Good News This Time

Posted on 2025/04/07 by Gunther

Well, I got some decent news for ya today…

Connie and Neil went down to Corkscrew last Thursday and got some nice shots…its getting to the end of the breeding season but the water at the two Lettuce Lakes is still up enough to  allow the waders to feed and so there was still a decent number available. 

Unfortunately…I don’t have those images for you today since Neil and Connie were overcome by life…but I do have a couple of quick ones he got out by the pond out back that I’ll get to in a bit.

As noted last time…they got last minute tickets to the National Symphony Orchestra and as I reported it was good…but then had a Sarasota Symphony concert last Friday evening. They had shifted to Sunday afternoon matinee performances a few years back because getting back home at 2300 or later is just no fun…but because of her Mastersingers commitments she couldn’t attend on Sunday. We left early, ate dinner at our usual Longhorn Steak House only it was pre instead of post concert…then headed over to the concert hall. We stayed for the opening piece which was a piece by contemporary composer Peter Boyer named Horizons and it was the best modern piece we’ve ever heard. Mostly current composers are into atonal and noise rather than music but Horizons was well worth it. Then it was the Beethoven 3rd Piano Concerto which was excellently played by the soloist…and we can now say that we’ve heard an Elton John piece as the extra by a classical musician…it was a jazzed up version of Bennie and the Jets and was actually quite good as well albeit unexpected. None of us were overly enamored by the piece after the intermission…the Brahms 4th Symphony and Connie had an early rehearsal Saturday morning so we left at half time and were home about 2200 or so.

Saturday she was off most of the afternoon for the dress rehearsal of the Mastersingers concert…then on Sunday it was Mass and the concert. Our original pans were to eat on the way home but Neil was feeling poorly all day with stomach issues so we just came home and ate some chicken noodle leftovers…it had Port wine instead of Marsala wine and mushrooms in the sauce and was pretty tasty. Along the way the other day when he was cooking it…he called it Chicken Port…we wondered what the basic difference between Port and Marsala is…turns out that both are sweet, fortified wines (fortified means they add extra alcohol)…but Port is made from white wine grapes and Marsala from red wine grapes. Then they’re both aged in barrels…typically those started as bourbon barrels since bourbon requires new white oak charred barrels which the distillers then sell to the rum producers to age rum and then they sell them to Port, Marsala, and Madeira (another fortified, sweet wine) wine producers and then they probably sell them to somebody else for something. Along the way the barrels soak up some flavors from the bourbon and rum and pass that to the wine.

Today we had left over pork carne asada with peppers and onions in corn tortillas…we had some of that on Saturday and kept the rest for today. And now she’s off to the Mastersingers rehearsal place…no more music for the season but they do have the end of the year annual meeting to go over schedule for next season and assorted admin business stuff. And oh yeah…we had the Lee Country inspector this morning to close out the post work inspection for the permit the HVAC guys had to get to replace our A/C unit last week. Turns out our 10 year old unit needed a new coil. They run $3500 and come with just a year warranty and nothing on the labor so it was better to just replace the entire unit and compressor…we got a Lennox which because of the way the coil is built will solve an ongoing problem we’ve had where the filter which sits at the bottom of the vertical unit gets sucked up into the coil area. The Lennox has a dual sided coil and the sides are much more vertical so that allows a better filter retaining mechanism.

Hopefully…the current stupidity coming out of DC from both sides will stop soon…but I fear that’s pretty much a forlorn hope at this point. 

Hopefully he will get to the Corkscrew images this week. With that though…we did see an old friend out at the pond over the weekend and a never before seen here at our pond critter.

Ragnar…the big gator we see…hasn’t been around in 4 or 5 months but he was out sunning himself the other day on the other side of the pond. He’s a big dude…probably 8 or 9 feet long and is never seen on the house side of the pond. The smaller two come over this side occasionally and Neil’s gotten some photos of them in the past literally 10 feet from our lanai.

20250405 Z8 LPR 8631.

Then there was this female Mallard Duck…we’ve been here a bit over 5 years now and this is the first duck we’ve sen.

20250406 Z8 LPR 8635.

Hopefully those two will keep ya primed up for more later this week…assuming he gets off his keister and finishes them.

Interesting things found on the net.

Strong Passwoord.

I knew New Zealand was sparsely populated but had no idea that 78% of the country had nobody living there…no inhabitants per square kilometer.

We’ve all looked up at one point…well most of us anyway…and beyond the Big and Little Dippers the most recognizable constellation is Orion which has the distinctive 3 stars in a row forming his belt. Those stars are named Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka which was one thing I didn’t know. The second thing I didn’t know about them is how large thy are. As you can see in the shot below…they’re about as much larger percentage wise than our sun as our sun is larger than the Earth. The first is a triple star system, the second a single star, and the third is a sextuplet start system (we knew about binary and tertiary systems but never heard of anything larger than that). Multiple star systems consist of however many stars that orbit each other in some manner with any possible planets beyond that. Because of the strange orbital mechanics involved…it is unlikely that any but a binary system would have stable enough planetary orbits (if they have planets at all) to offer even a capability to support life as we know it. The three stars forming the belt have Arabic derived names and were known to ancient Arabs as Al Niṭhām which means String of Pearls and you can see how that name came about. The three stars are 1200, 1300, and 2000 light years away and only appear in a line due to the vagaries of geometry. Orion itself is the 26th largest of the 88 named constellations…and contains two of the larger known stars…Betelgeuse and Rigel…and the stars in the constellation range from 500 to over 2000 light years away…the sword stars also include the Orion Nebula which is the remains of a supernova.

Here’s what the complete Orion Constellation looks like. Although it…like most constellations…looks like a 2D object…its actually composed of stars at greatly varying distances so  it only looks like what we call Orion when the 3D is compressed into 2D…and if we were elsewhere in the galaxy it would not be recognizable as the pattern is only visible from near our solar system. And that’s probably way more than you ever wanted to know.

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Cyas.

Posted in Critters, Homebody | Leave a comment

Bad News…and Good News

Posted on 2025/03/20 by Gunther

Ok, here we are the day after Saint Paddy’s day and it’s a beautiful high 70s day with clear skies, low humidity, and slight winds here in SW FL. But…it’s getting on towards summer when we’ll need the A/C. For that, Neil did filter and drain pipe maintenance items the other day and we discovered a potential problem with the drain system. Going to turn it on in a couple days and see if it’s really something we need a repair guy to come and look at…the house is 10 years old and 13 is the average life so we’re not there yet but who knows.

Anyways…we moved Date Night from today until tomorrow (Wednesday) for the good news below…Connie’s off to choir practice and then we’ll have leftover stuffed shells for dinner. Neil made the sauce but we buy premade stuffed shells and manicotti because they (like lasagna) are just too much trouble to make for two. We found a nice brand at one of the higher end stores here and always get 2 meals out of a $7 or $8 package. This time he made bacon, onion, mushroom, and green pepper marinara sauce instead of his normal Italian sausage just to be different.

(Short timeout here for preparation of an Old Fashioned cocktail…Connie’s gone so us fellas are on our own)

So…sorta bad news but there’s some good news in it as well (in addition to the actual good news). We were supposed to go to San Antonio on Friday for a Saint-Saéns Organ Symphony #3 concert, got the tickets right after Christmas and had flight/hotel/rental car we paid for as well. This morning Connie was just verifying the venue for the concert as the orchestra there plays in 2 different places and it turned out that after we bought the tickets they changed the program. Now I understand things like that happen…soloist gets sick, organ breaks or whatever…but really…no notification to ticket holders? The symphony (we’ve heard it probably 50 times around the world and use it as an excuse to travel since we like pipe organ music) got replaced with something we know of but at getting on towards $2,000 for the whole trip to hear something we don’t really care about seemed dumb. So we cancelled the flight/car/hotel and since we paid for refundable tickets for those are getting money back. She emailed the orchestra to see if they’re going to refund the tickets as well…it says all sales are final but we feel like if they bait and switch on the program audience members should get a refund. We’ll see what happens there. So sorta good news is that at worst it will only cost us the 200 bucks for the venue tickets…and also sorta good news is that we now have some free days this weekend where it was pretty crowded this week before hand.

And the good news is that the other day Connie happened across a reference to the National Symphony Orchestra (they normally play at the Kennedy Center in DC) are in town for a concert tomorrow night at Barbara B Mann arts center. So…we had already moved Date Night…she’s in a six week course over at church on Catholic doctrine…she’ll just dress for the evening and Neil will go with here then we’ll head down to Logan’s Roadhouse down that way for dinner and then on over to the concert hall. 

Neil his new 48 TB RAID array all setup and in operation…so the only thing left is to order another big hard drive for some additional backup. The new one make more noise than the old one since it uses full size rotating hard drives instead of the quieter slower spinning laptop size…but the old array was maxed out on size and was getting close to full…making it time to upgrade anyway. He doesn’t really need 48 terabytes at all…but that’s the sweet spot on price per terabyte in full size hard drives. He’s also got our taxes about ready to go…just need to go over them with Connie to make sure he didn’t fat finger any of the numbers as he typed them in.

She just pulled back into the driveway so I’ll be back later after dinner for some funnies.

Well…dinner was wonderful but after cocktails and wine I never got back to it on Tuesday…and then yesterday I got caught up in other things so didn’t get to it then either. However…I can confirm that the National Symphony Concert was excellent. Connie got dressed for Date Night before heading over to her course at the church…then after that we went down to Logan’s Roadhouse for dinner as it is close to the concert venue. Dinner was pretty good…much better than we thought it would be…and we got to the venue an hour ahead of the concert for a pre concert glass of wine and some of their pretty spectacular candied pecans…but unfortunately the candied pecan lady wasn’t there last night so we just had wine for her and some Jameson Irish Whiskey for Neil. The first piece was advertised as being based on slavery era spirituals and while the basic themes may have come from there art wasn’t spiritual sounding at all. All 4 movements of that piece were pretty musical and we enjoyed them…but they weren’t spirituals at all. Then Hilary Hahn played the Brahms Violin Concerto…she was a child prodigy who made her professional debut at age 12 in 1991 in Baltimore. We heard her play while she was still a teenager there before we retired and moved into the RV and have heard her a couple more times over the years…she’s pretty darned good. After intermission they played the Beethoven 5th Symphony…that’s the one that starts out with duh duh duh daaaa…anybody that watches TV or the movies or listens to the radio would recognize the opening notes of the first movement. The piece was again excellent although the tempo was pretty fast…in fact faster than we’ve ever heard the symphony…but conductors routinely ignore the beats per minute the composers have always noted on their composition…in this case it’s marked as 108 beats per minute (I googled since I had no idea what it was) and the conductor used 150 or 160 instead. The NSO is here on a 5 concert 8 day tour in southern Florida…the moving around leaves no time for rehearsals so it is the same concert 5 times and they obviously had completed rehearsals before arriving here. 

The other difference was the enthusiasm of the conductor…we’ve never seen as much movement and jumping around as he did last night; too many Red Bulls maybe I dunno…but overall it was a highly successful evening.

Let’s see…what else I got…

Oh yeah…up in DC the idiocy from both sides continues to mount. The President seems to have ignored several court orders and both he and other admin officials say that the courts have no legal authority to stop executive actions…but longstanding SCOTUS cases say that they do have such an authority so I guess we’ll see what happens there. Then there is the DOGE claims that there is massive fraud in Social Security payments which just isn’t true (or at least they haven’t presented any actual evidence of it beyond “we say it’s there”). There might be some fraud…but according to SSA staff it’s minimal and there are not any 150 old year people still receiving benefits. According to the left however…this is all an insidious play to kill Social Security altogether…ya know, “the sky is falling”. I’m sure the actual truth lies someplace in the middle. And then there’s Mr. Bannon who went on a podcast the other day and said that the President would run again and win in 2028…at least according to him they’re working on a solution to get around the 25th amendment. In reality…just like the statement on birthright citizenship in the 14th the wording that you can only be elected President twice is pretty clear and either of those getting overturned seems even less likely than if I decided to transition from being a bear to a new species…say a cephalopod…nah, it ain’t happening. In the foreign policy arena…the current admin is obviously throwing the Ukrainians under the bus and cozying up to the Russians…which is about as dumb as most of the things happening in DC.

Interesting things found on the net.

Dog dating service.

And finally…Neil’s fave one of these. I don’t remember using it before but when I moved it from Funny Pics folder into the Done subfolder the ‘outer told me it was already there so mebbe I did…so whatever.

Cyas.

Posted in Homebody, Technology, Ya Can't Fix Stupid | Leave a comment

Nothing Really Happening

Posted on 2025/03/10 by Gunther

Wow…a month since my last post and while I wish I had something interesting to blather about the truth of the matter is that I don’t. We’re just living life down here…enjoying mostly warm weather even though it’s winter and making do.

Connie’s had a busy time of it…she had a Fort Myers Mastersingers concert and between two performances, extra rehearsals, and all that pretty much took up an entire week. We went down to the Valentines Party at the Cape Coral Elks Lodge since ours is still closed…and there’s no real progress towards getting the plans approved for the place they’re trying to lease so management is holding some more discussions with other lodges in similar straits to see if something can get worked out. 

We got our dryer vent cleaned on a neighborhood special price, got one of our windows that had a busted spring mechanism fixed…and Neil had to replace one of his hard drives. He’s got an array that one of the 4 drives in went belly up, and it was getting short on space anyway so he bought a larger one that has more capacity. Getting data backed up, the new drive configured, and all the data restored to the new one then fixing all of the related backup tasks pretty much killed another week. 

We got the oil changed in both cars and a new set of tires for Connie’s Mazda CX-5.

Add in a Sarasota Symphony concert and a coupe of periods when one or the other of us wasn’t feeling well and…you end up being a month out from the last post.

Neil worked on our income taxes today…and we’ll be filing our last Alabama state return for 2024. The family timber company land was sold after a great deal of infighting starting in about June of last year. The two folks that manage the company are both older than we are and wanted to retire so they investigated a potential sale of the land and dissolution of the company. Naturally the few shareholders who hunt on the land (it was mostly used for harvesting timber and partly leased out to another hunting club) insisted that they were being “deprived of their birthright to hunt on the land” and figured the rest of us should subsidize their search for Bambi. We like venison as much as the next person does…but penalizing 100 odd shareholders for the benefit of a half dozen doesn’t make much sense…and despite saying they were ready to step up and manage the company none of the naysayers either have the experience to do so or actually stepped up to do anything. The sale finally closed late in the year and we got a nice distribution from the proceeds since we owned something close to 2 percent of the shares. That adds to the 2024 income tax bill of course but it is what it is.

We’ve been watching and scratching our heads at all the cost cutting and job elimination going on up in DC and have to admit that there is some validity in at least the basic idea of what they’re trying to do. Anyone with a functioning brain knows that every government department and agency has some fraud, waste, and abuse going on…but both sides pick and choose the most inflammatory things they can find to demonize both the departments and the other side. We agree that the country has a debt problem and an annual deficit problem…but the only ways that can be fixed are some combination of increased revenue and lowered spending…again, anyone who’s ever worked on a family budget and spending can see that.

However…randomly firing employees and shutting the doors at agencies one doesn’t like isn’t the way to go about it…and neither is issuing crazy executive orders to not spend money that the Congress has provided under their constitutional power of the purse. What should happen is that Teslaman and his organization should come up with ideas to increase revenue and cut spending…and then send that to Congress to actually turn into laws. Congress isn’t blameless here though…for decades they have passed laws that left the actual rules up to agencies and then those agencies change the rules randomly depending on who is in the White House. Congress needs to pass better, more detailed laws…and they need to learn to compromise and to realize that the reason there’re in DC is to get the country’s business done. They’re not there to demonize the other side and eat their own young…which both sides have been doing repeatedly since Jan 20.

Unfortunately though…I don’t see it changing anytime soon,

That’s about all I got for today…sorry it isn’t any more interesting than it is.

I did find a couple interesting things on the net though.

This one tells you how to identify whether a snake is venomous or not…but I have to agree with Pubity’s comment on Corrine’s post.

And finally…

Cyas.

Posted in Homebody, Ya Can't Fix Stupid | Leave a comment

What In The H E Double Toothpicks Are These People Thinking

Posted on 2025/02/11 by Gunther

Or actually…what are they not thinking.

I swear…when you get into politics, government, media or pretty much anything else that attracts media attention these days…you must have to get a lobotomy, forget everything you know about how things work, and just spout whatever line you want. Doesn’t matter which party or which level of government or media…people are just plain not thinking.

Around the old home front though…we had a 2 day trip up to Umitilla FL (northwest of Orlando) for the Elks Quarterly Meeting that Connie had to attend and Neil went along for a Friday morning drive around Lake Apopka Wildlife Drive and he actually has some images for me to post in a bit. Our reservation for a king bed room at the Comfort Inn in Tavares got hosed up…probably because they were fully booked and we got there about 2100 at night after a Sarasota Orchestra chamber music concert on the way. We ended up with a dual queen bed room rather than the king bed we had reserved…and Connie was all kind of PO’ed over that…the front desk basically said we’re full and don’t care. She’s right though…if you reserve and pay for a king bed they ought not to give it away to whoever wanders in off the street. Just tell them you’re out of king beds since you’ve already reserved one for those people smart enough to make a reservation ahead of time.

Other than that…not much else is new. We had our annual Medicare appointments and they told Connie to eat fewer carbs. So we’re eating a lot more salads and veggies and trying to eat less sweet stuff and cut down on taters and pasta. She’s lost a couple pounds already and Neil needs to check and see if he has as well. 

She’s off to chorus practice tonight…and has a concert of the Bruckner Mass Saturday and Sunday after next…Neil got a ticket for the Sunday matinee. They’ve got a dress rehearsal before the Saturday evening performance and parking there is a bit limited so she’ll go on her own on Saturday and they’ll go together on Sunday…probably eat dinner on the way home afterwards rather than come home and cook.

OK, let’s get on to the various stupidities…in the interest of brevity I won’t bother posting the link to the news article but all of these are from the last couple of days.

Up in NC…the governor is pissed that the legislature passed over the previous governor’s veto a couple of bills limiting the governor’s power. Now the new governor is suing the legislature because according to him he was elected governor and thus the people want him to have the powers that were taken away and because the legislature made a “partisan” decision. Sure…it was a partisan decision but that’s politics for you. The legislature passed the bills, the governor vetoed them, and they overrode his veto…because that’s the way it’s supposed to work. Partisan doesn’t mean bad…it just means operating by the parties principles…and of course passing those bills over the veto is certainly partisan…but they’re still duly passed law. Just because he doesn’t like it doesn’t make it illegal.

The President’s killing of USAID, stopping all federal payments, giving Musk access to various computer systems, and banning birthright citizenship have all been place on hold by the courts. We’ll let the legal brouhaha play out…but fi it eventually gets to the SCOTUS, especially on the citizenship thing…it’s likely going to be a 9-0 vote against him. Yes…I know they’re conservative justices…and that liberals are convinced that they will give him whatever he wants…but they’re wrong. Conservative justices read the wording in the Constitution for what it says…not what they want it to mean…and born in the US and subject to our jurisdiction (which means the parents can be arrested and prosecuted) is what the 14th amendment says…so it’s going nowhere.

Out in Idaho…the city of Boise converted a park with some tennis courts over to pickleball courts…probably because it’s a popular game these days and takes less athletic skill, strength, and ease of movement than tennis. But the folks in the article are suing the city over the decision because of…the noise from the courts which has an “especially intruding quality” leaving them “tortured” and as a result they’ve incurred $1.6 million in losses due to the value of their property and psychological injuries related to the noise. Frankly…we think they are someplace off the reservation. We have picket ball courts in our neighborhood and they are maybe 50 yards from our house. We leave the windows open if all possible because we like fresh air…and while we can occasionally hear the players hitting the ball…it’s less of an intrusion than traffic noise and mostly we don’t notice it. 

There’s this idiot politician…or is that redundant…who claims that “Muslims don’t belong in America”. He claims that Islam exists “for the sole purpose of conquering Christendom and ending the Jewish people” (obviously completely bogus) and, therefore “they” do not belong in America. Doesn’t care if they are citizens, born here, converts, or whatever…Muslims “don’t belong here”.

Out in the PRC…one of their legislators is working on a ballot initiative to allow the state to secede from the union. Seems to me that the Civil War essentially wrote the law on that and anyway the SCOTUS after the war was over ruled that joining the United States was not revocable.

And it’s not just in the US…over in the UK there is a woman who was in a hospital bed for 550 days with a diagnosis of bacterial infection. She’s been medically cleared for release most of that time but the system (remember they have socialized nationalized medical care…so be careful what you wish for)…and the system has been unable to find a suitable place for her to be moved to. Nonetheless…she was evicted from her hospital room, arrested, and moved to some other facility which may or may not (the article doesn’t say) be suitable for her needs.

Getting back to the mess in DC…Representative Rabin has introduced the Birthright Citizenship Act which “ensures that U.S. citizenship is granted only to children born in America who have at least one parent who is a citizen, lawful permanent resident, or serving in our Armed Forces.”. Now let’s ignore the obvious idea that this would violate the 14 amendment…but this guy thinks that he can introduce a bill to change the constitution. There is a way to change the constitution…but news flash…introducing legislation is specifically ally *not* the way to make it happen. That requires an amendment and that needs 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress and 3/4 of the states. Amending the constitution is admittedly hard…but it was specifically designed to be hard…to eliminate the idea that a small majority could change it. 

A judge today (or maybe yesterday) issued a decision that basically said the administration was required to spend money that Congress had authorized and appropriated. Nonetheless…both Mr. Musk and the VP said that the judiciary had no right to overrule the “legitimate powers of the executive”. Seems to me…and I know that Vance went to law school…the courts are part of that whole 3 co-equal branches thing and ever since Marbury vs Madison the SCOTUS has been and will continue to be the arbiter of what powers the other two branches have…its that whole checks and balances thing. The admin needs to go back and reread the Impoundment Act which makes it mandatory that the Executive branch spend the money that the Legislative branch approved based on their powers under the constitution. 

Now…that doesn’t mean that we should just spend more…both parties have been spending like drunken sailors for decades and we as a country have a budget deficit and debt problem…and it needs to get fixed…but this is the wrong way to do it.

Let me tell you a little story…there was this guy named Clinton who was President a while back…you may have heard of him. He ran on a platform that he would balance the budget so after he was inaugurated he had his VP head up a commission to figure out how to do that and once they were done legislation was introduced to achieve the goal…and ya know…it worked. He had several balanced budgets during his time in office and he went about doing it the right way. Mr. Musk and the President are right…we do need to cut spending but in reality we probably also need to increase revenue since the majority of federal spending is mandatory under previously passed laws. While we like tax cuts as well as the next guy and while it’s also true that the high earners pay the vast majority of the federal income…and it’s also true that lower earners pay less…the old “the rich just need to pay their fair share” argument is just BS. Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders want a wealth tax…not an income tax…but they’ll need a constitutional amendment to do that…and even if they get one the federal government is no more qualified to administer and collect it than they are able to deport 11 million or whatever illegal immigrants. Neither of those goals is achievable…as is going to Mars anytime soon or ridding ourselves of fossil fuels. But…Congress has the power of the purse and they need to figure out how to balance the budget. Idiotic tariffs or unconstitutional wealth taxes aren’t the answer…it would require a hard, concerted effort by both sides and anyone with an IQ higher than room temperature should realize that with 2 parties and their differing goals some compromises in both spending and revenue are the *only* way this problem gets resolved. Unfortunately…in today’s political environment compromise with the other side is a dirty word and usually a death sentence for your political career as the radicals on both the left and right will primary any legislator who dares to work with the other side…and since it’s the fringes that vote in primaries the reasonable politicians will get voted out and we’ll get another election that turns out not to be a vote for the best person but a vote for the least bad person…and that’s a hell of a way to run a railroad as the old saying goes.

Senator Klobuchar has called for bipartisan working with the other side…which 40 years ago was pretty common but is apparently a not allowed thing today. After her call…Salon had an article that says there is “no common ground with fascists”.

One thing that might not be stupid…the President has ordered the mint to stop producing pennies since they cost about 3 cents to make…and in actuality a nickel costs about 14 cents to make. This has the left all up in arms…again…because Congress has the power to define currency. That’s perfectly correct…and the President’s order does not eliminate the penny as currency…they’re still legal tender (just as they are in Canada although production of them has ceased there as well)…he’s just ordered the minting of them to be stopped. Speaking personally…we think that both the penny and nickel should be abolished and federal legislation passed that the price after tax be rounded up or down to the nearest 10 cents and that’s what gets charged…or alternatively make that true for cash transactions and leave the penny and nickel in effect for non cash transactions (this is what they do in Canada and the UK). Heck…if we only want to eliminate the penny just start making nickels out of the same material as the penny but the size of a nickel and that will cut down the cost of making them as well.

I get the whole cutting spending and eliminating waste idea…and the argument about necessary vs unnecessary spending needs to happen…along with the how do we increase revenue as part of the solution since cutting spending significantly is impossible unless we eliminate the mandated spending requirements in law and that’s simply not an achievable goal for either side. 

Finally…and I don’t have the link for this one…there was a TikTok video that contrasted a couple of women in what happened if you left a political party…the two women went through what happened if both were red or both were blue. If both were red…the one said she wasn’t a Republican any more because her beliefs no longer were the same as theirs. The other one agreed that they could still be friends and discuss things since they had known each other since the 3rd grade. Then they pretended the one was leaving the Democrat party…and the other one responded “so you’ve become a racist, fascist pig”. The one leaving said again…we’ve known each other since the 3rd grade and I’m the same person I always was…the other one said “I have a policy of not being friends with Nazis. Given our current political polarization and looking at it from a mostly towards the center viewpoint…there’s a lot of truth in that video.

Ok…that’s enough of that for today…these morons need to actually remember what they were taught in Civics class or read the constitution or whatever is needed…they don’t get to unilaterally change things just because they say so.

OK…let’s have some images…but we’re going to have a little quiz today. Rather than label every image…Ima gonna let you see how much you’ve learned from my previous posts and you get to identify them. I’ll label them with a number and tell you at the bottom what the actual answers are.

1. 20250207_Z8A_Lake Apopka_0277-DxO.

2.

20250207_Z8A_Lake Apopka_0308-DxO.

3.

20250207_Z8B_Lake Apopka_8205-DxO.

4.

20250207_Z8B_Lake Apopka_8188-DxO.

5. 

20250207_Z8A_Lake Apopka_0365-DxO.

6. Flight sequence…she was brining back some nesting material.

20250207_Z8A_Lake Apopka_0574-DxO.

20250207_Z8A_Lake Apopka_0575.

20250207_Z8A_Lake Apopka_0578-DxO.

20250207_Z8A_Lake Apopka_0581.

20250207_Z8A_Lake Apopka_0580.

20250207_Z8A_Lake Apopka_0579.

7.

20250207_Z8A_Lake Apopka_0528-DxO.

8. This is a new one you may not have seen posted here before.

20250207_Z8A_Lake Apopka_0460-DxO.

9.

20250207_Z8A_Lake Apopka_0431-DxO.

 

10.

20250207_Z8A_Lake Apopka_0832.

11.

20250207_Z8A_Lake Apopka_0753.

I think it spotted Neil.

20250207_Z8A_Lake Apopka_0808.

12.

20250207_Z8A_Lake Apopka_0685.

20250207_Z8A_Lake Apopka_0687.

 

 

Ok…got all your guises written down? Here’s the key and I’ll let you grade yourself.

1. Great Egret (black legs and yellow/green bill)

2. Red Winged Blackbird Male (red/yellow swatches on the wing roots)

3. Moorhen

4. Great Blue Heron (or GHB as we call it)

5. Anhinga Male (species dives for food and perches with wings spread to dry them out).

6. Osprey (sometimes called a Fish Eagle although that is actually a different species in Africa). Could be either gender…they’re identical in appearance and size and both bring back nesting material so no hints there.

7. Anhinga Female (brown breast/neck)

8. Gray Headed Swamp Hen (I am not sure I’ve ever posted one of these before so…)

9. Red Winged Blackbird Male

10. Bald Eagle…our national bird. Based on size this is probably a female

11. Snowy Egret (golden slippers and black bill)

12. Red Shouldered Hawk (reddish on breast/shoulder/wing root). This is probably a female since it was bringing nesting material back.

So…how did you do on identification? Let me know in the comments.

Interesting things found on the net.

Only in Japan…their culture is markedly different from western society. They’re one of the few countries that are allowed to domestically produce (final assembly anyway) the F-35 fighter and this is the first one they finished. So…naturally…they got a Shinto priest to bless it.

Image

 

Cyas.

Posted in Critters, Photography, Reality Based Blogging, WIldlife, Ya Can't Fix Stupid | Leave a comment

The World Hasn’t Stopped Spinning

Posted on 2025/01/27 by Gunther

Well…it’s a week past the inauguration and despite the hue and cry from the other side…the world hasn’t stopped spinning, the sun still comes up in the east, democracy as we know it still exists and the earth still isn’t flat.

That said…let’s see what really happened.

The President declared a national emergency and is sending military to help secure the border. He said he was going to do this and the troops cannot participate in law enforcement as that would violate the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. Numerous illegal immigrant activists have sued over this and I guess we’ll find out what happens later.

He declared an end to birthright citizenship…and to be honest he said he was going to do this as well. Unfortunately…it isn’t as easy as issuing an executive order…the plain text says that born here equals citizenship with a very few exceptions. His lawyers are going to claim that immigrants are not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” doesn’t apply because the illegals are still citizens of whatever country they came from. However…subject to the jurisdiction of means that you’re subject to arrest,  trial, and imprisonment…and that’s certainly true of the illegals…thus this EO will fail on miserably. My guess is that he will lose at the trial court (and it’s already been injunctioned) and lose at the Appeals Court and then either the SCOTUS will decline to take the case (my guess) or take it and rule 9-0 against him. I also think that he knows all of this…but remember…it’s never his fault and he never accepts blame for anything. Thus…even if he knows it will be overturned he can then say “See, I tried” and deflect blame to the courts. In reality…this EO would affect way more than just illegal immigrants giving birth…it would invalidate the citizenship of most people in the country when you actually look at the wording in the EO and think about how current citizens obtained their citizenship.

He’s fired bunch of Inspector Generals at various agencies…without following the law requiring 30 days notice and explanation of the reasons for the termination in detail. Not sure what is going to happen here…at least some of them have said they are showing up to work today and we’ll see what happens. He is perfectly within his rights to fire them…but he has to follow the procedural rules. My guess is that nobody bothered to research if there were actual rules so it was wrong out of ignorance rather than malice.

He’s deported some illegals…but not really many more than the previous administration was deporting. Again…he ran on this and is doing what he said he would do.

He’s cancelled DEI in the government and defined 2 and only 2 sexes. Again…he said he would do this. And to be honest…around here we believe in merit and not quotas so the way DEI has been typically instituted is wrong. We’re all for advancing people of any race, color, creed, or gender…but do it based on merit rather than potentially hire a lesser qualified person because of some quota. As far as sex goes…we don’t believe in transgender and in other than males and females outside of genetic abnormalities. That doesn’t mean any individual can’t dress how they want, modify their bodies if they want, and sleep with whoever they want…it just means that wearing a dress doesn’t make you a woman. All of those other choices are just that…choices…and we’re perfectly fine with whatever choices one makes. However…genetic males participating in female sports (and vice versa) is simply unfair.

Let’s not forget the outrage over the pardons of the Jan 6 rioters. I realize that the left is adamantly against this…but then they claim that former President Biden pardoning his family members is perfectly fine…and the Republicans claim the opposite in both cases. The real answer is…both Presidents issued pardons as one of their presidential powers under the constitution…and while one may not like it in certain cases or like it in others…that doesn’t matter a rat’s behind…presidential powers are presidential powers and not subject to media approval, congressional approval, court approval or any other sort of approval. Like them or not…tough nuggies. Personally…I don’t think either President Biden’s family or the Jan 6 rioters deserved a pardon…and I believe that the George Floyd protestors who took over police precincts and attacked federal buildings should have been charged with crimes as well.

There’s been a whole lot of hoopla over some of the cabinet choices…and again…a President deserves to have his or her choices for leadership posts. We remain unconvinced of the capabilities of some of them…but hey, the man gets his choices. We will be surprised if any of them except Mr. Rubio are still in their position in 4 years…after all he pretty much fires people all the time.

The wildfires in the PRC are still burning…and while we feel for those people a lot of their problems are self inflicted due to decades of mismanagement. It’s the people’s prerogative to vote in whoever they want in the state and establish whatever policies they want of course…but then don’t blame anyone but yourselves when things go to hell. Santa Anna winds have been happening for decades and blaming the fires on “climate change” while ignoring the lack of ire preparedness and building codes that don’t require fireproofing is just foolish…in fact it’s just as foolish as the building codes in Florida not requiring concrete block houses with tile roofs and raised houses in flood plains near the beach or rivers.

In short…nothing really much has changed in DC…the politicians are still being lying politicians and demonizing the other side and we don’t expect that to change. We really long for the days when compromise wasn’t a dirty word.

Let’s see…anything happening around here? Not really. Connie finished up her concerts with the Southwest Florida Symphony of the Beethoven 9th Symphony and they’re now hard at work getting ready for the Bruckner Mass in late February with the Gulf Coast Symphony. We made some reservations for a trip to San Antonio for an Organ Symphony concert and for Neil’s trip to Botswana next summer. Got the oil changed in both cars, had a couple of Date Nights, got our teeth cleaned and a crown replacement for Neil…and that’s just about it. Oh yeah…it’s been mighty chilly the past 10 days or so…we’ve had several overnight lows in the 40s and Neil has had more than one bike ride where he had to dress up like Nanuck of the North before heading out. 

Neil did get a very nice thank you gift from a lady on one of his photo forums. She wanted to transition from a Surface Windows powered tablet and slow spinning external hard drives for her Lightroom use to a MacBook Pro and asked for help on the forum with the transition. The thread immediately devolved into the typical macOS vs Windows arguments…so Neil sent her a private message telling her that either would be fine but if she did decide to shift platforms he would be happy to to help her offline with the transition. She eventually went with a MacBook Pro and SSD drives to store her images…the latter was the real issue with her former setup…the Surface Tablet was part of the problem as it is underpowered for Lightroom needs but the slow drives were the major contributor. Anyway…he spent probably 10 hours or so over a month on the phone with her and another dozen or so emails solving questions and issues with her. She sent him a couple bottles of bourbon including one that is up in the $80 range that he would not normally buy himself…he protested that it was too much and she said it was way cheaper than a paid consultant would have charged her (that’s true, a paid consultant she would have paid at least $1000 over the 3-4 weeks he worked with her). One bottle of Four Roses Small Batch and a more expensive bottle of Angel’s Envy Rye. 

We’re planning on getting down to Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in the next couple of weeks assuming the water levels have gone down enough so that the wading birds can get in. He’s got a request in on the forums to check and see if that’s the case. Hopefully it is and he’ll be able to get me some dadgum wildlife photos to post.

Interesting things found on the net.

Ya might have to think about the old nursery rhyme to get this one…and I suspect most millennials and younger won’t get it at all.

Cyas.

Posted in Homebody, Reality Based Blogging, Ya Can't Fix Stupid | Leave a comment

More Random Musings

Posted on 2025/01/14 by Gunther

Ok, lessee what’s been goin’ on since my last post.

Basically…nuttin.

We had (well, Neil anyway…Connie was tossing her cookies that morning so she rescheduled hers) routine dental cleanings. Neil needs a crown replaced but otherwise all is fine. She still didn’t feel very well so we cancelled Date Night last Friday and rescheduled it for Sunday since we were going to Sarasota for an orchestra concert anyway. Excellent concert…they played the Dvorak 6th Symphony which we’ve never heard (his 9th or the New World Symphony is the most popular of his works)…and they both enjoyed it so it will be added to our bedtime music selection rotation. In the second half…the opening work was the Ravel Piano Concerto in G. In the program notes it said that Ravel believed that in a concerto the soloist virtuosity should be highlighted and the orchestra play a minor part…and on that the concerto easily delivered as the soloist delivered some pretty fireworks playing. That was only outdone by the fireworks of her outfit though. She is a US citizen of Russian descent and she wore a relatively short bright pink dress with very low cleavage and let’s say a very robust figure…good thing for double sided tape as otherwise in her gyrations there might have been one of those ‘wardrobe malfunctions’ they talk about these days. She matched that with a pair of 4 inch tall neon chartreuse to lime green shoes…and while the combination certainly would have gone well at a party type thing it seemed a bit over the top for a concert soloist…but maybe that’s what the well dressed Russian piano player wears these days. 

This week…well Connie has been and will continue to be very busy. Monday she had Mastersingers rehearsal for their performance this week of the Beethoven 9th Symphony (that’s the one everybody is pretty much familiar with that uses Schiller’s Ode to Joy set to music in the 4th movement) on Friday and Saturday evenings. Tuesday’s she’s off (well Mastersingers at least but she does have a Ladies of Elks meeting and lunch followed by choir rehearsal) and then Wednesday and Thursday she’s got more evening rehearsals with the orchestra and the concert Friday and Saturday. 

Next week we’ve got her rescheduled dental cleaning and Neil’s crown prep and scheduled oil changes in both cars along with rehearsals Monday evening (Mastersingers) and Tuesday (choir) but other than that we have a slightly less hectic schedule next week.

Last week he got our new Epson ET8550 printer setup…it will print up the 13×19 inches and is designed for both normal letter/office printing as well as photographs. He did his first test today on the high quality photo paper and all I can say is…wow, that looks pretty darned good. We’ll use normal copier paper for everyday letters and bingo sheets and the like…but the more expensive (like $4 a sheet for 13×19) paper to print out some of our photos and hang them around the homestead. He’s gone through and picked out 35 or so candidates from our 2024 images and they’ll negotiate together to pick out what he wants to final process and print. Mostly we’ve just used their images for the blog as you know but it’s time to put some of them up where we can see, enjoy, and remember the places we’ve been. We’ve ordered some 13×19 picture frames and as soon as they do their culling and he finishes the editing and printing process I’ll post some shots of the finished pieces up on our walls.

And oh yeah…it’s the Presidential Inauguration next week too…and Congress will start to work on the President’s agenda…and the Democrats will complain about ‘the rich need to pay there fair share’ and all that jazz…but I would call their attention to
this put out by taxfoundation.org using actual data from the IRS rather than the admittedly (by both sides) carefully edited soundbites.

The top 1% pay an average 25.9%, more than 8 times the 3.3% average paid by thew bottom 50%.

The top 50% pay 97.7% of all income tax and the bottom 50% the other 2.3%

Since 2001…the top 1% share of total income tax paid has risen from 34% to 45%…all other groups percentage of the total has declined.

So…what I’m wondering is…why does the left and Democratic Party insist that the rich are not paying their fair share? Looking at income tax paid…they are certainly paying their fair share and more. Looking at wealth…yes…a lot of left people compare their income tax dollars to their wealth dollars and come up with absurdly low tax rates…but that is an apples to oranges comparison designed solely to stoke outrage. We do not and cannot tax wealth in this country…it is specifically unconstitutional and even to have an income tax required the 16th amendment back in 1913. Passing a wealth tax as Senators Sanders and Warren demand…well, in the first place it would require another amendment and given today’s toxic political environment that isn’t happening…but that’s not the real problem. The real problem is defining wealth.…that’s pretty easy with things like stocks and bonds…but how does one determine the price of a Picasso or Da Vinci painting…the government simply doesn’t have the technical capacity or knowledge to determine those things…and even if they did if the value next year is less does the owner get a rebate from last year’s tax due? Nope…they’re not interested in that…people that demand a wealth tax are really interested wealth confiscation and transference from the people that either earned or inherited it to use that money to buy votes and voters. 

Speaking of Presidential things…Neil found this comment earlier in the week on fark.com…he can’t find the exact site again to pass along but basically the article said that Mr. Trump says a lot of outrageous things because he wants to be on the front page every day and that the media puts him there because they want the headlines. He thought to himself that is pretty much the case. 

Now…we’re not really fans of Mr. Trump personally or as a Presidential acting person…but overall we like his policies better than those of the left which is what we got the last 4 years and would have gotten a lot more of if the election had gone the other way. But really…most of the things he’s said are just meant to rile up his opposition and are not going to happen.

Deport 11 million illegal immigrants…and yes, they are illegal, not undocumented. Isn’t going to happen since the government doesn’t have the capacity to do it and the courts aren’t going to allow it anyway.

Deploy the military to accomplish the aforementioned deportation…yeah, the Posse Commitas Act of 1978 pretty much limits that possibility. The Insurrection act of a little later does give him a little leeway in the event of an ongoing insurrection or emergency but again…the courts aren’t going to allow him much latitude there.

Making Canada the 51st state. Well…there could be some advantages to our two countries joining up as one…but there are also a considerable number of disadvantages as well. Should/could our two governments talk about it? Why not…but any joining would surely require a vote in both of the countries because nobody really knows whether either country’s citizens are interested in joining up…and there would be a lot of problems to be worked out. First…Canada has 10 provinces and 3 territories and that probably would mean 10 states and 3 territories or more likely 13 states rather than just one. There are two in our opinion insurmountable barriers to this happening though. First up…culturally the two countries are just so different that most citizens are not likely to vote in favor of it but the biggest problem is that of those 13 new states some would be red and some would be blue. The eastern provinces would probably be blue but at least 6 or 7 would be red and neither party is going to vote for something that gives more seats in the House or Senate to the other side. Given that impasse…this ain’t happening either.

Greenland…again nobody has asked the general population of the self governing territory of Denmark what they think about becoming a state in the US…and the last thing we need is another territory that is really an economic drain on Denmark. We already have military bases there and could easily negotiate for more so security is taken care of. Economically…US companies can already go there and mine their natural resources as long as appropriate environmental, permit, and agreements are hammered out. So…again, not happening and this is just a rile up the opponents thing.

Panama Canal…ditto…we signed it over to Panama and short of an invasion it’s not coming back…and we’re about as likely to invade them as either Greenland or Canada. I know that  he said he would not rule out either military or economic intervention in all 3 cases…but as the President he would be a fool to rule out anything at this point. Not ruling it out most certainly does not mean the invasion will start next Wednesday as a lot of the left media is screaming about.

I see that long time Washington post reporter Jennifer Rubin has resigned because…and this is her words…the owner wants to take the paper back to the center politically rather than be a liberal rag. She said that “the Post no longer safeguards democratic values”…when all Mr. Bezos said he was going to do was move the paper to the center politically but would still cover the news…ya know, do actual journalism instead of being a liberal mouthpiece. Methinks that news media being journalists instead of opinion writers is a very good thing and we should get back to it.

As everybody knows…there are massive wildfires out in Los Angeles burning up both the homes of Hollywood elites and the common folk. I’m not going to minimize the damage and disruption the fires are causing…but to some extent it is really the fault of both state and local governments. Let’s be honest…California has had Santa Anna winds, wet winters, and dry summers pretty much forever and the state has…for decades…not done the things that experts told them they needed to do to try and minimize those fires. Water management, fire prevention management, and firefighting management have for a long time been subordinate to their demands for climate change mitigation and other environmental causes. Yes…those things are important…but just like here in Florida where concrete block homes are very common to protect against hurricanes…controlled prescribed burns to remove the fuel, better funding of fire prevention and fighting efforts a opposed to high speed trains to nowhere would have enabled the fires to be less out of control than we’ve seen this week. Dry brush is eventually going to catch fire and burn…and you can either let it happen in a controlled manner when the weather is good or you can let it build up to the point that controlling the inevitable wildfire is basically impossible.

Posted in Homebody, Learn Something New, Photography, Reality Based Blogging, Ya Can't Fix Stupid | Leave a comment

Random Early 2025 Meanderings

Posted on 2025/01/03 by Gunther

Happy New Year everybody…today is Jan 3 and Ima following up a comment that suggested keeping up with just life. Neil has a couple of blog buddies…one a former and one a still RVer…that post daily and even the still RVer only travels a little and is typically stable at a single place working for months at a time so posts are really more life and what’s going on as opposed to traveling and talking about experiences doing so. With that decision made for me…let’s dive in (as another of his YouTube buddies says at the beginning of his videos).

You probably saw Alabama lose to Michigan in the Reliaquest (ne Outback) bowl up in Tampa on New Year’s Eve…they were pretty much doomed after the first quarter…two fumbles by the QB and an interception he threw along with a turnover on downs after a long drive let Michigan put up 16 points and only a pretty effective defensive performance prevented the damage from being a whole lot worse than it was. The defense played extremely effectively the rest of the game but the offense was to put it mildly ineffective when it counted. They made more first downs and out gained Michigan by 70 total yards but demonstrated a mostly complete inability to actually score points after drives. Neither team could make many first downs with both being in the 25% conversion range and neither made a 4th down conversion either with all 3 of Alabama’s coming with a chance to score including at the end of the game. At that point they were only down by 6 and after a punt by Michigan they had first down on their own 10 or 12 with about a minute and a half remaining. They very quickly Marche down the field to a first down at the Michigan 14…but were unable to score what would have been the winning TD from there.

This morning their QB Jalen Milroe announced he’s going to the NFL…but the trouble is that as of today he’s not really NFL material. He’s an outstanding runner but NFL QBs need to be able to read defenses, go through their progressions and find the open receiver. He gave up sacks on 5 or 6 plays with open receivers for big gains (and at least 2 of them would have been scores) but he was unable to work fast enough to throw the ball to the open receiver. He’s a long shot for an NFL career…lots of upside but he will need a great deal of coaching to turn him into a decent passer.

Neil’s not really sure about the new coach there either…he seems unable to make halftime adjustments and quit doing what isn’t working while shifting to something else either offensively or defensively…and in the SEC those talents are required as there are too many really good coaches who can adjust. 

All in all…their 4 losses this year were away games and the team simply wasn’t ready to play. Yeah…he brought in new offense and defense schemes and had to work with players he didn’t recruit…but really good coaches learn to adapt their schemes to what their players do well (see some guys named Saban, Belichick, and Smart for some examples). We’ll see how he does next year…but he has the problem of being the “guy that follows the legend” and a lot of the time that’s some tough shoes to fill and being the “guy that replaces the guy that replaces the legend” is really where you want to be. However…he’s won every place has been and a 9 win season isn’t anything to sneeze at despite the lofty expectations of the fan base.

On to the college playoffs…this was the first year of the 12 team bracket and the top 4 got a by to the quarterfinals over the holiday…and all 4 of those team lost. The problem is not the 12 team playoff vice 4…it’s how they are seeded. The SEC and Big 10 dominated the rules and established that highest rated conference champs got the highest seedings…but the seeding should really take into account a lot of other factors besides conference championships and records…strength of schedule, turnover margin, key injuries that will keep people out of the playoffs and a lot of other factors need to be added to the rules…but in this case money is doing the talking rather than how good individual teams are. Neil personally thinks they need to expand to 16 and get rid of the by games for the top seeds…play the first round on campus as they did this year with the normal 1 vs 16, 2 vs 15 and so on matchups…and then reseed the remaining 8 after the first round. This year the top seed Oregon had the hardest route to the finals and if you’re the top seed that seems unfair. That way…the top two seeds won’t meet unless it’s the finals. This is the way every other sport in the NCAA including every other football division runs their tournament. All of the talk about taking away class time from the student athletes is just hogwash. He’s also convinced that the Name Image Likeness (NIL) rules and transfer anytime rules are ruining the game in college football. Good players transfer for more money or for better stats if they’re not the starter…and it’s really turning the college game into a minor league for the NFL like Triple A is in baseball. There’s no loyalty to your school and team…heck, Miami’s QB played in their bowl game because he wanted to break the TD pass record which he did in the first quarter then he told the coach at half time that he would not play in the 2nd half…he should have been tossed off of the team and out of the locker room immediately once he said that…the boy has no class at all. Neil’s not really opposed to players getting paid…after all they’ve been getting paid under the table for years now…but team with a lot of money can essentially buy all the players they want. Ohio State did that this year…they’ve got the best team money can buy…and based on the games over New Year’s Day they’re the odds on favorites to win the championship.

Wrong…just wrong..

Let’s see…what else?

They skipped date night last week and this week due to Christmas and New Year’s Eve but might head out tonight depending on how Connie’s feeling, she’s been having stomach issues the past couple of days.

Christmas they had duck breast and New Year’s Eve they had lobster with stuffed shells with Neil’s Bolognese sauce with Italian sausage.

Gift wise…they both pretty much got stuff they needed…mostly when they want something they just get it. Connie got a new diamond tennis bracelet to replace one she broke a year ago and they both got a color inkjet printer…Neil picked one that will do 13×19 inch paper so he can print some of this photos to hang and being color Connie can do her Ladies of Elks stuff in color when needed. Beyond that…it was some clothes and bike shorts/jerseys, nothing really exciting.

You probably saw the news reports about the Azerbaijani airliner that was (most likely) shot down by the Russians…and the one that belly landed in South Korea killing everybody on board but 2. The latter reported a bird strike but never anything else and requested and was approved to wave off a landing attempt, make a U turn, and land the other way on the same runway (with the wind instead of into the wind as is normal). Then the pilot landed halfway down the runway with no gear down, never attempted to slow down via air brakes and overshot the end of the runway. The kicker was that there is a concrete wall at the end of the runway…and when you run a sliding airliner at 100 mph or so based on the video into a concrete wall the fuel in the wings results in a fireball and kills everybody on the plane. Now Ima just a bear and not any sort of engineer…but building a concrete wall across the end of the runway just seems…like a poor choice to me.

I keep reading how the President elect will be the downfall of democracy…but really folks…especially on the D side…just need to take a deep breath and calm down. Yeah…the man says a lot of things…and some of them are deliberately edited in news reports to say that he’s gonna do things that he actually didn’t say he was going to do. He says a lot of things to both rile up his base…and to troll the other side as well. He’s not going to be allowed to deport 11 million illegal aliens by the courts…and even if he was allowed to do so the government has neither the facilities or the competence to round up and deport that many people. He’s also said that birthright citizenship is illegal and he will executive order it out of business…but it’s right there in the 14th amendment and again he’s not going to be allowed to do that. He says he’s gonna lock up his political opponents…but again…courts aren’t going to allow that and there’s no evidence that can convict them of anything. 

And what’s with the whacko that ran people down in New Orleans the other day and the one that blew up the Cybertruck outside the Trump hotel in Vegas? Both were US citizens and military people…the New Orleans one was clearly radicalized into being a terrorist by something but the guy in Vegas apparently wasn’t…he was an apparently upstanding Army enlisted man who was on leave with a wife and a newborn child…so he drove up to the front of the hotel, engaged a timer for his bombs in the truck, and shot himself in the head?

Anyways…enough rambling.

All I got for ya is this interesting take on the number 2025…so more math nerdery I reckon.

Well…except for this which Neil found on one of the blogs he follows…it’s a bit risqué…maybe…but Ima gonna put it here anyway. Don’t look if you’re easily offended.

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He had to laugh when he saw that one.

Cyas.

Posted in Homebody, Reality Based Blogging, Ya Can't Fix Stupid | 2 Comments

Holidays and Churn

Posted on 2024/12/25 by Gunther

Wow…over a month with no post and that’s a rarity for me…but the reasons will become a bit clearer shortly.

First up though…it’s Christmas Day and here in SW FL we’ll have a 76 degree overcast day and duck breast is on the menu. Neil already made some really tasty cinnamon buns for breakfast and precooked the carrots as well as unwrapped the duck a couple days ago and put it in the fridge unwrapped so the skin dries out…that helps make it nice and crispy. He’s got some sweet potatoes to cook as well and they’re having a nice bottle of wine and then a mint torte from Swiss Colony for later on.

Anyways…happy holidays to all and we hope that all of you have a great holiday celebrating with family and friends. We plan to do so although it will just be Neil and Connie…but that’s the way it is.

Churn…well as one of Neil’s internet buddies who writes a blog as she goes through treatment for a brain stem tumor says…is the ability to write about basically nothing and make it interesting…so Ima gonna give that a try 

So…what’s happened resulting in no postings for a month?

Easy answer…December happened. After their combined anniversary dinner and Organ Symphony trip to Scottsdale last month Connie at least hit the ground running with music things…and they both had a lot of Elks things to attend to. 

First up was the Elks Friendsgiving pot luck at the lodge so some effort went into building a nice dish to take along…he decided on sweet potato casserole…but not the gooey sticky sweet kind with the marshmallows on top, that’s pretty disgusting stuff he thinks. Instead…he went for bacon and spices including some smoked paprika to add a little heat It musta been good since none of it came home afterwards. Then the next week she got hot and heavy into rehearsals for her Mastersingers Christmas concert with the Gulf Coast Symphony and doing Christmas shopping. 

Meanwhile…Neil got involved with helping a fellow photographer who lives up in NC make the switch from her Windows machine to a new MacBook Pro and get her Lightroom catalog and images moved over. She is a member of one of his forums and asked about switching there…and got a bunch of recommendations to both stick with Windows and also to make the move. Neil told her that her biggest problem was really slow drives she was using for her images and that switching to SSDs with no moving parts would solve most of her issues…and he offered to help her offline if she decided to switch. Her original decision was to buy a high end Windows laptop but it continued to give her problems so a week or so later he got this email that said “my new MacBook Pro arrived today…what do I do now?”. They ended up having 3 or 4 phone conversations and another half dozen emails back and forth but eventually she got everything moved over and is happy with her move although she’s still working on figuring out the differences between Windows and macOS…they’re not major but there are some things she needs to learn a new process for. 

Then there was the Elks farewell party at the lodge…the building we’re in is being redeveloped so management has been searching for a new place ever since February or so. Unfortunately they have a champagne taste and a beer budget and there was constant disagreement amongst management about not wanting to go to a “not so nice neighborhood” as opposed to “not wanting to overpay. Add in that management is adamantly against having a kitchen because the same 6 or 8 people keep doing most of the day to day work. We realize that and can see their point…but after having seen probably 75 lodges around the country in our RVing days the successful lodges have food available and are open more than 4 evenings a week. Our lodge is pretty small at 250 or so members and while everyone in management talks a good line about increasing membership the fact is that the Elks like every other membership organization is struggling…and they’re not interested in doing what might put more people in the door. A full service restaurant is out of the question but they’re even resistant to having frozen pizza and pretzels and other bar food which would let people get a bite to eat and sell more cocktails which is were every place that serves alcohol makes their money.

Anyway…we have to be out of the building by the end of the year so we also spent a day packing, taking TVs down off the wall, removing decorations and related tasks. Then we were supposed to be notified when the PODS storage container would arrive so we could go help actually pack it but nothing heard so far. We removed ourselves from trying to micromanage their schedule but told them to email/text us with when it was happening…and dead silence the past 10 days.

The lodge is closed for now…and management is advertising to people that we’ll be in the new location by March 1…Neil sez Fat Chance. It is leased of course and needs new flooring installed as well as some internal construction for offices, liquor room, and the like…and Lee County is very slow getting permits. First off they need to finish the plans, then get permits and when we moved into the current place each of those parts took a couple months…and then there are the inspections and that took 3 months for the current place. Last time it was 10 months before we could move in and we know that nothing at all will happen on the new place until at least mid January since it’s the holidays. We’ll be surprised if we are in there before June and even that Ima not betting on. We’ll just go to the American Legion post or our old Elks Lodge 2742 or the one up in Punta Gorda in the meantime. PG’s was completely destroyed in the 2 hurricanes that went by but they’re already back up and running with a kitchen and tent and making money…they’re open almost every day and with food that puts butts in seats and cocktail sales in the register…but nooooo, we can’t have those sorts of nice things at our lodge. Of course…they have a lot more members than we do…and their location on the waterfront really helps…but the biggest part of their success is food and more days a week. I understand the reluctance to put more work on a few volunteers and officers at our lodge…but complaining about shrinking membership numbers and telling members to go bring in their friends while ignoring the question of what do those friends do when they get here and refusing to do anything that will actually help solve the problem is just nuts. Neil and Connie have essentially become social members only…they’re happy to help out with specific short term projects when needed and when asked but neither of them is interested in the clique politics of management and neither is interested in coming part of management for the simple reason that officers are expected to to be there every day the lodge is open and spend some time on most days doing Elks things. We have other things in our lives besides the Elks.

Connie’s concert went off just fine…and then we stopped by Pinchers for some steamed oysters for dinner afterward…Connie was the best dressed person there since she was in her black concert gown although she did change to a lighter weight top to go with the long black skirt.

Meanwhile…Neil hit the 2,000 mile goal for yearly bike ride miles last time out and also made it to 15,000 miles since he started tracking bike miles in 2012. Add in another ~26,000 miles from his run every day streak from 1996 to 2012 and he’s gotta lot o’ miles on dem legs…and a lot more to go he sez.

The final big even this week was Midnight Mass yesterday…but here in God’s Waiting Room (FL) midnight means 1600 in the middle of the afternoon since a large percentage of old people don’t drive after dark and wouldn’t be awake that late anyway. And frankly…it was pretty much a disaster. In years past the choir always sang a 30 minute or so concert before Mass but the new choir director reduced that to a single Christmas tune with none of the classical music they always did in addition to seasonal tunes. Then he brought in a couple of outside musicians…the violinist is a volunteer who’s played with them before and he’s decent…but the French horn/trumpet player was…well, however much they paid him was too much as he was literally terrible. The director had zero rehearsals of the choir ahead of time and then tossed in a song they had never looked it…Silent Night only they sang verses in German and Spanish. Connie said on the way to the car that it was the biggest Charley Foxtrot she had ever been around. Neil told her that was being too generous and that even train wreck was too generous but he figured that Demolition Derby on an ice rink was about right.

The worst part of the night was the poor 7 year old violinist who had obviously been volunteered by her parents to play a solo of Silent Night before Mass. The lass was practically in tears before hand and kept telling her father and the pastor she didn’t want to do it but they essentially bullied her into it…Connie and Neil both thought it was bordering on emotional abuse and should have not happened. 

We finished opening up our presents here…Neil got some bike shorts and jerseys, a couple of pairs of jeans that will fit his now larger butt, and a knife honing tool for the kitchen. Connie got a diamond bracelet, a couple pairs of shorts, and some books she wanted. All of that for both of them was pretty much what they told each other to get…these days after 52 years together there aren’t many secrets between them and mostly they buy presents they would buy anyway as it was needed stuff. They also went to Bealls a couple weeks back and got some things they needed…shorts and slacks for Neil that again were larger and a couple of tops and a nice dress Connie found for her. She had a 20% off birthday month coupon so we saved a bunch with that…and it’s an outlet type store anyway so clothes there are pretty inexpensive.

On the photography front…we’ve started seeing a little wildlife out back now that the summer heat is gone and in a month or two it will start to be breeding season for the birds and I expect they’ll get out and get me some images for ya. Neil got his tickets for the trip to Botswana next summer…and I gotta tell ya it costs a lot for a round trip biz class ticket that far…but it is what it is. At least he’s not spending as much as the lady on the forum who is going to Antarctica next month. 

On the political front…the President-elect keeps making outrageous statements about what he’s going to do and what the DOGE (department of government efficiency) is going to do…cancel current executive branch departments, cancel birthright citizenship, deport 11 million illegal aliens, take the Panama Canal back, annex Greenland. Anybody with half a brain and an IQ above room temperature realizes that most of what he says simply can’t happen…they are either unconstitutional, require approval of congress (and that means 67 votes in the Senate along with a majority in the House), or are simply something that the government is incapable of doing. But as Bette Davis said back in 1950 in the movie All About Eve…(well, actually this is another of those movie quotes that is famous but never actually happened)…”Fasten your seat belts boys, it’s going to be a bumpy ride”.  The actual line in the movie says bumpy night but just like “Play it again Sam” in Casablanca…it never happened. However…if you actually watch Casablanca which is a really, really great movie…it’s amazing the number of lines from it that are pretty well known…a few include the aforementioned Play it again Sam” misquote as well as “We’ll always have Paris” and “Round up the usual suspects” and “Of all the gin joints in all the world…” among others. Anyways…we’ll see what happens post January 20 and I’m quite sure that it won’t be nearly as draconian and immoral as one side will say it is nor as great and excellent as the other side will say it is.

Frankly…Neil doesn’t think that either side is actually interested in solving the major issues we face these days…abortion, voting rights, gun rights. Social Security, immigration, border security, et.al. They’re more interested in (a) getting reelected, (b) being against whatever the other side wants, (c) demonizing the other side, and (d) ignoring all attempts to compromise in order to actually get something done. Both sides raise money and political capital over their signature issues and neither side is actually interested in losing their signature issues on something as freaking common sense as compromise.

So…how did I do on making nothing sound like something? Let me know in the comments…and I’ll try to do better heading into 2025 and not go a month between posts.

Cyas.

Posted in Homebody, Ya Can't Fix Stupid | 2 Comments

Scottsdale AZ Organ Symphony

Posted on 2024/11/20 by Gunther

Well…it’s Neil and Connie’s 48th wedding anniversary today and they just got back yesterday from a quick trip out to Scottsdale AZ for a Saint-Saëns Symphony #3 Organ concert by the Scottsdale Philharmonic…and while they were there they went ahead and had their anniversary dinner at one of the restaurants at the Fairmont resort there in Scottsdale.

Last Friday they went to down to the Barbara B Mann auditorium for an Air Supply concert…they were one of her favorite bands back in college days and thereafter. She really liked it…for Neil it was mostly noise but he at least recognized the tune for 2 or 3 songs they played…but it was way louder than he would have preferred. So loud in fact that he turned his hearing aids down to zero and it was still too loud.

They were then off early Saturday morning to the airport here in Fort Myers for a flight first to Charlotte NC and then another 5 hours to the airport in Phoenix…Scottsdale is attached to the north side of Phoenix. Terrible to have to go to Charlotte from FL before heading west…but that’s the American southeast hub so it is what it is. Their original plan was to hit up this oyster house and bar for dinner…but by the time they got to their hotel they were wiped out so skipped it and just went to bed.

Sunday was Mass at a local church and then lunch at In and Out…they had heard that they were supposed to be the epitome of burgers. I gotta tell ya…they were just ok, not really anything to write home about and their fries definitely don’t match up with the ones from the Golden Arches.Then if was off to the concert which was at a local Lutheran church. Here are a shot of the organ pipes and then the orchestra seating section and organ console to it’s right from our seats in the front row of the VIP section (it cost an extra 10 bucks per ticket to be a VIP and since Neil’s ticket was free as a veteran and Connie’s was just $15…they figured another 20 bucks was worth it after flying all the way there for the event. The pipes were maybe 30 feet from their seat and there are more behind the cross to the left of the ones you can see and the louvers to the right side.

They particularly chose their seats so they could watch the organist (who was the organist at the Lutheran church) do his thing.

The concert opened with a double concerto for trumpets, organ, and harpsichord…they weren’t familiar with the Trumpet Concerto for Two Trumpets by Vivaldi it is played on soprano trumpets which like about half size replicas of a normal sized instrument…quite excellent. Next up…the Academic Festival Overture by Brahms…it was written by him for a university who was awarding him an honorary degree. The man didn’t think much of academia so the theme in the piece was borrowed from the tune of a collegiate drinking song at the time…so joke on the university I guess. That was followed by Les Preludes by Liszt…they’re familiar with both of those pieces and enjoyed the performance. Last up before intermission was an aria by a local mezzo-soprano from the opera Samson and Delilah by Saint-Saëns.

Following intermission we got into the highlight of the afternoon…the Organ Symphony…which was again spectacular. There were a few baubles in the French Horn section on some of their higher notes…which makes them appreciate even more the quality of the horn section at our local Sarasota Orchestra…it is the hardest instrument to play well of any of the woodwind instruments. You did know it is considered a woodwind and not a brass instrument despite having a mouthpiece like other brass instruments…right? Yep…dunno why but it falls into the woodwind category. The organist opened up the louvers on the right side of the pipes for all of the loud sections and while it wasn’t the most powerful organ they’ve ever heard…it well filled the church and the sound was quite excellent. It would have been slightly better sounding if they were a few rows back but they decided the opportunity to watch the organist do his thing was worth it. The entire concert was live streamed so there were large screen videos as you can see from the orchestra shot above.

They had reservations at Maggianos after the concert…so they sat at the bar, split a bottle of wine and an order of stuffed mushrooms and then split one of their signature butter cakes for dessert…it is one of the better desserts they have ever had at a restaurant.

Monday they met Michael…one of Neil’s photo Internet forum friends who lives in the area…for a dawn photo shoot at the Riparian Preserve at Gilbert Ponds and spent a very pleasant couple of hours with the birds. Photos from the morning will be posted later once Neil processes them. They then headed to Old Town for a late breakfast/early lunch since their anniversary dinner was scheduled for 1800. Heading a couple miles north from their hotel then turned into the Fairmont Princess Resort and it was pretty spectacularly lit…all of the Christmas lights were up and turned on. After parking they headed inside looking for the La Hacienda Mexican restaurant which turned out to be several buildings back into the complex but they eventually figured out where it was located and after checking in for their reservation moved to their far preferred seats at the bar for dinner. They ordered a bottle of wine to split and started viewing the menu…which included well over 100 different tequila brands and types at prices ranging from $15 to well over $400 per shot. Connie noticed the caramel flan on the menu for dessert and they immediately decided to eat light. They split an order of Lobster Tacos and a basket of chips and salsa before ordering the flan. Flan is essentially a soft egg custard flavored with vanilla and baked in a small dish has caramel on the bottom…then the dish is inverted onto the plate so that the caramel runs al over. It was then topped with a combination of whipped cream, marscapone, and sugar so you end up with a thicker than whipped cream topping and then topped with some crunchy stuff with pepita seeds, toasted oats, and some other goodies they could not identify and a scoop of strawberries on the other side. They were glad they only ordered one as it was huge and excellent. Following that they headed back to the hotel. Here are a couple of shots of the decorations inside the resort.

Tuesday morning their flight out left at 0600 which means get to the airport at 0400 which means set the alarm for 0300 to pack the last couple of items, drive down, get gas for the rental car, turn the car in, and schlep seemingly miles through the airport to their gate. Leaving on time they arrived in Dallas-Fort Worth early for a bit over an hour layover than another 3 hours back home. The remnants of Hurricane Sara out in the Gulf south of Louisiana rerouted their flight a bit…instead of heading southeast straight from Dallas they went east until over central Mississippi and then turned south over the gulf back home.

They were pretty burned out by the time they got back to the house…so Neil just whipped up some potato hash topped with eggs for dinner and they were in bed early.

Cyas.

Posted in Critters, Food, Hiking, Organ Symphony, Travel | 2 Comments

Thoughs on the Election

Posted on 2024/11/08 by Gunther

Yeah…I know a little less than half the country is unhappy…and in a bit I’ll give you our synopsis of why she lost…but first…

Truthfully…I’m quite sure that millions of voters weren’t actually voting For either of the candidates…they were mostly voting Against one of the candidates…choosing the least bad between two alternatives. Neil still thinks that his idea for elections is the best answer…None of the Above should be on the ballot and if None wins then there must be a new election and nobody on the previous ballot is eligible to run. Unfortunately that would take a constitutional amendment to happen as well as revision of a lot of the relevant election laws…but it would prevent us from being stuck with the least bad of a bunch of crappy candidates.

What in the heck are people that supported her thinking.

Staring into the abyss

He will never leave office

I’m leaving the country

If you assholes voted for him unfollow me on social media

I will drink Drano now

This is the end of democracy

He won because the US is racist and misogynistic

It doesn’t make sense

White women cost us the election

Black men cost us the election

Biden cost us the election

Each and every one of those was a headline in the last 3 days…and each and every one of them is wrong.

As I’ve said before in these postings…bears don’t have political opinions…but their humans do…and while they’re right of center they both consider themselves pretty much in the middle and actually think that some of the things that Democrats who aren’t far left progressives make sense. But the trouble is the politics has changed drastically in the past 50 years they’ve been voting and the changes have been for the worse. Used to be…both sides would compromise and work out a bill or solution or program that gave something to both sides. Nowadays…the only things that are important are demonization of the other side, name calling, and absolute refusal to entertain either the idea of compromise or that some of the other side’s ideas might have merit. Nope…strict party line BS is what we have these days…and that’s a damn shame.

Ok…why did Ms. Harris lose.

She was Biden only worse. 

As a member of the current administration…there’s no way she was going to be able to dodge responsibility for conditions in the country today. Granted…the inflation we’ve had recently isn’t entirely this administration’s fault…the previous one contributed to it as well…but in the middle of the pandemic rapid development of a vaccine and getting it out to people was important and worth spending a lot of money on. Presidents get far too much credit when the economy is good and far too much blame when it isn’t…and while their policies can contribute to things…economics goes up and down in ways that are to a large extent unpredictable. She couldn’t run against the administration’s policies without throwing the President under the bus. People are concerned about inflation and prices and they’re concerned about the border/immigration disaster…and again both this administration and the ones before all have their share of that blame. The bottom line…she said that she would have done nothing differently than the President did…and the people were really into a “throw the bums out” mode this election cycle.

She was a terrible candidate.

You can’t run an election campaign based on telling everyone that your opponent is a bad guy…you have to run on the issues and say what you will do and Ms. Harris simply refused to do this. From refusal to take any hard questions at interviews to refusal to take Joe Rogan up on his offer for a 3 hour podcast of questions…she simply refused to do anything but take softball questions and anything slightly difficult she went off into one of her canned statements that answered nothing. She continued to act like the elite progressive she has always been and her run to the center for the election was patently a lie to anyone who’s heard her talk or read her positions for her entire career. Add in the media being in the tank for her from day 1 and refusing to report about any of her negatives and it’s no wonder nobody trusts the media these days.

The Democratic Party completely screwed the pooch on this one.

This is far and away the biggest reason for her loss. The President ran in 2020 on a transition to a younger generation platform…but then decided he liked the job and wanted to keep it. Anyone with 2 working brain cells has seen his cognitive decline since 2020 and even before then…but consistent denials by the White House, Democratic elites in the party, and the media that Joe was “sharp as a tack”…was and is obviously just so much BS.It was absolutely zero surprise to anyone when the great debate debacle happened…but then it got even worse. The party elites…and I’m talking to President Obama, his wife, Ms. Pelosi, and Oprah Winfrey…stabbed the man in the back and basically forced him to withdraw. And if that wasn’t bad enough…she was anointed as the nominee sans any voting. The party should have recognized a year ago that the President was not going to win reelection and convinced him to step down at that point in favor of an actual primary season that would reveal things about the various candidates and result in a better candidate. I don’t know who would have won in the primaries if he wasn’t running…but I’m pretty darned sure that Ms. Harris would not have been the nominee. The party passed up the option of having an open convention and went for the coronation instead…and it backfired spectacularly.

Then there were speeches in the past couple of weeks by President Obama, his wife, and Ms. Winfrey…all of which basically told women and blacks that if they didn’t vote the way those three told them to then the women and blacks were enemies, not true men, and assorted similar slurs. Even Steven A. Smith disagreed with them after the election and wondered what in the heck they were thinking…and both Connie and Neil found it funny that it was the first time they ever agreed with Mr. Smith about anything.

In all likelihood the President would have lost the election anyway based on the dissatisfaction with his policies…but she only made the problem worse. All she did…and the media and her party…was focus on convicted felon and fascist and insurrectionist and let’s not forget rapist.

Elections should be about policies and not about personalities. We’re not fans of Mr. Trump around here at all…but his policies (at least the ones that weren’t stupid or illegal and got cancelled as they should have by the courts) were better than the current administration’s policies have been…and that’s shy he won and she lost.

Let’s not worry that this is the end of democracy…the country has survived every president we have had believe it or not. And he’s not going to really deport 12 or 20 million or however many it is illegal immigrants for a couple of reasons. First off…the government can’t find them all. Second and more importantly…the government simply doesn’t have the ability to round up that many people, house them until the deportation hearing, and send them home. Third…a country can only deport people if their original country agrees to accept them and that’s unlikely at best. What we do need is to keep illegals from coming across the border and that will require spending a bunch of money. We also need to beef up the immigration system to process asylum seekers claims in a more reasonable amount of time…catch and release isn’t cutting it as most of them never show up for their hearing in 2 years anyway. We personally think we need more legal immigration than we currently allow…but criminals should not be allowed in and economic refugees which is what most of them are need to wait in line until their turn comes. I can’t fault…not one bit…the wishes of parents in impoverished countries to our south wanting a better life for them and their kids…but they need to do it legally. The left likes to call them “undocumented persons”…but that’s just whitewashing the fact that they are here illegally and that makes them criminals.

Down here in Florida…both the abortion amendment and the marijuana amendments failed…and again they failed due to lack of compromise. While we personally believe that abortion is wrong based on our religion…we don’t get to impose our judgement on everyone else and our personal opinions and legal opinions on both of those are different. I’m quite sure that a reasonable compromise on the abortion amendment would have resulted in something more than the current 6 week limit in the state and requiring parental permission for underage women…and heck maybe the father of the pregnancy should have a vote as well…but no, the amendment was written as broadly as the progressives that wrote it could do so…providing zero limits on the practice because that’s what progressives want. Religious fundamentalists want no abortion ever for any reason…and both of those positions are completely out of step with legal reality or common sense. Same with the drug one…written far too broadly to be acceptable. Maybe they’ll learn and try a more reasonable approach next time.

Interesting things found on the net.

Everything you need in one place…aisle 11.

Out in Ranier, Oregon…
there was this 71 year old cyclist riding his bicycle in town…at least there was until an ambulance from Columbia River Fire and Rescue made a right turn into him and destroyed his bicycle and injured him. Being an ambulance…the driver loaded the man up and took him to the hospital for treatment…and then sent him a bill for $1,862 for the ambulance ride to the hospital.

Cyas.

Posted in Reality Based Blogging, Ya Can't Fix Stupid | Leave a comment