I thought he was a pretty cool dude and a great actor. Not anymore. This grandstanding jackass needs to go suck a fat one. It’s not like his wife’s medical issues haven’t been the known topic of conversation, comedic or otherwise, for years. But when you’re three inches taller than the target in an auditorium full of famous people, why not go ahead show off for the camera? Maybe the antidepressant effect is waning, but there’s no excuse. Go ahead strutting around like you own the place, being a total asshole.
Your acting career is over as far as I am concerned, fuckwit.
Then they let the fuckass walk up onstage and accept an award ten minutes later. I’ve been pretty much done with Hollyweird for quite some time. Now it’s official.
It took nine years from groundbreaking, to get it right, after Francie said we needed a pond. As a pro in the industry, my friend Joe will attest to the challenging aspects of stone masonry, but that was not the most difficult part of creating this little hole-in-the-ground ecosystem. Keeping the water inside of it was always the biggest problem forming a uniquely shaped liner like this. Search “pond” for all the details from years past if you’re interested. The final word is a product called “Pond Armor™,” It’s a 2-part epoxy paint, designed specifically for this purpose.
Downtime in the off-season over the past four years involved re-coating the liner with numerous layers of truck bed liner to build a sufficiently stable base for supporting the final Pond Armor top coat. I tried the stuff at one point five years ago before it was ready, and failed miserably. The epoxy forms a hard plastic-like surface. But it cracked and leaked badly that first time because the base was not solid enough yet. Time will tell if we have it right for the long term. It hasn’t leaked much the past couple years, as the liner improved. It’s looking really water-tight prior to this year’s fill-up.
The biggest Pond Armor issue is the difficulty in working with it. I spent the entire day yesterday making quite the mess, resting in-between mixing six separate batches to apply in the 20-30 minutes it takes to start setting. It’s thick and difficult to brush on. $350 for enough to do a proper double-coat on this particular project is a not insignificant expense, to me. After coming this far over the years, I may do it again next spring, just for insurance.
The previous post alluded to how the social media industry protects and fuels their business enabling entertainers to scrape money off the bottom of the Internet trashcan. The problem with all these money-for-nothing schemes is an irreconcilable imbalance between the number of people going after easy, legal online money and the overall supply of it in viewer’s pockets. It’s a really big game in the good ‘ol US of A: Make it Internet easy and cheap, grab the gold and keep them coming back.
Supply and demand concepts apply to all sorts of things in the economic sphere. Americans seem to have plenty to waste on entertainment, so the demand is insatiable. The scam/grift squeeze moves up to middle management in high-speed digital communications entertainment these days. Now every Tom, Dick and Harry is doing a podcast about everything imaginable and most every broadcast outlet streams Youtube™ channels sucking up advert pennies around the clock. That’s just the news and infotainment crap.
Streaming services are little removed from last century coal company Pinkerton’s pushing striking miners off the tracks by force when it comes to the big players like musicians and Hollywood types. You wanna work here, you gotta shop at the company store. They just do it with a keyboard nowadays. Kanye’s trying to fight back, oblivious to the fact that he is just as fucked as everybody else here in Corporate America.
Good luck, but I don’t think the Internet is going away any time soon.
Interesting how pandemic suppression tactics seem to follow economic indicators in this country. Things get serious only when the oligarch’s revenue stream is interrupted. The big difference between this year and 2020 is how the grocery store shelves are being emptied this time around not from panic buying, but a lack of staffers and truck drivers to keep them stocked. That’s a real indicator. If you were scared at the outset of the pandemic nutbuggery, buckle up.
Even more telling, here in Colorado, some of those short-staffed workers finally got around to telling the company what they really think about it. Kroger doesn’t agree, now they are on strike. I only hope this marks the beginning of a nationwide revolt against these greedy bastards practicing their Trump-inspired economics, sucking the life out of this nation.
Essential workers only become so, when the oligarch’s revenue stream gets interrupted.
The basic principle/engineering appears sound and seems to work exceedingly well. I haven’t seen any real performance tech specs, but they must be quite efficient. Running a 10/1 diesel/WMO ratio, not a hint of smoke was seen. I’d like 4/1, so we’ll see how it goes. They claim it will run almost a day on a gallon of fuel at moderate settings. That seems to align with the consumption rate I’m seeing initially. There were a couple of extra reasons* for how long I took to put this one together. The main issue I saw was some of the cheesy components included in this particular kit. Tell me how anyone is using this clamp for anything except scamming their customers. Controllers are an issue, and probably the only real shopping point differentiating them as far as I can tell. Most if not all of the accessory materials in the kit are inferior quality. They’re certainly not going to supply pro-grade residential install parts, so perhaps that’s where it translates to the cheap *Chinese diesel heater product category (Webasto knockoff).
It took awhile to gather and fab parts. The fuel line connections seemed iffy, to me. A nylon tube stuck in a rubber tube held with a clamp might work for awhile, so we’ll see how it goes. The air intake tubes are what came with a Fluval FX40 fish filter. That needed upgraded for the aquarium, so it was on-hand and just the right size for a Webasto intake. Exhaust was cobbed up in a few hours of welding from a scrapped desk frame and some steel conduit. The long side is about ten feet overall length, with both intake and exhaust a mm or 2 larger in diameter and thicker gauge than the supplied tin-foil-thin parts. It runs up to around 500° at the port, so I put a 90° bend outside pointing it toward the corner to protect the bushes. A couple pieces of 3/4″ plywood with appropriate holes guide things through the wall ducts.
Fuel and electrical is straightforward: batteries, and related bits plus a tank, tubing and fittings. They include a 10L tank I deemed insufficient for this application. Five gallons and gravity feed with a proper filter makes the fuel supply fairly bulletproof and good for at least a couple days before needing re-filled. Even the fuel petcock I got from a different (Chinese) Amazon source leaked. I am so done with China. Good batteries are the most expensive pieces, by far. There’s room for 4 or 5 of them behind the TV without the CO2 tank there, so I’ll need to do some runtime tests. The cool part was how the whole system integrated more-or-less seamlessly and hidden from view, customized for what we had to work with around that corner. of the house. The bedroom bay window provided a convenient outside place to hang the fuel tank sheltered from sun and rain, hidden behind lilac bushes.
Pumps are noisy and the exhaust makes a wooshing sound like a vacuum cleaner, so the supplied mufflers are probably not useful for much except restricting flow. The heat shields and ceramic insulation was probably overkill, but I didn’t know how hot they ran until after it was in and running. The supplied so-called air filter components will have to suffice temporarily, until proper units arrive. They were ordered two months ago. The vendor says supply chain bottleneck is slowing their pipeline. That could ostensibly be the other reason* held against the schedule. Fortunately I managed to fabricate the most important parts from stuff already on-hand. The extra cooling fans circulating warm air down from the cubby holes are probably unnecessary, but with a 400°f steel tube running through there it does get warm and adds a bit more warm air circulation.
It’s not gonna keep the basement toasty in sub-zero temps. But piggybacked on available APC UPS units, should have enough electrons stored to keep it livable and the aquariums liquid though an extended cold weather electrical outage. I’ll put a solar panel up on the shed to charge the batteries at some point. That battery bank will eventually grow to become integrated with the panels already on the house. Our grid’s winterized, but that’s not the only threat to it. We’re passing on some of what happened in Texas last year. Enough batteries, and we’ll eventually pass on the grid altogether.
Things were right with the world in Steeler Nation last night, despite slim-to-no hope for a wildcard berth. The Defense hammered Cleveland into submission once again, and MNF set the stage for a hometown sendoff Ben will not soon forget. A Jacksonville victory seems unlikely next week, but there’s another wildcard called Covid this season. Just remember an unlikely 2005 Super Bowl run starting with a 2nd year rookie quarterback on a wildcard bid.
In appropriate fashion, PBS and NASA teamed up to present the most comprehensive, information-filled launch coverage program ever. It’s a long sit for anyone not totally fascinated by space stuff like me, but the important part is pictured below. Webb Is up, looking good so far, representing a new, comprehensive, information-filled future for space explorers the world over:
Finding things I agree with in current events has become somewhat challenging lately.
I have some issues with him, like being the son of a South African emerald miner, pushing to open factories in the midst of raging Covid, insider trading and burning enough hydrocarbons in 30 seconds to heat a small town all winter every so often. But overall he seems to have right ideas 🙄. And he’s going against some of the toughest Oil ‘n Gas forces in the country.
Electric cars, space/starlink, tunneling – good luck, and go for it, Elon!
The job title no longer means anything. “Astronaut” is now conferred like so many participation trophies and honorary degrees. Pilots aspiring to astronaut status used to be a different breed altogether, amassing a sum total of technical knowledge and skill unparalleled anywhere in the world. Now they are just customers on an expensive amusement park ride.
The USAF Space Badge I was awarded in 1983 means more than this.
It’s been 18 years since I retired from the Air Force. They still let me on base, but being retired is an outsider position, with no real insight to what’s going on in the organization. This year’s Heritage Foundation report confirmed suspicions brewing in news reports for years.
“For decades, the perception of American strength and resolve has served as a deterrent to adventurous bad actors and tyrannical dictators,” the report reads. “Regrettably, both that perception and, as a consequence, its deterrent effect are eroding. The result is an increasingly dangerous world threatening a significantly weaker America.”
Old jets, new space, lotsa problems.
Being conservative hawks, of course they’re always lobbying for more defense spending. Playing catch-up will be a more expensive defense strategy, with less available to spend on it going forward. Chickens are roosting.
