Fine Art Tuesday

 

Sergey Vasilkovsky was born in Kharkiv Oblast, Ukraine in 1854 and he died in 1917. 

 

Fake rocks, work tickets, Primaries

Yesterday's work-tickets

Yesterday was another light day

I drove to the local big-box store and bought a grout bag, sand and Portland cement powder. 

Then I used scrap wood to make a fixture to hold tennis balls. It was 36" long (because that was the length of the scrap) and it can hold 12 balls. I cut 1" long slits into the tennis balls. The two sides of the fixture are 1-3/4" apart. By squeezing the balls and pressing them into fixture with the slit perpendicular to the sides of the fixture, the slit opened up like a coin-purse.

I mixed up the sand:cement 2:1 with enough water to make it a little soupier than gravy.  It is essentially concrete without coarse aggregate in it. Unlike mortar (which is Portland cement, slaked lime and sand)  it is not very caustic, should be a little bit stronger than mortar and should harden even if deprived of atmospheric CO2.

Then I filled those tennis balls using the grout-bag. The open "coin purse" slits closed up after prying them out of the fixture. Removing them from the fixture was the most difficult part of the production run.

I will have 24 artificial rocks to practice throwing after they harden. They are 2-3/4" in diameter and weight 7-1/2 ounces. That compares to a baseball at 2-7/8" diameter and 5 ounces of weight.

The rocks are bright yellow and should be easy to find for reuse. The picture in my head is to take ten of them to the field and pitch them downrange. Then collect them and throw them back toward the starting point. That will be 100 throws if I do that five times.

The other two items on the work ticket list were to walk with Mrs ERJ and to continue processing the wood from the Honey Locust branch. That added 40 minutes and 60 minutes respectively.

Today's work-tickets

I am up to eleven items on the list. That is what happens this time of year. Lots of work. Taking a break the last few days didn't help matters.

Two items of note: I am going to cull some tomato vines. The seeds I bought from a seller on Etsy germinated but are clearly a lot of mongrel seeds. I will be removing the vines that have zero or very light fruit-set. That will make more room for the vines that are pulling their weight.

The weather look-ahead implies that we (Eaton County, MI) are entering a week when we might get rain. This is a good time to broadcast turnip and radish seeds into squash patches and in other places.
 

Primary day

Michigan Primaries are today. There are two millage renewals on the ballot. One is for 9-1-1. The other is to fund "justice involved youth programs".

A trip to the cemetery

Mrs ERJ and I drove to her home-town yesterday and visited her parent's graves.

The site is covered with majestic, 200 year-old White Oaks

We scrubbed the algae off of the stone and scraped the moss and algae out of the lettering.

I left Mrs ERJ after a bit and wandered around.

Power mowers are rough on grave-stones. These were knocked off of their concrete bases

Not perfect, but it was the best I could do without stretching a line and using edging equipment to find concrete bases.

These graves are right next to the road and in the center-foreground of the overview picture.

The cemetery is hilly by Michigan standards. Family lore has it that my wife's father used to snow-ski through the cemetery after dark as a young man. He hid the skis in a hedge and then late in the evening he would take a shortcut through the cemetery on the way home from downtown. He could build up enough speed to coast into the backyard of his father's house.

Bonus image

A bird had flown into our living room window and left an imprint.

"Ghetto Culture" and A re-post from July 6, 2020

Cultures do not evolve in a vacuum. Their characteristics evolve as solutions to environmental challenges and to scarce resources.

"Ghetto Culture" did not evolve in a vacuum. The environment is one that has a shortage of "net primary producers" and is heavily invested in the predator economy.

The reason I bring this up is that the environment Xavier tells us about is one that is no longer just an inner-city thing. It is in the stands of the high schools your grandkids attend. It is in the grocery stores and parking lots. It is walking down the street in front of your house. It is delivering the Amazon packages.

So you can stick your nose in the air and pretend that "all of those people are trash". Or you can study what they are doing, why they are doing it and decide how you can do it even better. Because at some time in the near future, if you cannot deliver loud, convincing performative outrage at the drop of the hat then you will be volunteering to be a victim.

From a practical standpoint, if you have to escalate to the kinetic level, you want lots of noise to indicate that you attempted to escalate with words before you had to employ a kinetic solution. 

The following is the 2020 post, in its entirety:

 

***START***

A classic post (2006) from Xavier Thoughts

Xavier was a traveling nurse who provided hospice care to cancer patients in inner-cities. He carried potent narcotics and was exposed to criminals who wanted to steal what they knew he was carrying.

That forced him to be a keen observer of human nature and to learn to deal with the criminals.

Unfortunately, I cannot direct you to a link that shows just that post. Rather, it is embedded within a month of posts so you have to dig to get to it. Xavier, please forgive me if I violate "fair use".

Xavier Thoughts, March 2006, Recognizing Threats, Selection

The criminal, once he has observed a potential victim, will send out some test runs to determine if the person is indeed prey, or predator. These tests may be asking for a match, the time, or change. The initial tests all have one thing in common. They violate boundaries, and determine if the selected person will allow their space and generosity to be violated.

This is the single best time to opt-out of the victim-selection process. Sometimes a Big Noise and a Big Show are appropriate. Predators do not want attention. A very loud "Fnck OFF!" and a vigorous shove are called for. It sends the message "I will not go passively to the fate you choose for me. YOU will get hurt."

One great thing about being intelligent is that we can learn from idiots. We can even learn from Whoopie Goldberg. The over-the-top reactions that are inappropriate in civilized settings where people attend to nuance can be very appropriate on the city streets where subtlety and nuance are washed away but the bustle and noise.

The predator is mimicking a common panhandler to get in close, test the waters and position himself for attack. All of these persons are easily recognized by their inappropriate behavior and boundary violations. Like the fish who fails to recognize the moray eel on the reef, the person who fumbles for change with a predator has sealed their fate. The ruses are many and varied. I have seen crackheads target tourists and ask to get their pictures taken. I have seen balloon ladies that had accomplices working in the shadows. I have seen young women toss out lewd comments as their male accomplices tried to blend into the landscape. I have seen kids sitting on trash cans in housing projects while older gang members waited around the corner. I have even seen one teen lay on the side of the road in the projects waiting for a good Samaritan as his accomplices hid behind a dumpster. Like the anglerfish, these predators actively dangle lures to allow them to catch prey. To be seen as a potentially superior predator, one must simply recognize the threat, refuse to engage, and continue without alarm.

Does this process sound anything like Seattle's CHAZ experiment and Mayor Jenny Durkin's non-response? Durkin failed the victim selection tests.

If the predator is engaged, a request for change quickly becomes a demand for a dollar, then a twenty, then a blow to the head as soon as the victim refuses. This kind of escalation is common with young gangs who quickly befuddle their prey with unrelated questions and demands from all directions. As the victim struggles with the insistent demands and questions, the gang will begin positioning itself for attack. These criminals work like sharks, first brushing their victim, then bumping it, and finally going after the victim is a swirl of blood and gore as others also jump in.

Somebody is in the background running the theater. It is not the guy unlocking the gate into the gated community. It is not the young men at the front of the mob throwing rocks. The hand-in-the-puppet is in the middle of, or near the back of the mob. He is directing probes and watching responses.

It would be instructive to watch drone footage to see if the HITP can be identified the way Mazer Rackham identified the mother-ship in Ender's Game.

The most feared predator is the one who uses the silent selection process. This criminal watches the parade of people passing by, while trying to blend into the scenery. He wants to be neither seen or remembered. Once he recognizes and selects a victim, he knows he needs the right time and place to launch his attack. He may follow his selected victim to a more promising location. If he follows his victim, he knows that he must go unrecognized as a predator. He is the tiger in the jungle, relying on stealth to get close enough to quickly subdue his prey. Like the tiger, he leaves his lair to hunt. He may stalk his victim for long periods of time. He may lose interest in a selected victim that never knew he was there. He may follow the victim until the victim enters an area where an attack can be successful. If the time and place are already in his favor when the victim is selected, however, the victim will be like the fly who fails to recognize the chameleon among the leaves. Thankfully, these predators who use the silent selection process are not as common as other predators. They are, however, highly effective, giving the victim very little warning. The key to recognizing them is the last chance of conflict avoidance.

 ***END***

 

A red-headed teen-ager in the orchard. What could go wrong?

Yesterday's work-tickets

The great news is that my volunteer-help yesterday was able to fix the lawn tractor that was in the pole barn at the Upper and Hill Orchards.

I asked him what he did to fix it and he shrugged his shoulders. He had done a handful of things and wasn't sure which one(s) had resolved the issue. He did caution me that there were likely to be mice nests in the shroud that directed cooling air from the fan and I needed to clean those out or I could warp the cylinders if I ran it for extended periods.

We spent the next two hours moving wood from piles in the orchard to the property line where the neighbor would claim it for firewood.

Near the end of the two hours, the generous neighbor lady (not the wood burner) who has been letting me use her hose brought over her niece and asked for a tour of the orchard.

I can be awkward around people until I "calibrate". It takes me longer to calibrate around women then around men. It takes me longer to calibrate around teenagers than around adults or children. It takes me longer to calibrate around red-heads than around brunettes.

Yes, her niece was a gangly, red-headed teen-ager. She looked like a colt whose body parts were at different stages of a violent growth-spurt. For all that, she comported herself with poise and grace. Gymnastics is a wonderful activity, I am thinking. 

Her parents had tried to grow fruit trees but their site was too shady, had too many squirrels and too much deer pressure. It was a bust.

The home-run was when I learned she was from Illinois "Born and bred...", I took her to an Illinois Everbearing Mulberry. She was impressed. She ate a handful and picked a handful for her aunt who had elected to drop out of the tour early.

From the comments

Anon @ 8:51 PM yesterday asked "Would you mind posting some of the sources for your knowledge?" 

The most concise answer I can give is that I used to be a member of an email list called NAFEX-L. NAFEX stands for North American Fruit EXplorers.

Very early in the days of the internet, it was a "thing" for people interested in arcane topics to join email lists where people discussed various problems and opportunities. At one time I was a member of SHEEP-L, GRAZE-L and NAFEX-L.

The members of NAFEX-L included giants in the field like Ed Fackler (Southern Indiana), Lon Rombaugh (Western Oregon), Lucky Pittman (Western Kentucky), Bob Purvis (Alaska, Minnesota, Idaho), Bernie Nikolia (Alberta) and hosts of others from Maine to Florida to Alaska to California.

NAFEX still exists and publishes four magazines (called Pomona) a year. It is organized around interest groups. Each interest group has a leader and members are encouraged to join various interest groups.

The common denominator in these groups are that most of the members are interested in growing fruit in areas that are not currently centers of commercial production. They are home fruit growers and holders of small orchards. They are people who push the boundaries.

Back to LIST format

I think the LIST format was one of the high-points of the internet. Most of the questions were well posed and the answers were well thought out and presented. The format encouraged dialogue. Threads were durable and could be referenced later on. The readership was large enough to have a wide range of expertise but small enough that trolls were rare. The topics tended to be quite focused. Most of the contributors were genuinely motivated by a desire to help their fellow man.

By contrast, today's social media is "open" to the general public. Any idiot can comment. Trolls abound. Forums get flooded with random, tangential off-topic threads. In many cases, contributors are instant-experts and mindlessly parrot the summary from the first line of a Google search as deep-truth.

Presented without comment

 

Things might not be what they first appear

 

One minute run-time.

My original reaction to this short video was the predictable one: How could she not know the card was "empty". My original impression was that the customer was trying to scam Walmart by bluffing/intimidating her way through.

A bit later it occurred to me that the woman working the cash register didn't say "the balance was zero" but that "the transaction was declined" which really means that there are insufficient funds to cover the amount requested.

So what if this was the last week before her balance is refreshed and she is trying to buy the same items in the same amounts that she has for the last two years? What if she has done this 24 times (24 months) before and there has always been enough money to make it to the next month? 

She doesn't have to do math because she solved this math problem two years ago. She "knows" there is plenty of money in the balance because she has 104 pieces of data (104 weeks in two years) that what is in her shopping cart SHOULD be covered.

If she was knowingly trying to scam the store, she would have used self-checkout. Nobody would have challenged her if she mis-scanned some items.  

What happens when the food prices go up but the deposits made in her SNAP account don't? 

You can tell by the reactions of the woman working the cash register and the manager that this event is not rare. Neither of them batted an eye and the woman's lack-of-funds.

So maybe this video is not about "ghetto culture" but about rising food prices surprising everybody.

Finally, a bit of background info: The annual inflation in food prices in Ukraine has been running between 20% and 25% a year since 2022. At 25%, because of the compounding effect, the price of food doubles every three years.