HOT!!! Boomer Babes of Minneapolis! Candid photos of protesters

 

Level with me. What did you expect when you popped this post open?

Videos can be a productive way to pass time

Since I have been "house bound" for much of the past week, I have a lot of empathy for the people south of me will be enduring, both during and after the huge ice-and-snow storm that will be hammering them Friday, Saturday and during the clean-up.

One of the distractions that help me retain my sanity was.....Youtube!

Youtube is a tool. Youtube is like a chainsaw. You can be the master of the tool or the tool can be your master. Trust me, it is better to be the master.

Proactively "seeding" your algorithm (or feed) is a smart move.

Here are a few channels that held my interest.

Serenity

Life is good when listening to piano concertos while installing primers into brass cups. I confess to a fondness for compositions by Sergei Rachmaninoff and Camille Saint-Saens. The Youtube video linked above is almost five hours long so you will not have to keep interacting with your device while listening.

Social commentary

Andre Williams

This guy's channel helps certain mysteries snap into focus.

For various personal reasons, I have a vested interest in understanding how I can help individuals of the African-American community be as successful as possible.

His language is edgy.

Relationships

Jimmy on Relationships. Look through his videos and click on something that you are interested in. Or not. I don't get a commission.

Conflictish. Look through his videos.... Pretty chill dude. Easy to listen to.

Understanding women

Yeah, right. Impossible, but I never saw that stop any man from trying.

EmilyWKing, Look through her videos...

 

Jedediah Bila: Look through...

The audio is garbled at the start of this video. "Cinderella took off her shoe and found love. You (modern women) took off all of your clothes and couldn't find love."

For the Francophones

 

Passe-moi les jumelles

Or, if you cannot understand French, you can turn on auto-subtitles after clicking on the gear icon in the lower, right corner of the screen. Then you can click on the gear icon again and activate auto-translate to English or any other language that they offer.

Not a French channel but Swiss.

Apples

Cummins Nursery

None of their videos go over two minutes, which is not an overwhelming amount of information.

The narrator taste-tests many unusual varieties. I watched their video on Ashmead's Kernal, Black Oxford, Boskoop and Zabergau Reinette.

You have to go to the videos page to see all of their content.

Do any of my readers want to recommend any video channels to those poor folks who might find themselves snowed/iced in?
 

Last day of flu reports

I found a weak spot in our preps. We ran out of dog-treats.

It is possible that our enforced "in house" conditions may have increased the number of treats Zeus got. He manfully consumed the extra treats without complaint.

Worst Storm Evah!

Inches of freezing rain predicted for the coming storm

It looks particularly bad for the band where freezing rain will exceed 1/2".

Power outages kill. Downed power lines kill. Carbon monoxide from improperly used generators kill. Hypothermia from furnaces that won't run without electricity kills. 1/2" of an inch of freezing rain is considered catastrophic and power outages are a near certainty.

Southern Arkansas is predicted to get over an inch of ice. So is a band from Atlanta, Georgia to Virginia's Dismal Swamp which includes the entire state of North Carolina.

Glare ice is almost impossible to walk on without crampons or without sprinkling some kind of grit on the surface. As a last resort you can vacuum your carpets and sprinkle the dust the vacuum collects on those surfaces you must walk on.

Snow can collapse roofs and is messy. If you have to drive in it then you can get stuck or have an accident. But it is the ice that is the big killer.

Be safe out there, y'all.

 

Paid protesters refuse to report for early shift

 

 

45 second run time.

I guess all of the quality people already have jobs. 

King-makers

This essay will be a quick look at what I see as the leverage-mechanism that allows a small number of people to have outsized influence on "who will be our kings".

One proposal (not mine) to address the issue is presented at the end of the essay.

*** 

It costs about $3.0 million to run a viable campaign for US House of Representatives. That is an average of $3.0 million for both sides. In "safe" districts, it will be substantially less. The losing side will establish a presence but aren't going to invest huge amounts on a sinking ship. The dominant party in the "safe" district doesn't need to spend $3.0 million to win.

Contested districts might see twice the average invested.

That money does not come from within the district. It come, mostly, through fund-raising mechanisms that are party specific. That means that if you, as a candidate, want money from WinRed or ActBlue you MUST dance to the tune they call. You must vote straight party lines and not what you perceive is the desire of your constituents nor what your conscience tells you to vote for.

It is just one more example of J.P. Morgan's Golden Rule, "The man with the gold makes the rules."

That leads to the capture of the party platforms/planks by the fanatical, one-issue voters: "I will eat nothing but BarS hotdogs, canned beans and instant rice for the next six months so I can send another $1000 to fund ProLife (or save the whales or advance LGBT rights or...) candidates.

The incredible price of the elections is primarily driven by the cost of media advertising. I suspect that many mainstream media outlets would go bankrupt without the huge influx of advertising dollars from political campaigns.

Viable solutions are tough to come by 

One proposal that was offered by people interested in campaign reform is to have the media outlets NOT CHARGE for political advertising. Let's say they have to sacrifice the minutes-per-day that are purchased by the industry that currently buys the largest share of advertising...say Pharma...and they have to give the same number of minutes/day to political candidates in October and early November.

That proposal died before it was born. The media corporations puked all over it. Financially, legacy media is furiously dog-paddling to keep their financial nose above the water due to competition from the internet. Pulling revenue from political advertising would be the equivalent of thumping the dog in the head with an oar.

Another issue involved the constitutionality of not funding minor parties. Would you force every station to host every whacka-doodle party equally?

If you only fund the advertising for some minor parties then you create some very strange dynamics. Suppose you ran a "primary" election for the minor parties at the same time you ran the Big-Two primary and the top one or two minor parties gets free advertising.

Furthermore, let's pretend that the top-two minor parties in Eaton County are the Green-Eggs-and-Ham party and the Whackum-and-Stackum party.

If you gave free advertising to the Green-Eggs-and-Ham party then the Republicans will win because the GE&H party drained the fringe voters who would have normally voted for the Democratic candidate. Similarly, if you funded the W&S party, the Democrats will win because the traditional Republican base was split. That is the opposite of what should have happened if we expect the representatives to be a "representative sample" of their constituency.

You might say "fund both of them", but what if the top two minor parties are Green-Eggs-and-Ham and Juan-for-the-Money parties and both robbed voters from the Democratic party. That would result in the "wrong" major party winning.

Cap spending?

Maybe the answer is to cap spending the way major sports leagues cap payroll. It would force the parties to become much more focused on their messaging and potentially give locals much more leverage since most volunteers for door-to-door work are local.

Flu Report: Day Four

"G' morning, Kubota. What's up?" I answered the phone call.

 "Is a temperature of 101.9 considered a fever?" Kubota asked me.

"Yes, Kubota. Yes it is" I replied. I was impressed that he had a thermometer.

At noon, I sallied forth with a stupid face mask* on and purchased blue-gatorade (I don't think anybody knows the actual flavor), two gallons of spring water, ramen noodle soup, minestrone soup, mucus-thinner and elderberry syrup.

Upon re-entering the minivan I goobered all over my hands with hand sanitizer and waited ten seconds before touching any of the interior. 

He was at the doctor's office when I dropped them off at his bachelor-pad.

Trimming trees

I installed a fresh battery into my electric pole saw and carried a 1/4 mile to the back of  the property. My goal was to trim a grafted chestnut tree back to the branch that was grafted.

It took me about two seconds to realize that somebody had installed the chain on the bar backwards.

I trudged back to the house. Used the Allen wrench and flipped it around.

Then I tried again. It cut much better when the sharp end of the teeth were hitting the wood.

I whittled the chestnut tree down to the grafted branch. Then I trimmed another chestnut tree. Then I limbed two oak trees up as high as I could reach.

God told me it was time to stop by putting some sawdust in my left eye. 

Quicksilver detail

I am recovering more quickly than Mrs ERJ.

The tentative plan is to have me go over to Southern Belle's house on Thursday to watch Quicksilver so Mrs ERJ can continue to recover.

Handsome Hombre still has the crud, so he will be watching Quicksliver tomorrow. Or at least that is the plan. 

NCAA Football National Championship

I like it that at the start of the season that the National Champion could be almost any Division I team. Who would have picked Indiana in mid-August?

While the years of "Will it be Georgia, Alabama or Clemson" were great for those programs, it did little to excite nation-wide interest through the entire season.

The fact that Indiana was able to transform from Big-10 boat-anchor to National Champion in two-years is because of the portal and transfer rules.

Let's be real. Sports-ball is entertainment. It is an escape from sometimes crappy lives. If Name-and-Likeness and portals increase the chances of Eastern South Dakota University  playing against Cal-State, Needles...then I think those are good ideas.

*Yes, I know that virus are very, very small. I believe that most virus are distributed in droplets of mucus and saliva. I KNOW the mask stops them. Masks, wearing or not-wearing is not a hill I will die on....unless I am working in a factory 50 feet away from other people and the temperature of the air is 104 F.

The case AGAINST term-limits

I assume that most of my readers lean toward the conservative end of the political spectrum so I will write this post with that with that in mind.

Take a minute and think of two or three nominally-conservative politicians who you feel have betrayed the cause in the last thirty years or so.  

***