He taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich starting in 1889.
His work spanned bright, airy spring-time scenes to dark, brooding forests. While some of his work seem repetitive, original works are a bargain running between $300 and $6000 at auction.
A tip of the old fedora to Lucas Machias
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| I have a plastic tub on a 20W heating mat. I had to fiddle around to get it near 80F, which is optimal for callous formation in many plant species. |
Sticking some cuttings.
I am trying the modified "fig pop" method. Most of the cuttings are figs with a few plums just for giggles.
The bases of the cuttings are re-cut and I vertically score the bottom of the cuttings for about 3/4". Then I dip them in diluted Dip-n-Gro rooting hormone.
2 cuttings of Florea. The first, ripe, mainseason fruit can be expected to ripen at 1950 Growing Degree Days base 50F SOURCE
3 Rondo de Bordeaux (supposedly a difficult fig to root) 1900 GDD
8 Mt Etna type cuttings 2070 GDD
12 Alma cuttings 2700 GDD (not sure what I am going to do with these. Roots are supposedly more resistant to nematodes than many other varieties.)
8 AU Rosa plums
Gwain sat in his swivel chair and studied the young woman who had copied her entire paper. It was clear that she had been crying. Gwain was unmoved by the tears. He knew that some people could turn them on-and-off. Some people burst out crying for no reason at all. Gwain wanted to know WHY. Why had she cheated? Why was she crying now?
Olivia Benavidas was the first in her family to go to college. She was the oldest of five children. Her father was a pipe-fitter in an oil refinery in Corpus (Gwain would have to look that up). Her mother was a seamstress and did alterations for weddings and prom dresses.
Gwain cut to the chase. “Why did you cheat? You knew it was wrong.”
Tears started leaking out of Olivia’s eyes. “Because I can’t write!” she wailed.
“What do you mean “You can’t write”?” Gwain asked, bordering on being dismissive.
“I got a “D” in my first writing class” Olivia said. “The harder I tried, the worse the professor graded me. If I do bad in this class, I will be on academic probation, and I don’t know how I will be able to tell my father.”
Gwain got the sense that Olivia was a “daddy’s girl” and her loathing the thought of telling him was not out of fear of punishment, but out of fear of disappointing him.
Gwain hear some minor scraping and squeaking outside his office. He had the door shut to provide (minimal) privacy. He assumed somebody was using an office chair as an ad hoc cart to move something from one office to another.
“Everybody can write” Gwain assured her. “It is something that you will get better at your entire life...but it requires practice and critical appraisal. That means turning in your own work.”
Then Gwain heard some tapping at his door.
“I am in a conference; a PRIVATE conference. Come back in fifteen minutes” Gwain said.
The person who had been tapping at the door did not respond and Gwain assumed they had gone away.
“Let me look up some of your papers from last term” Gwain suggested. “Maybe I can give you some guidance.”
All of the papers were indexed and Gwain had no problems finding her work. Her best grade was a C and he sped-read the first couple of paragraphs. Then he picked a paper from the string of “F”s she had turned in at the end of the term.
“Oh!” Gwain verbalized without knowing it.
“What do you think good writing looks like?” Gwain asked Miss Benavides.
“I DON”T KNOW!” Olivia wailed in anguish.
“What I see from your prior work is that your last professor was marking you down early in the term because of mechanics. You could have pulled up those papers by at least a grade if you had used MZ Wozzard’s grammar and spell check” Gwain told her.
“Your later papers are almost unreadable” Gwain said, as gently as he knew how. “Your sentences are run-on...maybe the worst I have ever seen. And you use lots of big words that you are clearly not familiar with.”
"I think you were guilty of trying much too hard” Gwain said.
Before Olivia could respond, Gwain heard Cole Byrd’s distinctive voice “Play with the bull, get the horns!”
Cole was the tall, arrogant student who Gwain was expecting to “test” his resolve in regards to students who plagurized work.
Gwain swiftly stood up and strode across the tiny office to confront his unruly student...and he could not open the door.
“Ha, ha, ha, ha!” he was met with a gale of derisive laughter as Gwain rattled the doorknob. And then he heard the sound of running feet.
“Well, that is a fine kettle of fish” Gwain commented as he sat down.
Looking over at Olivia, he intuitively deduced that she was going into a panic attack.
“Oh dear!” Gwain managed to get out. “You are claustrophobic!”
“No” Olivia lied.
Gwain pretended to believe her lie. “Lots of people get stressed when they feel like they don’t have any options.”
“This is what we are going to do. You are going to start journalling RIGHT NOW” Gwain told her, his voice brooking no objection.
He slid a yellow legal pad across his desk toward her. Then he gave her two sharpened HB pencils.
“Who, what, how, where, when, why. Those are the basics” Gwain barked out.
“Write down your name. Write down the time. Write down where we are” he continued.
Olivia, appreciating the distraction, started writing.
“When you are done with those, start writing down how you feel. While you are doing that, I have to make a few phone-calls to get us out of this pickle” Gwain told her.
“Hello, Violet? I seem to have found myself in a bit of a predicament” Gwain told the Department Secretary. “Some students decided this would be a good day to pull a prank and I fear they may have wedged my door shut. Do you suppose you can call maintenance and have them get it unstuck?”
Five minutes later, Gwain and Olivia heard the heavy trudge of work boots.
“Dang! I never seen this before” the masculine voice on the other side of the door stated.
“What haven’t you ever seen before?” Gwain asked.
“It looks like whoever did this to your door planned on keeping you in there for a while. They used a half-dozen shims and it looks like they super-glued them into place. And where they don't have shims they filled with expanding foam. I am not sure how we are going to get you out.”
Gwain heard a pencil snap. He looked over at Olivia and her face was as white as a ghost.
(C) 2025 Eaton Rapids Joe, All Rights Reserved
*Apologies to Edgar Allen Poe
One of my internet buddies is horrified that Trump followed through with his threats to levy tariffs against Mexico, Canada and China.
"Doesn't he know that tariffs generate tariffs in return and destroy the economies of both countries?"
My parroting of the old bromide that the first rule of training a mule is to get its attention was not appreciated.
Part of me understands where my friend is coming from. The Smoot-Hawley Tariffs act of 1930 is credited with increasing the intensity of the Great Depression, increasing its duration and "exporting" the economic downturn to places like Germany (and indirectly) setting the stage for Hitler and the NAZI party.
Theoretically, Trump's tariffs are almost identical to the Nuclear Weapons policy of Mutually Assured Destruction.
If the way for Mexico and Canada to avoid mutually assured economic destruction is to stop enabling economic immigrants who want to violate US laws from passing through their countries, why is that a problem?
Somebody is profiting from the vast subversion of US law. Otherwise it would have been a minor issue that would have been dealt with before midnight of January 20th.
OK, I can see that some will say that Mexico and Canada are not compelled to follow US laws. But do they really want to go down the road of testing Trump's resolve?
On a different note
One can make a compelling case that if the events of 2020 had happened in 2017, the first year of Trump's first term, then he would have handily won reelection.
Few people remember that Ronald Reagan first term was marred by a brutal recession. I graduated in Engineering from Michigan State in 1981 and only 17% of the people in my major got jobs in Michigan. Fortunately for Reagan, it was very early in his first term and the economy was coming roaring back by 1984. The economy was doing OK and the momentum was in the right direction. The United States electorate cheerfully sent Reagan back for a second term.
From a strategic standpoint, it would not hurt Trump if he had a very sharp recession of short duration NOW. In fact, it would probably help his legacy because it would make MAGA very strong for 2028. I don't see the threat of his tariffs triggering such a recession to be a bug...it is more like a feature from the standpoint of timing the bounce.
You can say lots of negative things about Trump and his MAGA brain-trust but even their critics must admit that their organization is very effective at LEARNING and IMPLIMENTING those lessons.
Side-story about recessions
It is like a young man I know who owned a diesel, 4WD truck. He could not afford to keep it running. It absorbed all of his discretionary money and it was still not reliable transportation. He was trapped by that truck.
His life was on-hold until he confronted the reality of the truck. It was a money-pit that would never offer him a positive return on his dollar invested. Shit happened and he was FORCED to sell his truck.
He dumped the truck and took his loss. He bought a beater, gas-powered car that got 30 mph mpg and never looked back.
Sometimes you just have to let go.
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Gazing into my crystal-ball, the S&P 500 could drop by 40% and it would only unwind the stock market back to October of 2022. That is NOT the end of the world, even if it dents some politicians' stock portfolios.
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| Happy Ground Hog Day! |
Lifting notes: 6 reps of 135, raw to warm up. 5 reps at 225, felt weak. Dropped down to 185. 4 sets of 6 reps. Finished with another 5 reps at 225. Total weight 7750.
Fired 1858 over the chrony. 25 grains by volume/23 by weight of Triple Seven FFFG gave 749.6 fps five feet from the screens.
The trees can grow as far north as Wisconsin but there will rarely be enough heat to properly ripen the nuts.
It is a reasonable expectation that you will have enough heat to ripen selected varieties of pecans in the regions that are YELLOW, enough heat to ripen many/most pecan varieties in the regions that are ORANGE and to have plenty of heat to ripen all pecan varieties in the areas that are DARK RED.
The areas that are AQUA and BLUE can ripen some pecans, some years but the pecans will be just one-step-up from wild seedlings in terms of size and ease-of-shelling. Frankly, most growers in those areas will be better served by planting Shellbark Hickories and/or named varieties of Black Walnuts
This is a real article published by a British-owned, mainstream newspaper.
Bevis and Butthead were not pictured in the actual article, but they came close.
AND
Pecan varieties recommended by the University of Georgia for home-gardens. LINK
"Pecan trees are everywhere in the South, and many years they provide a bountiful crop. This gives the impression that pecan trees are carefree yard trees. Unfortunately, this is not the case. It can be very difficult to get a good crop of pecans without spraying your trees, and this is especially true if you plant commercial cultivars which lack disease and insect resistance.
Biofeedback
A brazillion years ago, scientists in the west were astounded to find that "swami" from India were able to control the blood-flow within their bodies. It was reported that these Hindu/Buddhist holy-men could vary the surface temperature of their hands and feet, for instance, by more than 10 degrees F.
Fast-forward two decades...
Western scientists discovered that similar results could be obtained using cash-hungry grad-students and ample caffeine. But instead of taking several decades, the results could be obtained within weeks. All the grad students (most of them anyway) had to do was to hold the bulb of a thermometer between their thumb-and-forefinger and "visualize" plunging their hands into hot, soapy water and washing dishes.
The grad-students used the rise in temperature as-shown by the thermometer as a measure of how vivid their "visualization" was and kept adjusting their "fantasy" to produce better results.
Fast-forward another decade...
Some on-the-ball researcher noticed the correlation between hand-temperature, nasal congestion and some kinds of headaches. After his/her third IPA at the bar, they floated the idea that MAYBE...they didn't need a thermometer. Maybe subjects could "play" with different fantasies (washing dishes, walking across a hot sandy beach, sitting in a sauna, playing hot-potato...) and dial into their most effective fantasy based on how much their breathing eased.
And that could be a path to drug-free easing of head-ache pain.
For obvious reasons, this line of inquiry received no funding and died a sudden death.
Imagine; being able to improve people's ability to breath and to totally crush some kinds of headaches without expensive, purchased, proprietary pharmaceuticals!
A mental exercise
Suppose you have a head-ache or your nose is extremely congested.
You "baseline" how stuffy your nose is and then ignore it.
You sit in your favorite recliner. You swaddle yourself with quilts or fuzzy blankets and put a heating pad around your feet and maybe a hot-water bottle at your hands.
You put on a knit cap.
You visualize flames between your hands and the water-bottle. You mentally form the picture of youself holding your feet up in the air near a wood-stove glowing cherry-red from the heat. You HOLD those images in your head for as long as you can.
And then, when you cannot sustain the image any longer, you ask yourself "Is my nose less congested? Has the pain of my head-ache eased?"
Be gentle with yourself. It may take several tries before you find the secret-sauce in terms of mental images that convince your body to follow your bidding.
Maybe it is stroking the fur of your favorite, childhood puppy.
Maybe it is playing "flinch" with your older brother...and winning.
Only you can figure that out.
Give it a try. It isn't going to cost you anything!
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| Three pecan trees in front of the bungalow. Image taken from "LeFleur", Texas. The trees are planted in a line 20 feet west of the house. |
Seven pages and 336 lots as-of January 30
Random examples
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| Springfield 45-70 Trapdoor Rifle |
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| Tanker helmet from Spanish Civil War |
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| Powder flasks |
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| Engraved Hopkins Allen revolver |
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| Eickhorn Lionhead sword |
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| 16 gauge, double-barreled, Damascus steel shotgun |
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| Colt .31 caliber manufactured 1856 |
For the record
The third, timed reload of the 1858 New Army took 3 minutes and 5 seconds (including check to see that no caps were in-place).
Improvements that need to be made are to trim the pig-tails on the foam plugs to 1.5" and to have a better system for holding the lead balls. Basically, I need a short chunk of two-by-four with a groove in it long enough to hold seven balls.
Those were the only "bobbles". Once those changes are made and I get a few more untimed reps, I should be at about 2:30 and improvements will come more slowly as it will be primarily from training my muscle-memory.
Back in the day, one of our concerns was that our young daughters would sip from the cup of carnal desires at an early age and their lives would be derailed.
We had seen it happen to many other young women. They became pregnant before they graduated from high school. They don't marry the father of the baby. Often they don't graduate from high school. They have multiple "baby-daddies", a term that I loath.
That outcome seems to be what the popular culture is "programming" for women. "Everybody is doing it". "Enjoy sex, it won't hurt you". "You don't need no man".
Not wanting our children's lives to be ruled by the glamor of pop-culture, we studied what would armor our daughters against too-young-sex. This is what we found:
A strong spiritual community
No single armor-plate is total protection, but having the family regularly attend a traditional, Bible-based church is a good start.
A father who is "accessible" to his daughters and involved in their lives
Women crave male attention. If they cannot get it from their father then they will do whatever it takes to get it from boys.
An honorable father
A girl's father is the yardstick that she will will use to measure other men by. Treat your wife with dignity and respect at all times. Your daughter will see that.
As a father, don't send mixed signals. Don't flirt.
Embed your daughter in a group of like-minded girls
Sports are a good outlet for their energy and sports show girls that their bodies are designed for something other than wearing slutty clothing.
Scouting and band (music) are also possibilities.
Hunting and fishing and gardening and canning are good. A sneaky-Pete is likely to think twice if he knows your daughter can kill, field-dress and drag him out of the woods and then turn him into sausage.
As a parent...
The pop-culture is very strong and modern culture tells young people that they are not economic-maturity until they are in their mid-20s. Young people are biologically fully developed to have sex by their early teens but told they "can't marry" until they are in their late-20s. That is totally out of synch.
As recently as fifty years ago, puberty was significantly later than it is today. Some people blame the availability of calories. Others blame the hormone-like chemicals in our foods. Regardless, puberty is hitting years earlier than it used to. In ancient times, there was a much shorter period between "can do" and when most people got married.
Two sets of expectations
You can set the expectation that all of your kids will wait until after they are married before they have sex. High expectations are good.
And you are still very likely to not be successful in meeting that expectation.
BUT...you are partially successful if you delay the event by even one partner, if you delay it by even three months. Kids mature quickly and even an additional three-months adds resilience and maturity. And it is my humble opinion that you are likely to delay "the first time" by years if you armor up your daughter(s) and granddaughter(s) as described above.
Any comments from my readers?
From frequent commenter Jonathon:
You can't just slash the number of enforcers/ regulators without slashing the number of regulations - if you do, the delays to determine compliance will grow.
It is not my intention to "dog" Jonathon. His comments have always been thoughtful and on-topic. I chose his comment because it is a good point-of-departure for this post.
All bureaucracies expand until they exceed the resources allocated to them (a corollary of Pournelle's Law)
Back-in-the-day I was involved in lean-manufacturing in a small metal-stamping plant. One of the metrics was the dollar-value of the "maintenance materials" stored under the plant roof divided by the annual production. The auditors had a very simple formula for calculating the dollar-value of the "maintenance materials".
They calculated the square-footage of the maintenance parts cribs and multiplied by $250 per square-foot. There was no way to game the metric. The only way to get ahead was to sell more product (difficult) or to shrink the square-footage of the parts cribs (including that room in the basement).
I asked the auditors to defend their stupid-simple method...and to my surprise they were overjoyed to have a teachable-moment.
"Every time there is a break-down and the maintenance supervisor cannot find a part in five minutes, they order new parts from the warehouse. Not just one new part but one-to-use and two to put into storage for "next time". Except the parts crib is so crammed with junk that there is no place to put the two extra parts and so they are stuffed anyplace they can find room. That makes them unfindable the NEXT time that part breaks."
"The stuffed-to-the-gills parts cribs becomes a self-perpetuating disaster. The only way to unwind it is to shrink the cribs and to shrink the size of the shelves so parts so there is room for one, and only one, critical, high-frequency part."
The "cheat" was to take the cheapest, high frequency parts and to zip-tie them to the steel-mesh of the hard-guards of the robotic cells. If you lost an air-cooled welding jumper or "kickless-cable" you had one hanging right there and it didn't get counted against you as inventory.
Some skilled tradesmen had tool boxes filled with "parts". That was a serious no-no. Unlike the replacement parts that were in plain sight (if you were inside the robotic cell), the parts that were in a tool box were not available to other shifts and it counted on the skilled tradesman remembering that he had that exact part during the heat-of-battle.
To everybody's surprise, the plant ran better on a day-to-day basis when the cribs were shrunk to the point where the parts that were required to repair break-downs were exactly where the parts data-base said they would be (Stack, bay, level).
Back to the Federal Workforce
It is my perception that a log of all Federal laws and the regulations documented by the Executive Branch would run to hundreds-of-thousands of pages of single-spaced, 10pt font.
Only a very, very small percentage of those "laws" get "administered and enforced" on a regular basis. Saying that delays will occur because there will be longer waits to ensure compliance...what about the 99.8% of the rules that are assumed to be in compliance or assumed to not be critical?
What will happen is that the regulators will auto-calibrate and will focus on the (100%-99.9%) that are most critical and delays will remain almost unchanged (after the malcontents get smacked upside the head) for the most critical regulations...but the less critical regulations will get the three monkeys and things will move faster.
My most recent interactions with public-sector employees (state level) have been that they petrified when they have to make a decision because they know that they will be second-guessed and criticized. What that tells me is that all of the other employees who are second-guessing and talking-shit don't have enough of their own work to do...not if they have time to rehash everybody elses' work stream.
America's (and Britain's) only chance to avoid following the Weimar Republic's economic trajectory is to vigorously grow our economy.
That means chopping back regulations.
Regulations are "Default: STOP". That is, "Stop until you satisfy the regulator that you are complying with their understanding of the regulations".
Every stop creates a delay-to-market. Every delay creates cash-burn as staff is paid, interest is accrued. Every delay-to-market allows competitors advantage and increases the risk of your product/service appearing dated and low-feature.
Regulators don't care. Nope. In fact, stopping people is how they demonstrate that they are "needed" and "necessary".
There are far too many laws on the books. They are contradictory and ambiguous. Judicial interpretations twist and bend the original intent. There is far too much governmental meddling in the economy. The US auto industry pissed away $200 Billion in trying to meet EV mandates. That amounts to $1800 per household. For one industry. For one requirement.
The regulatory process is the choke-point that is strangling American innovation.
The only way to loosen the noose of regulation is to thin-the-herd. Eliminate departments. Comb the lice out of the scalps of productive people. Throw them into the fire (figuratively speaking).
Lifting notes: (135 * 6) + ((225 *6) * 4) = 6210 for dead lifting session.
Those of you who have been following this blog for a while know that I am very interested in "throughput" or the rapid and efficient production of things.
You also know that one of my buddies recently purchased a replica of an 1858, blackpowder, muzzle-loading pistol.
This is a time for honesty
The first time I timed myself reloading the weapon was the second time I loaded all six chambers. It took me 14 minutes.
Disgusted, I made some changes. I dumped the 25 grains-by-volume (23 grains by weight) of Triple Seven FFFG powder into six, empty .223 Rem cases and stuffed the mouths with foam, hearing-protection ear-buds. I did the same for the 1.0cc of filler. And rather than using my finger to wipe lube around the mouth of each chamber, I spent the big dollars and bought Wonder-wads.
I was able to beat the time down to five minutes and I cheated. The 1.0cc of filler was too much when combined with the 3mm thick wonder wads. I stopped the clock after chamber #3 and had to really crank the loading lever down so the ball would clear the rear of the barrel. Ooops!
If my buddy is agreeable, the next timed-trial will use 0.5 or 0.7cc of something round like millet or turnip seeds. I had used long-grain rice and that did not flow well. I will also put the filler in a different case (maybe .38 Special) than the powder so I can reload totally by feel.
Looking at the labor content of the tasks, any shooter who can reload all six chambers in two minutes or less (twenty seconds a chamber) doesn't need to apologize to anybody. That time does NOT include the percussion caps.
Conceivably, it might even be possible to get it down to reloading all six in a minute but that will involve a multi-pocket apron with each component in its own pocket. That might work for "competitions" but would be impractical for somebody just rambling about the woods enjoying the glories of the autumn.
These are heady days for conservatives who are rejoicing as the Progressive over-reach is beaten back on a daily basis.
It is easy to forget that there is a tremendous amount of fragility locked into the system, fragility that cannot be surgically excised. Foremost among those fragilities is the the amount of US debt relative to the size of the productive (as opposed to the reallocative) economy.
Some people think we are doomed. They claim that we are too far into the quicksand to escape.
My personal opinion is that there is still a chance of the US economy out-growing the risk but that is totally dependent on resources NOT being pissed down rat-holes. Rather, those resources must be directed to enterprises that create value.
That applies to the resources we have at our disposal in our personal lives. Do the activities we choose make us healthier or less healthy? Do they increase our character and elevate the opinion others hold of us or do they erode our character and diminish our status in the eyes of our families, neighbors and friends?
Do we squander thousands of dollars on vacations where all we acquire are some pictures, a sunburn and maybe a tattoo, or do we strengthen our social equity by visiting family or do we acquire new skills (or hone old skills)?
Have you been putting off basic repairs on your house, maybe just out of a sense of inertia? This might be the lull before the storm. Good doors. Good locks. Clear out brush near your house. Is your roof "good" for the next fifteen years or more?
Are you mentoring any young people? If they are not volunteering to be mentored, maybe you hire them to do some of the more physical parts of your hobby and do a lot of explaining the "why" of what you do.
For the record: Quicksilver got her first lesson in recognizing rabbit tracks and following them today.
Humor
A young man from a small town in Michigan went to the University of Michigan. He was the first person from his very small high school to attain that honor.
He was sitting in a vast room with hundreds and hundreds of other Freshmen when the Dean of the College addressed them.
"I have a huge interest in the paranormal" the Dean said. "I ask every incoming Freshmen class these questions..."
"First, I want every one of you to stand up" the Dean told them.
"I want those of you who believe in ghosts to remain standing and everybody else to sit down" the Dean continued.
The young man was surprised when a third of the class sat down.
"Those of you who have ever SEEN ghosts, I want you to remain standing and the rest of you to sit down" the Dean said.
The young man was even more surprised when only about 10% of the class remained standing.
"Those of you who have TOUCHED a ghost, I want you to remain standing" the Dean said.
The young man was starting to get nervous. There were only three others who remained standing and the Dean was visibly excited.
"Those of you who have made love to a ghost, remain standing..."
The young man looked around and realized that he was the only one still standing and the Dean was beside himself with excitement.
"Young man. Come up here! I have been asking those questions for 40 years and you are the first one to remain standing for the last question."
Quite awkwardly, the young man worked his way to the aisle and then walked up to the dais with 599 sets of eyes on his back.
"Can you tell me, young man, could you tell how long the ghost had been dead?" the Dean asked.
The young man's face flushed. "Ghost? I thought you said "GOATS"!"
Scooby Doo and Ghosts
Quicksilver is suddenly interested in ghosts. She gets worked-up and is hard to settle for her nap.
Today I told her that it cost a lot of money to feed ghosts. I told her that if we got a ghost we would have to get rid of Zeus because we couldn't afford to feed both of them.
We will see how long that works.
I am attempting to graft a cadence of peaches ripening on 5-to-10 day intervals.
One of the EXCELLENT things about growing fragile fruits like raspberries and peaches and plums is that the grower can harvest the fruit at the very peak of perfection rather than picking it green so it can be shipped to market like so many billiard balls.
The peach connoisseurs in the family tell me "Red Haven", "Red Haven", "Red Haven". They latched onto "Red Haven" like a pitty-lab cross staking claim to the carcass of a bicycle tire.
I know better than to argue with the "customer" but it is nice to have options.
Red Haven is an excellent peach but it ripens during the first week of August (in Southern Michigan) and that is right in the middle of the dog-days of summer around here. Ideally, I would have different peach varieties ripening at approximately one-week intervals. Not just to provide a long-window of perfectly ripe peaches, but to create a back-up plan in case the canners "miss the window" on the Red Havens. Life happens.
The challenge is that there are LOTS of outstanding varieties that ripen three weeks after Red Haven but darned few that ripen in that window between five days and fifteen days after Red Haven. And of those that exist, many of them are proprietary, Patented varieties that are difficult for non-commercial growers to get trees of.
The list of peaches (a late addition to the 2025 planting plans) are:
I have scion for Contender and Cresthaven but am looking for scion of Challenger.
I am coming to the realization that 10 seedling peaches might not be enough as mission-creep rears its head.
I realize that I am deeply blessed to have these kinds of problems. Very few people have enough room to plant four different kinds of peach trees.
Information from a previous part of my life:
The original Head Injury Criteria later used in Federal Motor Vehicle Standard 208 was generated by dropping embalmed cadaver heads onto unyielding, flat surfaces, striking the subject on the forehead. The WSTC (Figure 2-1) provides a relationship between peak acceleration, pulse duration, and concussion onset. In the original work, skull fracture was used as the criterion for determination of concussion and the onset of brain injury. The final form of the Wayne State Tolerance Curve was published by Gurdjian (Gurdjian 1963, Patrick 1963). In its final form, the WSTC was developed by combining results from a wide variety of pulse shapes, cadavers, animals, human volunteers, clinical research, and injury mechanisms. Skull fracture and/or concussion was used as the failure criterion, except for the long duration human volunteer tests in which there were no apparent injuries.
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| The math behind the Head Injury Criteria |
In English rather than mathematical expression, a sliding time window 0.032 seconds long is moved along the acceleration trace for the crash-dummy's head. The average acceleration for the 0.032 second window is raised to the 2.5th power. The maximum HIC value for the entire time-trace is the HIC reported for the event.
The Physics
Brains are jelly-like and a shock is treated like a center-pass filter. A very fleeting shock, even though very high, does not last long enough to cause the entire brain to slosh across the cranial cavity.
It is counter-intuitive, but the primary damage to the brain is not on the high-pressure side. Being jelly-like, or liquid(ish), the brain is resistant to pressure as long as it doesn't squirt out of the skull. The primary damage occurs on the low pressure side where dissolved gasses expand explosively and rupture cells and blood vessels.
Consequently, a blow to the forehead can cause damage to the rear of the occipital lobe processes visual signals and works cooperatively with many other brain areas. The occipital lobe plays a crucial role in language and reading, storing memories, recognizing familiar places and faces which explains why people with closed-head injuries often have slow and halting speech.
More Physics
In a frontal car accident there are three collisions.
The first collision is when the bumper hits the object in front of the vehicle. The motor compartment side rails start to crumple and the body of the vehicle starts to slow down. Meanwhile, the bodies of the occupants and the engine merrily fly through space, not yet "knowing" that the body is slowing down.
Then the engine hits the object and starts loading into the motor compartment side rails and adds to the decel rate. The decel rate increases even as the occupants continue sailing across the free-space within the passenger compartment.
If there were air-bags, the bags already fully inflated and are starting to deflate. Air bags dissipate energy as the occupants hit them and air (hot CO2, actually) is squeezed out through the loose weave of the fabric. If the bags did not deflate in a controlled manner, the passenger's heads would bounce and be subjected to much higher rates of force.
The body of the car + engine is REBOUNDING from the wall when the occupant(s) finally impact the interior of the vehicle. It is very possible for a 30 mph collision to turn into a 37 mph net velocity change as the vehicle bounces backwards. That is a big deal because energy increases with the square of the velocity and a 20% increase in net velocity change means the restraint systems need to deal with 44% more energy.
What I see when I watch this image is that the man's head bounces after the first impact. That tells me that he didn't smash his teeth/jaw at that point. It also tells me that his head saw very high g forces and he is a likely candidate for the morgue. No airbags or plastic deformation of a steering wheel to help him out, there.
The second impact had no head bounce and the energy was probably dissipated by jaw fracture.
Part of the deal with the University was that Gwain would IMMEDIATELY pick up two classes. The previous instructor had been incarcerated and was not expected to be available for an as-yet determined amount of time.
Even though the semester was already in-session, the University was able to shuffle assignments around and arrange for two back-to-back classes in college-level writing for Gwain to teach.
That meant that Gwain would be gone for at least three hours, three days a week and five hours on the day he had office-hours.
Gwain walked in to meet his first class. Only a third of the students bothered to attend. He expected that to change after he had graded the papers his predecessor left him. Both classes had two sets of ungraded papers. In all, he had 160, 800-to-1200 word essays to grade.
Gwain launched into his monologue about how the Greek Myths were one of the ties that bound the far-flung Greek colonies together for three thousand years. The Greek colonies ranged from the Straits of Gibraltar to north shores of the Black Sea and were able to maintain their culture in spite of vastly different local cultures.
He rhapsodized about how itinerant storytellers repeated and refined the stories with every retelling, moving from community-to-community like a needle stitching panels in a quilt together. He talked about how stories, myths, evolved to make them easier to memorize and to embed moral lessons within them, lessons that every person who heard them could walk away with some greater understanding of humanity...
***
Diane Nance rang the doorbell and waited for Jana to invite her in.
Gwain had gotten her name by advertising for an "Adult sitter" on SpaceBook Markets.
Not only had Diane been the first to respond, but she lived only two blocks way from where Gwain and Jana now lived.
Diane was a black woman of about 40 looking to pick up a few extra dollars while her two children were at school. Gwain's offer of $25 an hour, cash payable the day she earned it, and the timing of the hours needed was very agreeable to her.
Jana bid her to enter.
Jana and Diane had a conversation the day that Gwain had hired her. Their chemistry seemed compatible.
Jana was wary. There is only so much you can learn about somebody in a fifteen minute conversation.
"I hope you don't mind if I do a few dishes and some light-picking up while I am here?" Diane ventured. "I have to move around or time goes really slow for me."
Diane's use of "slow" instead of the more proper adverb "slowly" grated on Jana's nerves. It was just one more indignity that she would have to get used to.
"I don't mind" Jana said. She felt strangely intruded upon by another woman doing domestic work in her house, her personal space. Then it hit her, Jana was already thinking of this small bungalow as her own space.
"Where do you keep the laundry baskets?" Diane asked.
"I think there one is in one of the back-rooms. I haven't been able to really look the place over" Jana apologized.
"Tell you what" Diane said. "Why don't I put you in the transfer chair and you can keep me company and look things over while I tidy up. You prolly have ways you want clothes sorted and folded and ain't nobody does things exackly the same."
Even though she was tired, Jana thought that was a good idea.
Jana asked Diane about the neighbors and the local businesses. And while Diane had something to say about every one of them, Jana noticed that Diane very carefully didn't say anything negative about any of them in any kind of direct way.
When Jana asked about the hardware store, Diane said "If you are in a hurry, you best go in the morning cause they a lot slower after lunch."
After a moment of thought, Jana realized that Diane was speaking in a kind of code. She was saying that the owner was likely to have a few drinks at lunch.
Once Jana had figured out Black-Southern-Genteel, she was able to glean far more information from Diane's descriptions.
"You know, only about a third of what you are telling me is sticking" Jana said with a sigh. "I think we need to have this conversation again after I meet some of these people.
Diane nodded her head in agreement. "Won't be no problem. Ain't much to talk about round here 'cept people."
Glancing at the clock, Diane said "Where do time go? I already been here for two hours and it is almost time for The Price is Right. I don't watch much TV, but I do like that show."
***
The Dean at Asphodel's College of Liberal Arts had extended Gwain some professional courtesies. One of them was continued access to the Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence paper-grader that had become a mandatory part of grading papers at Asphodel.
Gwain moved the papers from the shared-docs folder where students submitted electronic copies of their papers and placed them into the "hopper" of the LLMAI. Gwain accepted most of the radio-buttons to the defaults but made the confidence level a very-high 99.5% and clicked the button to identify where the oldest instance of the copied text came from and to identify other cases where that "snip" had been flagged.
Gwain had no illusions about what it was going to return. When Asphodel had first subscribed to the LLMAI, they quickly found that 70% of the students were violating the school policy on plagiarism. Some of the students were lifting a paragraph or two, verbatim, from published academic papers. Others were copying-and-pasting entire papers.
That caused a major crisis as the school policy clearly stated that plagiarism was grounds for dismissal. No University can survive if it eliminates two-thirds of its paying students.
Gwain's second class focused on contemporary short-stories. Gwain had never encountered the authors before, so he had a bunch of reading to do. First on the list was Curtis's A Learning Experience and Lawdog's Memories, Like Dust. Modern writers had very strange names. He just hoped "Lawdog" was not a rapper.
(C) 2025 Eaton Rapids Joe, All Rights Reserved
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| Diving |
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| Bull-fighting |
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| Kinetic make-up application |
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| Eye-hand-mouth coordination |
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| Never trust a pinko |
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| Pole dancing |
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| Nutrition |
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| Hydration |
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| Gymnastics |
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| High Hurdles |
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| Triathalon |
