You Can Retire When You're Dead

My brother Albert retired this year, and I'm insanely jealous.

And I look at the calendar: Ten years. Maybe 8 or 9 years. But it seems like forever.

I guess there is some good news. We owe less than $40,000 on the house; $38,744 and some pennies if you want something more exact. We owe about $12,000 on a Honda Ridgeline, and aside from that, just incidental credit card debt. Only one of our three kids is living with us at the moment, and he's so low maintenance it's hardly noticeable.

So we could be in worse shape. Nevertheless, I feel a Violet Beauregarde song coming on:

I'm tired of being beholden to a boss.

I used to work for the weekends. Now I live for them, and the longer I can make them last, the better.

I was sick a few weeks ago and took two days off work. That, combined with the four-day Labor Day weekend felt like V-E Day. And we're headed into the holiday season, which means some more time off and the perennial favorite: Seasonal depression, which I sense is starting a bit early this year if my attention span and desire to do much of anything is any indication.

Could potentially be a long eight or nine years . . . 

When the Muse Strikes . . .

Back in 2016, this happened:

“Of course. Of course they want Framderick. What group of mud-streaked, smelly peasants does NOT want Framderick?” Patrick thought. “There is not enough wine in this inn to convince me to sing it. There is not enough wine in the KINGDOM. But, alas . . .”

Patrick strummed his lute. As the familiar chords shrivered his spine, the crowd shouted until debris and a few cats fell out of the overhanging thatch. He strummed a bit longer and watched as mothers of young children, aghast, pulled them from the crowd and out the door, while the men – oh, the familiar men, all old and wrinkled before their time so it was impossible to tell one of thirty from one of seventy – pushed to the fore, leering and elbowing each other in the ribs.

Patrick began to sing.

The floods of spring came early,

That dark and loathsome year.

The Klof bore mud and branches

Bringing yon Kenputeris near.

The rain, clouds shed, the mountains fled

The villagers soaked their hats

When on the mats of floating wood

Came Mount Kenputeris’ fearful rats!

Framderick! Framderick! To you the nation calls!

Horribly, Patrick could see the crowd getting ready. Swelling to a man, filling their lungs with air, sucking in the stinking fug of the inn, ready to belch out their contribution. He scanned the room for sympathizers – and saw them. A pack of frowning women, arms folded sternly across their breasts. They would help. By the steely looks in their eyes, they would help. Frantically, he tried to remember the order – and then sang, without missing a note:

Framderick! Framderick! While the kings’ men lick

THE WALLS!

He breathed a sigh of relief. Though the men poked each other, laughing terribly at their wit, Patrick and the women knew they’d won. Putting the heavier strings on his lute had helped, Patrick thought. They make a heavier sound.

But the battle was not over yet. Some of the men jeered at him as the sound of what had won penetrated the alcohol. Others turned to their women-folk and half-heartedly barked at them to leave.

Patrick continued:

The rats were black and ravenous,

They ate crop and home

Then they ate the fish of the River Klop,

Spreading blood among the foam.

The kings’ men came a-hunting,

With sword and pike and spear

But they all got drunk and with a hunk

The rats bit them in the rear!

The men, Patrick knew, were ready this time. Fewer had sung the refrain, sucking in what air was left in the room, swelling for the chorus:

Framderick! Framderick! To you the nation calls!

Framderick! Framderick! While the kings’ men lick

COW STALLS!

Oh, the men shrieked at their misfortune as they knew once again they had lost the battle, while the weaker ones passed out from the exertion of shouting. A few began to throw bits of fallen thatch and empty mugs at Patrick, but the innkeeper came with more beer, clinking the change the women had collected.

“Come on, bard, sing it right! Sing it right or we’ll toss you in the well!”

The shouter looked capable of performing that feat. Built like a brick outhouse, but swaying slightly out of tune with the music. If Patrick were lucky, he’d be on the floor before the next chorus. And he knew even though he and the bulwark of women fought common cause, they would not intervene, having enough to handle when their drunk husbands and fathers began to sober.

But the pups of the famed Framderick

Framderick, Whelper of a Thousand Pups!

They caught the rats and chewed them up

As Framderick birthed a dozen more!

The doodles then chased the kings’ men

Out of the village, out of the fen

Leaving a trail of reddened pats

Stained in the blood of a thousand rats!

Framderick! Framderick! To you the nation calls!

Framderick! Framderick! While the kings’ men lick

SEAGULLS!

Tin plates sailed through the air as the crowd vomited displeasure and warm beer. The women in the back of the room, arms still folded, smiled smugly, and shouted at Patrick to stop. But they made no move when the men churlishly turned their backs on them and urged Patrick to continue. The rhythm of the song led him to the final verse.

When at last the food was gone,

The rats stole in to the babies’ cribs

But the pups of famed Framderick

Crushed the rats’ curved ribs.

Then the plague set in, with terrible din

The women of the Klop did pray

But the pups of famed Framderick

Remained in the terrible fray.

Framderick! Framderick! To you the nation calls!

Framderick! Framderick! While the kings’ men lick

KINGS’ HALLS!

Oh, with the howling, Patrick thought the plague had returned, as lamentations threatened to lift the thatch clear off the rafters. Men were smashing chairs into the floor and climbing on tables, rending their clothes and dancing naked, filling their mouths with beer and spraying it at the women and at Patrick. But for every one man able to climb on the table and sloppily spit half a mouthful of beer in the direction of their tormenters, there were five stumbling about, knocking those more sober off the tables, upsetting tables, smashing chairs over their compatriots’ heads until the sheriff burst into the inn with six armed deputies, all bellowing for calm.

“You! Minstrel!” the sheriff yelled. “What doggerel stirs these fine folk to such debauchery?” The sheriff, who gutted a man only last week for urinating in the street in full view of the priest, rested his hand on the pommel of his sword.

“Balls.”

One word from a weak voice at the bottom of a pile of drunken men, and the room was in pandemonium once more.

HORSES

I didn't expect to see four wandering horses while at the Griffin Family Reunion in Farr West yesterday, but that's what we saw.

In and of itself, watching the loose horses was only mildly interesting. More interesting was watching the growing crowd of people who gathered to help corral them (I didn't help because, clearly, as the crowd grew, they had enough people, and the only thing I knew about horses at the time was that there were four loose and running on the road nearby).

First, they wandered up to a house where someone popped out with a little dog and shooed them away. Then, one by one, three men arrived, ostensibly to corral the horses, or they could have been just wandering by.

Then an older couple arrived in a truck and pulled into the driveway of the house where the horses has scurried into the back yard. I had no idea if they were there to help, or were just going to find a surprise.

Then -- no kidding - four motorcyclists, three with riders, pulled up. They parked at the same house and all began a merry chase, first capturing one horse, then two in rapid succession, but then fighting mightily to corral the last horse, who I pegged as the ringleader.

Read as it all unfolded here.

. . . and That is A Crazy Lady . . .

I grew weary earlier today while on Facebook, scrolling through the stupid crap --

-- and I mean I saw two iterations of stuff like this within minutes; the other one was some morons using wood, wood screws, and the skeleton of an old box spring to build a tent platform on the top of their car --

-- and was given the opportunity to "set my preferences."

I learned the following:

1. For suggestive content, the settings are "default" and "show less," which I guess makes sense but is bad news for the perverts.

2. For political content, the settings are "default" and "more," which also is bad news, but for everyone, perverts included.

3. I still don't see a setting for "don't show me weather reports for areas I don't live in," though. I guess we can't have everything.

For a closer look at all that junk, go to my post on Facebook; I'm not going to clog my blog with all those stupid screenshots, which are full-sized screenshots to show I didn't cut anything out.

No way to turn any of it off. No way just to see what my friends have posted -- I have to search long and hard to find any of that. Just ways to lessen the likelihood. And when you block one, three more pop up. It's an infernal social media game of whack-a-mole.

Or this. It's really this.

Something I have noticed:

My phone is probably the best Facebook machine, in that when I look at Facebook on my phone, I tend to see more of what my friends have posted.

Next, the desktop computer. More crapola, but I still get to see what my friends post.

Worst -- and by far the worst -- is my Kindle Fire. I seem to have nothing but crapola on Facebook when I use it.

Russian Propaganda is for Idiots

Note the title. That's pretty much what the author of this YouTube video says.

And he should know: He lived in Ukraine pre-USSR dissolution, and is now seeing his country at war with its former master.

The video was prompted by people in comments on his other videos getting mad that he was comparing Russia to Nazi Germany. Their argument was that the Nazis were much worse than the Russians, and that anything being reported as "worse" had to be western propaganda.

So he lays into them, saying that Western propaganda has to rely on half-truths, while Russian propaganda relies wholly on lies.

Inserting my own opinion here: We now have a major political party in the United States that has shifted to relying on lies for their propaganda, and the idiots on their side are lapping it up.

Just about everything this political party says triggers what this YouTuber calls the "imbecillamus," viz:

This is also the pinned comment on the video, from its author (warning, a swear in the last paragraph):

That idiotic black/white response he's talking about? It's the same from the idiots of the political party I've mentioned. So they're textbook idiots, based on the defininiton this author shares of idiocy.

Silence is What?

After I watched "Room Service," the last of the Marx Brothers movies I bought over the weekend, I decided to watch one of the shorts included on the DVD, a Daffy Duck cartoon titled "The Daffy Doc."

It's from Daffy's manic period, with lots of woo-hooing going on throughout. In addition to including some Carl Stalling music I recognized from one of my CDs but had never heard in context with a cartoon, it also included Daffy holding up the following sign, after the surgeon he was assisting asked for quiet in the operating theater:

I have no idea what "foo" means, and after some internet searches, I'm pretty sure no one really grasps the concept.

I did find this blog post from a fellow curiosity-seeker.

It seems to be a pretty comprehensive exploration of the foo phenomenon, though he conflates foo with "foobar," which is actually FUBAR in the context used on the post, but that's excuseable if you've never seen FUBAR in print. FUBAR is mentioned in the dubious "entymology of foo" document linked in the post, as is FOOBAR. Still, I think there's a mixup. Some of what's discussed in the post is due to an author working to capture a dialect in print, so it may not necessarily have any relationship to the word in Daffy's sign.

This dictionary entry adds a bit to the definition, bringing in Australian slang (they wrote "Foo was Here," rather than "Kilroy was Here."

This artificial intelligence roundup (a good use of AI, I think) of definitions is also helpful:

Just some weird little bit of late '30s slang that had a moment in the sun, then disappeared, I suppose.

Galoot v Bozo

Today, something startling from the Vox crossword:

I had never regarded galoot as a synonym for bozo. Bozo, in my mind, is a harsher epithet, while galoot carries more of an "innocent goober" vibe to it. Bozos are complete jerks and do things on purpose to annoy others. Galoots are just goofy guys tripping over their own feet.

Indigant, I raced to the Internet to find the definition for galoot and discovered thus:

This kinda vibes with what I suspected: clumsy and oafish aren't necessarily "on purpose" behaviors, while bozos are, well, bozos.

As for the word origin: I suspect, somehow, it's Dutch. I don't know exactly why I suspect that, but I do. Galoot sounds like an Englisher trying to say something they've heard a Dutch sailor say. And that's generally not a good thing.

Also, what casued the surge in the use of "galoot" in the 21st century? Or the surge in the late 19th and early 20th century, for that matter? The long tail leading into the '50s and beyond can probably be explained by Hollywood westerns, but as for the rest, I'm lost.

Probably the late surge can be explained by the Internet, and having the word counters have a lot more and a lot more easily-searched text to delve into.

In contrast, here's the same dictionary's definition of bozo:

Note the inclusion of "rude" in the definition. Rudeness, to me, is what sets a bozo apart from a galoot.

Why Am I Doing This?

When I started this blogging year, I made it a goal to hit an average of 20 posts a month.

There's one month left in 2024, and I have thusfar made that average with a little bit of a cushion:

December brings a few expected posts, including a recap of the books I've read for the year, and a few other things that repeat year to year, so I'm fairly confident I'll meet my goal.

Why bother blogging? Partly, my blog is a journal where I record things that happen to me and my family. Partly because I've been doing it since 2008 and feel like keeping it going, even if I never hear from anyone about it. I guess I'm doing what I can to fight the dead internet theory. Also, I haven't had a year with more than 200 posts since 2012, and that feels like a lifetime ago.

Floating around in the ethers somewhere is another blog I started earlier, but lost track of somewhere along the line. And if the Wayback Machine ever gets back up and operational, there's some stuff there from me from the mid-1990s. (Looks like it *is* operational; I had heard they'd suffered some kind of massive cyberattack and were offline.) I'm an internet fossil. The stuff I did at the University of Idaho was just me dabbling with HTML. They gave us a limited amount of storage space for stuff, and I do recall getting an email from them saying I'd hit my limit, but they decided to give me more space. Not that I was producing magnificent stuff, but I did have a fair bit put up there.

Clean as A Whistle, Inside and Out

So. Second colonoscopy a raving success. I'm sure many more people saw my butt than I'd rather think about, but all I know is that I was watching the guy inject the drugs into my IV and the next thing I know they were waking me up and telling me to get dressed.

Result: This time, only one polyp, which they will of course test. I don't have to have another colonoscopy for five years, barring any startling results from the lump they chopped out.

Reading the report they sent, I'm learning a few things I didn't pick up from the last time:

1. I got a perfect 9 on the Boston Bowel Preparation Scale, meaning they could see EVERYTHING.

2. The polyp they found this time was "sessile," meaning fully attached and not dangling like some uvula appendage. I suppose that's a good thing, but I'm not sure. I don't remember whether the three polyps they found 3 1/2 years ago were sessile or not. Clearly I didn't lose sleep over it.

3. My prostate appears normal. I didn't know they checked for that while they were in there, but I guess it makes sense to look around the neighborhood.

4. Gary, my hemorrhoid, which had been acting up earlier in the week, appeared quiescent, and has apparently been joined by others that don't appear to be causing any trouble as of yet.

5. Whatever it is they put in the drugs to put you to sleep is good. I was watching them attach it to the IV, thought "That's interesti . . ." and then they were waking me up saying I should get dressed and that my son was there waiting to take me home.

So in all a good experience the second time around. Worst parts:

1. The prep. That stuff remains not fun.

2. Watching the nurse struggle to get an IV needle into a vein after I told her my veins like to run away.

Standard Frying the Brain Time

November now. That means going back to Standard Time. Which in our neck of the woods means pitch darkness at 6 pm and gradual darkness in the morning until there's no sun left at all and my seasonal depression kicks in.

I spent today mostly on my butt -- feeling ill. Picked up a bug from somwhere. Don't know where. It seems to be fading, but I'm certainly glad I took the day off work. Not that I want to burn through that personal leave, but I felt really blah.

All because some idiot wanted more daylight after work so he could collect bugs.

Probably Don't Include Me in Doctrinal Conversations

Our scripture reading last night brought us to the Three Nephites and their desire to not taste death before the second coming of Christ.

Part of the discussion led to me pondering their appearance as the Three Stooges as being a funny but confusing part of their timeline, and that is where my wife pulled the plug on the conversation.

That Well-Traveled Road

Just watched the MASH episode "Follies of the Living, Concerns of the Dead" from season ten.

Seen it dozens of times before, of course.

If you're not familiar with it, it focuses on the ghost - or spirit - of Private Jimmy Weston, killed in action and wandering the 4077th trying to convince others he is not dead.

The closing scene, shown in the photo, shows Weston joining a nameless soldier and others, including Chinese soldiers, civilians, and other combatants walking up a road, destination unknown.

Dad had a dream about that road. He dreamed he was on one side of a river, and saw Mom coming up the other side, struggling mightily with a walker on a rough path. She saw him and plunged headlong into the river, startling him. He called out to her, but saw her go under.

Then she came out of the water, swimming strong, and young as she was when they met. She came out if the water into his arms, and they continued their journey in the road, arm in arm.

At my sister Marina's graveside service earlier this year, I had a strong impression that Mom and Dad were there, waiting for her to come out of the water so they could journey together.

We'll all walk that road eventually. There's some comfort in knowing what lies at the end.

TOUGHER SENTENCES FOR JOGRAFFY TEACHERS!

One of the biggest buzzes I get from spoken English is hearing a proper English pronunciation of "geography."

They just get to it: JOGraffy.

I have noticed in some Americans a tendency to hesitate slightly on the ending of the first syllable, making it sound like this: JeOGraffy.

Does anyone else notice this?

(Also, I envision some of you spending the next few minutes saying "JOGraffy and JeOGraffy" to yourselves to hear the difference, then getting to the point the word and associated sounds lose all meaning.]

Below, a Brit saying "geography."

And in American English:

But clearly there's still some dispute as how to say it. You'd think Pitt the Younger would get it right, but no:

I had to listen to this twice to make sure I got it right. I fully expected to be wrong, particularly on the second mention of the word, which should have come off as a pejorative. But no.

Then Richard Hammond, accused of being a de facto American nails it as a Brit:

Food Makers, Just Stop

So, food makers.

Just stop.

Deep down in your marketing department, you know this is a gimmick. A gimmick meant to remind shoppers that in an oversaturated convenience food market, your products exist.

At 100 bottles, this will only be the briefest flash in a widely disparate and distracted pan of a market. Maybe you'll see a blip in sales as the curious, motivated by boredom and the vagaries of the Inernet, will buy and mix your sauces to reproduce the scarce, mediocre commodity.

I guess slap yourselves on the back as this maybe increases your share of the sauce market by razor-thin margins.

Just stop.

Sincerely,

A consumer whose wife and daughter fell in love with Dr. Pepper's Coconut Zero concoction before it was cruelly pulled from the market in the hopes people would continue buying their mass-produced drinks now that people remembered they were on the market.

Truth and the Murder House

As much as I think Orwell might not have been prepared for people espousing their own versions of "the truth," I'm pretty sure he knew all to well that as far as the public goes, truth is relative.

Also, forget about that house; that's the murder house.

Careful: Humor May Be Dangerous

So our daughter is getting married next Saturday. I've been doing a social media countdown, using mostly marriage-related bits from The Simpsons.

This was Saturday's seven-day warning. Which prompted a little concern from our future son-in-law:

I don't think he was offended, but it's a good reminder that what I think of as funny may not translate to his family. So I'm going to have to be on better behavior.

For the curious, Lisa is marrying a carrot because the kids are teasing her about becoming a vegetarian:

Negative Reality Inversion, or NO ONE COVETETH MY ICE CREAM BAR

This is why sometimes I come to my blog, which no one reads, to do my shouting.

Yesterday, after a rather nasty work-related dream, I awoke feeling rather down on everything.

Circumstances yesterday led to bits of good news after bits of good news in several facets of my life, so today I'm doing a bit better. Can't let that negative mindset rule everything. Or at least try not to let it, too much.

I try not to be a negative person, but sometimes circumstances arise where the negative is what I want to dwell on, and that's not healthy. So many examples out there of people dwelling on the negative. I think about Laman and Lemuel, of course. They stacked up reason upon reason to be upset with their situation when Lehi said God had told him to take his family and flee into the wilderness. They lost their inheritances, their comfort, and at times were wandering the wilderness rather on the hungry side. They didn't believe that their father was indeed in danger for his preaching, or communicating with God in any fashion. Maybe they had glimpses, but rather chose to focus on the negatives, and let those negatives pile up as they collected them like neat rocks from the ground.

It's so easy to do, to collect the negative stuff. I see it every day in people I interact with. I don't want to be part of that world, because it ends in tears.

It's cliche to look at the positives. But that's just the adversary saying it's cool to be negative and to concentrate only on the negative because THAT'S ALL THAT'S GOING TO COME BETTER STRAP IN.

So I'm feeling better about things.

Re di Tutto, Ken Mattingly

I've been watching documentaries on the Apollo missions, and they keep using NASA publicity photos like this one of Ken Mattingly, with the astronauts in their spacesuits sans helmets.

I couldn't help but think I'd seen something like this before, and then it hit me: Robin Williams in Terry Gilliam's "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen," from 1988.

AI IS HAMMER, ALL PROBLEMS ARE NAIL, Part 2

I know tech has a bro problem, or at least that's what they tell me.

But I also know when you have a hammer in your hands, every problem around looks like a nail.

Artificial intelligence has a lot of potential. But in our society, the easy path to potential is for using AI for bad ends -- because the ol' hammer/nail analogy applies for those using these tech products for the most part.

It's a fallacy to think that "Hey, if everyone like me were in charge, we wouldn't have Problem X." That might be true. We'd have Problem Y and Z and probably a lot more that are universal to THEM and US, but that's now how the hammer/nail people think. And they exist in whatever sex/whatever you want to scroll up on the big Wheel of Whatever.

Threaten Me, Will You?

A week or so ago, YouTube suddenly decided it didn't like my adblocker anymore.

So it began threatening me. At first, they were pretty innocent threats, basically just making me acknowledge that I was using an adblocker before it would play a video.

Then it got serious and told me it would only allow me to watch three more videos before something terrible would happen.

So I did what any other red-blooded American would do: I caved in and turned the adblocker off.

After a week of watching ads, though (and by watching, I mean zoning out when they played and then skipping when allowed) I turned my adblocker back on.

No more ads. No more (as of yet) threatening messages.

Now I know this isn't a free service. But I also know any ad revenue I'd like to see go to the content creators, not necessarily the content host. So if a creator has in-house ads or sponsors, I'm all for that. Just don't make me watch any more commercials for Liberty Mutual or Tmobile, please.

So I should watch the ads. I mean, I used to watch a ton of them when I was a kid. But we got more variety in ads then. And the sun was warmer, and all that old guy stuff. They didn't make us watch commercial after commercial for Liberty Mutual, or force us to listen to the Tmobile Singers butcher songs from Oklahoma.