This is genius, and drives a point home using a literal cartoon character: Can you tell who said each of these phrases, Elon Musk or Mr. Burns, the villainous billionaire from the Simpsons? I got 75%.
Seriously, I don’t understand what is going on over there. It’s like they let the kindergarten bully run the whole school.
Saturday was almost 70˚ here in Maryland, a rare treat for November, and the last warm day forecasted for a while. So I got outside and made the most of it. The first task of the day was to help move frozen turkeys from our church to another one down the street for their Thanksgiving food giveaway. I got the Scout gassed up, bought some coffee, and pulled up to the house behind the church just in time to throw 15 frozen birds in the back. The destination church was the one we volunteered at last year, spending the whole morning to help sort and organize meals in bags and then hand them out as cars drove through the parking lot. This year they’d presorted everything so I dropped the birds off and wished everyone a happy holiday; they had things well in hand without me getting in the way.
From there I stopped at home to see the girls, and then loaded the truck up with the girl, the dog, and a load of crap for the dump. After pitching a bunch of garbage, we stopped at the bakery up the street for donuts, then hit the Home Depot for a ceiling fan to be installed in the hallway upstairs.
I didn’t want to miss out on the weather, so I went out to the garage and started organizing. Years ago, when we were trying to insulate the front porch, I wound up with about thirty sheets of unfaced insulation that I couldn’t use elsewhere so I stored it up in the attic of the garage. I’ve been meaning to get up there and clean it out for years, but working with insulation is one of my least favorite jobs so I’ve been putting it off. I’m also at the point where my available space in the garage is at its lowest point ever, so something had to give. With mask and gloves I pulled all the bales down and bagged them up for disposal, then hauled both Scout windshields, the spare gas tank, and several other bulky items up and out of the way. I have to go up and organize things better, but it’s a good start and it frees up a lot of space on the floor.
Before the sun went down, I threw the breaker for the vestigial knob-and-tube wires on the second floor and disassembled the ceiling fan left over from the Doctor’s ownership. When I repainted the hallway up there last summer I hit it with the ladder and cracked one of the blades; no great loss there. The new fan is a three-blade unit with a remote control but the genius engineers didn’t build the remote circuitry inside the fan housing—it’s a separate box that gets wired in between the fan and the power line. Because this house is 100 years old and it’s all plaster and lathe, I have no way of stuffing the box up into the eaves without doing major surgery, something I’d like to avoid for now. So it’s hung and wired until I can get back up there in more daylight and cut a fucking hole in my ceiling to make it work properly.
Longtime readers here might know that I’m an aviation history buff; I love reading and learning about WWII-era planes of all kinds and I’m fascinated about the history of those still flying. So it was a shock to read this evening that Texas Raiders, a flying B-17 on the airshow circuit, was involved in a horrific midair crash with a fighter from the same era in Dallas today. I was never able to see Texas Raiders up close but I did get to see it fly in formation with a small armada of antique planes in DC back in 2015 during the Arsenal of Democracy Flyover. This marks the second loss of a B-17 in three years; Nine-O-Nine crashed as the result of poor maintenance back in 2019. Sadly, I suspect the era of seeing antique planes fly will soon come to an end.
I went back to Procreate on my iPad the other day and finished up an illustration I’d started months ago, basically doing a treatment of a photo I took at the farmer’s market. I think it needs some more work, but I like how it turned out.
The CR-V is back on the road and running happily, but we’ve got a Maintenance light on the dashboard, which could mean any one of a number of things. Typically this means she’s reminding us to change her oil, but that was done less than 1500 miles ago and the alert shouldn’t be coming back up. I figured I’d bite the bullet and buy a cheapo OBD2 scanner to hook up to the car and see if it threw any codes; in typical Amazon fashion I ordered the unit over morning coffee and it arrived later this afternoon. Plugging it in to the car, it took a minute to talk to the car and revealed no codes. It is probably just the oil maintenance light coing back on, in which case I can reset it in 10 seconds; knowing it’s not about to explode for other reasons is a good thing.
In the car on my way home from karate this evening we heard about Bitcoin dropping in value because of some exchange doing something or another, and Finn asked what Bitcoin actually was. I started out by asking her about the concept of money, and then explained government-backed securities, and stocks, and then tried to explain Bitcoin to the best of my abilities. I think I got it about 60% correct, and ended with an explanation of what a Ponzi scheme is, which I figure at least puts me in the ballpark. Finn listened and answered questions and was very interested to know if all of our bank accounts were FDIC insured. Defector did a very good explanation of what all the fuss is about, and I suddenly understand a lot more about what NPR had been reporting on.
One of my favorite podcasts, You’re Wrong About, did a format change last year when one of the hosts, Michael Hobbes, left for greener pastures. I like the other host but I don’t dig her new format all that much, so I ended my subscription. He’s now doing a new podcast called If Books Could Kill, which reviews single-serving pop nonfiction books you see in airport newsstands. The first episode is about Freakanomics, and it’s an excellent takedown of a factually bullshit narrative. As someone who has made a big part of his professional life about producing and promoting factual scientific information, I found this fascinating. Subscribed!
We walked across the street to the elementary school and cast our votes yesterday with Finn. This has been a family tradition since she was born (we brought her over in a carrier when she was only several weeks old) and she stood with Jen as she filled out her ballot. This morning we have a new Democratic Governor and Attorney General, and it’ll be legal to smoke (and grow!) weed in Maryland by June 2023. Let’s hope the rest of the country brings good news too.
I put PT Cruiser seats in Peer Pressure seven years ago and I’ve never regretted the upgrade. They are comfortable over long distances, provide ample lumbar support, and are easy to clean—all things I’ve tested extensively. They sit two inches too high off the floor, but that’s something I’ve learned to live with for the moment until I get a pair of Binder Boneyard’s upgraded seat bases. The one thing I don’t like about them, now that I’ve switched almost everything else in the cab over to black, is their color. Chrysler made a bazillion PT Cruisers, and the majority of of them had gray cloth seats like the ones I’ve got. I set up an alert on my pick-a-part app to let me know when new stock rolls in the yards, and a flurry of them came in last week. Lo and behold, a gold 2005 came in and the VIN check said it had the correct upholstery. I got some basic tools together, loaded Hazel up into the Scout, and set out for Mt. Airy on Saturday morning to check it out.
I set her up in the truck with food, water, and a comfy blanket and set out for the yard. As I would have expected, the Chrysler section was all the way at the back of the lot, at the top of a hill, so I knew I’d be humping seats a long way. The car itself was in decent shape, and the seats were dirty but showed no major signs of damage, so I unbolted them both and hauled them up to the front desk in a wheelbarrow. Hazel was curled up on the passenger seat dozing in the sun.
The weather was so beautiful, we took a leisurely drive home through the country, stopping here and there for some photos. Back at the house, it was a pretty easy process to pull the old seats out and swap the new ones in on the bases. There are just two holes to drill at the front and everything bolts up smoothly. I hit them both with upholstery cleaner and some 409 on the plastics, and in about two hours I had them both installed.
They’re not perfectly black, but they look a million times better with the rest of the interior, and they should last a good long time.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
I was down in DC three weeks ago for a work thing, and because I had to hump a bunch of video gear from the office to my old CEO’s house as well as meet up with a bunch of folks for lunch, I drove the Accord. We were eating at a restaurant I’d never been to before, so Siri took me in and dropped me at an empty parking spot right out in front of the place. I went in, lunch was had, and we left two hours and five minutes later—just enough expired time for the Accord to collect a $50 ticket. The ink was still warm when I pulled it from the wiper blade. Last week I went online to pay it, grumbling, and found a cryptic message that said I owed $0. Puzzled, I waited for the official paperwork to arrive. Yesterday I got two (?!?) letters from the DC government that confirmed things: the officer hadn’t turned in his paperwork on time, so by law I owed nothing. That was a nice gift.
We got the CR-V back from the body shop yesterday, looking like a half-brand-new vehicle. The list of stuff they replaced was long, but the visible stuff included a new bumper, bumper surround, front fender, and weatherstripping; the rear hatch opens and closes again, and the spare tire hangs straight. It’s good to have our old girl on the road again, even with 150K on the clock, and I hope we can keep her going for another 50. Now I need to bust out the buffer to shine up the sheet metal that wasn’t sanded and repainted so that it matches correctly.
A man named Tony Baker played bass on three of my favorite songs from the early 80’s, in three different bands:
Apparently he played in a band with Pete Townsend’s younger brother, and got the gig to work with Pete on his first solo album.
Big Country had one big hit here in the states, and a huge part of that is the fluid bass line he lays down throughout. This song rips.
When their founding bassist and guitarist died within a week of each other, new players had to be brought in. Tony Baker sat in on this track and Back on the Chain Gang.