This American Experiment

Posted on August 7, 2024 by sarette

I ran across this today, randomly, searching for something else. I like it. It resonates with me, given the state of not just America but also all of western civilization.

Why Franklin, Washington and Lincoln considered American democracy an ‘experiment’

Specifically, I found this telling:

Their work, the founders believed, was also an experiment because, as everyone who had read their Aristotle and Cicero and studied ancient history knew, republics – in which political power rests with the people and their representatives – and democracies were historically rare and acutely susceptible to subversion. That subversion came both from within – from decadence, the sapping of public virtue and demagoguery – as well as from monarchies and other enemies abroad.

I would say that both decadence and a lack of public virtue plague us in these modern times. It isn’t clear to me whether we’ll shake free of that or if the corruption and rot will overtake us. 

There are plenty who would cheer if it overtook us.

But in their arrogance and greed, I wonder if they understand just how much they wouldn’t like what comes after this experiment?

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Swimming II

Posted on August 4, 2024 by sarette

I promise, I’m not going to blog every time I get some exercise. But I’m caught up in this Five Mile Swim Challenge in August thing. And you’re supposed to talk about it on Instagram or Facebook. But I’m not on Instagram or Facebook. So I’ll just record my swims here.

Went another thousand yards today. Well, a thousand-ish. I lost count at one point so I did what I think was an extra hundred just to be sure. But I’m counting the swim as a thousand yards.

And, yep, it did indeed suck. My ego is taking a beating at how out of shape I am. Hence, the reason why I was put up to the challenge in the first place.

I did manage to string together 150 yards non-stop to start, up 50 yards since last time. After that it was all 50’s and pain. Mostly crawl with a little breaststroke and maybe 100 kick. But I battled through. 

I was wallowing.

My shoulders and back felt tired. Like, lifting weights tired. I can’t remember a time in my life that just swimming made me feel that way. I also had a new swimming suit since all my other suits shrunk (ahem). I think they call the style Jammers. But I don’t look good in it. I have this giant belly that sort of sticks over it. It’s, uh, disturbing.

Not a pretty sight.

Which is why I was delighted when I got to the pool at 10 am this morning and there was absolutely no one there. Yay! No witnesses. But, no. No sooner did I get into the water and about twenty people showed up. Mostly families with kids. One lap swimmer. A small swimming lessons class. All staring at me as I huffed and puffed and wallowed my way through 1000 yards and didn’t have a heart attack although I don’t know how or why I avoided that fate.

By the end of this, I was freaking beat. Used to be, a 1000 yard swim in a quarter of the time was a warm up. Not no more.

You should have seen me try to get out of the pool. I didn’t use the ladder or the stairs. I just pushed myself out of the pool. Except it wasn’t so much a push as a flop. Imagine an exhausted overweight seal flopping onto a dock with an embarrassed bark and that was me.

This is terrible. Can’t wait to finish the next seven swims so I can get back to sleeping in and eating chocolates all day long. So much more civilized than this.

Ugh

Pool2

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Movies: Twisters

Posted on August 4, 2024 by sarette

Went to see Twisters with Daughter #2 yesterday. It’s not something that I would ordinarily bother to see in the theaters but Daughter wanted to see it so I played along.

I was entertained. The movie centers around storm chasers, which are a breed of foolishness that inexplicably run towards tornados instead of away from them. This one involves a woman (Kate) who is the bestest storm chase ever with the most awesome skills ever, but she screws up and tragedy strikes so she stops chasing storms. Then she gets convinced to chase storms again by someone who, it turns out, is a bit morally ambiguous.

Since this is Hollywood there has to be a romantic hook to the plot. The formula demands it. Enter Tyler, a storm chasing YouTuber showboat with a million subscribers and a cowboy hat. He also has a pickup truck that looks awesome but, honestly, I think that thing would sink into farm fields up to its frame if you tried that shit for real. Or you’d just blow out the suspension considering all the extra weight on the truck. Anyway, in the end, the day is saved and the romance blossoms. Roll credits.

As I said, I enjoyed the movie, although it took a small effort of will to suspend my disbelief. I know that actual storm chasers exist. I know that one even got himself killed. Mostly, the entire topic just makes me shake my head. I grew up in the midwest hiking & canoeing & biking & dodging big storms, including tornados. As a teenager, I also had a bad run-in with 90mph straight line winds. So believe me when I tell you, one does not run towards big winds. One runs away from them. (Actually, perpendicular to the tornado’s line of travel if you can manage it.). Barring that, find a ditch and kiss your ass goodbye.

What you don’t do is drive straight into a tornado, even a little one, and shoot off fireworks. If you think that’s a good idea, well, you get what you get.

So, yep, I had to work to suspend my disbelief. But the soundtrack was good, the special effects were fun (if wildly unrealistic), and there was a few laughs to be had. Not sure I recommend paying to see Twisters in the theater but if it pops up on Amazon or Hulu or something, I think you should give it a go. So long as you don’t mind watching people get sucked into the sky to their doom.

By the way, did I mention I got the senior discount at the theater? First time ever. Not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I saved five bucks. On the other, it’s one more sign that I’m old. sigh Time marches on.

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Swimming

Posted on August 2, 2024 by sarette

Yeah, so, Chiropractor Brian yelled at me. Something about me not getting enough exercise (er, I mean, any exercise) and that’s why my back is all jacked up.

Then he pointed out that the American Cancer Society has a challenge going on in the month of August. Swim 5 Miles on either Facebook or Instagram. And then he said I’m doing it. What a kidder.

I’ll admit it. I laughed.

Then I noticed that he was dead serious. So then I pointed out that I’m not on Facebook or Instagram, so that lets me off the hook.

Would you believe he didn’t buy it? Turns out, dropping out off of social media DOES NOT give you an excuse to be a couch potato.

sigh

So here’s the thing: I was a competitive swimmer in grade school through high school, and then I kept swimming for most of my life after that. But somewhere around 2017 I came down with serious allergies that caused endless post-nasal drip, which made me choke when I was swimming, so I gave it up. Turns out, the allergies were due to cats. Turns out, the cats died in 2020. (No, I didn’t kill them. You can’t prove anything.) But somehow I never got back in the water again. (Although, to be clear, it did take about a year before the last of the cat hair was out of the house and therefore out of my body).

Googles

Anyhoo. I haven’t been swimming since about 2017. So that means I’m not going to start swimming. Nope. Not me. No how. Then I went and bought these.

Yeah, okay, I’m going to give it a go. Had my first swim today. 1,000 yards. It just about killed me. Seriously, I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I had to stop just about every 50 yards. I felt like a dead whale rolling around in the water. It suuuuuucked. But, just for the record, I did in fact go 1,000 yards.

The really sad thing is that 5 miles is 8,800 yards. Back in the day, I used to swim 10,000 yards every single day. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. 1,000 yards should not be a big deal. But instead, I almost drowned. Also, my swimming suits don’t fit any more. I didn’t get fatter. They just shrunk. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

So, anyway, I had my first swim in seven years today. One down, eight to go, and I can get back on the couch. Go me!

Pool

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The King of Elfland’s Daughter

Posted on August 1, 2024 by sarette

I have banished most politics from my content consumption and that has left me with time for other things, such as reading. It’s been a while since I did much reading — most books are entirely too predictable for my tastes, usually because they’re written to please marketing departments instead of readers. But I have decided to give it all a go once again in the hopes of at least keeping me off of the internet and all the angry algorithms to be found there.

But first up isn’t something new. It’s something old.

The King of Elfland’s Daughter was written in 1924 by someone I’ve never heard of before — Lord Dunsany who, according to Wikipedia, was an English-born Irishman. (Bit of whiplash, to be honest.) Somehow my English degree from way back in the 1980’s managed to skip this guy. I’m not surprised. It skipped a great many things.

But Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett (no commoner, there) was prolific and important (at least from a literary perspective) in his day. And among his 90 published books was The King of Elfland’s Daughter.

I found this book because I was curious to see how far back in time the concept of a half elf went. Looks like the idea of it goes back to Norse mythology, but most people who first encounter the half elf these days do it (I think) via Tolkien or, probably, Dungeons and Dragons.

But a predecessor to Tolkien’s work was Lord Dunsany and The King of Elfland’s Daughter. This is a short (by modern standards) novel — 232 pages on Kindle — and it employs a writing style that is archaic by current sensibilities but somehow enjoyable nevertheless. I found myself slowing down reading this, savoring the language, enjoying the trip. Still, if you didn’t spend four years of your life somewhere along the way reading classic English literature, you might find this a bit of a slog.

The story centers around the Kingdom of Erl and “these fields we know.” They’ve got themselves a Lord and a Parliament and between the two they decided that they needed some magic in their lands. For fame and fortune, you see. So the Lord sent his son, Alveric, off to the elflands to get him a wife and thus some of that magic.

Alveric does exactly that (I was surprised at how excited the Elf King’s daughter was to run off with him) and, well, it all goes sideways from there. I suppose the moral of the story is, “Be careful what you wish for,” although Lord Dunsany doesn’t quite rub our noses in it that explicitly. Not quite.

All in all, this was an entertaining foray into a book that seems to have been extremely influential in fantasy literature, even if most people these days know nothing about it. As I was reading it, I kept having flashbacks to Critical Role’s descriptions of the Feywild which, I suppose, is based on the Forgotten Realms source material. Yep, this is where all that started, although now I’m a bit interested to see how Norse mythology handled the subject. Maybe sometime down the road when I have more time I’ll poke my nose into that stuff.

C’ya!

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Not an Awesome Weekend

Posted on July 29, 2024 by sarette

I pretty much spent this weekend flat on my back. By Friday I had thought I was on the mend, but then I was in the garage on Saturday and I lifted a quarter sheet of plywood just so and … back to the couch and the ice for me.

Getting old is not for the weak or the wimpy.

And, yep, I know I need to start working my core and my lower back. Planks are going to be my new best friend for a while. But first I have to be able to get out of a chair without wincing.

That said I did get a tiny thing done on the Jeep. Very tiny. Really, it doesn’t get any tinier than this.

That steel tray that I put in my Jeep last weekend gets loud whenever anything is on it. Think sheet metal with a hammer rattling around and you’ll have the right idea. So I got down to the hardware store and I bought a 1/8 inch thick, 2 ft by 4 ft (3mm, 60 cm x 121 cm) sheet of rubber matting. A little cutting, a little drilling, some nuts and bolts and fender washers later, and that rubber isn’t going anywhere. And the metal shelf doesn’t sound like a metal drum anymore either.

Let’s face it: Jeeps are noisy. Something’s always rattling or squeaking. And if I get on washboarded roads, the whole beast feels like its going to shake apart. But that’s no reason to deliberately make things worse.

Hey, it’s a Jeep thing.

That is all.

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Bad Back

Posted on July 26, 2024 by sarette

Things are not going well this week. I have no idea what I did but I woke up a few days ago with lower back pain so bad that I could barely get out of bed. Everything has been a chore this week. Everything.

Sitting at my desk to work? That hurts.

Getting in the Jeep to go to work? Agony.

Getting food out of the refrigerator? Well. I didn’t fall over.

Getting dressed? The struggle is real.

Not fun. And, of course, people at work are all telling me about their bad backs too. Even the young ‘uns. It appears that we all spend way too much time sitting at our keyboards and not enough time actually, you know, moving about. So we all have lower back pain.

Things are a bit better today, but just sitting here typing this is a chore.

In any case, once I’m mobile again it’s time to get serious about at least some minimal exercise. If nothing else, some planks, crunches, pushups, etc, every day are in order. Because this sucks.

That is all.

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Political Videos, I Banish Thee

Posted on July 21, 2024 by sarette

I really did have to do something this.

I started today by watching my usual YouTube channels that come out on Sunday morning (none political, they’re all about building stuff).Tray

Then I spent a little time with the tray in my Jeep because it was rattling. Found some things to tighten so hopefully that annoyance is solved. Plus I cleaned the tray up a bit.

And then lunch.

And then I glanced at YouTube before moving on to other stuff and … it’s wall to wall about Joe Biden dropping out of the presidential race.

Look, I’m okay with a single video about Biden dropping out. I’m even okay with three or four videos about it. Really, its important, and its something that I need to know. But not Every. Single. Recommend. Video. Holy Crap!

And, no, I didn’t click on any of them. That would’ve just encouraged the algorithm.

As it turns out, one of the channels I watch (Jenna Phipps, who is rebuilding a mid-century house in Vancouver) had their video today sponsored by the Opra web browser. Hey, I remember that. I used to use it exclusively back around 2001 or so.

Thus was my mad plan hatched. 

I will no longer click on political videos in YouTube because I really don’t want to encourage the algorithm. But what I will do is if a political story is breaking, I’ll switch to my laptop, launch Opra, open a private window, and go looking for that story. Google really hates that, by the way. They made me prove I’m not a robot before they would serve up my searches. And then the search results were, well, stripped down shall we say.

And now my YouTube habit can hopefully go back to people building stuff, and people driving around in the wilderness, and people sinking ships for artificial reefs, and maybe the odd history lesson, and even some Critical Role (although it usually takes me most of the week to get through one of their episodes).

Now if I can just figure out how to cut down on all the spam in my email. Joe Biden has been hammering me for money five or six or ten times a day recently. Seriously, I need to implement a white list.

Whelp, sounds like a project.

C’ya!

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The Internet is a Bummer Right Now

Posted on July 21, 2024 by sarette

I have to learn how to shape my recommended videos list on YouTube better. Right now it’s all about Trump getting shot or whether Biden is going to drop out. No doubt these things are important. I just wish my feed wasn’t all that and nothing but that. Probably I clicked on one too many political videos, and I don’t show YouTube enough about what I actually want to see on YouTube. So right now I’m watching a video from venture4wd. Maybe if I watch enough of that kind of content, YouTube will lower the political heat in my feed.

But I’m not on YouTube all day (thank god). Today I put the shelf back into my Jeep, which was a giant PITA but now I’m essentially ready to start camping again. So … Yay? It’s a tiny step but an important one on my long march back to the wild. It’s last thing I wanted to do. Well, I should probably do a test setup of my tent and make sure it hasn’t mildewed or something over the last couple of years. But I probably won’t head out until September when all the children are back in school, so I have time.

Politics right now are horrific and tragic and, really, everyone needs to deescalate. But I don’t get the sense the deescalation is the goal for most of America.

I swear I’m going to spend the 2024 election week hiding in Death Valley.  

That is all.

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Backup Lights

Posted on July 14, 2024 by sarette

Tiny bit of Jeep work today. I took about a half an hour and reconnected my backup (or reversing) lights.

About a month ago I disconnected all the extra electrical “stuff” that I have added to my Jeep, Zen, over the years. I did that because Auto Stop/Start stopped working on Zen. Normally I’d be happy with that because I really hate Auto Stop/Start, but in this case it meant I wouldn’t be able to get Zen smogged. So I took it down to the dealership to see whatever the problem could be.

The Jeep dealership is, um, a problem. I don’t think they know what they’re doing. But Zen is still under warranty, which meant they had to fix it for free, only they couldn’t fix it, and it turned into a whole big thing. Because the entire problem seemed to be centering on the batteries (there are two batteries in Jeep JL — a horrible design), I became suspicious, and continue to be suspicious, that I have some kind of a parasitic draw in the Jeep.

Which is why I disconnected all the custom electronics in the Jeep just in case they were the cause of whatever it was that was destroying the batteries.

To date, all those electronics remain disconnected. But I really don’t like not having the backup lights working. The stock backup lights on the JL are wimpy (understatement). Other drivers ignore them, or don’t see them, or are just jerks when I’m trying to back out of a spot. Even worse, they don’t actually light anything up when I’m backing up at night. But with a couple of Baja Designs S2 Sports on my bumper (1581 lumens, each, of you-can’t-effing-ignore-me on my bumper), all my reversing troubles disappear.

And, yes, I very carefully aimed those slightly down so that they aren’t blinding anyone.Rear taillight

To reconnect them, all I had to do was pull the right taillight assembly and crimp wires back to together again. Yeah, I crimped them. No, I didn’t solder them. No, a heat gun was not involved. What I’ve done is just temporary. It is my intention to add in a control wire to my switch panel so I can turn those lights on even if I’m not in the drivers seat and the Jeep is not in reverse. I want this to help light up a camp site if, for example, I’m forced to pitch my tent at night. Which means I’ll be getting back in behind that taillight assembly again at some point in the future.

But, yeah, it took longer to write this post than it did to actually do the Jeep project. I like that.

Anyway, that concludes my Jeep projects for the month. I think. Don’t hold me to that. There’s other things I need to get done before I can go camping again this fall. Maybe I’ll do some of them before the end of July. We’ll see.

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