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Weekwander

I spent a week in Chicago (or started out there) to gather with old friends, some from grade school, some from high school, and one (my friend and Best Man Art) from Kindergarten. I rented a smallish car (a 2024 Corolla Cross, which I had not heard of before) and Art and I forged west to the town of Galerna, in northern Illinois on the Mississippi River. My old friend Rich (whom I met in third grade, as best I recall) has a place there. For three days we drank wine and ate cheeseburgers, played whiffle golf around Rich’s substantial house, watched the stars from his front porch, and laughed our asses off over old stories of school, The Fox Patrol in Boy Scouts, college parties, the Resurrection Hospital dish room, where most of us worked at one time or another, and much else. Rich took us all (there were six present) on a pontoon boat tour of Galena Lake near his house.

I’ve read in many places that bonding with friends is one of the best ways to keep your brain cells alive and functional, and now that we were all in our 70s, I took great comfort in that. Rich has been holding these gatherings for almost 20 years, and (especially in the last 10 or 12 years) the group has shrunk from 15 or more down to seven or eight, of which a couple couldn’t make it this year. Each time one of the group passes on, we plant a tree on the slopes of the hill near Rich’s house in their honor.

After we returned from Galena, I visited with my father’s youngest cousin Mary Ellen, and her daughter Mary Kate. They’ve been friends for a very long time, and both helped me piece together the Duntemann family tree back in the ‘90s. We laughed and remembered old times, like the freshman ROTC Military Ball that I was required to attend, and did, with my cousin Mary Kate on my arm. She was a beautiful girl (still is, in my eyes) and I hope it wasn’t a sin that I quietly neglected to tell anybody that she was my cousin, including all my nerdy friends who attended the ball alone.

Honor is good. I honor all my friends, alive or dead, as I will as long as I’m here in God’s beautiful and extravagant creation—and maybe beyond.

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The day I flew back from Chicago (October 2nd) was our 48th wedding anniversary, and Carol and I celebrated and had a nice dinner out together. Again, friendship underlies our relationship, and has always done so, across our 48 years as spouses and 55 years as best friends. Friendship, as I’ve said many times here and elsewhere, is the cornerstone of the human spirit, the anchor to which all other positive forces that act upon relationships are anchored. Marriage works—if you work at it, as Carol and have always done and will always do.

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Some time back I was threading my way through parts of the Scottsdale-Thunderbird shopping plaza where I don’t often go, and saw that the restaurant Casa Greeka was evidently closed. My guess is that COVID did them in, as it did in so much else. Their theme was Mexican-Greek fusion. I never ate there, but I did wonder what people of Greek heritage thought of the name. The proper name would (perhaps; I’m not Greek) be Casa Greco.

But it got me thinking about food fusion for a bit. How about this: A restaurant specializing in Irish-Hawaiian fusion, called Lovely Houlihan’s. Don’t fret if you don’t get the joke. It’s for old people.

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Yes, it’s true: I’m finally closing in on the last bits of my new novel, The Everything Machine. It’s the cornerstone Drumlins story, and will reveal (most of) the mystery behind the thingmakers and the alien minds that created them. If you must genre-tag the novel, I call it a Space Western, with a side order of airships and a whiff of Dieselpunk. Should come in between 120,000 and 125,000 words, which is 25,000 words shorter than The Cunning Blood. After I get that published, I’m going to work on nonfiction for a bit, starting perhaps with a Square One introduction to Windows programming with Lazarus/FreePascal, drawing on my parts of The Delphi 2 Explorer. I already have 7,000 words on that book, which I set aside in 2021 when I began The Everything Machine. There’s a lot to cover, especially for a beginner audience, and I don’t know how long it will be. I won’t know (as usual) until I finish it. Wish me luck.

New Year’s Daywander–A Day Late

But better late than never. I actually relaxed, played with our Lionel trains, and posted a few Odd Lots to Twitter, which I will gather into a Contra post later this week as time permits.

One of those Odd Lots posts went viral.

This has never happened to me before. I didn’t join Twitter until 2014, and haven’t used it as much as most users, especially the bluchecks, who more or less live there. I have better things to do than live my life on social media. I keep my Twitter account because every time I post a link to one of my books, I sell a few books. This doesn’t happen on Facebook, probably because my Facebook audience is relatively static, and I’ve sold about as many books to the people who read my Facebook wall as that static audience wants to buy. I’m ok with that. Saturating an audience is a species of winning.

Twitter is different. People who read something I post and like it can retweet (basically, repost) that tweet to their own followers, most of whom have never heard of me. If it catches their attention they can in turn retweet my original tweet to their own followers, and the chain reaction continues until it burns out.

This is not a good thing if the chain reaction consists of a Twitter lynch mob. That usually happens with political tweets, which I rarely if ever post. The tweet that sparked a chain reaction this time had nothing to do with politics. It was about food: A team of University of Washington researchers scrutinized decades’ worth of studies focusing on red meat consumption and its association with various illnesses, like cancer, heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes. What they found was (a little) startling: The correlation between red meat and cancer, heart disease, and diabetes was down in the noise. There was no correlation with stroke. None.

Their conclusion violated all kinds of conventional wisdom, which warmed my heart. I have some sort of genetic aversion to conventional wisdom, most of which is deliberately designed by those in power. I’d seen some research showing the meat-disease connection to be false. This time, people at a reputable institution nailed it for all time.

And it took off like an F-14. Before the dust settled last night, that one tweet got 823 likes, 295 retweets, and 16 comments, many of which I answered, spawning still more comments. Come this morning I had 21 more followers than I had before I posted the meat-bomb tweet.

No other tweet of mine has every done a tenth as well.

There were some grumblers and at least one troll, who claims that he lost weight on a high-carb diet—and stated that all books saying carbs make you fat have been debunked. They haven’t, obviously, but I’m letting him be him. Maybe he’s a metabolic outlier. It’s ok. I don’t block people unless they attack me, and politely challenging a tweet I post is not an attack.

I have no idea why that particular link started a chain reaction. I don’t really care. It’s how I build an audience for my books, and to a lesser extent, for Contra. It’ll be very interesting to see if it ever happens again.

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Yesterday was Public Domain Day. This year everything published in 1927 went into the public domain. The big fish in that pond is (finally!) Sherlock Holmes. The last Holmes story was published in 1927. So now the Conan Doyle estate can pack up their tent and go home. They certainly got their money’s worth.

What else is now free as in, well, free? It’s a decent list:

  • The first three Hardy Boys books are now PD. I was never a big HB fan, but I read The Tower Treasure and enjoyed it. Expect more HB adventures entering the indie pipe soon.
  • Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
  • The Jazz Singer.
  • …and a whole lot more.

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I begin 2023 with a new blog editor for Contra: Open Live Writer. This is a fork of the Microsoft product Windows Live Writer 2012, which was open-sourced some years ago. I tried that item back in 2012, but it was not “better enough” to switch. I’ve been limping along on Raven Plus, an adaptation of the now-defunct Zoundry Raven, introduced in 2008 but basically killed by Windows 10. Raven Plus runs on Win10, if barely, and in 2022 I got tired enough of its glitches that I spent some time trying out new blog editors. Open Live Writer won. I won’t fully endorse it until I’ve used it for a few months, but so far it’s given me no trouble at all.

Oh—and I no longer post to LiveJournal. Nobody was reading the Contra mirror I maintained there, and the site finally killed my paid account for nonpayment.

_…_  _…_

So before I forget: Happy New Year, everybody! My plan file this year includes finishing the fourth edition of Assembly Language Step By Step, and finishing and publishing The Everything Machine, the first full-length Drumlins novel. If I can nail those two items, I’ll consider the year a good one. Thanks for reading and don’t lose touch!

Odd Lots

Odd Lots

  • I got caught in an April Fools hoax that (as my mother would say) sounded too true to be funny: That Tesla canceled all plans to produce its Cybertruck. (Read the last sentence, as I failed to do.) I like Musk; he has guts and supports space tech. About his Cybertruck concept, um…no. It looks like an origami, or else something that escaped from a third-shelf video game. The world would go on without it, and he might use the money to do something even cooler, whatever that might be.
  • Oh, and speaking of Elon Musk: He just bought almost 10% of Twitter, to the tune of about $3B. He is now the biggest outside shareholder. This is not a hoax, and I wonder if it’s only the beginning. Twitter is famous for suspending people without explaining what they did wrong, sometimes for things that seem ridiculously innocuous. A major shareholder could put pressure on Twitter’s management from the inside to cut out that kind of crap. It’s been done elsewhere. And boy, if anybody can do it, he can.
  • Nuclear energy has the highest capacity factor of any form of energy, meaning the highest percentage of time that energy producers spend actually producing energy. I knew that from my readings on the topic. What shocked me is that there is in fact an Office of Nuclear Energy under the DOE. I’m glad they exist, but boy, they hide well.
  • The Register (“Biting the hand that feeds IT”) published a fascinating article about how C has slowly evolved into an Interface Definition Language (IDL). C was never intended to do that, and actually does a pretty shitty job of it. Ok, I’m not a software engineer, but the way to build a new operating system is to define the IDL first, and work backwards from there. C is now 50 years old, sheesh. It’s time to start again, and start fresh, using a language (like Rust) that actually supports some of the security features (like memory protection and safe concurrency) that C lacks. This is not Pascal sour grapes. I’m studying Rust, even though I may never develop anything using it. Somehow, it just smells like the future.
  • Drinking wine with food (as I almost always do) may reduce your chances of developing type 2 diabetes. It’s not taken up in the article, but I have this weird hunch that sweet wines weren’t part of the study. Residual sugar is a real thing, and I’m drinking way less of it than I did 20 years ago.
  • People have been getting in fistfights over this for most of a century, but establishing Standard Time year-round may be better than year-round Daylight Savings Time. I’m mostly neutral on the issue. Arizona is on permanent DST and we like it fine. The problems really occur at high latitudes, where there isn’t much daylight in winter to begin with, so shifting it an hour in either direction doesn’t actually help much.
  • There is Macaroni and Cheese Ice Cream. From Kraft. Really. I wouldn’t lie to you. In fact, I doubt I would even imagine it, and I can imagine a lot.
  • Optimists live longer than pessimists–especially older optimists. Dodging enough slings and arrows of outrageous fortune somehow just makes the whole world look brighter, I guess.
  • Finally, some stats suggesting that our hyperpartisan hatefest online has pushed a lot of people out of political parties into the independent zone–where I’ve been most of my post-college life. 42% of Americans are political independents, compared to 29% who are Democrats and 27% who are Republicans. I’m on Twitter, but I don’t post meanness and (as much as possible) don’t read it. And if Mr. Musk has his way with them, I may be able to post links to ivermectin research without getting banned.

Lots of Odd Lots

Hallowander

Halloween. Wow. It seemed like the Fourth of July was just a few weeks ago. Then Carol and I walked into Wal-Mart. We live on a street with only a few kids, and if memory serves we ended up eating most of last year’s candy ourselves. So we bought a couple of bags of stuff we wouldn’t mind finishing, if it comes to that.

And it will.

At Wal-Mart (and probably almost everywhere else in the retail universe) Halloween was already over, and shoved to one side of the Seasonal aisle. Many of the candy SKUs were gone, including every species of M&Ms but…popcorn. Huh? Popcorn flavored M&Ms? I’d like to say I’ve seen stranger things, but I’m not sure I can. (Ok, sure: Peanut butter-flavored whiskey is a contender, as is coffee-flavored Coke.) At least we got it cheap. And the rest of the Seasonal aisle–along with much of the rest of the store–was already full-bore Christmas. No surprise.

And still tiny radishes. That’s the only kind of radishes you can get at Wal-Mart. Back in September you could still get full-sized radishes at Fry’s and Safeway. Now everybody is selling miniature radishes. I like slicing radishes and covering the tops of our salads with them. Microradishes cut a little easier than big radishes, but you have to cut a whole lot more of them.

Oh–and Total Wine now sells a red blend infused with…habanero. Maybe there’s a habanero surplus because everybody with asbestos esophagi are demanding ghost peppers in everything. So the winemakers could be getting them cheap. (An aside: Witching Hour wines are decent, for cheap red blends. Why not get a bottle for your Halloween festivities? There are several SKUs. Just read the labels before you drop them in your shopping cart, ok?)

Maybe there’s a habanero surplus. I really don’t care, as long as they don’t start loading it into iced coffee. But I will tell you something else: There is a severe onion-ring shortage. Two fast-food restaurants that we haunt now and then haven’t been able to get onion rings for literally weeks. For Corleone’s, it’s been longer than that. A little sniffing around online tells me that the world’s #1 exporter of onions is…China. So the nation’s onion rings are likely as not sitting in that immense barge-clot that’s jamming up California ports, especially off Los Angeles.

There’s hope on that front. As usual, the problem devolves to idiotic regulation by government seat-warmers who’ll gladly collapse the world’s economy because a handful of whiners in LA complains that they can see containers stacked more than two high at the ports. If they’re on a ladder. And holding binoculars. Here’s a long-form explanation of how that was discovered and how it was (maybe, or might be) solved. Let us pray. I miss onion rings.

My old friend Mike Bentley posted a link to a stack rank of books about…drumroll please…the PowerPC CPU. My PowerPC book came in at #7. Mike’s was at #24. All those books were long ago and far away. Once Apple switched to Intel CPUs, the PowerPC went gently into that good night. That’s too bad; it was a solid architecture and deserved better. In case you’re interested in PowerPC books, you can get mine on Amazon. It’s a shame the mass-market paperback is now going for $877.95. I guess you’d better order the trade paperback, which sells for $4.75. A footnote: There never was a mass-market paperback edition. Maybe it’s a ghost. (More likely a daemon, heh.)

Carol has a recipe for beer bread that she wants to try, and we’re going to make it pumpkin-spice beer bread. How? By using pumpkin-spice beer. I bought a 12 oz can of Sleepy Dog Gourdgeous Pumpkin Spice Ale yesterday. You likely won’t see it in stores because it’s a local product, produced in Tempe, a suburb of Phoenix. Not sure how well it will work. I’ll let you know.

A quick aside: I’m still getting old coins in change at McDonald’s and other stores when I pay cash. The nation’s penny jars are still emptying into our outstretched hands. The other day I scored a 1969-S and a 1975-D in one transaction.

Speaking of stack-ranks, Google has a search-trends stack rank of Halloween costumes. We don’t see a lot of kids in costumes anymore, and it’s been a very long time since I wore one myself. I’m thinking a lot of these popular outfits are popular with adults. #1 is Witch. (My psychic powers predicted that one.) It’s an interesting list, and starts getting peculiar fairly quickly. #10 is Chucky, the serial murderer doll from the Chilld’s Play flicks. #18 is the 1980s. Ok, I could see the 1970s as a costume. (Maybe I wore a costume more recently than I thought.) But the ’80s? What is it? A pinstriped suit with matching vest? It surprised me that Princess was down to #30. Disney may have saturated its market. I had to look up “The Purge,” which took #38. And #49: The 1990s? I got nuthin’. (The site does not provide examples, just stats.) Oh–#59 was the 1970s. Dressing a kid up like the 1970s might be considered child abuse in some jurisdictions. And that’s as far as I went.

KBAQ, our local classical music station, is going to be playing Halloween-appropriate classical compositions all day long and into the evening, including a lot you may not have heard of. You can stream it here no matter where you live. If you like classical music, it may surprise you how many compositions are about ghosts, devils, death, and wizardry/witchery–or at very least sound like they should be. (One example is the waltz from Aram Khachaturian’s Masquerade.)

In closing, on this long afternoon of the creepiest night of the year, I present a recent translation of an ancient Halloween prayer that most of you have heard many times:

“From goosies and goalies and long-legged besties
And things that grow hemp in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!”

Odd Lots

  • Sandia Labs has invented a way to extract metals from coal ash, including rare-earth metals used in batteries and electronics. Furthermore, they do this using food-grade citric acid, which is relatively benign from an environmental standpoint. The treatment makes the coal ash residue much less toxic, and thus easier to dispose of.
  • It took a few seconds to decide if this listicle item was in fact satire, but it seems to be factually accurate, to the extent that facts are presented. Behold a stack rank of The Most Miserable Cities in America. Arizona has both ends covered: Bullhead City is the most miserable city in the state, but Scottsdale is said to be the happiest city, and Phoenix the city with the greatest job security. The Phoenix suburb of Gilbert has the lowest poverty rate, not just in Arizona but in the whole country.
  • A lot of misery is caused by debt. Here’s another stack rank of our 50 states (it’s a long piece; scroll down to find the full table) this time by debt per capita. Arizona is #42, which I consider pretty good. Wyoming is #50. My home state of Illinois is #4. and, as usual, the king in this wretched wreck of a castle is…skip the drumroll, please–New York.
  • Mary Pat Campbell operates a fascinating site called Actuarial News, which aggregates articles about economics, risk and statistics in many areas, including COVID. She’s an excellent aggregator, in that her capsule summaries save time for me by letting me decide quickly whether a piece is worth reading in full. Highly recommended.
  • Arizona has administered 8,197,928 doses of COVID vaccine as of today. 59% of the population is fully vaccinated, while 69.5% of eligible persons are fully vaccinated, including 88% of the over-65 cohort. Unfortunately, the state does not track breakthrough infections, which are a topic of great interest to me right now.
  • Every new Windows 10 machine I’ve bought in the last couple of years has pestered me to “get even more out of Windows” at boot time. You can’t kill the screen except to delay it by 3 days. Here’s how to kill it so it never comes up again. I’ve done this on three machines so far and it’s worked every time.
  • Antarctica just had its coldest winter on record . Average temp there went down to -61.1C, the coldest ever recorded. Russia’s Vostok station went down to -79C, (-110F) just one degree from the coldest temp ever recorded on Earth. Brrrr! As for fear of the Antarctic ice melting and killing us all, well…don’t sweat it.
  • From the No Shit, Sherlock department comes a revelation that full-fat dairy products do not increase heart disease risk. I’ve been following the high-fat/low-fat issue for 20 years, and this is not new knowledge. Of course, the knucklehead interviewed at the end said that non-tropical vegetable oils are even healthier than dairy fat. To the contrary.
  • A study performed by a Native American health service found that treating COVID-19 patients with monoclonal antibodies was very effective: Only 17% of infected patients treated in the study were later admitted to a hospital, and only 3% died.
  • Here’s another drug to watch for early-intervention COVID-19 treatment: fluvoxamine (Luvox) which is a well-understood SSRI antidepressant that also has anti-inflammatory properties. See this paper published in the journal Open Forum Infectious Diseases.
  • Merck has a new antiviral in testing with “phenomenal” success against SARS-COV-2 . It will cost $70/pill. Why is there a furious war being waged against ivermectin? It’s a well-understood and safe generic that costs $2/pill. Meanwhile, much of the health industry, including hospitals, clinics, pharmacists, and even doctors (who should know better) are standing around watching people die, even as evidence is piling up that ivermectin is effective against early COVID-19. Merck’s new drug may be a gamechanger, but the game is crooked as hell.

  • Since we’re talking about diseases, I’ll throw this in: Certainty is a disease. An interesting piece from Inc explains how certainty is a key element of the Dunning-Kruger effect. My own views go like this: Certainty and competence are inversely related. The more certain you are, the less competent you’re likely to be. Many years observing humanity suggests to me that the more you scream about how right you are, the more likely you are to be wrong.

Daywander

HugeHoneycrisp - 500 Wide.jpg

Carol and I went grocery shopping this morning, and came home with the biggest damn apple either of us had ever seen. It’s a honeycrisp, which we’ve had before, many times. However, none of them were ever like this honeycrisp. They weren’t labeled “giant honeycrisp” or anything. And while this was the largest one in the display, the others were just about as big. If you don’t eat apples very often, you’ll find a comparison photo between The Giant Apple and an ordinary Gala below:

Apple Comparison - 500 Wide.jpg

Wow. Just wow.

Yesterday, Arizona’s governor made masking optional, and allowed bars, restaurants, and gyms to open at full capacity. O dear Lord, the dudgeon; the moaning and the groaning and the predictions that everyone in Arizona is gonna die. Well, the graph of COVID-19 deaths here is down to single digits per day, and over three million people in Arizona have received at least one shot. The state is running some of its vaccine centers 24/7, and now anyone over the age of 17 can make an appointment to be vaccinated. No one knows how many people had a brush with the virus but never even noticed. It might be a lot, mostly younger, and now mostly resistant to infection. We’re far closer to herd immunity than anyone in the media or government is willing to admit.

I check that ADHS graph every morning. No one knows why we had the fall/winter surge with mask compliance at 90% here. This tells me masks really don’t help much. Some of that may be because masks don’t protect your eyes. More may be that the virus does indeed travel as an aerosol, which might be slightly attenuated by a typical mask–but only slightly. No one knows, including our supposed “experts,” who say whatever they’re told by the people who own them, and lie on demand, all “for the greater good.”

The media (and most of our elites) really doesn’t want the pandemic to end. It was a titanic ego trip for them, to pump out endless panic porn and watch people obey them slavishly and persecute others who were skeptical. There’s backlash brewing: CNN’s ratings are in freefall, and the sooner they collapse and go under, the better. Some in the medical community are now calling foul on harassing the general public. Cord-cutting may finish the job that the backlash began: Carol and I dumped cable TV and now keep cable service solely for Internet access. I’ve been investigating Internet Radio to fill the gaps. The units are basically low-end computers with network connections, and can be had for less than $200. Music is big, but there is plenty of news and weather if you know their IPs. Internet radio is basically the stake hovering over the heart of cable TV/audio, and the hammer is coming down.

Reception of our local classical radio station KBAQ can be spotty. It gets disrupted when a jet flies over the house, heading for the Scottsdale airport. (This happens a lot.) They stream over the Internet, and with an Internet radio, I won’t have to worry about multipath or other species of radio interference.

Since we’ve moved to Phoenix, I’ve noticed that an entire genre of computer retailers is missing: the box shop. By that I mean a place that would put together a custom PC for you. I had a machine built at Fry’s back in 2018, but Fry’s is now gone. I had a great box shop up in Colorado Springs. That’s where my current (aging) desktop came from. I need a new one, but if box shops still exist here, they hide well. Yes, yes, I could do it myself, and if I must I will. But having done it many times before, I consider it a bad use of my time.

Alas, the Thermaltake case I used back in 2012, their BlacX, no longer exists. That’s the one with two SATA drive slots in the top panel, so you can plug barenaked SATA drives into the top for quick backups. I suspect the BlacX was popular in the LAN party era, but like box shops, LAN parties are receding into the misty past at 40% C. Thermaltake does make a 2-slot external SATA dock, which I’m guessing I’ll end up using.

The pool water is now at 61°. We bought a new solar cover a few weeks ago. As soon as the water hits 70°, we’ll spread it out, and in another week or so the water should be at 80°, which for me is the lower limit of swimming temperatures. Winter here was nice, but it’s gone. The pool makes the summers worthwhile.

I tried rereading Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, but the 1968 Dover paperback I have is laid out with such small type that even with reading glasses, it gives me headaches. Ebooks arrived just in time for my old eyes. I also bought the NESFA Press hardcover of Believing, which is a collection of all the non-People stories of Zenna Henderson. It wasn’t cheap, but it’s a handsome book, and will replace several crumbling MMPBs from the ’60s. Oddly, it’s not on Amazon. I had to order it direct from NESFA.

And with that, I declare today over. Time to hit the sack. Much to do tomorrow.

Plaguewander

How serious is this lockdown thing? Well, I’ve won all 1600 boards on Mah Jong Titan. That includes all available premium board packs. If there were more I’d buy them. There aren’t. That doesn’t surprise me, given the work it must take to produce another 300 boards that only the occasional crazy like me will ever play.

I’ve played Mah Jong for decades, and not just to kill time. For me it’s a sort of mental palate-cleanser: I play a board or two when I need to shift gears from one project to another. When I move from working on Dreamhealer to some construction project out in the shop, I play a board to stop me from thinking about Dreamhealer, or at least to pull me down from obsession territory. It does work. I’m not sure why, given that Bejeweled doesn’t provide the same benefit, nor do any of several other games I’ve tried. My theory: Mah Jong depends to a great extent on memory. Playing well requires remembering which tiles are where on the board. You’d think that that would be no big trick, given that the board is already laid out in plain view. Not so. A few tiles stand out from the crowd. Most do not. If a move uncovers a four of bamboo, you had better know if there’s a four of bamboo elsewhere on the board. The games I play, at least, are played against a clock. You don’t have a minute to scan the whole board to spot that four of bamboo over in the lower-right corner. Dead-time adds up, and each board has a time limit. To win the board, you have to empty it within that time limit.

The creative life is all about memory. This is true of fiction, especially the fiction that I write, which is heavy on ideas, foreshadowing, and gradual reveals. Getting away from fiction means remembering other things for awhile. And because Mah Jong is a shallow memory challenge, it takes little or no effect to push a board full of tiles out of the forefront of my mind when it’s time to turn to something else.

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Carol and I did some shopping at Wal-Mart today. I don’t know if this was their innovation, but aisles at Wal-Mart are now one-way. This makes it easier to stay away from other shoppers, though it can be a nuisance at times. I tend not to go shopping when I’m feeling impatient. Mercifully, I was not feeling impatient this morning.

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While at Wal-Mart, we looked at Polish sausage and other sausage products. I typically eat a bratwurst or some other similar sausage for lunch. There was a run on such things for awhile, and I was unable to find the Hillshire Farms smoked sausage that I’d been lunching on for some time. We saw them at Wal-Mart today. I picked up a pack, and scanned the list of ingredients. Yikes; they now put MSG in their smoked sausage products. I originally chose them because they did not include MSG. Johnsonville sausage products, on the other hand, have been nonstarters here for years, because all their sausages contain MSG. Well, since I was reading labels anyway, I picked up a package of Johnsonville smoked bratwursts and scanned its ingredients. No MSG! So I bought some.

It is a puzzlement. Given how many people react badly to MSG, I have to wonder why sausage companies insist on using it. Does a sausage really taste better with MSG than without? I can’t tell the difference and never have.

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Cutting Board Before-500 Wide.jpg

54 years ago, I took wood shop at Lane Tech in Chicago. We built a number of projects, but the only one that survives is the heavy oak cutting board. My mom used it while I stilled lived at home, and I took it with me when I moved out and married Carol. So it’s been in use for all 54 of those years. The board’s saggita is now half an inch, so we flipped it over and now cut on what was the bottom face.

Alas, the two outer oak layers on the board started peeling away from the rest a few years ago. Food was getting caught in the resultant cracks, and I was afraid I’d have to toss it out. Not so: A little careful work with my chop saw and some belt sander time yielded a narrower but now far more hygienic cutting board. This may not last, and the day may come when I can’t cut any more layers off the edges. Still, 54 years is a long time to be using an artifact that you built yourself with your own hands.

-…- -…-

My fellow hams don’t need me to tell them that the bands are dead right now. The very occasional sunspot is so small I often wonder if it’s dirt on some telescope’s lens. Propagation is lousy. Working Wisconsin was a delight. Working Seattle almost knocked me off my chair. But beyond the current sunspot dearth, what really annoys me is the noise level. I thought for a long time that this was caused by the crappy switching power supplies inside every LED bulb in the house, which would be all of them but two. (The two incandescents are grow lamps for Carol’s African violets.) So I did the experiment last week: I shut off every piece of electronics (including the AC) and every damned lightbulb in the house.

The noise level did not change at all.

I can’t shut off the security system and really don’t want to. But I’ve had security systems in every house we’ve lived in since 1990, and have never had noise levels like this. The houses here are widely spaced (this is the land of half- to one-acre lots) so I suspect I’m not hearing the neighbors’ stuff. All the more reason to buy a 12V battery pack and enable the Icom IC-729 to run on battery power. If the power ever goes out in our neighborhood, I’ll make a beeline for the shack, to see if the noise level drops. That won’t help me work Wisconsin once the power comes back on, but at least it’ll narrow down the culprit list a little.

-…- -…-

Dreamhealer is coming along. I’m still doing some edits, but in truth, I’m waiting for the artist to finish the cover. I was going to release it at LibertyCon in June, but there will be no LibertyCon this year. My deadline, being dead, no longer has much force.

-…- -…-

Arizona is opening up. Carol’s going to her hairdresser to get her hair done on Tuesday for the first time in quite awhile. The next time I need a haircut (I know, I know, during the next Ice Age) I’ll be doing the same thing. We’re being careful, but we’re no longer cowering at home. I’m watching Arizona stats for a number of reasons, the main one being that we’re already most of the way to a long hot summer. Viruses in the Sun die in seconds. No data on how long they last in triple-digit air out of direct sunlight, but I suspect it shortens their viable stage by a lot. Viral load is, as best we can tell, a factor. So we don’t go to concerts or political rallies. (Actually, I have never gone to a political rally. Viruses are not the reason.) We used to go to sit-down restaurants maybe once a month. We have carryout service accounts now and know how to use them. Total Wine is open, as are most other stores that we frequent. My motto remains what it is and has always been:

All will be well. And all will be well. And every damfool thing in the universe will be well!

Friday Night Locust Report

Carol was running out of cottage cheese, which she eats every day for breakfast. We shopped last weekend and forgot to get it, so I cruised up 64th Street to Greenway, where there are two supermarkets: Fry’s (the local Kroger chain) and Safeway. We were also out of milk, and since we still have half a box of corn flakes I figured I’d get a half gallon, which would see the corn flakes through to their final destination. We generally shop at Fry’s to get their gas points, with Safeway as a (rarely used) backup. (For certain things we go to Costco, if not as often.)

Well. Fry’s was a madhouse. I had to bring a cart with me from the parking lot. The store was busy when we were there a week or so ago. Now it was insane. I went to the back of the store to the dairy case, dodging frantic suburbanites with carts piled high with sodas, bagged rice, canned goods, crackers and chips, booze, and Kleenex. Nobody had any toilet paper in their carts, because there was no toilet paper in the store. There were a few packages of paper towels. No bleach. And (oddly) no vinegar.

There was no real milk. There was 1% and skim, which I don’t consider real milk. And there was almond and soy milk in abundance, but that is really not milk. There was no Daisy cottage cheese. So I picked up a bottle of the sugar-free creamer that we like, plus a pint of the expensive organic cream, with which we dilute the sweetness of the creamer.

The produce department was pretty bare. No fruit. Some potatoes and onions, plus plenty of certain vegetables that I’m not sure people ever actually eat, like squash.

I did not look for hand sanitizer. We have plenty of hand soap, and hand soap, being an emulsifier, is a better antiviral than alcohol.

There was plenty of meat, but our supply is still reasonable, and the last thing I want to be seen as is a hoarder. I needn’t have worried; I was surrounded by hoarders. The line for the do-it-yourself checkouts was long, but the lines for the real cashiers were considerably longer, I think because the carts were all piled eyeball-high with what their purchasers doubtless considered survival goods.

I still wanted milk. So after checking out at Fry’s, I went across 64th to the Safeway. Safeway is usually pretty quiet; so quiet that I’ve sometimes wondered why the store is still there. This time, it was–you guessed it–a madhouse. Same deal: Shoppers with carts up to here, the paper products aisle bare, most of the produce gone, and although there were some eggs, most of the cartons had been badly handled and had one or more broken eggs in them. However, they still had the fancy organic whole milk for $5.79 a half gallon. The cheap milk was gone. Surprisingly, they had at least the small cartons of Daisy full-fat cottage cheese. I grabbed one. I was tempted to grab two, but there were only four or five left, and I’ll be damned if I’ll be a hoarder. There are plenty of actors in this production of The Tragedy of the Commons. I refuse to be one of them.

So I came home with cottage cheese, milk, cream, and creamer. Four items. Now, Carol and I don’t eat much, and the fridge is reasonably full. I’ll probably visit Fry’s again this coming Thursday, and get some ham steaks if the locusts haven’t cleaned them out. We’re OK with toilet paper for awhile, because we get it in quantity at Costco, and picked up a big package about two weeks ago before this whole business blew up.

Which leads directly to the question: How long will this go on? The answer is pretty simple: It will go on as long as our wretched media continue to incite panic. Panic sells clicks. Panic turns ordinary Americans into hoarders. In other words, panic pays.

We don’t know the mortality rate of coronavirus. We can’t know it, because we don’t know how many people have it. Dividing deaths by confirmed cases may yield a worst-case percentage, but until we test almost everyone (which won’t happen) nobody will know the true mortality rate. Three quarters of the deaths in the US are from a single nursing home in Washington State. Fatalities are mostly people over 70, and among those largely over 80. Now, at 67 I’m edging into that demographic, but I’m a lifetime nonsmoker with no pulmonary issues and a strong exercise regimen. Carol and I are washing our hands a lot, and avoiding crowded places. There’s not a great deal more we can do.

What we will not do is panic. Nor will we hoard. Nor (I think) will we ever watch or read mainstream media news again. I’m smart enough to know when I’m being played for a…locust. Not gonna happen.