"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
I have an amazing lip-reading ability. For example, I do watch Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind “news” programs every now and then, but I mute the sound when I do. That way, when, say, The Zero is featured in a clip, I can amaze others present with my lip-reading ability. For example, in the clip the following graphic was extracted from…
“Lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie.”
See? Amazing.
(BTW, I also have the ability to read minds. I know this because I got absolutely nothin’ from Biden.)
I saw an article on building a Linux-controlled “Corretto” coffee roaster and thought, “Cool, but where would I put everything in our kitchen? I’d have to build on an addition!”
*heh*
Still, one of the things that gives Henry Ward Beecher a claim to historical immortality that rival’s his sister’s is his appreciation of good coffee:
“A cup of coffee – real coffee – home-browned, home ground, home made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java: such a cup of coffee is a match for twenty blue devils and will exorcise them all.” – Henry Ward Beecher
And, after reading the above paean to a good cuppa joe and singing a few verses of O Blessed Holy Caffeine Tree i9n appreciation of The Holy Brew (#1) myself, almost the article cited above persuadeth me to do a “Linux Coffee Roaster” build of my own… Almost. I’d still need to build that addition onto the house.
I can recall a time well over half a century ago (OK, I was four years old) when I went around “touching” things with an imaginary eleven foot pole that I “wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole”.
And then I read recently,
They’d be fools to touch it with a 40 foot pole.
*sigh*
The older I get the more things I find about which I just don’t give a rat’s ass.
No, really.
OK, I can understand and accept execrable grammar in dialog. Heck, I write in a way I find nearly inexcusable myself pretty regularly here, for effect. But when ALL David Weber’s characters in ALL his books have difficulty properly using adverbs… (almost) ALL the time (and always when forming adverbs from adjectives or using adjectives in an adverbial position, if you’d rather), it grates a wee tad.
Just sayin’.
(I keep wanting to send Weber–or his editors/proofreaders–a link to this page. *heh*)), it grates a wee tad.)
Lunch time. Hey, here’s an idea, kiddies! While munchy-lunchy and all that jazz, let’s check the weather!
Well, all right! Te temp seems reasonable, doesn’t it boys n girls? But… what’s that with that “Hi: 70 °F” thingy there in the upper right-hand corner? Hmmm, seems a bit anomalous, eh?
Let’s look at the forecast, mmm-K?
*huh* Seems the forecasters are having a tiff. Must be some Anthropogenic Global Warmistas projecting fantasy or something, eh? On the “current conditions page” temps at noon-thirty-ish are ~78% of the projected high for the day, as noted on this page (current temps as reported at the local high school weather station, on a hill 1/4 mile away from another weather station–local electric utility company–which always, consistently, regularly reports temps 2-3 degrees cooler). Well, maybe things’ll warm up 15-16 degrees by day’s end.
…Or maybe not, as, according to the same weather site’s 7-day forecast page for this locale, the forecast high for today is… 48 °F.
*huh?!?*
Yep, one page says 70 °F and another–same site and supposedly same forecasters using same data–says 48 °F high… just 68% of the other forecast number from the same people and 12% less than the actual, current reported temp.
Once again, if meteorologists who rely on massive data sets, compared to the time frame, etc., from the best available sources can’t even agree with themselves on a forecast one day in advance, or get within 10% of the actual temp with even one of two forecast temps, how is it that the Cult of Anthropogenic Global Warmistas can confidently predict temperatures to tenths of a degree 5 or ten years down the pike, especially when they have such a minuscule data set compared to the problem they’ve set themselves?
Well, they can’t, especially when they deliberately, obdurately, stupidly ignore, lie about and discard data they find inconvenient to their fantastical claims.
In answer to Aggie’s “assignment” (which I found out about here), submitted late because the Damned Dog ate my homework:
“That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It”
I am an Olde Pharte, the embodiment of the stereotypical irascible curmudgeon with a heart of antimony. When I do have to interact with people, I enjoy most twisting their tiny little brains into knots and leaving them thinking we were having fun, when in fact I was having fun mocking them.
Almost no one catches wise.
And then…
It was a typical Thursday evening, and I was out, walking the Damned Dog. (I refuse to call my wife’s animated mop by the anthropomorphic name she gave it; as much as I despise people, it’s an insult to most of even the self-lobotomized among humanity to use a name one might in the phone book to describe this creature.) As usual, the Damned Dog was taking its damned time voiding its bladder and bowels—a necessity at night if I want to avoid stepping in “presents” deposited on my path to paying the mid-nightly water bill.
Well, it was a typical Thursday evening until, “Psst! Hey, mister! Can ya gimme a hand?” came at me in a whistling, oddly mechanical sotto voce from the shadows beside old lady McIntyre’s garage.
WTF? Whoever it was looked to be really short and sounded almost as though he were whispering through some sort of brass musical instrument. Well, even though I only had The Animated Mop as my great defender, I didn’t feel threatened by a midget whispering through a trumpet. If he (she-it?–couldn’t tell) had a whole brass band with him (she-it?), that could be a different situation, though. Oh, well, “Who are you? What do you want?”
“I’m kinda stuck here.”
OK, button on my cap light. WTF?!? No, seriously, WTF?!?
Yeh, it was apparently an “it” and… and shiny, with what appeared to be tentacles. And its head? Stuck. In the hole it appeared to have poked through the side of the garage.
“How’d ya get stuck?”
“Ate too much, I guess.”
“Too much what?”
“Too much hydrocarbon.”
“What?”
“The vehicle inside this building was just full of bunches ‘n’ bunches of hydrocarbons, and I gorged on the stuff until I’m just too full to get out by the hole I came in by. Can ya gimme a hand?”
“What do I get out of it?”
“Interstellar goodwill?”
I considered the situation. I had a good knee brace on my right knee, and my left leg and hip hadn’t been acting up all that much recently, so I figured I could handle a little physical exercise.
“OK, hold still,” and I hauled off and booted the nasty lil bugger’s head into old lady McIntyre’s back yard. So maybe I didn’t consider what the lil critter had been eating and maybe its head did draw a spark off a trash can on its way to the back yard. These things happen. My eyebrows will probably grow back, old lady McIntyre’s insurance will replace her garage and car and the Damned Dog looks better with no fur.
That’s my story and I’m sticking with it. Stop laughing at me, or I’ll hit you with my cane. (The knee brace wasn’t quite as good as I thought.)
Sometimes reading one to three lines of text at once (scanning and “absorbing” is how I tend to think of it) isn’t really as fast as it might seem. Recently, I had to back up and “re-read” (mentally review) “mixed martial artist” which I had “read” as “mixed martini artist”.
*heh*
How I scanned those two letters as “ni” instead of “al” I really don’t know. The occurrence gives me a little more reason to exercise patience with OCR software, though. In my case, though, I’m blaming coffee deprivation.
At times, though, it’s just not my fault that my reading simply MUSt slow down. *heh* Take for example the inexcusable,
“…those interactions surpass in quantity and complexity the human brains ability to comprehend them.”
Oh, heck, “those interactions” apparently even “surpass… the human brains [sic] ability” to write about them grammatically. *heh* If the author of that ungrammatical comment isn’t able to comprehend the possessive form “brain’s” (and whatever editor might have passed that abortion of English doesn’t even have brains enough to correct it), then I just have to slow down and gripe about the stupidity and poor ethics it reveals. “[P]oor ethics”? Yeh, the author of that comment accepted payment for furthering illiteracy. Evil troglodyte. *heh*
(Worse, the moronic thief–yes, “thief” for taking pay to utter crap–repeated nearly the same ingrammatical crap with, “The world’s complexity may simply outrun our brains [sic] capacity to understand it.” There, the proper formulation ought rightly to have been “brains'”.)
But, of course, this sort of stupidity is common among our “betters” who presume to be able to tell us how to think. To show I’m evenhanded, I’ll even class the WSJ’s James Taranto as among the stupid bright people. Take this Taranto’s piece of stupidity as an example:
“Understand, I don’t want the Obama’s [sic] $81 steaks.”
In an otherwise fairly on target piece about Dhimmicrappic hypocrisy, Taranto loses sight of how to create a possessive form of a plural. Since he was referring to the Obamas (The Zero and Moochelle), what any literate person would have written in his place would have been “Obamas'” with the apostrophe following the plural “s”. Some might have written “Obamas’s” although that formation is non-standard. As Taranto wrote it (and his lazy, subliterate editor(s) approved) he refers to ONE “Obama” (THE) and makes of the ONE “Obama” a possessive referencing the $81 steaks (big appetite for ONE Obama, but then we knew the Obamas have big appetites, for various things).
Gripes me off that people like that don’t have their pay docked for doing such things.
Or at least the warning label printed on the bottle. Just sayin’.
The warning reads,
Use this product one drop at a time. Keep away from eyes, pets and small children. Not for people with heart or respiratory problems.
I’ve spent a lifetime enjoying increasingly spicy foods and find jalapeno, serano and habanero peppers to be tasty lil tidbits, although jalapenos are, IMO, more for children and delicate flowers with “the vapors” who faint at the mere sight of black peppercorns. This stuff, while tasty, is HOT. No, not the very hottest thing around, if Scoville measurements are on target, but very, very close.
Use with respect. 🙂
Note: Recent college graduates may need to have someone who’s literate to translate the label for them, so if you’re in this category (and having someone read this blog post to you), please seek help.
I mean, seriously, how can you even acquire a target that doesn’t exist? Aim at a donut hole in a non-existent donut? At a zero with the rim kicked off? No, really.
*heh*
Oh, well, absinthe makes the heart race, or something like that…
In other news, while I like the service in general, Amazon really, really, really needs to take a look at its Cloud Drive limitations. I mean, download only ONE file at a time? Really? How very… 20th Century. For example, whenever I get another 100 or so mp3s stored there, it’d be handy to download ’em in one batch (for local archiving locally, transferring to a super small 8GB mp3 player–for use while doing yardwork, etc., where the Kindle Fire might *cough* not be the right device, etc.) rather than one. At. A. Time. Just sayin’, Amazon…
If you like Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum–or even merely like to read the S. Plum books in order to mock the “life” of a fictional character whose “life” is more dysfunctional than your own *heh*–you might like the less dysfunctional female sleuth found in Dani Amore’s Death By Sarcasm. Some folks might be put off a tad by the constant, repetitious, almost metronomical (notice the scesis onomaton? *heh*) sarcasm–weak, middlin’ and somewhat fierce but constant, unending, continual. OTOH, I liked it. 🙂 Unfortunately for my tiny lil tightwad heart, it was good enough that I’ll soon crack open my coin purse to cough up a carrot ($0.99) for the author. I like to encourage good writing, and the author’s second book (Dead Wood) is also better than some (*cough* Evanovich *cough*) books I’ve paid much more for.
Fun stuff, Maynard. The second novel noted above doesn’t include never-ending lame jokes to accent an overarching ironic theme–perhaps a plus for some–but does have one small structural weakness in the plot. It wasn’t enough to cause anything but a minor pause in my devouring of the book. A $0.99 murder mystery of the caliber of either of these books is a crime… against support of good writing.