We made it to Victoria Falls. Land of elephants in the streets. Warmer than Joburg, very much a tourist town. Small town, about 40k people. Helicopters buzzing about constantly, filled with folks like me gawking at a world wonder.

Our lodge and rooms here are excellent, a huge improvement from the in-decline family lodge at Joburg. Here we have electricity and (sporadic) Internet.

We see the falls in about an hour. I’ll try to find a way to share pictures without a damn laptop.

Oh, and happy birthday to my brother Mark! Hope you do something fun today.

My previous post was a little dramatic, but I *am* bummed about my laptop. Much harder to do anything online, and I don’t have access to most of my data without the laptop. It’s still there, you just can’t navigate to it with a dead display.

Our current safari camp at Karongwe Game Preserve is wonderful, but the animal density was much better in Kruger Park. Accommodations here are very, very good. Pictures of it all will generally have to wait until I get back to the States. And we have some superb pictures.

Health status here halfway thru the trip is…rough. Lots of pain and we’ll leave it at that. If I had known it would be like this I would have shifted the trip a few weeks. But at this point the only way thru is forward.

Finally, my old friend John Wiseman’s memorial service is today. I’ll never forget John, he was one of a kind. RIP, buddy.

Well, posting updates and pictures from Africa just got complicated. My laptop display just showed damage, and then went completely blank. Dead laptop. And I’m a million miles from an Apple Store. It’s been one of those days. The single short safari here in our new location was a bust. Now this.

I haven’t been without a working laptop for a couple of decades. This should be fun.

We saw a *lot* on our first safari day. Here’s a larger sample.

Nile, Nile Crocodile

Roadside monkeys, I forget what type. They’re everywhere.

Zebra. Zebras? Zebrae?

Big mouth hippo.

Not an animal, but epic views above Kruger Park, from atop the escarpment.

The lichen-covered cliffs – might have been an inspiration from one of my all-time loved SF series, The Many Colored Land, by Julian May. If you haven’t read it, get busy and read.

We heard so many heartbreaking stories about rhino poaching yesterday. It’s worse than imagined, with the rhinos even in African national parks like Kruger being slowly massacred. It’s all so stupid and greed-driven that I can’t be rational about it. Poachers (and their higher-ups, the ones driving the market for rhino horn) should be gunned down on the spot. Or imprisoned and their keratin fingernails and toenails (same dumbass substance as rhino horn) should be ripped out every time they grow back, ad infinitum. I wish them all eternal kidneystones.

So it was a surprise that we encountered a couple of rhinos as we were leaving the park yesterday. They’re big gentle giants. This guy has had his horn filed down by park rangers, but even that won’t deter poachers, who will simply chain saw the remaining horn off the snout and condemn them to a slow painful death bleeding out.

Apparently COVID accelerated the demise of rhinos in a big way. Tourists left the parks, rangers absent too, so poachers came in and slaughtered at will during 2020 and 2021. Rhinos are an uncounted victim of COVID-19. Fuck.

It’s things like this that make me a hard-core cynic with regards to humanity. Individuals can and will be wonderful. But in groups and as a species, we are tragically flawed.

I chose this trip and itinerary because I wanted to get into the bush and see wildlife ASAP after landing in Africa. Today made me second guess that decision. It was a looooong drive from Joburg to Hazyview, Hazyview being right at the gates of Kruger Nat’l Park. Long and bumpy – and by “bumpy” I mean really rough, which wasn’t easy on us. My post-surgery body didn’t like it at all. We left at 6am and arrived at 4pm, with a few stops along the way. I could’ve done without that drive.

Tomorrow is our first full day of safari, starting at 5am. We’ll see if I have further regrets about this itinerary after that. The hotel/lodge we’re staying in for tonight and tomorrow is lovely. Very nice modern rooms. Umbhaba Eco Lodge. Recommended, with one notable exception. They have the hardest beds on the planet. Somehow, being “eco” means they have to use repurposed concrete for mattresses. Miserable, miserable beds, bot good other than that.

In other news, I’m hating Texas more than usual lately. Bastards.

A couple of hours relaxing at the lodge and away from airports have improved one’s mental health immensely. They have great old leather couches here, my favorite, and I’m currently ensconced on one. A nap is imminent. Meanwhile, I’ve noticed two interesting things right off the bat:

1. The lodge had no power, no electricity when we arrived. They got their generator started and now most things work here, including Wifi. It’s sporadic, but it’s mostly on. Apparently this is normal – S Africa has ongoing and systemic problems with their power grid. I know some engineers who could fix this. Microgrids, anyone?
2. Walking around the property, we could just as easily be in San Diego. Same flora, halfway around the world. Can’t really tell about the trees because it’s winter here and anything deciduous has dropped its leaves. But the succulents, flowers, cycads, etc. are all the same as at our CA home.

It’s nice to be able to return to this blog’s original charter – travel blogging. Here we sit in the OneWorld Lounge at LAX, enjoying comfortable seats, some so-so food, and free drinks. Airport lounges are a godsend, even with so-so food. While on the subject, the absolute best airport lounge ever is the Turkish Air lounge in Istanbul. I could just live there – it’s that good. Gourmet food, top-shelf drinks of all types, beds and showers, a movie theater, workout equipment, acres of hospitality…it’s the best. So I can say with some authority that the OneWorld lounge at LAX is just OK. Beats the cheap seats.

I’m hoping we’ve done the hardest part of the journey already. The drive from northern San Diego to LAX on the 405N is/was bad. Stressful. Packed bumper-to-bumper on a Sunday afternoon. The least scenic drive you can imagine – it’s like driving through a post-apocalyptic world at 80 and 20 miles per hour, varying at random. I absolutely hate the urban sprawl up the Socal coast – I can think of few worse places on Earth. Worse than the traffic in Lima or Mexico City. Humanity is a plague, and we have royally fucked up a place that used to be paradise. That’s part of what I love about KY. Sure, there are messed up places in eastern KY and in downtown Lexington and Louisville, but they are small. Contained. Tiny. Most of the state still is a paradise. Just don’t tell the 30-40 million people living in concrete Socal.

Rant over, I suppose. But that drive triggers me. I did it or a variation of it for years. Decades. Kind of a crummy way to start on a vacation.

On a better note, at checkin the British Airways clerk showed us pictures of his Africa trip, and they were pretty great. He was anxious to share his tour/location details, but I think the dirty looks of the people in line behind us killed that idea.

We have about two hours to kill before boarding. After that, it’s fly all night a couple of times and we’ll be there. At least someone else will do the driving.

Here’s the weather we’re heading into at Johannesburg. Not bad at all. Pretty much San Diego winter weather.

On the 31st we move from S Africa to Zimbabwe. Quite a different weather situation there, about 15-20 degrees warmer, but still pretty darned good.

I have high hopes for the Zimbabwe/Botswana visit and Victoria Falls. Here’s the Natgeo writeup about our first day there.

Day 8 Victoria Falls   Morning Join a knowledgeable guide for an unforgettable experience at Victoria Falls. Explore the rainforest and learn about the geology, history, and local legends of this world wonder. After your immersion, get up close to the falls and discover the beauty of “the smoke that thunders.” Be sure to have your camera ready!   Zambezi River Sunset Cruise
Climb aboard and cruise along the beautiful Zambezi River. Enjoy some snacks, drinks, a festive atmosphere, and gorgeous views of the sunset. It’s the ideal way to end an eventful day in Victoria Falls.

And the next day we head to a wildlife area on the Zimbabwe/Botswana border.

Day 9 Full Day Excursion to Chobe National Park Depart Victoria Falls in the morning for a full-day guided tour of Chobe National Park in Botswana – a wildlife-abundant region covering about 11,700km2 of the Northern Kalahari. Begin your adventure with a cruise down the Chobe River, taking in the sweeping views and witnessing the wildlife grazing along the riverbank. Enjoy an included lunch on land before boarding 4×4 safari vehicles for an afternoon wildlife safari drive with an expert guide. Keep an eye out for lions, elephants, and buffalo. Transfer back to Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, arriving in the early evening. Please note that this activity includes two border crossings between Zimbabwe and Botswana. The ordering of activities is susceptible to change.

After that, it’s just unwinding all the travel – over 10,000 miles to travel to get home. Fly Zimbabwe back to Johannesburg, spend the night, then Johannesburg back to LAX via Heathrow. We gain a day flying west, just as we lost one flying east.

Sitting here today, I don’t know why we waited this long to make this trip. We got really enamored with wine trips to Europe in the 2015-2019 timeframe, as opposed to seeing the rest of the world. But that’s the theme of this blog – Better Late Then Never.

Today is the last full day in Socal before we fly east and south to S Africa. We have everything ready, including extra security on the homeplace. Today was also the first time I got off my butt and got out to play 18 holes of golf. That went surprisingly well after being a couch potato for five solid weeks. Weirdly, I always play better after I’ve had a long layoff from the game.

One small glitch remaining is that British Airways won’t let us select our seats until 24 hours before flight time. After paying business class prices, they want to charge us about $200 per seat, per flight, to select our seats “early”. It’s free inside the 24 hour window, but that practice is just BS. I hope the rest of BA’s service is more customer-friendly than that.

My health seems up to the trip, and my MD assures me that another stone attack during this trip is very unlikely. That’s one of my worst case scenarios, along with eaten by lions, bitten by cobra, and smash-drowned by hippos. Now that I think of it, Cabo or Hawaii are sounding better and better. But we’re committed.

Here’s some good electoral demographics news. The younger and educated crowd may save us yet.

And Democrats need some good news. With friends like these, who needs enemies. Manchin and Sinema – sanctimonious, money-grubbing, attention-grabbing, insincere and unserious asshats.

And in Alabama, if you don’t like the legal ruling, just ignore it. Gotta keep the black man down.

The wheels of justice turn slowly, especially if you’re trying to convict a former President. Trump’s judge-in-the-pocket Aileen Cannon gave Trump most of the delay he wanted. The classified document trial will now be held in the thick of the 2024 election race. That’ll be interesting.

This Lukovich cartoon says it all about football coach turned Senator Tommy Tuberville. And they call themselves “patriots”.

In non-political news, we lost a great one today – Tony Bennett. Gone at 96. I dearly love his duo recordings with KD Lang.

Jeff Tiedrich’s newsletter is some fun reading these days. He doesn’t hold back. Here’s a quote from his latest:

“The Republican Party is a dumpster fire inside of a train wreck inside a of nuclear fucking meltdown.” Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

***

Enjoying watching The Open today and remembering my first/only time there in person. In 2016 I had an epic golf day. Played Carnoustie in the morning (Carnoustie!) and shot low 90s, a superb score for a golfer of my skill on one of the toughest courses on the planet. Caught a ride to St. Andrews midday and spent the rest of day on The Old Course watching The Open in person. Bedded down for the evening at The Fairmont in St. Andrews. One of the best golf days ever.

James Hansen, climate scientist from the 1980s, takes no pleasure in being right. “We are damned fools”. I hope that’s not our epitaph. I for one don’t want to get into a debate about how much of what we’re observing/measuring is human-driven. Some of the change probably is, but who the hell cares at this point. What *is* important is that we use our gigantic footprint on this Earth to not make things worse. Reduce greenhouse gases, stop polluting the planet with plastics and hydrocarbons, build and live more sustainably. And we should get ready for a pretty big change to worldwide coastlines. Turns out the Anthropocene will look a lot like the Pliocene.

It really would be fascinating (maybe horrifying) to watch how this plays out over the next few hundred years. I wish I could be around to see it.

***

Having said that, off we go to Africa next week to see some big critters before they die off from climate change or are killed by poachers. Our international flights won’t exactly be carbon neutral, but they’re flying with or without us. So yeah, I’m a hypocrite on being responsible about minimizing our human impact on climate.

Our first stops will be in S Africa. After a night spent near Johannesburg, we head out for Kruger National Park for a few days of National Geographic-hosted safaris. We’re staying at Umbhaba Eco Lodge – not exactly roughing it. Here’s the description of one of our safari days:

Rise early and climb aboard an open jeep for a full-day safari in Kruger National Park—home to an extraordinary array of large mammals. Spot elephants, lions, giraffes, and perhaps elusive leopards as we explore this breathtaking wilderness of savanna and scrubland. Return to our lodge in the evening, where you can take some time to relax and enjoy the nocturnal sounds of the bush. At over 19,000 sq km (7,500 sq mi), South Africa’s Kruger National Park is one of the largest and most impressive animal reserves in the world. With 147 species, Kruger has more species of large mammals than any other park on the continent.

Hop in a 4×4 safari vehicle and get yourself one step closer to the surrounding nature. Be ready to spot elephants, giraffes, hippos, lions, zebras, and many other species in this impressive South African national park.

Sounded pretty good to me.

Another safari we’re taking from that base is to the Karongwe Private Game Reserve. Again, from the Natgeo description:

Travel to the Karongwe Private Game Reserve, a pristine wildlife sanctuary located in the Greater Kruger area. Meet with a researcher from the Endangered Wildlife Trust’s Cheetah Metapopulation Project—a program funded in part by National Geographic’s Big Cats Initiative—and learn about efforts to protect the region’s cheetahs and other carnivores. The researcher then joins us for a wildlife-viewing excursion through the reserve.   For the next two days, enjoy ranger-led morning and evening wildlife safari drives in an open safari vehicle in Karongwe Nature Reserve, searching for Africa’s famed Big Five. With over 9,000 hectares (22,240 acres) of supreme African bushveld, Karongwe Private Game Reserve is home to many creatures, and our safari drives provide several opportunities for wildlife viewing.   We use various accommodations within the reserve (the location is based on availability). During your time here, you will either stay in lodge rooms or very comfortable permanent tents (both of equal quality and with similar amenities).   Wildlife safari drives are conducted with qualified wildlife rangers and local expert trackers who will share their vast experience of the African bush.

Then, we’re off to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. I’ll save that description for another post.

Well, this is terrifying. The MAGA rubes want Trump as dictator for life, and Trump’s team is preparing the way with detailed steps on how they’ll tear down all semblance of checks and balances in government. Goodbye democracy, hello autocracy. I truly don’t understand why some 30-40% of voters are OK with this. They want a strong, patriarchal leader to “take care of things”. And take care of them. It’s mental illness on a national scale.

The 2024 election will be the most consequential of my lifetime. We *know* that Trump is an existential threat to democracy, and yet he’s still the front runner, 18 months out. Insanity.

***

Now that I’m on the mend, I’ve been educating myself about sepsis, and…holy shit. All the latest literature warns that for every hour sepsis is untreated with antibiotic therapy, risk of death increases by 7-8%. Per hour. My case from Thursday to Monday (June 23rd-26th) was almost a tragedy. On Thursday night I had my second round of kidney stone pain and a fever. So on Friday I was admitted to the hospital, where the focused on the kidney stone, inserting a stent through the urethra, bladder and ureter to provide clear drainage of one kidney. They *did* infuse antibiotics for what they believed was a kidney infection, and that may have saved the day. By Saturday evening I went home to recover and wait for word on when they might remove the kidney stones.

By Monday I felt pretty good, good enough to attend an all-day Board meeting downtown. I wasn’t 100%, but I pushed through the day. I had my phone off most of the day. I was sadly unaware that starting at 9am that day, Kaiser had received blood culture results indicating stage 1 sepsis, and they were calling me, leaving voicemails and texts to get my ass to the ER ASAP. In a comedy of errors, I didn’t see any of those messages until I was already home at 5pm. Exhausted, the last thing I wanted to do was turn right around and drive another hour+ to the ER. But by 530pm, sanity prevailed and K took me to the ER, where I was admitted (after 8 hours in the ER queue !) and began aggressive antibiotic treatments and hourly blood tests. At the time I was shocked by how “all hands on deck” the medical team was those first couple of days. Now, in retrospect, it was a close call. If I had been lazier and waited until the next day to go back to the ER, the outcome might have been much worse. I feel like the guy who went swimming in shark-infested water and came out with a scrape, as opposed to being shark lunch.

After watching all four of the Cats’ winning games at GLOBL Jam in Canada, I have to say I’m excited for the fall season. The Cats looked great across the board, with depth, high energy, great early season teamwork. And they’re one of the best 3-shooting teams I’ve ever seen. There are five (five!!) guys who can shoot from anywhere with high percentage – Reed Shepherd, Justin Edwards, Antonio Reeves, DJ Wagner, and Tre Mitchell. What are the odds of all five of them having the same off night? Low, very low. We’ll destroy some teams with 3s this season.

As for the big men, I’m ambivalent about when our two 7-footers are ready to play. Yeah, I think we’ll need them against some teams. But this team is so good with the small-ball lineup (no one taller than 6’8″), having the bigs will only be necessary against a few opponents. Think last years’ TN team with that monster in the paint. For the moment, Thiero is doing his best to play strong against some bigger opponents, and doing it very well. Thiero was a beast in these games. Likable kid, too.

Anyway, I promised not to get too optimistic about the team after only an exhibition summer tourney, but damn. These guys are good! November can’t get here soon enough.

***

All the weather services say it’s gonna get hot in Socal today. Like 102+ degrees hot. Good day to stay inside, but I have to go visit the Kaiser clinic to get the hole in my arm patched up. Happy to do that, no matter the weather.

And the hot weather isn’t local. Turns out the Sun will have a turbulent day today. “X-class flares” predicted. That sounds straight out of a Marvel movie. I don’t imagine that will help cool off Socal.

This is true – nobody cares about your blog. But I like writing it anyway.

***

As this guy points out, climate is complex. Calling this year’s heat wave a direct result of human-induced climate change is…lazy. Probably wrong. And looking at the data, what the hell happened in the 1930s? Yikes.

***

This is ominous. Horrifying. Not sure why there isn’t more press about this. Is a birdless world even viable?

***

It’s been almost a month since my initial kidney stone attack, the inciting event of this lingering illness. And today is the last day of my self-administered IV antibiotics. Tomorrow starts the next and hopefully final phase of infection recovery with a final nuclear-option ABX infusion at the clinic and then the removal of my IV port. What a long, strange month it’s been. And I still have kidney stone removal to look forward to, post-Africa.

***

Something large fell and crashed on the property last night, the boom waking me at 230am. Probably a eucalyptus tree or branch – they have a tendency to crack and crash during periods of heat. Just hope it didn’t break anything important, like our rock walls or the RV. Or the guest house.

***

And Rory McIlroy wins the Scottish Open with birdies on the two final holes. Must’ve been a great finish, but I couldn’t find it on TV.

It’s easy to have little or no sympathy for the SAG actors’ strike. After all, we are relentlessly bombarded with stories and images of actors living The Big Life, paid so much they can live like kings. But those stories are of the 1% (5%? 10%? – hell, I don’t know, but the point remains the same). Most actors are not multi-millionaires. According to salary.com, the average actor’s salary is $49-73K. And given that most of these unknown actors must live in the high cost of living LA and NYC areas, that’s a near-poverty income. So yeah, the SAG union is a real thing for 90+% of actors. The Tom Cruises and Kate Winslets of the bunch…not so much.

And this news yesterday explains why SAG has chosen to take a hard line. Turns out the studios want to use actors’ image and likeness without compensation, forever. A bit player actor would get scanned while in a movie, but the studio would then forever own that scanned image and be able to reuse it for future productions – with no compensation to the original human. They’re calling it AI, but it’s not (that’s a whole other story) – AI is simply a label to put on the enemy, shorthand for a software process too complicated for laymen to understand.

So for most people this technology looks like magic, and right now the media is calling that kind of magic “AI”. Whatever. Image processing and digital simulation tools have simply gotten to the point that any image of any person can be inserted into any bitstream (a movie, a cartoon, a picture), made to move around and talk, and that simulated human looks completely like the original. These are called deepfakes, and it’s how anyone can make their own fantasy film of someone doing things that never happened in real life. It’s a troubling technology – at this point in time, you really cannot believe anything you see in digital media – any person doing any thing can be faked.

From Wikipedia:

Deepfakes (portmanteau of “deep learning” and “fake”^[1]) are synthetic media^[2] that have been digitally manipulated to replace one person’s likeness convincingly with that of another. While the act of creating fake content is not new, deepfakes leverage powerful techniques from machine learning and artificial intelligence to manipulate or generate visual and audio content that can more easily deceive.^[3][4] The main machine learning methods used to create deepfakes are based on deep learning and involve training generative neural network architectures, such as autoencoders,^[3] or generative adversarial networks (GANs).^[5][6] Deepfakes have garnered widespread attention for their potential use in creating child sexual abuse material, celebrity pornographic videos, revenge porn, fake news, hoaxes, bullying, and financial fraud.^{[7][8][9][10]} This has elicited responses from both industry and government to detect and limit their use.^[11][12] From traditional entertainment to gaming, deepfake technology has evolved to be increasingly convincing^[13] and available to the public, allowing the disruption of the entertainment and media industries.^[14]

So yeah, if I’m a minor actor scratching out $50K per year as a background person in films, deepfakes of me are an existential threat to my crummy job. And if I’m a big star, then hell yeah, I don’t want the studio making Shooting Big Guns 16 using my image, my avatar, and not paying me anything.

So this is a *really* interesting moment, with lots of interesting questions. If it turned out that Timothy Chalamet (not a fan, BTW) was a synthetic person (totally digital, no human original), would he still be a “star”? Would anyone care that the next George Clooney movie didn’t involve the person himself, but a very convincing digital version of George? What should an actor be paid, if anything, for use of their image and likeness in future productions? What should the penalty be, if any, for producing a video using deepfake tech for the sole purpose of misleading the public (e.g., a political ad showing a candidate doing something awful that never happened in real life)? Is video of a crime being committed really legal evidence, or is it a fake? And on and on – so many interesting questions.

SAG-AFTRA is doing the right thing taking a stand here. The moment has come to sort out who gets paid for synthetic copies of real humans providing a platform for profitable entertainment businesses.

I predict that many studios will skip this issue entirely and begin manufacturing storylines around completely synthetic “stars”. And I predict that most people won’t care. They just want to be entertained.

Pretty sad that I’m not attending this on Friday/Saturday. I sure enjoyed the conference last year. This year I’m just doing my best to spend my time writing instead of learning about writing. Only 10,000 words finished in a week, though. Gotta do a little better.

***

And Socal is now firmly in the grip of a big heat wave. A fulsome summertime is upon us. Been in the 90s every afternoon for a few days, and over the next week it’s gonna be 10-12 degrees hotter. Good time to be stuck inside healing up, I suppose.

Found a really great non-partisan, data-driven source of health/drug news and information: the Kaiser Family Foundation. No bullshit left or right, just solid information. Well done.

***

I’m all in for this. Presenting Li-Fi, the next generation of home networking. It makes complete sense.

***

Woke up at 430am today and felt great. That may be my body’s natural or default wakeup time. And I’m OK with that. The period from 430 to 8am is really peaceful. Plenty of time to think, read, write, and ruminate.

***

Talking politics with our friends a few nights ago, I’ve come to realize that my hope is for someone smart and charismatic (and not evil) to come out of nowhere on the Democrat side of things and take charge in 2024, just the way Obama did in 2008. Obama’s rapid emergence didn’t give the Republican smear machine enough time to really target him. He was elected before they knew what hit them. All the folks who might be good D candidates this next election have already been sized up and pre-compromised with the R team ready to take them down. Who might that person be? I don’t know; that’s the point. Maybe it’s time for another celebrity President, just not a corrupt asshat like Trump. Kevin Costner? After his divorce drama, being President would probably be a relief. Matt Damon? C’mon, who wouldn’t vote for Matt Damon? Or Meryl Streep? I think I’m on to something here.

***

No one on planet Earth should have to experience the indignity and waste of being questioned by the likes of Gym Jordan, James Comer and Matt Gaetz. Especially not someone with an actual job to do, like the FBI Director. Jordan, Comer, and Gaetz exemplify what’s wrong with Congress. Add MT Greene and Boebert and you’ve got a perfect Top 5 evil idiots. They don’t represent anyone but themselves. They don’t govern, they perform.

***

The KY Wildcats looked pretty darn good yesterday against Team Germany. That’s all I’ll say for now, after learning the lesson last year that summer tournaments with weirdo opponents do NOT serve as a good indicator of how a team will do against real SEC competition. No conclusions, but they looked good yesterday.

***

I’m learning (again) that as an aspiring novelist I have a major weakness. Second Act plotting. I come up with good ideas, good beginnings, good characters (at least I think so), and good endings. But how you get from Act 1 to Act 3, that middle part…not so good. That’s where I’m stuck right now with a novel I’m calling Envoy. Gotta work through this a little quick; I have a deadline.

Interesting day today – doing something other than wait-around for the next IV drugs in X hours.

• Finally selling K’s old (2019) Jeep Cherokee to a private buyer. Meeting them today for a test drive.
• Will get to watch way-too-early UK basketball this afternoon as we play in Canada’s Globl Jam. Weird little tourney, but I’ll take any opportunity to watch UK hoops. UK’s team = Team USA for this tournament.
• Attending only my second company meeting since falling ill. It’s an online meeting, so minimal time and stress.
• Taking time to wish my great friend Mike Delvizis a happy birthday. We’ve been friends for 50 years, a number that astounds me.

***

The heat wave has finally hit here. Yesterday we had a long afternoon with temps above 90F, and more of that on the way the next few days.

Don’t know if its connected to heat, but we’ve seen a lot of animal action lately. In addition to the usual owls and coyotes every night, during the day we’ve had snake incursions. Not rattlesnakes, fortunately, but their nemesis – king snakes. We’ve had three or four king snakes hanging around the house. One big one got in the front door, hanging around on the cool brick flooring, and a smaller one in the back door nicely splayed out on our carpet. We’ve had stop keeping any doors open. While it’s OK to find a king slithering across your floor in the open, having one of then decide the bedroom or the bed would be a good place to nest…nightmares.

King snakes are definitely the good guys, so we gently coax them back outdoors and hope they go find a rattler to attack.

Sixty seven years. It seems a large number. Two-thirds of the way to one hundred (yeah right, as if I’ll live to 100).

More likely this is my Pareto birthday, wherein 80% of the tough things that’ll happen to me will happen in the next 20% of life. Not being pessimistic, just being real. This current health scare is probably the inaugural event of my Pareto years. So 20% remaining. Could be worse – could be raining.

Another way to look at this is that I’ve just hit the average life expectancy age for a lot of third world countries, like Belarus, Phillipines, and Cambodia. Not that encouraging, now that I think of it.

Trying to ju-jitsu this theme around to something positive, here are some things I think I’ve learned in these 67 short years, some of them reinforced by events of late.

• Be true to yourself. Decide who you want to be and then stick to it.
• “The failure mode of clever is asshole” (thanks to John Scalzi for that one). In my case, trying to be the smartest guy in the room all the time does not make one a likable person.
• Life is short. Really fucking short. So don’t waste much of it.
• Compound interest is a powerful force. Get it working for you as fast as you can.
• Be kind, even if you have to work at it. Especially if you have to work at it. Kindness and empathy are what hold people together – families, friends, and communities. Not enough of that happening these days.
• “Fear is the mind killer.” A quote from the immortal Frank Herbert, in his book Dune. Truer words were never spoken. Every mistake I’ve ever made was based in fear.
• Everything is better with olive oil. Everything.
• If you can afford it, buy the prime cut of meat. Just sayin’.

I’m sure there’s more if I think about it a while, but that’s a good start.

It’s been 20 days since my current health problems began. Rough day yesterday, probably because of the added immune system impact of getting all my Africa trip shots on Thursday evening – immunizations against polio, Hep A, and typhoid. That’s quite a vaccine cocktail – JFK Jr’s head would explode at the thought. Felt like shit all day Friday and Saturday, though that’s mostly gone today. I am reminded of how tough anyone with long-term health issues has to be or become. It’s one thing to feel bad for a few days – it’s quite another to have it drag on day after day.

I’m sure that most of the strength and stamina I had acquired through twice-weekly sessions with our trainer is now gone or significantly diminished. Not being able to exercise enough to break a sweat has been a real burden these last three weeks – with a week+ to go. I’m not looking forward to starting over on the stamina front.

This morning I’ve turned my attention to a first world problem. Digital audio. A couple of years ago I thought I had solved the problem by ripping a lot of my CD collection to FLAC files and saving them on a hard disk drive. I then attached that drive (my music library) to an Elac S-101 music server and expected to be able to access all my music, plus millions of songs from Tidal, via the Elac. It just hasn’t turned out that way. The Elac server has been flaky, and each time I think of listening to it I dread the inevitable futzing and troubleshooting required to make it work. Sometimes I get it working; sometimes not. That’s not what I’m looking for when I just want to relax and listen to music.

I *think* the problem centers around the Elac’s network connection. I use a Wifi bridge/repeater to bring the home LAN to that room, and use the bridge’s wired Ethernet connection to attach the Elac. I suspect the Wifi bridge performance is spotty/marginal, so I get poor performance and random errors on the Elac side of things. Can’t find the server, can’t find the song, long random freezes of the UI, etc. Again, not what you’re looking for each time you decide to listen to some music.

Plus the Elac is not well supported. Elac has not maintained or updated this product in years. their software wasn’t that great at inception, and from what I can see there have been no improvements since it was released in 2017. Six years is an eternity in the digital world. So even if I decide to run Ethernet from my cable modem to the Elac, I still have to contend with buggy/unreliable software.

I’m considering buying a different digital streaming platform, the Brennan B3. It’s got most of what I want, and the feature set is attractive. But the Brennan gets shitty reviews, and I suspect buying it might be just like buying a British car back in the day. For example, my old MG-B – cool looking, fun in theory, but a maintenance nightmare.

Another option is a no-name music server made in Poland and sold via Audiogon. It’s a Roon music server without the Roon brand pricing and with better/more modern hardware. The price is decent and the price/performance is great, compared to the Roon label. I think this is the way I’ll go.

All this said, why doesn’t someone other than Brennan or this Polish outfit make a simple, modern, well-supported CD ripping, digital music storage and streaming device? Why doesn’t Marantz or Denon put their product muscle behind this simple need? It’s a mystery.

I never thought I’d be a junkie. But here I am, day after day, getting up at 530am for my first drugs then killing time for eight hours until I can get the next fix. It’s a shitty way to live. Fortunately I get to quit cold turkey in about eight days.

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Our friends T&T are off shopping for real estate on the Carolina coastline. A great adventure for them, but we’ll hate seeing them leave Socal (like almost all our other west coast friends). I hope they shop with a 2-3 foot sea level rise in mind – it’s happening, inevitably. They don’t call the southern end of that coast The Low Country for nothing.

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Whoa! Talk about life imitating art. I’m a big fan of Octavia Butler’s writing, but I missed this. In 1998 Butler wrote about a Christo-fascist American society with a nation slogan of “Make America Great Again”. !?!? I wonder if Trump’s behind the scenes gang “borrowed” this from Butler’s book. Kinda doubtful, I don’t think Butler is Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon’s cuppa tea.

Then one of the commenters pointed this out. Seems obvious that this is the most likely source of Trump’s MAGA cult slogan.

And finally today, polymath Casey Handmer’s company has announced its product – The Terraformer. Revolutionary, out-of-the-box thinking. This’ll require some reading and thought, but I think I want one. Or more likely, I’d invest in a partnership to buy/install one. Love the way this guy thinks.

I’m really not proud of my generation. The boomer stereotype has some basis in fact, or at least lots of anecdotes. But a *lot* of my generation is in the Trump/authoritarian camp. I’ll provide evidence via an anecdote and some data.

The anecdote is that we were sitting in the Kaiser clinic yesterday when another couple sat in the seats immediately behind us. The “lady” of the pair, a 60-ish person, was a real piece of work. She spent the entire time rattling off Faux News talking points to her partner. How evil and corrupt Biden is. How the godless (she actually used that word) Democrats are on a national baby-killing program. How the cocaine found recently in the White House must have belonged to Biden’s son. How Biden is still trying to control us all with vaccines. And so on. She would then intersperse each talking point with thanks to Jesus for being in control, and that God/Jesus would make everything right in the end.

My wife wanted to get up and move, but I wanted to stay and listen. It’s not often you get to hear what one of these low-info MAGA folks really think, unfiltered. After it was over (they left), I was just ashamed to be part of the same generation as this poor brainwashed person.

The data supporting the notion that my generation is pretty bad comes from Digby’s latest essay, describing how the GOP is getting older and super white. I resemble that remark, other than the GOP part. The GOP’s demographics are now 75% over the age of 50 (40% over 65!), 89% white and 62% with no college degree. Yikes.

The good news is that this is a problem that looks like will die off, literally. It’ll take 20-25 years, but all those white uneducated boomers will die off. The bad news is that it’s my generation, and while I only share the age demographic with these GOPers, I’ll be gone too.

Maybe The Who had it right all the way back in 1965.

People try to put us d-down (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Just because we get around (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old (talkin’ ’bout my generation)

This is my generation
This is my generation, baby

Why don’t you all f-fade away (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Don’t try to dig what we all s-s-s-say (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
I’m not trying to ’cause a big s-s-sensation (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
I’m just talkin’ ’bout my g-g-g-generation (talkin’ ’bout my generation)

My generation
This is my generation, baby

I keep getting these email ads from Imaginarium, the little so-nerdy-it’s-cool creative conference in Louisville each summer. Up until recently I read them with interest, looking at the session list and planning my 2-3 days there. But Imaginarium is eight days from now, so I won’t be able to go. Thanks, bacteria. Last year Imaginarium rekindled my desire to finish a novel or two, but it’s not to be so this year. Maybe I’ll just spend some time with Masterclass during that same weekend.

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I’ve gotten the daily Wordle in two guesses a few times lately, so I’m pretty sure the bacteria didn’t reach my brain. Or if it did, the little bastards did something good.

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A shoutout to the Kaiser Permanente health system. I love the Kaiser system (other than the ER); it just makes so much sense. They are both the insurer and care provider, and they 100% understand that keeping you healthy is the best thing for you and for their profits. Win-win. And it shows. When you get into their acute care process, you get soooo much attention. They’re as desperate to get you out of health crisis as you are – not by rationing care, but by piling it on when you need it. I think KP is the perfect blueprint for a nationalized health system. They currently cover 12.7 million people in the US, only about 3.8% of our population. But they are a force in CA, with over 9 million people in their system. I’m happy to be one of them.

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There’s a lot of shit happening with major social media platforms lately. Noteworthy, but I’m having a hard time caring. Musk continues to destroy his $44B Twitter investment, so it looks like that platform is going down. Zuck/Meta just released Threads, with a lot of Twitter functionality and built on the nontrivial Instagram base of users. That may be where Musk’s traumatized Twitter users and advertisers eventually land. And now a Trump judge has ruled that Congress can’t communicate with social media companies (?!), and therefore can’t engage in coordinated regulation of them. It’s all a mess, but as someone who has no social media footprint other than LinkedIn and this blog…I don’t care. Neither my professional life nor my personal life depend on my saying or re-stating clever things to vast online audiences. I’m not an “influencer” (we should all be thankful for that). So this kerfuffle, while entertaining, doesn’t hit my give-a-fuck threshold.

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I talked to both of my remaining close friends from high school yesterday. We agreed that it shouldn’t take a serious illness to trigger a phone call or a get-together. (And yes, I have lots of old high school friends still alive, but only a couple I’ve stayed in touch with for 50 years.)

July 5th. Back to work for most of the western world. Just another Wednesday for us semi-retired folks in the last quarter of life. Good Independence Day yesterday, though I missed seeing fireworks. I’ve always loved fireworks, the bigger and deeper the boom the better. I suppose that explains my speakers.

Another list I wish KY wasn’t on.

Look, suppose I won an afterlife lottery and the prize was getting to come back for another lifetime – with a catch. My adult life would be dedicated to eating more hot dogs faster than anyone on Earth. My immediate response would be “Let’s have a look at second prize, shall we?” Joey Chestnut is one weird dude having a weird life.

Today’s gonna be a quiet day – reading, writing, and medicating. I cooked like crazy yesterday and it wore me out. Smoked beef ribs, chipotle grilled corn salad, grilled romaine with shiitakes, bacon and onion topping, and smoked peach cobbler. Made some mistakes, but the meal was pretty good in spite of them. Today it’s right back to barely eating.