly Politico and I have decided to cross link on our reviews for this movie. We both thought this movie was awful but we thought that readers should see nuanced differences. Actually what you’ll see is our two styles. Tyler is a witty and intelligent writer and I like to rant. So here’s the link to his review and below is mine.
This is a cinematic version of Lovecraft’s story about a meteor that lands in a rural Massachusetts farmyard and infects the soil and the water with an entity that subtly alters the plants and animals and then sucks the vitality and finally the life out of every living thing around it before shooting back into space leaving a dead landscape behind. But let us say the movie takes liberties with this plot.
How do I hate this movie? Let me count the ways.
First off, I despised all the characters in this story. I even despised the seven-year-old who was the youngest kid in the family. They are stereotypical yuppie transplants to the countryside and all of them have extremely annoying personalities. The father is Nicholas Cage and he spends his time milking alpacas and raising heirloom tomatoes. The mother is a financial advisor who has neglected her kids to the point that older son is a useless pothead, the daughter is a bitter Wiccan wannabe and the younger son appears to be a doofus. Tommy Chong is the forest dwelling pot grower who supplies the son with his weed and also seems to be acquainted with alien invasions. Then there is the hydrologist who is taking water samples for a new reservoir that will be covering the property that Nick Cage’s family currently inhabits. He walks around warning everyone about the dangers of meteorites and contaminated water but achieves nothing other than somehow surviving the apocalypse.
Next is the plot. In the original Lovecraft story, the baleful influence of the entity slightly modifies the appearance of plants and animals but its most powerful effect is the sapping of the life force and eventually even the structural integrity of organic materials. By the end of the book the whole farm where the meteor lands, the house, the trees, the animals and people, the wagons and the fences crumble to dust. Only stone and metal remain.
In this version of the story the entity is able to fuse groups of animals together into hideous many-headed monsters. It can disable all communication devices and even alter time, making days and nights shorter as needed. So, they’ve revved up the monster’s power quite a bit. But the use they put this to is horrendous. In one scene the mother and the seven-year-old kid are walking in the dark near the barn when the creature zaps the both of them with its potent “light.” Next, we see that the mother and the little boy have been fused together. His head is attached to her shoulder, their torsos are fused and both of them are writhing in agony. And the older son characterizes what’s happening to them as the younger son being re-absorbed into the mother’s body. Even the thought is horrifying to consider. And later on, the fused creature starts taking on a preying mantis like shape and Nick Cage’s character shoots both of them in the head to end this nightmare. Okay sure, this is a horror movie and it’s no more disgusting than the scenes in John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” but he didn’t use a mother and a little boy as the victims of this abomination. To my mind this is awful.
Finally, the acting. The only cast members I’ve heard of are Nick Cage and Tommy Chong. I’m guessing the rest of the cast is unknown and they should stay that way. They were awful and so were the two better known actors. The script was awful. The plot was tedious and the resolution seemed pointless and annoying. I will say some of the special effects were interesting looking and well done. But not the fused animals and people. Those were hideous and depressing.
I would avoid this movie. Nick Cage has descended indeed from the time when he was a pretty good actor. He should be ashamed that he was in this crap. Seeing this movie has ruined a perfectly good day out of my life. Not recommended.
Warning Statement – The current exercise of control over explosives manufacture precludes today’s Americans from practicing the kind of backyard munitions and explosives production described below. The FBI will lock you up if you attempt the stuff that used to be done by backyard Edisons all over the formerly Land of the Free. photog
Me and my brother had our own space. Right next to dad’s shed where his machine tools lived, we had our own shed. In there we made our own gunpowder, other explosives (it was the 60s) fireworks, rocket motors, and made the stocks for our handmade, muzzle loading, cap-and-ball rifles and shotguns. We used dad’s tools to cut down, bore, and rifle the barrels and make the locks. Everything else was made in our shop. The powder, the balls, then the mini balls. All we had to buy commercial was the caps themselves. We found out that fulminate of mercury was ticklish and fussy so we bought our caps. We took a lot of deer and other game with the rifles and the shotguns we made, too. Today, we’d likely be in federal prison for making those things as juveniles. We did our chemistry experiments in there, too. To keep thieves out we rigged up an explosive and flash device. Open the door without reaching in to find the disarming wire and you got the sound of a 12 gauge shotgun shell with a large flash from flash powder. Sort of like police flahs0-bangs. About once a summer someone would try to sneak in an set it off. They ran like red-arsed baboons with lions after them. Since practically everyone knew we had gunpowder in there they may have thought they had set some off and worse was to come.
We loved “playing” with thermite. We used it to weld old railroad rail pieces and steel bar stock together to make things. We found that if you added small amounts (powdered/filings) of magnesium or aluminum to the mix you could do even more. When a piece broke on papaw’s farm implements, me and my brother would weld it back together with thermite.
People complain about the internet teaching people to make bad things. When I was sixteen, papaw (my grandfather) had some stumps that a pipeline company had left on his farm when they put the pipeline through. They needed to come out. As they were quite large, we could not shift them with the regular tractors (middle 1960s) and renting, having delivered and picked up heavy equipment was cost prohibitive. I blew a few stumps with dynamite, but they wouldn’t sell papaw any more when the rumor got out, I was doing the blasting. So, I went to the county Carnegie library and did a little research. I had not yet taken high school chemistry, you understand. Our black powder might have done it but it would take me and my brother a long time to make that much. We needed an explosive that was easy to make and cheap, and would raise no suspicions.
I settled on fuel/fertilizer. There were no charts of equivalent explosive power between fuel/fertilizer and TNT so I guessed. We used the tractor’s auger to bore under the edge of a big stump, put in 3 sacks of fertilizer and 5 gallons of diesel and let it soak for a while. I had inserted one of the blasting caps we had left over and we backed off a couple hundred yards and used the tractor battery to light it off. We had tamped the borehole with the dirt we’d dug out.
The explosion was tremendous. The stump shot about 100 feet into the air and seemed to dissolve into toothpicks-sized shreds.
Papaw said; “I think we used a bit too much.” I replied; “Oh, ya think?!”
The crater it left was impressive, but papaw said he’d wanted a small pond about there, anyway, for the hogs to wallow.
Eventually I got to where I could lift a stump out of the ground and set it five feet away with no damage to the stump or the ground. All from readily available books in a public library in the middle 60s. Eventually we had to use fuses as we ran out of blasting caps. A neighbor asked to borrow me to get rid of a few stumps of their own. It went well until one day when I was not there, the sheriff came and said he’d hate to make a fuss about a teenager without a license doing blasting. That ended my teenage career of explosive demolitions. I still did minor blasting at papaw’s farm but not enough to raise concerns.
Today, me, my parents and my grandparents would all be wearing orange prison jumpers. The 50s and 60s and early 70s were a lot more fun than today.
It would be interesting to see how women fare in the infantry in actual combat as an example of why we should not do it again. It would be expensive for the women involved but since infantry is voluntary, too bad. Women have their uses in even spec ops. Delta has a “fuzzy section”. Women can be brave and intelligent. However, physically, they are no match for men in a fight. I am 70-something and I could whip pretty much any 20-year-old woman in an all-out fight. When I was 60 I proved it to a MMA femme fighter by manhandling her when challenged as I voiced my opinion on the matter.
After, she said that; “Well, you’re a trained soldier”. “Yes” I replied; “And so are all the enemy infantry you are going to go up against. I could have killed you several times when I was mopping the floor with you. Any fit, enemy soldier will not be so considerate.”
My concern with the experiment is that the men in the mixed unit may suffer when the women prove physically unable to withstand combat. In one unit I was assigned to the Army placed women where they did not belong. The sergeant major placed them all in my section as he knew I was faithful to my wife and there would be no hanky-panky. As soon as the femmes found out they were going to be treated like any other soldier you never saw so many sick call runs. They wanted the sex-based special favors they were used to, not to work like any grunt. Pretty soon I had two, only two out of twenty, that stuck around. In the meantime, the others had tried to use sex to get favors from me. When that backfired on them, they tried false accusations of sexual harassment or battery. One flat out offered me oral sex to get out of weekend duty. All she got was 25 pushups for offering. Then my wife started getting calls from disguised female voices telling her I was sweating up the sheets with so-and-so, one time when I was sitting across the table from my wife.
Having a flock of women in a military unit is like high school all over again. Sure, there are a few, damned few who are worth their salt, but the great majority are not. Maybe that has changed since I retired. But with politics involved, I doubt it.
In these troubled times it’s probably not a bad idea to understand the basics of self defense with a hand gun. And being a law enforcement officer I guess the Deputy is performing a public service for his readers.
I’m always interested in practical information and I guess there’s nothing more practical than knowing how to survive actual problems. And after what’s been going on across the country during the BLM/Antifa riots I would say knowing how to use a gun to save your own life sounds practical.