Bouncing off rocks, landing in a beautiful pool

I am going to talk about something that I’ve never written about before, but to preface the remarks, it’s not private, and though it was at that time of my life, it is not important.

It has to do with becoming a CPA, and what it takes. At the time I passed the exam, in the early 1980s, it was a completely bluebook pencil-driven affair. We answered multiple choice questions; we wrote essays; and solved long problems in a show-your-work style.

It was my understanding at that time that only five percent of candidates did as I did, and passed all five parts on first attempt. I’ll get that part out of the way, in the “what it says about me” department. One, it means I’m pretty smart, at accounting anyway. I’m not terribly smart in many ways. But more than that, it says that I knew how to take a test. I didn’t sweat it, never sweated tests in college, and yet, for sure, I did not ace them all, not even close.  I was not an A student. However, I was always relaxed, and on tests usually done before everyone else and busy checking and rechecking my work. Some people I knew sweated and panicked. Even though they were smart and capable they were not good at testing. That’s a shame. There should be a better way for those who study hard, have the knowledge, but do not test well. I do not know the answer there.

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Yellow highlighters and the art of memory maintenance

While we were vacationing in France, I had the pleasure of meeting Jan Spreen, an occasional commenter here. He allowed me to publish a couple of his pieces, here and here, while we traveled, and I have put his blog up on the blogroll. I advise caution, however, as much of his blog is written in French, and those French, as Steve Martin once reminded us, “have a different word for everything.”

Jan and I discussed books of importance, and I told him that I have a problem with retention, that I had read many book and that after I remembered nothing. This came to the fore this year when I put great effort in transcribing portions of the book Public Opinion, by Walter Lippman. I use 3m flags to highlight important passages, and then use a transcription program to read those passages into a Word file. I have accumulated scores of such files, and I occasionally consult them.

I have too many books and not enough space, and so was thinning them out and selecting many to give away to our local Community Nest. Or to toss. I came across another copy of Public Opinion. I had flagged that copy as I had the other, but had not transcribed it. I then realized that I had read and flagged the book twice, transcribed portions once, and not retained a word of it!

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Consensus in science can only mean no science is in the works

Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. There is no such things as consensus science. If it is consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. (Michael Crichton, 1942-2008)

I don’t know enough of science to say this with any certainty, but I do not think there is much real science going on anymore. It is discussed here on this blog frequently, how Moon landings, space travel in general, atomic bombs, nuclear power (which I suspect is real**) are all fake. I am a complete skeptic about geology and evolution. Weather forecasts are indeed reliable for a few days time – there is good work going on there. Bridges do not collapse, nor buildings, which look like boxes. That says that engineering is reliable, but that architecture is not very creative.

Crichton’s remarks above are aimed directly at the climate change regime, which relies on a fabricated “consensus” of 97% of scientists to sell itself as real. Never mind that the consensus was not real, even as then-president Obama used it in a Tweet. The idea behind it was to prevent questioning of the fabricated science that was underway. It has been used as a hammer, and “scientists” and researchers have been cowed into submission by brute force by the progenitors of this fake movement.

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Journalists: They put the ‘con’ in confidence

I can tell you from my viewpoint that spinning Montana’s newspapers was as easy as spinning a top. There’s precious little congressional news that is actually broken by a Montana newspaper. That works to the advantage of the politician. Absolutely. When you are free from a burrowing press, you pretty much have clear sailing. (Pat Williams, 1937-2025, US Representative from Montana, 1979-97)

The above quote was important to me at one time. For one, I was a Montana resident, and for another, I thought journalism was a real profession. The last book I read by Bryan Wilson Key, Subliminal Seduction, has an appendix devoted to the “Canon’s of Journalism”, which are as follows:

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Starry night in my head

I am now back after a long and arduous trip home. I doubt I shared any of this, but we were scheduled to leave Denver on Lufthansa on April 12. On April 11 we got an email from Lufthansa telling us our flight had been cancelled. The reason was a pilots strike, but also around that time, there was a cabin attendant strike. A person we met while traveling, a German national, told us that flying Lufthansa can be a problem because they have more than one union, and any of these unions can shut down the airline. So, right around our 4/12 departure date there were two strikes, and the one by the pilots shut down the airline. Hundreds of flights were cancelled, including ours.

So, after receiving the email from Lufthansa on 4/11, I realized that there was going to be an exodus of passengers and that any other available seats on other airlines would quickly be snapped up. I went to my Delta account and entered our dates, and we could fly on 4/12 directly to Lisbon, Portugal rather than through Frankfurt, Germany, as Lufthansa had routed us. I didn’t think too hard about it and grabbed the seats, hoping that we’d get a full refund from Lufthansa.

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Note to self: JFK must have vaporized due to speed of limo

We are in the closing hours of this long European trip, in fact, have been here long enough that all of the ads I receive on YouTube are in French. I no longer need to turn off the sound as I cover them with my hand. The French language is, some might say, guttural, that is, they seem to be flowing words more than speaking them plainly. I’ve picked up a few, and use translate apps for signs, and so can manage.

I had the privilege of meeting and spending time with an occasional commenter here, Jan  Spreen. We ended up in proximity by chance in the Provence area of southern France, so he drove a few kilometers to meet with us. I had a delightful time picking his brain.

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Pump this …

While planning for our soon-ending trip, we decided to avoid checking bags and so minimized stuff to bring. We rented several dwelling units of various types, most having washers and dryers. Thereby, and you neither want nor need to know this, I brought only four skivvies and several pairs of socks that qualify as hiking grade.

The first place where we did laundry had an odd machine, and a dial completely written in Portuguese. I translated it, and thought I understood the machine to be basically normal. However, at the end of the washing and spinning cycle our clothes were soaking wet. I ran them again, same result, and then on a cycle that promised to spin them really fast, which it failed to do. We ended up with a load of soaking-wet clothes and a small deck to dry them on. I wrung them out by hand.

Finally, on what I later decided was a fool’s quest, I went searching for a laundromat. It took several hours to find one,  get change, and finally run our clothing that otherwise refused to dry. The machine I used had a heat button, but I could not make it hotter. I ran the clothing for two fifteen-minute intervals, and while not dry, the items were kind of warm,  and seemed to have been in the process that may well have required three our four more fifteen-minute cycles. I decided the machine was defective.

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Who knew? Certainly not me!

I awake early. Sometimes I get up as early as 3:30 AM. We are currently in France. Jet lag in the past has been a real problem, not so much travelling west to east. When we do that we usually arrive on an overnight flight and are sleep-deprived that day. But, we power through as best we can so that we stay awake as late as possible and then try to hit the ground running the following day. Usually after the arrival day and one complete day, we are acclimated.

I often wonder how presidents and business executives handle air travel to Europe, Asia and other places. They usually appear fresh no matter where they are. I know they can sleep in luxury aboard their aircraft, but who can just fall asleep at will and switch to a European or Asian schedule? Not me, for sure.
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