Of trees and firewood

This stack of firewood is the sum total of a week’s effort.I am not done by any means, as we normally go through a couple of cords every winter. By my estimation this is over a cord, but I have one partial and another full stack to to go. Note that a cord is 4X4X8, which is what the back two stacks are, roughly. Since the work is very hard I opted to finish the job in October, giving my body a needed rest.

Last year, knowing foot surgery was on the horizon, I put up as much wood as I could in a short period of time. That wood included garage scraps and pieces of willow and aspen (which do not burn as well as pine). We decided that for the first time in our then-twelve years here we would purchase a cord of wood. The cost was going to be $300. We burned less wood, however, and did not get around to purchasing it.

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Sunday notes

Demystifying Science: I stumbled upon what I consider a treasure trove of videos at the site linked to the left and also in the blogroll. The very first one that caught my eye was this one,  A Billion Years is Missing, featured above. I once read the works of Immanuel Velikovsky, who claimed that Earth had once had a near encounter with part of Jupiter that had broken away and eventually became the planet Venus. Poor Immanuel was loudly and publicly criticized and humiliated. He never backed down, although his daughter reported that he was almost suicidal for a time.

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Hiking the Big Hill

By: Dave Klausler

Three years ago, my buddy Ed and I turned back only some four miles into our hike up Mount Whitney. Still dark and roughly at Mirror Lake. Our legs had been absolutely fried coming down Boundary Peak, the highpoint of Nevada, just thirty-six hours previous. Neither of us were in prime condition, and it showed in lack of recovery and probably lack of initial capability. “I do not want to be one of those embarrassing pieces-of-shit who call in for rescue,” Ed said to me that early morning on Whitney. Yes, we could have made the summit, as uphill was not the issue but the quadriceps femoris were obviously still spent – revealed on any briefly hiked decline – and the upper reaches of the Whitney trail were said to be very steep; retarding and managing the downward fall is critical. “Okay,” I replied… we turned back. The side-trip to Lone Pine Lake on the return did little to quell my disappointment. I do not like to leave things unfinished (see this: Mount Katahdin). So, what led to the failure?

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Speaking of never learning …

I have a client of sorts, someone for whom I perform useful tasks. Since I am retired I don’t bill him, but every now and then he will send me a check. Recently he sent me $350, and I regarded it as found, or mad money. What to do with it?

We do not have cable and so do not have access to most professional football games. That’s OK by me as I stopped being a football fan back in the early 1990s. I was appointed “commissioner”  of a fantasy league and so had to keep track of the stats. I could have just downloaded them off the infant Internet, but doing that meant that I had to abide by rules I did not like. Our league had its own rules, such as a waiver wire and bonuses for things like a 300 yard passing game etc.

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Obama solves a manufactured crisis

The American health care system is easily the most expensive in the world, and one of the least efficient. It all goes back to the end of World War II, when progressive ideas were in vogue in most of the world, though not here. Countries around the world adopted various kinds of health care systems:

  • Great Britain chose a government-owned and run system where all costs are subsidized and doctors and nurses are employed by the national health care system. Coverage is effectively 100%. All injuries and illnesses are covered.
  • Switzerland chose a private insurance model, but heavily regulated the insurance companies, insisting that they turn no one away. Coverage is effectively 100%. All injuries and illnesses are covered.
  • France chose single payer insurance, that is, there is only one insurance “company,” the government. Coverage is effectively 100%, all injuries and illnesses are covered. At one time France was reputed to be the least costly and most efficient system in the world. I have not looked lately, as my “research” for this piece is limited to what I did around the time of the Affordable Care Act, aka “Obamacare”.
  • Canada chose single-payer as well. Its system is not as effective as that of France, and there are many complaints about long waits, mostly in Ontario.
  • Taiwan was a late comer to public health care. Its US-like private system was strained and inefficient, and many people went without coverage. The government decided to go public, and wanted to learn from a system called “Medicare.” That is not the US health care system for senior citizens, but rather the official name of the Canadian health care system. That became the Taiwanese model.
  • The U.S. chose private care given by private doctors and funded by private insurance companies. It was a mess, and senior citizens were losing their life savings due to medical bills. The problem was that private insurance would not cover seniors citizens, or made the coverage so expensive that few could afford it. In 1965 the U.S. Medicare sytem was formed, and all seniors in the country automatically gained coverage.

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A Barack Obama Primer, Part II

I recently put up a post concerning Obama and a goofed up fake photo of him and his supposed Hawaiian grandparents. I did not mention in the piece that I suspected that Obama has been given a fake background and a fake family, all put in place once it was decided that he would be a useful tool as president. Set all of that aside for the moment. Also set aside, please, the discussion that ensued about Michelle Obama being a transgender, or at least a cross-dresser, and Obama’s gay lover. We can only speculate about such matters, and it does none of us any good.

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Even Glacier National Park Wilderness Can’t Escape the Hubris and Wrath of the Man-Gods

By: Steve Kelly

Note: See video at end of this piece for information on fishing, hiking and camping at Gunsight Lake.

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It’s been decided.  Glacier National Park won’t be deterred from sprinting ahead with its grand experiment to use poison to kill rainbow trout planted in Gunsight Lake a century ago.  Back then, Gunsight Lake had no fish. 

Rather than restore Gunsight to its original (fishless) condition, Park managers want to introduce three new species: bull trout, cutthroat trout hybrids (whatever that is exactly) and mountain whitefish. What could possibly go wrong with an experiment so grand as this?

Does anyone remember what happened to the kokanee salmon in Flathead Lake? I sure do.  They all died when Montana Department of Fish Wildlife and Parks broke the delicate food chain when they introduced mysis shrimp to engineer bigger kokanee salmon. 

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A Barack Obama Primer

 

This series of posts on Barack Obama will not be sequential, and other things will interfere. I intend to keep the posts brief and deal with one subject at a time. I want first to draw attention to the photo above, supposedly taken after Obama had moved in with his grandparents in Hawaii. It is set in New York City’s Central Park.

(The grandparents are Stanley Armour Dunham and Madelyn Lee Payne Dunham. (A future post – those peerage names. Obama’s mother’s first name is “Stanley”. It’s Stanley’s all the way down!))

See anything wrong? I call it the “floating hand syndrome”. Do the measurements mentally if you can. We can see that Stanley’s left arm is hanging downward. I inserted arrows, one where the right elbow is, and the other where the left elbow is obscured by Obama’s right arm. I measured the distance from my elbow to the point of the opposite shoulder, and got 27 inches. If my forearm, hand and fingers were that long, my arm would hang down to the middle of my calf.

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Hiatus? Nah …

I listen more than I should to Conan O’Brien, whose father once said to him after he had attained great success as a talk show host that the success was based on a condition that might otherwise be “treatable.” His dad, a microbiologist, wasn’t joking. Conan says that in any other era, he would lack the basic talents necessary to live well and prosper. He would be doing grunt labor in fields or factories, and annoying everyone around with his humor. His would be a difficult and short life.

I’ve not been posting much here, and in part it is because I have removed the one topic that I write so easily about, climate change. Indeed I had gotten highly repetitive, and I could put up a climate piece with one hand tied behind my back. Conan has been asked about the current cancel culture and how humor has to be so carefully structured so as not to bring down the wrath of the embedded liberal censors all around us. He says that is a good thing, maybe somewhat overdue, as once upon a time it was too easy to make fun of gays, cross-dressers, trannies and the like.

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Things are slow

Our Internet went out last Friday, and CenturyLink told us that it would be back by today at the latest. It has been both an unpleasant and pleasant experience at once. I am reduced to doing anything online on my iPhone, which is difficult for me and leaves me dictating everything I see on the screen.

there is some humor in the situation. I was interacting with an oil and gas landsman. He was asking me about a bankruptcy in which I did some work in preparing assignments out of the bankruptcy estate. He wanted to know if I had the bankruptcy documents. Which I do not I told him that the case was so large and my part in it so small. I told him that the case I’ve gone on for many months, and that the person subjected to the proceedings had farted all the way. Of course I meant “fought it.” I’m correct in the dictation error. I told him that she may well have farted all the way, but that I was never in her vicinity and neither her nor smelled anything.

there are people around now, and I like this idea, I suggest that we don’t try to correct dictation errors anymore . Just let them be. People will figure things out, and in the meantime, where is humor to be had.

see now, there are many dictation errors in the last paragraph and a half. I just let them be.