I’ve taken some pretty shots around Fallbrook lately – we’ve had a few sunny days. Here are a couple of shots of a micro-park just outside of the village.
The park is called The Palomares House – I don’t know the history of it, but now I’ll; have to look it up.
Most days of the year it’s unremarkable. But this year, the rain has produced a bounty of flowers.
Then of course there’s Kathryn’s labyrinth on the lower section of our property. It looks great this time of year.
The all too predictable news about a family in TX, shot dead by the man they asked to stop shooting rifles in his front yard, is a sad reminder of the state of our culture. Offend someone, get shot. The cartoon below says it perfectly. What a terrible society we’ve become.
I used to think that folks saying they would leave the country fleeing gun culture, or abortion laws, or expensive health care, or the surveillance state, were over-reacting. Now I’m not so sure. If I were starting out in adult life, starting a family, I can think of quite a few places that would make more sense to live.
I want to be clear, I love America and appreciate the life and opportunity I’ve had here. But the America I experienced is disappearing, and this new version is…not good.
This continues to be a travesty. An outrage. One super-Karen from the odious Moms for Liberty gang decides that Florida children can’t read books by Jodi Picoult, Bernard Malamud, Judy Blume and Nora Roberts (among others). Just one shitty person with a complaint, no review and no due process. For this alone, Ron Desantis should never be allowed to approach the White House. He foments and supports the worst kinds of fascist control.
Books are….everything. Books can rescue a poor child, or a child in a weak educational system. Books paint the picture of what the future can be to someone who has no role models, no access to the larger world. So these trolls are taking those possibilities away from Florida children, showing them only an increasingly narrow Christo-fascist world view. These people, these book banners, are pure evil.
There’s a whole lot going on in the world, too much to stay focused on any single thing. More Trump trials, Biden announces a second run for Prez, wars continue in Ukraine and Sudan. Asshat Tucker Carlson is off the air, for at least a little while. The Supreme Court is deeply corrupt and no one seems to care much. Republicans continue to fight culture wars and fail to do anything useful. Red states are moving as fast as they can toward Gilead. It’s all kind of exhausting. We need some humor to offset the crazy.
That in mind, this movie looks pretty damn funny. I hope the full movie lives up to the trailer. We need a good laugh.
Turns out that a really bad night’s sleep leaves you feeling worse in the morning than a hangover. I ate healthy, had no alcohol, went to bed early, got to sleep easily but then woke up at 2am. Never really got back to sleep, so this morning is awful. This is my reward for trying to live healthy. No good deed goes unpunished.
This is also the best argument I know for a couple of glasses of wine in the evening.
We went to Fallbrook’s annual Avocado Festival today. It’s a big deal for our little town – over 100,000 people expected.
It’s a half-mile long array of tents selling arts, crafts, clothing, hats, carnival food, and everything avocado. Avocado fudge, avocado gelato, avocado soap and perfume, avocado oil, and lots of guacamole. Avocado wood carvings…you get the idea.
We had perfect weather, got there early and out before the heat and the crowd got bad. Hopefully the pictures tell a good story.
Poor Mitchell Ashley. He’s now being remembered for writing one of the worst tech predictions ever, in 2008.
“Apple iPhone Doomed To Failure — Windows Mobile 7 Plans For 2009 Leaked“. From the unfortunate article:
You might assume from this blog post that I’m very anti-Apple. Actually I have a very long history using Apple products, beginning with the Apple II Plus and the Mac Plus. There was a long period where I was an Apple zealot and evangelized the benefits of Mac over Windows. But as both the Mac and Windows matured, Apple products became no less complex to use and maintain than the Windows platform. The gaps between them closed and the hassles just weren’t worth what you have to give up to be a Mac user.
Apple’s inability to gain any significant market share means the options for software products are much more limited and hardware is much more expensive. That’s still true today, despite my friends efforts to try and tell me a Mac Pro notebook or desktop isn’t much more expensive than the comparable Windows machine. Just price them and you’ll see what I mean.
Apple iPhone. Enjoy the limelight because it won’t last long.
Yeah, I’ll go charge up my Windows 7 phone now. As Neils Bohr famously said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”
An old friend from my time in Akron OH (1979-1987ish) shared a photo with me today, and it brought back so many memories, almost all of them good.
Those years in Akron were some of the best of my life. Great job with horrible bosses (plenty of stories there). The peak of health in my adult life. Playing Go at lunch with the other aerospace engineers every day, playing basketball most evenings after work, golf with my work buddies. Getting to work on world-changing technology with people smarter than me. My best friend in those days, in the picture at top left, was everything I wasn’t. Worldly (he had been a lot of places I hadn’t), from a family of means, confident, and emotionally mature. He and I spent a ton of time together, great times I still remember. I’m thankful that he was thoughtful enough to share that picture (and others) with me.
In that period my Mom died and late in that period, Emily was born. The worst and the best of times. In retrospect, I can see that Mom dying sent me into a tailspin that took years to recover from. I ran away from people and places who would have supported me, but I was too dumb and broken to make good decisions at the time. 20-20 hindsight.
Taking a cue from the photo, here’s to old friends!
This article has made me rethink my rather simplistic idea to team with the Mexican government and have the US military go after the fentanyl cartels. How do you team up with a government that is infested with cartel cronies? If, as the article says, what we are dealing with in Mexico is a completely corrupted government, there’s not much hope of doing anything productive.
This article explains a lot. The pandemic scared people, and scared people do weird things. One thing US citizens did during the pandemic was buy guns – 60 million of them! And these are just the ones we have records for, not the ones sold by individuals at gun shows or out of the trunk of a car. Scared people with guns – that’s why we’re seeing innocent people shot just for showing up at the wrong property. Don’t think I’d want to be a Doordash driver right now.
SCOTUS is supposed to rule on the abortion pill issue today. Whatever the outcome, it’ll turn a slow news day into a big one.
Lotta headlines today about the SpaceX Starship blowing up, and that the launch wasn’t successful. Bullshit. Anything that got off the launch pad was successful, and I’m sure this test launch gave SpaceX engineers a wealth of data to analyze and do it better next time. the people who write those headlines either don’t understand the meaning of “test” or don’t care. People forget that SpaceX blew up a lot of Falcon 9s before evolving it into a very reliable launch vehicle.
It *is* interesting to speculate on why stage 2 didn’t separate as planned. Mechanical failure? Software or firmware glitch? We’ll find out. But this launch included a full Super Heavy burn, transition through MaxQ, and a lot of other milestones. Can’t wait for the next try.
I did something yesterday I seldom do – I gave up on a book. Adrian Tchaichovski’s Cage of Souls. Just too damn depressing and too slow paced. I liked his Children of Time series, but not this one. Can’t win ’em all, I guess.
Also, first Faux News and now Lindell has to put his money where his mouth is. I sure hope the courts make this asshat pay up. $5M will hurt a bit.
Finally, and sadly, we have a fourth incident just this week of innocent folks being shot by someone just for crossing their property line. A little girl and her parents were shot by a neighbor upset that a basketball rolled onto his lawn. A basketball! It’s insane – what has to happen before people understand that many, many folks who have guns don’t have the maturity/ability/training/confidence/education to own one? I’m not against gun ownership, but I *am* against gun ownership by just any idiot. You should have to earn the right, to prove that you are trained, capable and responsible. Until that happens, we’ll keep getting this result.
I have to say, the well-educated but clueless Anheiser Busch marketing VP who decided to make Bud Light “less fratty” has pulled off quite a feat. By misreading her customers, she’s now managed to lose customers on both the right and the left of US culture. Now both liberals and conservatives hate the brand – this’ll be a marketing case study for years on how to NOT do your job. So far Anheiser Busch has lost about $5B in market value due to the fallout. I’m sure she joined the firm to “make a difference”. Mission accomplished.
First the good-ole-boy crowd got really pissed off by the new marketing campaign featuring a trans person on the Bud Light cans. That led to a lot of can shooting and Bud Light renouncement over Twitter, and will probably depress sales of Bud in the Xtian-country-guns segment of America for years to come. And that was Bud Light’s core customer base.
Now the LGBTQ community wants to boycott Anheiser Busch, Bud Light’s parent company, because of their rapid and some say cowardly retreat back to good-ole guns, God, and country marketing. No woke here now, they say. So the original target of the marketing now feel abandoned and betrayed.
I’d sure like to hear her exit interview, and/or her interview for the next job.
Good news today. 🙁 Looks like if you’re male, overweight, and 60+ years old (check, check, and check), a case of Covid gives you a 50% greater risk of Type 2 diabetes. That’s just great – what was second prize? Covid-19, the gift that keeps on giving.
With that in mind I just booked an expensive wine dinner at a new Oceanside restaurant, Valle. They’re having a multi-course Mexican meal (not like any Mexican food you’ve ever seen…this ain’t Robertos) paired with Valle de Guadaloupe wines, in their ocean-view dining room. Take that, Type 2 diabetes! I’m going down swinging.
The Starship launch is back on for Thursday. Fingers crossed…
In other wine news, we just got our new Regusci shipment for the quarter. Their wines have gotten so, so good. One of the best Napa “secrets”.
Finally, this just in from Bizzarro World.
Trump says he will outlaw homelessness and arrest everyone who refuses to comply. He will then give them the option to get out of jail to be relocated to new tent cities elsewhere where he will take care of their needs.
He’s going to put homeless people in concentration camps for non-compliance, whatever that means. He’d have to be a lot smarter to be called stupid.
So close. The Starship launch was scrubbed today in the last few minutes. Some unexplained “pressurization issue” with stage one Super Heavy stopped the launch. Next attempt – possibly Wednesday morning. It takes 48 hours to drain the 10 million pounds of fuel (!!) and get ready to start over. Disappointing, but not that surprising.
I did learn some things by watching the SpaceX launch commentary.
I lost a bit of sleep last night over this, first waking up after midnight in anticipation, and then re-rousing myself at 530am to watch the launch. Totally worth it, and I’ll do it again in 2-3 days.
It looks like it’s really happening tomorrow. The SpaceX home page features Starship on the pad, ready for launch at 5am Pacific time. I’ll be up and watching. It’s not often you get to see the world change (in a positive way), scheduled and televised.
It took a year (!) for the FAA to approve the launch. We’ll know in a few seconds after ignition if it’s a success.
Looking ahead to the massive payload capacity of Starship, here’s a source for how much payload was possible during the Apollo era using Saturn V rockets. It’s hard to derive the number from this haystack of statistics, but my best estimate is about 15 tons cargo delivered to the Moon. Starship can deliver up to 250 tons!! That’s a true game changer.
I held my nose and watched some of the speeches from the recent NRA convention in Indiana. Opposition research.
What became obvious was that D. Trump is going to be the 2024 Republican nominee for President. He’s still vigorous, still gives his weird everyone’s-against-us speech with a lot of conviction, and the audience loves him. They love him, even though most everything he says is straight out of the fascist dictator’s handbook. They *want* a crude, domineering, ignorant fascist as their leader.
I don’t understand it, but you better believe it. Democrats need to buckle up and get ready to run someone who can beat this guy. Biden has the political chops, but I worry about his stamina and health. Trump is a human cockroach – he’ll probably live to 110.
Part of feeling better the last 24 hours or so is getting back into the things I enjoy. Like music. I spent some time today and yesterday and repositioned my speakers in the main system to find the true “sweet spot” And to restart my buggy Roon and Tidal software.
The speaker tweaking was a great success, though it won’t be popular with K. She likes the speakers up against the windows and as unobtrusive as possible. Turns our the sweet spot. where the speakers disappear and the sound appears inside your head, requires that the speakers are moved out (wider) and forward a couple of feet. And voila, it’s like you have headphones on. But these “headphones” can shake the floor if you want them to, all while revealing the little nuance hidden in a well-recorded song. The music now sounds *great*; the sound I’ve been looking for. We’ll negotiate over the speaker moves.
The Roon/Tidal restart, I’ll give it a 50% success. There’s a problem somewhere, and the Elac music server that runs Roon just doesn’t give you the tools to look inside and see what’s going on – what’s working and not. Could be network, could be software versions and connections, could be cross-software authentication, could be…lots of things. From here, I have a few options:
I’m unlikely to put in the time to do the last thing, or even the next to last thing. But until I do something, my digital music collection is crippled. First world problem.
That’s when you know all is basically OK in your life – when your problems are first world problems.
Today Heather Cox Richardson tells the story of how the Mexican drug cartels are behind the fentanyl drug epidemic in the US.
It seems pretty black and white to me. Mexican organizations (cartels) are attacking the US, killing 200 people every day. Why can’t the State Dept and DoD work with the Mexican government on joint military strikes against these targets? Ms. Richardson advocates a financial approach to the problem, but she’s nicer than me. The cartels are a disease affecting both the US and Mexico. Time to cure that disease.
Special forces strikes at locations softened up by drones, missiles and laser guided bombs make sense. Target the production sites, the money processing sites, the chemical import sites, and the homes of the leaders. That last part is tougher because of “civilians”, particularly the families of the leaders. I’m sure these guys constantly surround themselves with innocents as a shield. But one way or another, you have to take out the leadership.
I have to believe that if we put our minds and weapons to it we could eradicate this problem. And I think US and Mexican governments working together to solve this problem would be healthy for both nations.
Woo hoo! I’ve been waiting for this for a couple of years. Maybe my whole life, now that I think about it.
Musk is a weirdo, at times an obstinate asshole. But if he gets Starship running between Earth and Moon, all is forgiven. We’ll finally be on our way to climbing out of our gravity well prison.
The day that Starship reaches orbit I’m gonna open the most expensive bottle of wine in my collection and enjoy it. And if that one disappoints, I’ll open another.
I’m sure I’ll look back on this in a month or two and think “how naive”, but at the moment I don’t care. We’ve had a wet, cold 2023 so far in Socal. The weather in KY has been *much* better, on average. Today it is again 60 degrees, damp with a chilling wind blowing. A normal day in Scotland, but not Socal. So even though I feel much better today, there’s really no reason to go outside. I have a trip planned to KY in a few weeks and I’m already looking forward to the warmth and the May flowers.
There’s something about a chilly day on the Pacific coast that is much, much worse than the same conditions elsewhere. Maybe it’s humidity, but there’s a X factor about a Pacific breeze that just cuts right through you. That’s what we have today, so I’ll spend another day in front of the computer and/or the TV and/or a book. There’s this thing called the “weather tax” that accounts for Socal property being so expensive. This year, we’re not getting our money’s worth.
I *should* get back into writing the novel, but after being sick for 5+ days I’m not quite ready. I would get out and play golf, except for that whole Scottish weather thing. If I’m going to get out and play in Scottish weather, it damn well should be in Scotland.
The news is full these days of trans-person debates. For example, should a trans person be allowed to compete in athletic contests? Should insurance pay for surgery to transition? And so on. But of all the debates, the one that puzzles me the most is the question of a child’s “rights” to choose to transition from one sex to another. Those rights are often debated under the label of “gender-affirming care”, a codephrase covering actions that can range from verbally supporting the child’s gender choice to medical procedures. A very wide spectrum.
It puzzles me because this debate defies common sense. Because of common sense, for decades we have made laws about the things that children, minors (under age 16 or 18, depending on location and activity) do NOT have rights for.
These are all common sense decisions encoded into law because society has rightly judged that minors simply aren’t mentally or physically prepared to make decisions that will affect the rest of their life. These laws are to protect them from exploitation by evil-minded adults and to protect them from their own lack of judgement and experience.
So why should we allow a minor to make a life-changing decision about sex transitioning? The answer is we shouldn’t, and it has nothing to do with judgements about trans persons. It has to do with the common-sense principle of doing no harm to minors, who by definition are not ready to make adult decisions.
Someone will come up with a hypothetical example of a thirteen year old who absolutely, positively knows they were born the wrong sex and is anxious to take steps to correct that surgically. This hypothetical person will be miserable, will suffer needlessly by waiting until they are 18 to take this life-changing action. I will agree that this is possible.
But balance that against a thirteen year old who is uncertain about sexual identity, and who has a parent or mentor who strongly encourages them to act on that uncertainty. That person and their perhaps-well-intentioned guardian may make the right choice or the wrong choice – we can never know except in hindsight.
For every one of the first case, I posit that there are many of the second case. In any event, the law is designed to deny minors that choice because we (and they) cannot know for sure if they are making a decision which they are prepared to live with, forever. So that right is denied, or delayed until they are an adult in the eyes of the law.
I realize that this is a hot topic, and my position can be attacked with the argument that I have no training or experience in the matter. That’s correct. But my position is based on logic, and on common sense.
Amazon just became the world’s largest AI lab. From the WSJ. I think the AI progress and experiments are much like our wrong-headed notion about gain of function experiments with viruses – it will have some world-changing unintended consequences (COVID 19, anyone?) and may end even worse.
There’s really no stopping this. We’re just monkeys playing with a new toy, and we can’t help ourselves. We will create ever-more-deadly viruses and some of them will escape, and we will create software that regards us as the silly monkeys we are.
How’s that for a positive thought on a Thursday? I’ll blame it on my 5th straight day of feeling like crap. I’ve said it before, but I have soooo much respect for those with chronic illness who manage to treat other people well and go on with their lives. Just five days of being sick and I’m pissed off and a little depressed. Don’t know how I would treat others right now – there’s no one else here. But not to lose the thought, my hat’s off to those of you who suffer from something day after day. I would have to get a lot tougher to live up to your example.
20-25 inches of rain in the Ft. Lauderdale area in the last 24 hours. Yikes! There goes spring break. Twenty five inches is what we’re calling a small miracle in Socal for the whole year, so that much in a day…off the charts.
Perhaps it’s because I’ve felt so bad the last couple of days (still deeply in the grips of a malicious rhinovirus or coronavirus), but the news today aggrieves me. Offends me, repulses me. Take a look at this list and see if you have the same reaction.
I’m pretty sure I could go on finding news that sets me off, ad infinitum. It’s all Republicans, all the time, fighting culture wars aimed at creating a Christian Nationalist authoritarian state. Guns, gays, books, and women’s rights. These are the things they care about. It’s as if they all read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and used it as a model for their views on society. (I know, they don’t read, but if the shoe fits…).
I suppose this is my version of the old guy yelling at the television at some show or news he doesn’t like. If the shoe fits…
Rough start to the day today. Coughing, runny nose, headache, itchy blurry eyes…fairly classic cold symptoms. Haven’t felt right for 2-3 days. Took a home COVID test and tested negative, for what that’s worth. But I have one business meeting in person today, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be a no-show. I always hated it when, pre-COVID, people would play the martyr and come into the office when they were obviously not well, sneezing and contagious. I shouldn’t be one of those people.
Plus today is a scheduled workout day with the trainer. I’ll have to miss that too.
Other than feeling like shit, there’s not a lot that triggers my need to write at the moment. Politicians are still (mostly) crooked assholes, mass shootings continue unabated, Russia still threatens the Western world, culture wars continue..status quo. Probably a good day to read a book(s) or watch some movies. Or both.
Having a sick day in semi-retirement is actually worse than when I was working full time. Then all I missed was going to work. Now, I miss the opportunity to have a good day doing whatever I might want.
Turns out there were two shooting incidents in downtown Louisville today, not just the first event at the bank.
There’s really nothing else to say about this that hasn’t been said. Too many guns, too easy to get them, not enough oversight (licensing and training) of people who have or own them. Until we reset our understanding of what the 2nd Amendment means, we’ll continue this nightmare of never knowing when the next mentally ill/angry/disgruntled/aggrieved person will show up at your location and start shooting.
I can only hope the next generation will break this deadlock imposed on us by “conservatives” and the gun lobby. My generation seems unable to break the cycle.
The sad news today, summarized by Juanita Jean.
Good day yesterday, weird day today.
Yesterday we took K’s new vehicle to Temecula wine country and picked up our monthly or quarterly allotments from the wineries we’ve joined. Beautiful day and a happy mission. Then we stopped by full-time RVers Todd and Tania’s parking spot at Pechanga and had a cookout with them. It was great to catch up with them – between our travel schedule and their nomadic life we aren’t in the same place all that often.
Today I haven’t felt right all day, and less so as the day went on. I read a classic SF book To Reign in Hell, by Steven Brust. It was interesting but not as good as hoped. I watched the Masters golf tournament off and on all day, and I did two rounds of hard exercise (mostly weights) while watching. I expected to feel better after that, but nope. Feel like I have an incipient flu or a cold. Some sneezing, a sore throat and a general feeling of…not well.
I didn’t *lose* the whole day – a book and some real exercise has to count – but it feels like it. That’s depressing as I’m quite aware that the number of days any of us have is finite, and one going badly is significant. Can’t really afford to piss time away at this stage of things.
All I can do is get some rest tonight and hope that whatever is dragging me down will be gone, ASAP.
I don’t know about you, but this makes me angry. Clarence Thomas, the most conservative justice of all the Supremes and largest defender of the idiotic Constitutional philosophy of “originalism”, has taken huge gifts from a Republican billionaire for decades without disclosing them. In a sane governance system, he would be impeached and removed ASAP. Private jets, yachts, 5+ star accommodations – unethical doesn’t even cover it.
Thomas is clearly bought and paid for. From the article:
Crow’s access to the justice extends to anyone the businessman chooses to invite along. Thomas’ frequent vacations at Topridge have brought him into contact with corporate executives and political activists.
During just one trip in July 2017, Thomas’ fellow guests included executives at Verizon and PricewaterhouseCoopers, major Republican donors and one of the leaders of the American Enterprise Institute, a pro-business conservative think tank, according to records reviewed by ProPublica. The painting of Thomas at Topridge shows him in conversation with Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society leader regarded as an architect of the Supreme Court’s recent turn to the right.
In his statement to ProPublica, Crow said he is “unaware of any of our friends ever lobbying or seeking to influence Justice Thomas on any case, and I would never invite anyone who I believe had any intention of doing that.”
“These are gatherings of friends,” Crow said.
This is just wrong, but we will likely not do anything about it because Congress takes similar bribes. Arrrrgh! Makes me feel like this.
Shifting gears, here’s a great explanation of how generative transformers like ChatGPT work.
I’ve had a few more thoughts on my review of The Passenger. My review immediately after reading it was pretty harsh – perhaps deserved, perhaps not. But the afterthoughts are less harsh.
Call it magical realism or urban fantasy, this is a genre I like a lot. De Lint is one of the finest fantasy authors of all time. He reminds me of a good soul from rural KY who happens to live in Canada and writes about the backwoods and spaces in between. His recurring characters, like The Crow Girls and The Trickster, are memorable. It’s hard to say what to read from de Lint first – he has been prolific. The Wild Wood is a good suggestion. I have most of his books in high quality hardback and paperback.
Carroll isn’t well known in America, but I get the same feeling reading his books – that the world is magical, and most anything is possible. His settings and his life are primarily in Europe, Austria to be precise. His writing is much like McCarthy’s – poetic and evocative. I have all his books collected as well.
So that’s part of why I had a negative reaction to The Passenger. He took one of my favorite genres and painted it solid black. Bold move, but nihilism isn’t my style.
SDSU’s magic run came to an end last night. They had a 10-12 minute cold streak (!!) in the first half that sealed their fate. If not for that, they could have won. But they had a great tournament run and should be proud. I’d give a lot if my UK Wildcats had gotten as far.
Made some big financial decisions yesterday. Dropped my employer’s $150/month group health plan for a $0/month Kaiser health plan. Same coverage, same benefits. Once in the Medicare world, things get weird, like $0/month premiums for full medical coverage, as long as you’re paying for Medicare parts A & B. Go figure. I hope I don’t regret leaving the employer plan, because once out, you’re out.
In the same vein, I signed up for Social Security. It’s a calculation, and my calculation right now is that the time is right for me. Depends on how long you’ll live and how long SS will be solvent, and that second thing has me worried. OK, the first thing too. Take the money now while it still exists, even if I get the shit taxed out of it due to other earnings.
These are two big, non-reversible decisions. No mulligans. (Actually, there *is* a mulligan on filing for SS benefits, but I used that five years ago.) But I’ve been grinding through the tradeoffs on these for a while, so I’m (mostly) sure I understand the consequences. One consequence is that now I’m completely, officially, indisputably, old. Hard to believe.
Finally, the big news today is that Herr Drumpf is getting arraigned and arrested today in New York. You can spin that news a lot of ways, but I choose to spin it as “no one is above the law”. Happy about that.
