Author: Mark Tokarski

Just a man who likes to read, argue, and occasionally be surprised.

Billy Shears: Revelation of the Method

I made it through all 666 pages of the book Memoirs of Billy Shears, by Thomas E. Uharriet some time ago. To the left is a face split between the image on the cover of the book, and a 1957 photo, said to be of Paul McCartney, but actually the one I call Mike. In the book “Billy” claims to have undergone plastic surgery to implant plastic to create the illusion that he looks like “Paul”, or the man we know now as “Macca”.  But it appears to me all they have done is take the original Mike and draft an image based on that. I see no plastic sticking out.

The book is written in two voices, that of “Billy”, who claims to have been a studio musician before the death of the original “Paul” on 9/11/1966, to have played in various bands under other names, to be a trained musician who can read music and who has written all of the songs of the Beatles (after 11/22/66) that are not separately attributed to John Lennon, George Harrison, or Ringo Starr. That part is made-up nonsense, but there is an overshadowing of truth admitted to in the time alluded to that came before the fake death on 9/11/66: 

NOTE (Page 167): The Beatles’ music will evolve from the most naïve that their writers could imagine to the most liberated. The first hit in America ( being their second in the UK) credited to Lennon-McCartney, though far beyond their writing skills, was Launching the engineered social transformation that sold over 15 million copies worldwide. [MT Note: this must refer to either I Want To Hold Your Hand or She Loves You.]

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A Lilliputian Windmill Blade?

Mr. Mathis highlighted this photo, calling it an obvious fake, which it is, and commenting that it looks like a “Hot Wheels mock-up, with square-edged cars and all the seams still showing.”

All that is true, but I add one more thing: The blade is not nearly long enough to service the windmills I see. Try this calculation for yourself: A typical truck bed is 8’6″. At 1PM in the photo, you’ll see a truck – perspective is completely distorted, but let’s run with it. On my screen, it is one-half inch wide. (All screens are different, but the relationship of images to one another should be the same.) The blade is about five inches, so that in real life that blade would be five divided by one-half (=10) times eight feet six inches, or 1,020 inches, or about 85 feet long.

A typical carbon-fiber wind turbine blade is about 350 feet long, or the length of a football field plus two ten-yard endzones plus the distance to the first row of seats where Green Bay Packers go to jump up after a touchdown.

So the blade above is only about 24% the length of a real blade. That is, unless the blade is being trucked to Lilliput.

PS: How did that blade wind up way over in the oncoming lane? All I can think is that the wind blew it.

Where might it all begun? Or gone South?

By The Old Badger (Dave Klausler)

Some daydream, nightmare, or this stupid world charade tipped me to fitness thinking lately. Nah, that may not even be it – I am triggered by music frequently – during workouts most commonly. But that’s right back to physical stuff – melting deep in my head too. I paused while the haunted Sinéad was expressing herself in Universal Mother – heartbreaking. She can shove Shuhada’ Sadaqat right up her dead pseudo-muslim ass. If you really want to hear raw power and fury, try Troy from The Lion and the Cobra – incredible. There’s a guy here on SubStack – Jonathan – that I view and read – he uses gymnastic rings too – that was also stewing in me. Hard to say now… I’m always consciously multitasking.

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Following Annie’s advice

We have upstairs three rooms, each inordinately large: a bathroom, walk-in closet, and bedroom. They are what I would consider artifacts, which I define as something unintended and left over from other intended activities. This house in original from was much like a toaster, two floors, small footprint, and by world standards fully adequate for its intended purpose.

The former owners, however, wanted something bigger and better. They did not want this in order to live in a bigger house – they wanted to be able to sell it so that they could buy a place with land. The woman who was partnered with a man in the construction business wanted to raise horses, utterly impossible here, as it is a steep wooded hillside. So they popped out the north side of the building, and doubled the size of the structure, creating a lovely living and dining area, and two “offices” on our main floor, each qualifying as a bedroom were it to be used for that purpose. In the basement, they created two large areas of no particular purpose, and two small rooms, one qualifying as a bedroom, the other not (no closet). 

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Asch to Quora, experiment to sad reality

When I was a child in Catholic grade school, I was an altar boy. It was a big deal to my deeply indoctrinated mind, wearing girly frocks and lighting candles and ringing bells. Our pastor, Father Neville once took trouble after a morning mass to advise me that I was not my brother Steve, that I was not measuring up. Asshole. That really stung and in no way did it move me forward, especially not beyond Catholicism, as it should have.

One morning during a weekday mass we had to attend, my class sat in the balcony of the church, Little Flower, to this day still on 2nd Avenue South in Billings, Montana. It caters to the Hispanic community, and is quite charming. As an altar boy I knew the drills, when to stand, when to kneel and sit. We came to a part of the mass where we insiders knew it was time to stand, and yet my whole class just sat there, so I mustered all my courage and stood up, all alone, to snickers and oddball looks from our nun/teacher, sister Iforget.

I was demonstrating the courage of nonconformity in the most conformist way possible, by adhering to the altar boy code.

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Eurhythmy

The word above, “eurhythmy” is a solution to a clue in an anacrostic I completed yesterday. It is a new word for me.

In case you’ve not done an anacrostic, sometimes called just acrostic, it is like a crossword puzzle with the following complications:

  • The ultimate solution is a quotation from a published work. All of the letters are numbered one to however many (170 in this case).
  • There are clues to solve, and solution to each clue is spelled out on blanks, under which are numbers that correspond to the quotation, so that those letters are moved above.
  • The first letter to the clues will spell out the author of the quote and name of the work.
  • There is a lot of back and forth between quotation and clues, otherwise I think the puzzle would be insoluble.

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Anyone care to check it out?

I’ve done all I am going to do. It has to do with the fatal shooting of two Democrats in Minnesota, State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and the wounding of State Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, on June 14th, four days prior to this writing. The shooter is identified as Vance Luther Boelter, born in 1967.

Police received a call from the daughter of the Hoffman’s at 2:06 AM. They encountered Boelter in a parked car at 2:36 AM. They arrived at the Hoffman house at 3:35 AM.

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Some historic perspective on the carnivore diet

A commenter, Rob, wondered if we are not better off on a no-carbohydrate diet.

Could it be possible that a diet of no carbs is the healthiest for humans? Maybe early humans existed for thousands of years through ice ages eating only meat. Don’t they find fossils of animal bones butchered with stone tools and not much evidence of any other food? Our digestive system is very different from a chimps or gorillas which both are able to digest vegetation much better than us. Maybe rollercoasting insulin and glucose levels are the main cause of health problems?

My own opinion, not without reading over the years, is yes, we could easily survive on a no-carbohydrate diet. Having just indulged in two Lindor chocolate truffles (my ‘reward’ for a long bike ride), I can only suggest that Rob is correct, and that it would be just a tad boring. It so happens that I just read a piece by Gary Taubes, science journalist, who has been writing about this subject for decades. In his latest piece, Tales from the History of Carnivore Diets, he offers the following (rather long but riveting) quotes:

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The light(bulb) goes on! (Extreme censorship at Amazon. com)

We have in our kitchen halogen lights under the cupboards that are burning out, five of eight now gone. I decided to replace them, and went to the local Ace Hardware. There I found a single GY6.35 replacement bulb packaged and priced at $6.99, meaning that we would pay $55.92 to replace all eight. I purchased one at that price, and then came home and checked it out on Amazon. There I was able to buy one dozen for $9.68 total.

Are they of the same quality? I cannot imagine why not, but even if not, say they last only three years instead of five, then I will have to repurchase them and again I will do so at Amazon.

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Pop quiz (courtesy of Good Eats)

I watch a show that has been running since 1998, locally and then nationally, called “Good Eats”, hosted by chef Alton Brown. I just discovered the show this year. It runs in half-hour episodes, and while I don’t look to it for recipes, I do find it useful for cooking and grilling tips, and general information (like the difference between baking powder and baking soda). Brown has a delightful screen presence, so it’s been a pleasure to watch him age over time, to gain weight and then go back to svelte using diet tips I would throw out the window, but by which he lost 50 pounds. (Hint: Smoothies are not my thing.)

I tend to watch every episode, even as artichokes, beets and turnips are not of great interest.  But watching as I do early each evening (there are perhaps two hundred shows available by my count), I notice they occasionally (and subtly) toss in a movie or music reference, leaving it to the viewer to decide where it came from. Below are three I’ve picked up on, and I leave it to you to provide the reference. (It helps to have been born in the 20th Century.)

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