Random stuff

Quicksilver attended the year's first play-date about 8 days ago. Yesterday she had a runny nose, a cough but no fever. She took a three hour nap and would have slept longer if her mother hadn't shown up.

I am firmly convinced that one of the reasons that senior citizens were monkey-hammered by Covid-19 is because most of us avoid contact with snot-nosed kids. We allow our subscription to the-virus-of-the-month club to lapse and our portfolio of antibody production tools becomes obsolete.

Viruses are like music. The coat of different strains of virus are all composed of the same musical notes but they are arranged in different patterns. New virus evolve with modest rearrangements of the coating; the part of the virus that is exposed to our bloodstream/immune system. If your body has been exposed to the new virus's most recent ancestors then your immune system will recognize most of the patterns and start churning out antibodies which will be successful in slowing down the new challenge.

My mental image is that of three defenders getting a piece of Billy Sims (a runner) and slowing him down enough so that the rest of the team can show up and help tackle him.

Wood-splitter

I bought a used wood-splitter yesterday.

The seller's father recently died and he had inherited his father's larger, newer wood-splitter. He didn't need two of them.

He started it up and split a gnarly piece of Black Locust log I brought for demonstration purposes. 

He sold it for a fair price. Fair for him. Fair for me. If taken care of, the unit still had 2/3 of its life ahead of it. It could last much longer if I (or whoever I bequeath it to upon my death) has access to a replacement motor.

He wanted 2/3 the price of new. Knowing that it would not wear out within my life-time, it presented no less value to me than a new one would.

It is now parked in the barn at the Upper/Hill Orchard site. 

Step counters

I have been wearing it more days than not. I am skeptical about its accuracy. I haven't done a test, but I think it logs steps when I am driving somewhere in the truck. It sees acceleration and the truck has a bumpy ride.

I didn't do much yesterday. I drove an hour, total, in the truck to pick up the wood-splitter. I walked 40 minutes with Mrs ERJ. I pushed a lawn mower for 20 minutes and the step counter credited me with 14k steps.

I will have to test the "truck hypothesis" one of these days. That is, write down the number of steps when I get into the truck and then after the drive to the Orchards.

Michigan is all centerfire for firearm deer-season

Michigan historically was divided into three zones. The most southern zone was "shotgun only" for deer season. Then exceptions were added. Black-powder and certain types of handguns were allowed.

Michigan was the last state in the nation to allow elevated deer blinds for firearm deer season.

Shotgun technology evolved. Rifled barrels, sabot ammo, "Rifle" platforms with stiff stocks and good triggers were chambered in shotgun cartridges.

Michigan then allowed certain rifle cartridges in the southern zone. They had to be within a certain size...not too long and not too short. They had to be more than 0.354" in diameter. They had to have straight walls. Those constraints limited the amount of smokeless powder they held and limited their power.

While all of this was happening, fewer young people became hunters. The average age is no about 64 years of age for deer hunters. The deer kept multiplying and now infectious diseases are an emerging concern.

2026 marks the first year that hunters in southern Michigan can use virtually any rifle cartridge to hunt deer.

Decisions, decisions, decisions.... I am sure this topic will be revisited on this blog.

Random meme

The meme may have mutated in the time between when I stole it from Midwest Chick and when I posted it here. IDK.

I watch the WOKE movement do exactly what the commentor suggests. They keep changing the location of the "Most Oppressed" sign. 

Friday grab-bag

It is rumored, at least among some groups, that young members of the Church of the Latter Day Saints can be identified by their luminous complexion.

The rumor (supposedly) got started when a group of young people were watching a game show (Jeopardy?) on television and one of the group blurted out "She is a Saint!" about one of the contestants. When asked how she knew, she claimed that the contestant had "The LDS glow".

It turned out that the impulsive TV watcher was correct. Then it became a game for the group, "Find the Saints".

If the missionaries who stopped their Toyota to talk with me are good examples, I can affirm that at least some LDS members do, indeed, have luminous skin.

Clean living, simple diets, exercise in the great outdoors: It is amazing what that can do for a person.

More backstory

During our conversation, the driver claimed to have mistaken me for somebody else who runs on the back-roads of Eaton County. I suppose it that was possible. Perhaps she saw my lumpy gait and assumed I was pulling up lame and needed help.

Most missionaries are not going to be in their late 60s, so this friend of hers who exercises is obviously not one of them.

I guess fat, old, shaggy guys all look the same to young people.

Side story

The passenger revealed that there were not a lot of single, young, local LDS men asking the young, women missionaries out to ice cream socials. Alas, MGTOW is seeping into every crevice of society.

I tried to cheer her up. I told her that "when she was ready" she would get lots of attention, that it would be like a light-switch flipping. In retrospect, I wish I had told her that she needs to get clear on "her mission" in life and dump the parts that dilute that mission. Once she had that squared away, she would be transmitting down a single channel and the-right-kind-of-guys will be pulled in like moths to a candle. 

ERJ Diet Program (10 pound weight loss guaranteed)

 The package comes with a complementary, weighed, sleep-shirt.

Running notes

Running notes:

3.2 miles in 42 minutes.

I was on the second-to-last stretch when an SUV that was traveling in the opposite direction that I was running slowed down and stopped. The window opened. There were two wholesome, modestly clad, young women in the SUV. They were wearing name tags.

I paused my stop-watch. 

I asked "Are you with the Latter Day Saints?"

"Yes we are" the driver replied.

"You've heard of us?" the passenger exclaimed, surprised. 

We chatted for more than ten minutes. They are a credit to their church. 

I changed the oil in the truck today

That was a work-ticket that kept sinking to the bottom of the stack for a week.

Inspection

The inspector for the construction work is scheduled to show up some time today.

We will see if it happens. I am holding off on the major repair to the landscaping until after that happens.

Quicksilver is growing by leaps and bounds

There were some new three year-olds at play-date today. They are tiny!

QS was that small and timid not that long ago.

Catbirds and small fruits

I was in the bathroom and looking out the window when I saw one of the grape vines shaking. Having nothing better to do, I watched until I could see what was doing it.

It was the catbird that had been nesting by the raspberries beneath the persimmon tree.

Suddenly, it clicked in my head. SHE was why the grapes and raspberries and even many of the mulberries were disappearing as soon as they started to show color. 

Mushrooms

Southern Belle gifted us with a big box of mushrooms. I don't know how they fell into her hands, but they were commercially grown mushrooms.

So, part of my day was spent sauteing them in butter and putting them into small, snap-top plastic containers for freezing.

I will be making applesauce in the near future. 

Conformity

Sigma personalities

The "Sigma" personality is the honey-badger personality. "He doesn't care". 

Seth Capehart is a doctor who practices Emergency Medicine in Sarasota, Florida. He also has a Youtube channel.

Sarasota is an attractive community for retirees. Given his location and his profession, he gets to interact with more people who are over the age of 100 than most of us.

He said they all have one thing in common.

"They dance every chance they get." *

Beyond the physical benefits of dancing, Capehart points to one of the underlying enablers: They are immune to the opinions of the wallflowers. They do what they want to do, what they feel is "right".

The wallflowers do a lot of "crab-bucketing" and try to drag down the outliers. They actively discourage people with curious minds from exploring new information and new skills. They mock and ridicule people who work-out. 

The wallflowers are frightened by Sigmas and call strong-minded people "lone-wolves". They are outraged by the dissonance that Sigmas create in their conformity-based world.

One of the divides between women and men is that most women have a greater need for belonging and conformity than men do. It is a generality and there are exceptions. The discussion of whether it is due to socializing (nurture) or biological (nature) is beyond the scope of this essay.

The oppressive hand of conformity clamps down in about 7th grade. At one time, it loosened during the early 20s when kids left their parental homes and experimented with a vast diversity of sub-cultures like The Society for Creative Anachronisms. A few fell into cults but that seemed to be a small price to pay to let the majority of kids flower into full adulthood.

For our purposes I will define a cult as a rigid system of beliefs where the dogma is absolute and questions are not tolerated. The control structure is authoritarian and top-down. People outside of the cult are less than human.

Unfortunately, the college experience metastasized into a cult. Divergence is not tolerated. A very large number of kids are exiting college owing a metric shit-ton of money and with petrified brains.

One of the cult's articles of faith is that "feelings" are a superior form of "thinking", that is, "Emotions" are a truer and more pure than logic.

If that is so, then from a purely economic standpoint it would be far cheaper to put three-year-olds into corporate and government positions than to spend another half-million dollars** and 20 years teaching them how to throw peer-reviewed tantrums. Even the STEM fields (Sub-stack, Twitter, Ello, Meta) are not immune.

ERJ to start marketing a diet program

Guaranteed to produce a 10 pound weight loss in the first week. Much cheaper than GLP drugs. Deals with healthcare insurance companies are pending.

Sign up now and get a discount and the tee-shirt.

 

---Image of tee-shirt not postin

*Mrs ERJ was delighted to learn that dancing is mandatory. She likes to dance. I do not. We met dancing. I figured dances were a target-rich-environment.

**In Michigan, we now spend an average of $17k per year, per student between K and Grade 12. That is $221k for 13 years. Then add another +$200k for the 4-year college experience + graduate degree and and you are well over a half million per moron.

My Two-Cents on the Clancy hung-jury

Would the jury have convicted Lindsay Clancy of First Degree Murder if she had methodically killed anybody else's three children? I suspect that there is a 99.9% chance that the jury would have turned in a unanimous "Guilty" verdict for Murder in the First Degree after 10 minutes of deliberation if she had killed her next-door neighbor's kids (for instance) and no other circumstance had been changed.

Why is viciously killing her own children not murder? Weren't they unlawfully deprived of their futures? Why is she held to a much lower standard for caring for her own children than for the children of random strangers?

The law is not based on Empathy. It is based on facts that can be generated. 

DARVO as a style of "communication"

One of my commentors used the acronym "DARVO". Being a curious person, I looked into it.

DARVO stands for a style of argument:

Deny: Deny everything even when it is a demonstrable, provable fact. "I never said that." "I did not do that."

Attack:  Attack the other party. It does not matter WHAT you attack him with. If it is not related to the argument then it will take him off-balance. "You are such a slob, leaving your things everywhere". "You are always imagining things". "You are stupid and can't keep facts straight".

Reverse Victim and Oppressor*: Suppose you were shoplifting and were just detained by "Loss Control". After Denial and Attack, switch to "You followed me because I am an Old, White, cis-Hetero Man and you are oppressing me!!!" That deflects the attention back onto the other person and makes something that was objective, clear and cut-and-dried into a situation that is framed in relative terms which makes it ambiguous and emotional.

Why do people use this tactic?

The tactic works great for short-term gains but comes with very high mid-term and long-term costs. 

If you are a psychopath or a sociopath or a narcissist, then the cost those tactics will have in your relationship are (essentially) invisible to you. You just don't care. 

If you are ADHD and/or extremely stupid, then you are time-blind and "long term" does not exist, so the tactic appears to be essentially free.

If you grew up in a household, perhaps a single-parent one, and your mother used this tactic then this method is your "normal". You might not be a narcissist or have ADHD or be time-blind or be as dumb as a rock, buy you have seen this tactic work over-and-over-and-over again and because of your family-culture, you think it is an appropriate way to get what you want.

In theory, the last category can be trained to not use DARVO as their go-to preference for interpersonal relationships. That is the good news.

The bad news is that more kids are being raised in family environments where DARVO is the default mode of arguing, i.e. communicating. 

DARVO is particularly attractive to people who feel relatively powerless and have little to lose by going scorched-earth. It is also attractive to people whose inner-lives are littered with mental chaos. DARVO levels the playing field for them. An example would be a single-parent who has serial relationships and is struggling economically and is facing food and housing insecurity. 

*Original text erroneously used the word "Oppressed" rather than "Oppressor". A kind reader pointed out my error in comments.

Fine Art Tuesday

 

Nicolai Alexandrovich Sergeev was born in Russia in 1855 and died in 1919.

 Hat-tip to: