- I now understand why so many of the early colonies in Virginia died out within a year.
- Do y’all set out water evaporators just to add to the experience of swimming through the air or something?
- My hat is off to you if you lived here before the advent of affordable air conditioning.
- Also, please don’t get me wrong. Virginia is a beautiful place, I just hate humidity.
- I’d like to say that my work today went smoothly and was 100% successful.
- However, I was taught to never tell a lie.
- I’m not staying at the fanciest or most expensive hotel in town, but I wouldn’t trade the service here for anything.
- When I asked about a shuttle to the airport at 6:30 tomorrow morning, the clerk said that they’d call me a taxi and the hotel would pay for it.
- I’ve never had that happen before.
- If I were 20 years younger, I would already be out enjoying Saturday evening. I am now, however, just going to clean up, find something to eat that I don’t have to chew too much, and crash.
Thoughts on the Day
Posted by daddybear71 on June 29, 2013
https://daddybearsden.com/2013/06/29/thoughts-on-the-day-146/
Thoughts on the Day
I actually made it through Uncle BadTouch with my dignity intact this morning.
I shared a row on my first flight today with Justin Bieber’s favorite stalker. I now know which hospital he was born in and his blood type. I probably could have lived without that.
A kid in the seat next to you, chugging soda and eating Skittles, does not bode well for the flight.
Airports are great places to people watch. You see a little of everything.
When I got to Norfolk, I waited for the hotel shuttle with a family of 7, with all the children apparently 5 and younger, who had their flight canceled. They will be continuing their journey to Hawaii tomorrow. There but for the grace of God go I.
I’m getting old. I walked past a breastaurant to get dinner somewhere else. I finally reached the age where I feel creepy around scantily clad 23 year old women.
Tonight I hydrate, for tomorrow I shall sweat like a hog. Although it doesn’t seem as sticky here as I thought it would be.
Posted by daddybear71 on June 28, 2013
https://daddybearsden.com/2013/06/28/thoughts-on-the-day-145/
Today’s Earworm
Posted by daddybear71 on June 28, 2013
https://daddybearsden.com/2013/06/28/todays-earworm-385/
Thoughts on the Day
- Remember how I felt good and productive yesterday? It was a temporary condition.
- As I pack for my trip tomorrow, I remind myself just how much I hate flying and airplanes.
- This is not a good thing for a guy who works for a large airline.
- I’m definitely going to do my best to get to the range next weekend.
- I need the practice
- I need the recoil therapy
- I need to spend the time with Girlie Bear.
- I need to get somewhere where the cellphone doesn’t work.
- Whoever ordered the climate from southern Louisiana and had it delivered in Louisville, I hate you.
- It’s never good for my outlook on life when I start looking at real estate listings back home.
- Know what will put a whole new spin on your day? Try finding a relatively expensive piece of electronics in the pocket of your pants as you’re transferring them from the washer to the dryer.
- Oh well, I’ll just have to make the trip without my backup battery pack.
Posted by daddybear71 on June 27, 2013
https://daddybearsden.com/2013/06/27/thoughts-on-the-day-144/
Follow-up Question
In reference to my post the other day about the New Black Panther Party member who was arrested for wearing body armor and carrying a revolver in New York City, Jay made a good point: Whether or not it is just or unconstitutional, the law is the law, and when we break the law, knowingly or unknowingly, we have to be prepared to pay the consequences. I have to agree.
But I do have some follow-up questions:
Do we, as people who value our rights and the rights of others, have an obligation to follow an unjust or unconstitutional law? If we are willing to take the consequences for breaking such a law, are we wrong to break it? From another angle, are we bound by duty and honor to break them in order to bring attention to the injustice?
My opinion, and remember, I’m just a schlub from North Dakota, is that we have a duty to bring attention to unjust laws, up to and including inviting our own arrest in order to bring them down. Martin Luther King went to jail for breaking an unjust law, and history is rife with people who broke laws for the sake of breaking them in order to bring them down. Of course, when we get caught breaking them, as Jay pointed out, we have to be willing to face the consequences for our actions. Even if we are breaking the laws on purpose, we have to be willing to chance decades in jail. No “It’s not fair!” or “I didn’t know!” defenses should come from our side.
I know, I know, put up or shut up, DaddyBear. I’m not at the point of being ready to put a gun in a holster and walk into a bar in Chicago, mainly because the mechanisms for changing their onerous gun laws are grinding their slow justice. But if those mechanisms should fail, one of the more honorable ways that we can fight these laws is through civil disobedience and by supporting those ensnared by them, even if they knowingly broke the law. In the extreme, we can become the ‘test case’ that is used to bring injustice before the courts.
Now, Shabazz isn’t exactly Rosa Parks, and I doubt that civil rights lawyers are leaping at the chance to take his case through the judicial system. But a case like his will eventually come along, where someone with an exemplary record is picked up because she chose to put a gun in her purse rather than a rape whistle when she went to the Navy Pier, or who used a gun to defend his family in Brooklyn rather than cower and wait for the police. Will we, even acknowledging that they willfully broke the law, support them?
I’d love to hear your responses. This one has me puzzling and muttering to myself.
Posted by daddybear71 on June 27, 2013
https://daddybearsden.com/2013/06/27/follow-up-question/
Today’s Earworm
Posted by daddybear71 on June 27, 2013
https://daddybearsden.com/2013/06/27/todays-earworm-384/
Recipe – Homemade Applesauce
Ingredients
1/2 cup lemon juice
3 cups cold water
10 pounds or so of fresh, firm apples, whichever variety you prefer. We used the kind-of granny smith’s off of our neighbor’s apple tree, which just ripened this week.
4 cups of sugar (you probably won’t use all of it)
Cinnamon and nutmeg to taste
Put the lemon juice and water into an 8 quart kettle. Peel, core, and slice the apples, and put them into the kettle. Make sure they get a coating of the water-lemon mixture. This will prevent browning. Once the kettle is just about full of apples, put the kettle onto the stove. Bring to a boil over medium heat, then reduce heat and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes while stirring regularly, or until the apples start to fall apart. Remove from heat and allow to sit for about 5 minutes. Using a potato masher or similar instrument, mash the apple mixture to your desired level of smooth versus chunky. Stir in 2 cups of the sugar, then taste. It will probably be quite tart, depending on the variety of apple you used. Sweet apples will require less sugar than tart apples. Add the rest of the sugar in 1/2 cup increments, tasting after each addition, until the apple sauce is at your preferred level of sweetness. Season to taste with the cinnamon and nutmeg. Put the kettle back onto low heat and simmer for about 5 minutes, stirring frequently.
This recipe made 8 pint jars and 2 quart jars of apple sauce, which were canned in a water bath. Total time was approximately 2 hours, including the time it took prepare the jars for canning and can the applesauce.
Posted by daddybear71 on June 27, 2013
https://daddybearsden.com/2013/06/27/recipe-homemade-applesauce/
Thoughts on the Day
- I was actually productive and in a good mood all day. It felt….. odd.
- What’s that you say? The effort you made me work on a Sunday to get you ready for isn’t going to be finished for almost two months? No problem, I’ll just put the clean-up work I need to do off for another month. Thanks so much.
- It is amazing how fast people, who normally move at speeds that would piss off snails, move when there is a big black thunderhead rolling toward them and they have a long walk out to their car.
- For once, the drivers in Louisville acted like sane, rational people while driving through a rainstorm. Again, it felt….. odd.
- If our green beans keep growing up their trellis at their present rate, I’ll be climbing them and bringing down a singing harp sometime in the next few weeks.
- Our first baby tomato is doing well, and we should have our first cucumbers and bell peppers in the next few days.
- Of course there’s a 40% chance of thunderstorms in Norfolk this weekend. All I’m going to be doing is standing out in the middle a big concrete pad next to a big aluminum airplane.
- Irish Woman didn’t seem upset when I told her this. She may have finally figured out how much life insurance I carry.
- When making and canning applesauce in June, it is a good idea to crank the kitchen ceiling fan to “Turbo” and open a couple of windows.
- Then again, who doesn’t like a nice schwitz?
- I love the way a thunderstorm and heavy rain sounds.
- Moonshine, however, feels the need to protect the family from whatever is making all that noise.
- A dog barking at the sky at 10 PM is not optimal.
- The whole house smells of apples and cinnamon. I ate a huge dinner, but I’ve never had such a case of the “Feed me!” before, at least not in June.
- Thanksgiving doesn’t count, because if the smell of roasting turkey doesn’t make you hungry, then you need to see a doctor.
Posted by daddybear71 on June 26, 2013
https://daddybearsden.com/2013/06/26/thoughts-on-the-day-143/
Put Up or Shut Up
Like a lot of Americans, especially those who opposed the election of Barack Obama, I was shocked by images of Black Panthers standing at the doors of a polling place in Philadelphia with a club. I was appalled by what looked to be voter intimidation, and applauded when the Department of Justice brought up King Samir Shabazz on charges related to the incident. I was also outraged when the Obama administration walked away from those charges.
The other day Mr. Shabazz was stopped by police in New York because they saw that he was wearing body armor under his clothing. I wasn’t aware that it was illegal to wear body armor in New York City, but now that I see it in the news, I’m not surprised. Police officers patted Mr. Shabazz down, and found an “unlicensed” revolver on him. Now, he faces years in jail for the crime of not having permission from the state to keep and bear arms.
Now, I don’t agree with Mr. Shabazz on most things. He has openly called for racial violence and is alleged to have intimidated voters in the 2008 election. I doubt that he and I could have much of a civil discussion about anything of substance. But you know what? That doesn’t matter at all, or at least it shouldn’t. He is my equal before the law. The highest law in the land, our Constitution, states that we are born with the right to keep and bear arms, and he has been arrested for doing so. He is not under investigation for a crime of violence, but merely for not having begged for permission to exercise the rights that were granted to him as he took his first breath, and we should stand with him.
If we really mean what we say about gun rights, it’s time to put up or shut up. A fellow citizen is threatened with loss of his liberty for exercising those rights, and we need to stand with him. It’s easy to support someone who looks like you, or believes the same things you do. Do we have the courage to support someone who we disagree with, who actively spouts hatred our way, when he is prosecuted for exercising those rights?
I hope we do.
Posted by daddybear71 on June 26, 2013
https://daddybearsden.com/2013/06/26/put-up-or-shut-up/
Book Review – Gray Tide in the East
I’ll admit it, I’m a history nerd. If I didn’t have to make money to feed my family, you’d find me in some dusty library or walking around old battlefields.
I really enjoy well done counterfactual history. Counterfactual, or alternate, history is a genre of fiction where the author takes a real historically significant event, changes one or two things in the narrative, then explores how things might have turned out. The changes can be subtle (What if so-and-so had zigged instead of zagged at the Battle of West NoWhere in 325 BC?) to the semi-ridiculous (What if racist South Africans invented a time machine and took a few cases of AK-47’s and ammunition back to the American Civil War and supported the South?) The best examples of this, in my opinion, are in the “What If?” series of short essays and stories, but there are numerous other excellent examples to be had.
In his counterfactual novel “Gray Tide in the East“, author Andrew J. Heller explores how World War I would have turned out had the Germans not invaded Belgium in August of 1914. You see, the violation of Belgium’s neutrality was the reason the British government was able to sell the idea of going to war, and British involvement, including a ruinous blockade of Germany, probably led to the long, bloody slog of 1914 to 1918. Heller explores how the war would have gone had Germany not had to contend with the huge, but weak, Russian army one side, and the combined might of the British and French armies and navies on the other.
The book tells its tale in a narrative built around several real people, including Charles de Gaul, Adolf Hitler, and Ray Swing, an American reporter who is given access to the fighting because of American neutrality in the war. Other historical figures are liberally salted throughout the book. Significant events in the story are discussed either as they happen in real time to and around the characters, or the characters relate them in conversation. This is very well done, but it could have been augmented by a more detached discussion of what was happening. At the end of the book, Heller has two essays where he lists out his sources in researching the topic and explains his train of thought in writing the story. If similar material had been interspersed through the book, either as separate chapters or in-line with the narrative, the book would have had a deeper dive in to the culture, technology, and politics of the nations fighting in the war. However, the way that Heller laid out the story through the narrative makes the excellent research he did shine through in almost every paragraph.
Overall, I’d recommend this to anyone who is interested in history and enjoys a good thought experiment in “What if?”. It was not a difficult read at all, and I enjoyed being able to get through it in a couple of afternoons. For a history nerd, it was a great escape into one of the more pivotal events of the last century.
Posted by daddybear71 on June 25, 2013
https://daddybearsden.com/2013/06/25/book-review-gray-tide-in-the-east/
DaddyBear
DaddyBear’s Den 