Typical

I have been thinking about leadership.

The universe is not a big partnership. It’s a patriarchal hierarchy with our male God at the top and Satan at the very bottom. Everyone except God submits to someone. I suppose the reason God doesn’t have to submit is that he submits to his own perfect nature. There is no point in submitting to a ruler when everything you do is perfect.

A proper marriage is not a partnership. The husband and father is the leader, and everyone else is supposed to submit to him; they owe him support and obedience. It’s for their good more than his.

It’s very sad that feminism has been mainstreamed in the church. There are many preachers that acknowledge the Holy Spirit yet claim husbands and wives are equals. As my wife put it, they “apologize” for Ephesians 5:23:

For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.

Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.

There is no ambiguity there. You can’t “clarify” this by looking to other verses for reference. It stands on its own, impossible to contradict with other scripture. The husband is the boss, not an anarchist who takes turns running things. Not a slave who is forced to provide and protect without having a voice.

If you’re a wife, you are supposed to be subject to your husband in all things.

Feminist Christians love to point to 5:21, which describes Christians as submitting to each other, but that is in a different passage about a different subject. It’s about Christian life outside of marriage. It means we shouldn’t be pushy self-promoters; the kind of insufferable people who start running for office in the first grade. In our interactions with Christians outside the home, we should not force our decisions on others or appoint ourselves to positions of power; we should be humble and wait for promotion.

The word doesn’t say every woman has to submit to every man, and Ephesians 5:23 isn’t intended to be a rigid law. It’s a principle. It doesn’t mean you should obey your husband if he asks you to help him build a bomb to blow up a school. It means that if your husband is led by the Holy Spirit, you should submit to him.

“What if he’s not led by the Holy Spirit”? Then you married the wrong person, so you have no one but yourself to blame if your husband is a heathen. You’re going to have to build up your own relationship with the Holy Spirit and do your best, accepting the fact that you’re in a hole you dug for yourself.

It is hard to give advice to people who are stuck in very bad situations they created. It’s obvious that I should advise single people to avoid marrying heathens, but once the marriage is in place, there are no simple answers.

It’s important to note that disagreement with you isn’t proof your husband isn’t listening to the Holy Spirit, so you shouldn’t tell yourself that lie in order to excuse your family-killing rebellion.

Another important thing: submitting only when your husband agrees with you is not submission. I had to tell my wife that several times.

Say you want to paint your kitchen green, and your husband wants yellow. Badgering him until he agrees and then “submitting” to him is a farce. A wife is supposed to be a helper, but telling yourself you are helping your husband by helping him realize you’re right about everything is sin and a lie.

Sometimes even a good husband will be wrong. So what? Submit anyway, unless submission will be catastrophic. Maybe the kitchen should be green. Help him paint it yellow anyway, for the sake of the hierarchy, which is necessary and therefore more important than your kitchen.

It’s better to make trivial bad choices from time to time than it is to destroy the authority structure that keeps your family from destruction. As a mother, you will make mistakes all the time. Do you think your children are entitled to stop obeying you because of this? What will happen to them if they stop? Do you think they will have good lives?

As for men, maleness is not an achievement. You don’t get a prize for it. God doesn’t put you in charge so you can remain a selfish teenager all your life, staring at sports and playing video games, or obsessing on work, while you tell everyone else to kowtow and obey for your convenience. So you can be a frat boy when you’re 97.

A leader’s purpose is sacrificial, not selfish. Every real leader knows this. Strangely, Jews don’t know it. They worship a hard, imaginary God who doesn’t sacrifice himself for people or, in any real sense, regard them as his babies.

It makes perfect sense that God would allow himself to be crucified to save us, because even many earthly parents would do that for their children. A God who sits on a throne in the distance, invulnerable, ageless, and healthy, who never suffers for the ones he created, is not a leader. He’s more like someone who keeps tropical fish.

Every earthly parent understands the necessity of sacrifice as part of leadership, but somehow, Orthodox Jews think God’s principles of leadership are divorced from obvious principles we have seen here on Earth since man was created.

Yeshua, who was not captured, turned himself in to the Jewish authorities so he could be crucified, because he loved us so much he could not stand to see us get what we deserved. He endured rejection and slander. In his time here, he didn’t get much of a reward for all his efforts to help us. That’s how real leadership is. It’s asymmetrical in favor of those who are led.

This is what proper fatherhood is like. You may work all day. You pay the bills. You are the first one to face danger in a bad situation. In return, the people you help grumble. They say things about you that aren’t true. They disobey you and then blame you for the problems their disobedience causes. They make your job harder. They ostracize you to at least some extent. They never come close to repaying you. This is what God goes through, and if you’re a father on Earth, you’re supposed to go through it, too. It’s an honor and a privilege, even if it often feels like a curse.

I don’t know how anyone can respect a “god” who never suffers for the people he created. Earthly leaders suffer for the people they command, which is a good thing for them to do, but somehow God is not as good as they are? It’s absurd.

A proper patriarch does not expect his family to repay him fully. He expects to be shortchanged. He shouldn’t complain about his place, because it is more blessed to give than to receive. He shouldn’t sit around watching sports and playing video games all day, barking out selfish orders and leaving his family to guide themselves, as though a Y chromosome and a paycheck made him Queen for a Day.

A patriarch submits to God through the Holy Spirit. He does not grumble. He does not falsely accuse God of cheating him or not blessing him enough. He does not claim he submits when he only obeys the commands that comport with his own desires. He consistently asks God for correction when he has problems.

He doesn’t add up the ways in which his family has shortchanged him and present them with bills.

A patriarch spends time with his wife and children. He does not pat himself on the back for it, as though he gave a stranger a kidney. It’s what he owes them. He doesn’t say, “I’ve done this and that for my family, so now I’m free to do what I really want.” The time he spends with his family is not a tax or a permit fee. It’s a blessing for all concerned.

In order for a patriarch to succeed, the wife and kids have to support him instead of doing what they often do: joining outsiders in trying to bring him down. A leader has to have consent and support. Yeshua is the perfect leader, but humanity is still a failure, because most of us did not consent or support. A leader can’t force success on anyone.

I can give a great example of the way women kneecap their men. It amazes me that there are women who vote Democrat, knowing that their husbands vote Republican. This is the very picture of pathological rebellion. When two people vote the same way, they have power. When they vote contrarily, they have no power at all. It’s as though neither voted. Voting is an exercise of power, and casting opposing votes nullifies a household’s power. As Yeshua says, a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Opposition is supposed to be directed outward, not inward. Obvious? The world is against your husband. It’s sick and disgusting for you to be against him as well, especially when you still expect him to fight for you.

It’s pretty simple: one plus one equal two, which is something, and one minus one equals zero, which is nothing. When your votes agree, they have impact. When you vote against each other, you make your house a nothing.

Your husband considers the welfare of his family and his nation and decides to vote a certain way, and you decide you know better, destroying his power. Well, if you think your husband is too stupid to lead your family, what, exactly, did you want a husband for?

I know. Money, status, and babies. I don’t have to be told.

When I was a kid, I thought The Caine Mutiny was about a bad captain; nutty old Captain Queeg, and the smart officers who had to make a hard decision in order to save the crew from him. Of course, that’s not the message of the movie. It’s about immature, arrogant officers who destroyed their own leader instead of building him up. It’s a great picture of the way we destroy leaders who are put in place to benefit us.

The officers in the movie never tried to help Queeg do better. From the very start, they ridiculed him and worked against him. He was a flawed captain, but even a perfect captain would have failed with such officers. All fathers and husbands are flawed. What chance do we have without support? We can save ourselves, at best.

Queeg asked the officers for help, and in the book, he said this:

“Now, I’m the first to admit that I’m not perfect. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve had a lot on my mind. But a command is a lonely job. You men have no idea how lonely.

What I’m looking for is a little help. I don’t mean ‘Yes-man’ help. I mean the kind of loyalty that sees a captain through his mistakes for the sake of the ship. We’re all in this together. If we could just… well, start over. A clean slate. What do you say?”

Instead of helping, they refused to speak and waited for him to leave, rejected.

In the book, the snickering, whispering, mumbling coward who persuaded his friends to sabotage Queeg ended up captaining the ship, and he abandoned his crew in a battle, just as he abandoned his friends when they were charged with mutiny. The movie cheated the public.

All over the world, families are destroying the patriarchs who built the platforms they live on. No wonder young America men are shunning marriage now. In a world where young men are (correctly) moving to the right, and young women have swung hard left into sluttiness, rage, and arrogance, it is inevitable that men will avoid marriage. It’s like being asked to teach high school in the Bronx.

As for myself, I feel I need to give more time to God and my family and less to other things. Since my wife got pregnant, I have neglected things like shooting, tools, and yard maintenance. My pool is green. My hedges are a mess. I haven’t finished fixing the mower I bought last year.

I have felt I had to sink into the comfort of a love cocoon with God, my wife, and later, my son, to the detriment of my other responsibilities.

On the up side, I don’t regret it. I have had an experience very few fathers have had, and my wife is also privileged. These days many women treat their babies like purses or other accessories; like toys that bring them status. They hand them off to illegal aliens to raise while they give their golden, indescribably precious years of motherhood to jobs, serving alongside people who will forget them the week after they quit. My wife has been with her baby son every single day, as much as she wanted, and I have been with both of them.

On the down side, I know I still gave too much of myself to worthless things. The Internet. Even photography, which has been very useful in celebrating this family’s love. I haven’t given enough time to God and my wife and son, so I am turning the computer off multiple times every day instead of leaving it on, and I am trying to drop things that would ordinarily turn into time sinks.

If I give less time to worthless activities, I can give more to God and my family, and I can also do better with earthly responsibilities.

God is a patriarch. I am a patriarch. As a patriarch, I have power, but I also have responsibilities. My purpose is to pour myself out, not to be the king of the living room. This is all consistent with scripture and the Holy Spirit.

I’m very glad I’m not obsessed with video games or sports. These fixations are disgraceful; they keep men boys. Try and imagine yourself in heaven, with God asking you about your high video game scores or how much you could deadlift or how many games your teams won on Earth? Imagine the humiliation of even thinking about these things in his presence. But most American men think sports are more important than God, and many Christians even insist, childishly and in ignorance, that competitive sports teach Christian values. They teach the opposite. As for video games, it’s hard to imagine anything emptier.

There are many men out there who spend 10% of more of their income on watching sports yet don’t give yearly gifts to investment accounts for their kids. In fact, a man who does the opposite is an anomaly. A weirdo.

Sports insiders won’t say it, but the sports industry is, and always was, driven by gambling (another sin). Team valuations are largely based on gambling integration. Much of the money men spend on sports vanishes in lost bets. But it’s all about Christian values, supposedly.

A cheap (really bad) Super Bowl ticket costs $3500. To see a bunch of strangers who don’t know you exist do something unimportant and very silly. Think about that.

You can get your wife a dynamite gold chain for that amount. Or how about a weekend in Paris?

Feminism is a disgusting poison, and so is leftism. Spiritually, feminism is leftism. Satan was the first leftist. Leftism is about creatures coveting and wrongly taking that which belongs to those who are placed above them. It’s about taking shortcuts to get what you want.

A selfish patriarch is a rebel, too, so he is also a leftist. Leftists create leftist families with leftist problems.

I’m sorry for defaming God in my heart and exalting myself. I am trying to cooperate with the Holy Spirit to save whatever is left of my life and to be a blessing to my family. I don’t care what deluded, murderous people think of me, and I certainly don’t care about the arguments of loser spirits that want us to be losers just like them.

The Faux Exclusivity of the Fungible

Maybe I need to cut back on the AI, but it has certainly been useful lately.

My wife and I went to see a baby photographer. She was 7 months old and cute as she could be.

Just kidding. I wrote about her. We wanted her to do a few formulaic, inoffensive shots of our baby and us, and we wanted digital files instead of prints, mostly because her prints are obscenely expensive, and also because stiff, formulaic shots would look bizarre next to our own framed photos, which are full of life and evoke all sorts of personal emotions.

When we went to see this woman, she didn’t put the price of digital photos in front of us, so I emailed her on Friday. For 30 edited shots, she wants $1090, on top of the $267.50 we already paid just to talk to her.

No.

I am not cheap. I am not hard to deal with. Not THAT hard. But I can walk upright and use my opposable thumbs, and I am not stupid enough to pay almost $1400 for journeyman work a robot could do. We are cutting her loose.

She is entitled to the money we paid, I suppose. I consider it tuition. I learned that there is an entire industry out there that teaches untalented people how to sell and upsell pedestrian photo work. It’s a fantastic business, in case you are looking for a way to make money. I learned how little a studio costs to equip, and I also confirmed my understanding that I am already much better than the vast majority of professionals who churn out formula photos.

I contacted the outfit that did our hospital newborn photos. I think they will meet us at a location and do everything for something like $350. Their work is absolutely as good as the $1400 job. Pretty much all baby photographers shoot at the same modest level of talent and taste, so why not save whatever ($1090 – $350) is?

I don’t know if we will even spend that, because today we had an idea: turn a spare bedroom into a studio. Based on what I saw at the professional’s house, this would cost about $100. She didn’t have expensive (or any) lights. She had a Canon that looked like a DSLR, plus two lenses. She had a bunch of cheap toys. She had some kind of mat that looked like astroturf. A wall with unattractive baby clothes hanging on it, which would not fit our son because he is tall. One cheap reflector thing from Amazon. Not high-end stuff.

I went to AI because I thought it might have tips on setting up a room for photos, and the conversation went beyond that. For one thing, it helped me understand that I have talent, and that I have problems relating to people who lack talent but are much more technically proficient and know how to make the most of rules and recipes. I have problems learning from them, for one thing, because nearly everyone who teaches photography is a rule-follower who can’t produce art. You can’t teach what you don’t understand, to people who have abilities you don’t have. You can, however, teach them falsehoods that will hold them back and make them doubt they have the abilities they have.

Pride is bad. It goes before destruction. On the other hand, you have to be able to acknowledge your gifts. I can be very, very good at photography, if I keep working on the technical side so I can beat things like low light, noise, motion, and so on.

Here is something disturbing, to add to the other disturbing things I have said about AI: it is now fully capable of critiquing photos. Not just exposure and sharpness. It understands artistic merit. Craziest thing ever.

I showed it some shots I knew were pretty good, I told it not to BS me, and it flat-out told me I was doing things most pros will never be able to do. It was able to look at photos and tell me what I already knew was good about them. It also understood that getting solid feedback from other photographers would be hard, because some would be unable to understand what I did, and others would feel threatened and hesitate to say someone else was doing better work than they were.

It was able to identify flaws, and it was honest about them. It was also able to point out things that would appear to be flaws to rule-followers, yet which were really indications of talent. I’ve taken tons of horrible photos in the past, but things are really coming together now.

Okay. I accept it. I can do this. Why not? I never claimed I could slam-dunk a basketball. I never claimed I had the makings of a model. I never tried to make people think I was tops at anything I wasn’t actually good at. Why not admit it when I genuinely have a strong aptitude for something?

I’m going to run with this. It’s not a useless hobby. It will help bind my family together in love. It will produce images and videos my great-great-grandchildren will cherish, assuming everything doesn’t get wiped out in the tribulation. It certainly beats spending 20 times as much on fishing or 5 times as much on football tickets. Worthless pursuits.

I have enough guns. I am spending less time with tools. I no longer have any interest in cooking. It’s hard to travel with a toddler. I think photography is a good thing to settle on as I creep toward my expiration date or the rapture.

I don’t know how anyone with fungible, common skills can charge $1400 for a few hours’ work. Yes, I used to charge a lot as a lawyer, but I went to school for three extra years, and I did things that were way more valuable than shooting photos according to recipes other people made up. People needed what I did. Badly. I wasn’t putting them on rented ponies and telling them to smile.

I have had competent tradesmen show up at my house and charge $100 or less for an hour’s work. Important work that required a lot of experience and knowledge. I think the lady we talked to must be netting at least $250,000 per year for doing something almost anyone could learn to do in two months. Something other people do just as well for a fraction of that, gross. That is clearly excessive, and it’s insulting.

I pay my dentist something like $135 per visit, and he has a staff, a building, and tons of expensive equipment. He also studied for at least 7 years. That should put it in perspective. I suppose I get about half an hour of face time with him for $270 per year, plus at least that much time with a hygienist he has to pay, and their work is very good, unlike the photographer’s, so the contrast in value is stark.

I know what happened. The photographer found a company that works with people like her and tells them how to shame and upsell. It tells them how to create the illusion of being overbooked. It sells her the albums and pretty boxes. It gives her scripts to memorize. It probably sells her the prints. It’s like working for Omaha Steaks. I’m not stupid. I know how the world works. I don’t need to see proof.

Taking a photo with a camera whose settings you never have to change is not hard. Editing is fast. Maybe three minutes per photo. Seconds, if you use presets. I’m not stupid. I know these things. There is no talent involved, and also little labor.

I just looked it up. There are two famous “coaches.” Sue Bryce and Sarah Petty. There are others. It’s all just as I said.

Tomorrow we will see what we can do about getting that DIY one-year session done, and if it doesn’t work the first time, we will do it again, and within a couple of days, we will have shots that will shame anything that comes out of any local studio.

Knowing how the world works is always painful.

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The Internet says a 36″ metal plate with a photo on it, like the one the photographer tried to sell us for $2900, may come from companies like White House Custom Colour (WHCC), Bay Photo, or Miller’s, and they cost photographers $250, max.

Man, I hate being right about people.

Tech Turns Faultless Two-Dollar Item into $250 Nightmare

I have good news for people who are justly upset with Ford for making keys ridiculously expensive, fragile, easy for hackers to copy, and hard for owners to copy.

Electronic keys are stupid. The electronic key boom is just one more example of engineers doing things they can, but should not, do. It demonstrates a total lack of common sense.

I have two fobs covered with buttons I don’t really need. They lock and unlock the doors. Don’t need. They open and shut the hatch. Don’t need. I think one of them will start the engine, but I don’t know, because…don’t need. There is also a button to set off the alarm, and that’s nice when I forget where I parked at Walmart, but truthfully…don’t need.

These keys are easy to duplicate. Easy for you and me? No. Easy for punk car thieves. They see you walking to your car. They watch you raise your fob. Then they use a machine to capture the signal. Later, they use it to get into your car. A 15-year-old moron who can’t read and write can do this, but you aren’t allowed to go to a hardware store and have your key copied electronically, like you could copy, oh, EVERY key made before engineers lost their minds.

Each fob has a real key inside it. Great. Problem solved. Throw out the fobs and use the metal key.

Oops…wait! Can’t do it. The metal key will not start or stop the engine. It just gets you into the car when your fob fails, so you can sit in the shade while you wait for a locksmith to come and charge you hundreds of dollars.

If the problem is a dead fob battery, you should be able to use the secret slot in your center console to start the car. You put the dead fob in there and start normally. If the fob got smashed or something, you may be stuck.

Here’s more great news. The fobs are made cheaply, so they fall apart. Eventually, long before your car gives out, your fob will start to come to pieces. Then Ford expects you to buy a new one.

If you buy a new Ford fob, you have to go to a dealership or a locksmith, prove ownership, and pay three digits to get it programmed. And you get to wait around while they get ready to call your name.

It’s a money-making scam for Ford, pure and simple. It’s also an insult. It doesn’t make the car harder to steal; it makes it easier. It doesn’t save the consumer money; it costs him money. It gives preferential treatment to thieves and dealers. Perhaps I repeat myself.

So what do you do?

If your fob breaks, it will almost always be the cheap plastic shell that fails. You can buy new Chinese shells on Amazon for as little as $10. You take the guts out of your old fob and put them in the new one. You’re welcome.

The new fob may or may not last, but for what you’re paying, you shouldn’t care.

What if you lose an OEM fob?

It turns out that all the problems that result from this are your own fault, assuming you know what I’m about to tell you.

You never use the OEM fobs. They are to be put away in a safe place. Both of them.

You can buy programmable Chinese fobs on Amazon for $27. If you have an Explorer, which is the only car I’ve checked out, you can program them yourself, easily. You have to do this before you lose one, because the car will do the programming, and it requires you to show it you still have both OEM fobs. Stupid. This is why you never take the OEM fobs out of your house.

I’m not going to show you the programming procedure. You can Google it, and I would probably get something wrong.

Before you lose or destroy a fob, buy at least two Chinese jobs and program them. Then put the OEM’s away. If you want, you can copy your metal key and put copies in the new fobs, but be sure you keep at least one key with your OEM fobs, because once you lose it, you are out of luck. You can program more fobs, but you will have to pay a locksmith to make the keys.

Are the keys useful? Well, I have driven this car since 2017, and I have never needed the real key.

You can also get electronic doodads to put on your keychain so you can find your keys with your phone. Samsung makes the Smarttag2, and Amazon makes Airtags. Ford sold you $250 fobs and did not include this cheap feature. Ford likes it when you lose your fobs. Ford wanted you to buy more fobs, because Ford is a jerk.

The rest of us will never stop paying for all the cafeteria wedgies the STEM kids got in junior high.

I guess I should not make unsupported allegations, but I lost my personal fob for a day and a half, and then I found it, broken, under a nightstand near which a certain small diaper-wearing person had been playing. Let’s say I have my suspicions. This is why I am learning all these new things.

Making the Effortless Impossible

I’ve been having an interesting day with my Chinese Alibaba-grade excavator, an AGT QK16R.

The last time I used it, I saw a long trail of oil behind it, and I realized this was not right, even for a Chinese machine. I parked it and fiddled with it. I thought the oil was coming from the slew motor. This is the motor that turns the excavator without moving the tracks.

Slew motor leaks are common with these machines because a lot of Chinese workers don’t believe in using wrenches. My motor is held in by 4 M8 cap bolts with lock washers. A lot of people find that these bolts are loose from the factory. This makes the motors wobble around.

There are also 4 bolts on the underside of the motor itself, and they have been known to leave the factory loose. My understanding is that when these bolts are loose, the O-ring in the motor gets torn up and causes a leak.

I found out the size of the O-ring: 138. Don’t take my word for it, because I haven’t installed one yet. I got some O-rings.

Today I got into the excavator. It is an amazing piece of machinery. I don’t mean that in a good way.

To get to the slew motor, you have to take off the floor plate. Easy, right?

I removed every bolt that held the floor on, and of course, all sorts of stuff was still in the way. The pedestal with the controls, mainly.

I learned some things that may help others.

1. Do not try to take off the lower sheet metal. AGT puts welded nuts on the upper sheet metal, where you don’t really need them, and it uses loose nylocks for the lower sheet metal. They are very, very hard to get at for loosening and tightening. Welding nuts to the inside of the excavator would be a good mod.

2. Removing the upper sheet metal is not hard, but it is tedious. You have to take out 8 screws and nuts, plus two bolts, to remove the door in front of the engine. The 8 screws are in hinges which don’t work because AGT made it impossible for the door to swing. A clever guy tapped the pins out of his hinges and replaced them with R-clips. I plan to do that, although Velcro would probably work just as well.

3. You should remove the foot pedal in order to get the floor off. It is held on by one oddly-chosen screw with a nylock.

4. You will have to remove the lower canopy support which is bolted to the frame. The bolts that hold it on go through the floor for no good reason. I am going to turn the holes into slots so I can loosen the bolts and lift the floor up instead of removing the support. The support is not needed to hold the canopy up, because the canopy bars in the rear are mounted solidly to the excavator frame.

5. One guy recommends cutting off the bit of the floor to the right of the control pedestal. It doesn’t really need to be connected to the rest of the floor. It can be reinstalled after cutting it. Some minor mods could be added to make everything stiffer.

6. Another guy recommends cutting the floor in two big pieces, front and rear.

7. When you get the engine door off, you get access to the front oil dipstick. This machine has two dipstick holes, front and rear, and AGT puts the dipstick in the front one where you have to take the excavator apart to get at it. The holes are interchangeable, so while the door is off, swap the plug at the rear of the engine for the dipstick in front. Now you can check your oil.

It turned out my slew motor was just fine, sort of. The bolts were not very tight, but the motor was not loose. I pulled the bolts out, applied Loctite, and reinstalled them. I don’t know the actual torque figure, so I went with a Chinese measure: yu wei tai nau.

I am going to pull it and check the bolts on the underside. I don’t want to put the excavator together and then have the motor fail.

The hydraulic fluid was coming from a valve thing (hydraulic swivel joint?) that feeds the track motors. When I looked at it, without even checking, I thought it looked weird. One one side, there were three screw-on fittings, and one was clearly farther from the motor than the others, suggesting it wasn’t tightened all the way. I fired the machine up, moved the tracks, and saw oil dripping out of the fitting.

Now I have to tighten that fitting. I wondered how I would do it, because access is nearly nonexistent. It’s under another fitting which I can reach, but I can’t get to the leaky fitting itself. I realized I could remove the top fitting, tighten the leaky one, and reinstall the top one, so that’s what I’ll do.

I checked whatever I could reach to make sure nothing else would come undone, but I can’t get at everything without a ton of work, so I plan to put the excavator together and hope for the best. I’m glad nothing was damaged.

The moral here is: tighten everything you can on your Chinese excavator. Also, change the hydraulic fluid before you run it, and don’t be afraid to modify it. You really are smarter than the engineers who designed it.

This info ought to be very helpful to people with the exact same excavator, and it should be somewhat helpful to people with similar models.

I Better not See a Bro Stache on Him This Year

I expected my son to grow up gradually, but it seems like he changes in sudden jumps.

Maybe 6 weeks ago, we got him a push walker because he was standing and holding onto furniture. We thought a walker would help him learn to walk. A push walker is sort of like a lawnmower. Babies stand behind them. They don’t sit in them.

He started standing and grabbing it right away, but he could not figure out how to move it around. He kept pulling it backward onto himself. He banged his head on it. I put padding on it to keep him from getting bruised.

He wasn’t able to push it around, but it has a panel with a bunch of toys on it, and he loved using those.

Last night, I was lying in bed looking at my phone, and I heard a noise. I looked down, and I saw his funny little head smiling up at me from beside the bed. He had pushed the walker across the room and into the bed.

I was amazed. It happened very suddenly.

He pushed it all over the bedroom last night. He loves it. It’s very easy for him. He holds the top bar with one hand and takes off. He acts like he has been doing it for months.

He will be walking in a week or so. I am sure of it. He has tons of strength, and he can stand up and squat without support. I’ve only seen him stand unsupported once, and it was only for a few seconds, but he is changing fast. What he’s doing with the walker is very close to walking.

We had to buy him a bunch of toys because we realized he was bored. He was chewing on charging cables and playing with anything we left within his reach. We got him a little plastic table with toys in it, and we also got him a plastic fire truck and a little toy TV remote that plays songs and so on.

He loves all of this stuff. He has learned how to use the table toys, and he spends a lot of time playing with them. There may be one toy he’s not using; I’m not sure. He sucks on the remote and pushes the buttons. He takes the parts out of fire truck and throws them around.

Now he has moved to a new stage, so we have to figure out what else to get him. I don’t even know what babies play with, so I am researching.

I don’t believe giving kids things spoils them. I believe teaching them not to appreciate things spoils them. It’s important to give kids anything they can make good use of. Where would we be if the great pianists hadn’t had good pianos when they were little more than toddlers?

My dad made good money, but my parents deprived me in comparison to the kids who lived around us. My sister and I had toys, but not many. I actually received hand-me-down toys from my best friend. I should have been given music lessons and good instruments as soon as I could benefit from them. My dad should have bought me equipment and taken me hunting and fishing. He and my mother should have shown me how to use science and engineering toys. I should have been taught to use tools. We should have traveled to Europe and Israel instead of taking cheap trips to Kentucky over and over.

It’s sad that I was encouraged to write. My parents and my teachers let me down with that advice. As a hobby and a way to communicate with people you care about, writing is fine, but anyone who encourages his child to do it for a living is extremely foolish. I should have been helped along with STEM pursuits. I would have had a bunch of patents by the time I was 30.

Toys aren’t luxuries. For kids, play is work. It’s their job. It builds capable adults.

We should also get something better than a stroller to use for walks. I don’t know anything about babies, so strollers were the only things that occurred to me when we had to move him around. There must be other things, like wagons. I’m looking into it.

We like taking mile-long walks on our private road, so we need something that will work well for that.

This boy is in such a hurry. We need to enjoy him the way he is while we can.

Bad Ideas go to the Burn Pile

Oh, boy. I feel like a runaway slave.

I managed to bust out and get some things done. Jobs that have been weighing on me and making me feel trapped.

I have lost a bunch of oil seals lately. Utility cart rear axle. Excavator slew motor. Tractor front axle. Even my car is leaking around the oil sensor.

I finally took my tractor’s axle apart and replaced a seal and two bearings. I have been thirsting for the day when I could use the tractor again, and it has come.

I am moving more rocks out of my yard. I have some buried rocks and boulders that get in the way of the mower, and I also have–had–a big flowerbed surrounded by irregular native rocks placed there by the guy who built the house. In addition to all this, he and his wife dumped more native rocks in random places as decorations. He put a bunch of them in places where there should have been grass. I couldn’t mow over them, and they sheltered weeds.

Some people think there is nothing nicer than a bunch of crude rocks surrounding a flowerbed or a walk. I disagree. Pavers and curbs always, always look better. They do a better job of containing things. They make regular borders between things. It’s easy to get close to them while mowing without hitting them. It’s easy to clean them up with a weedeater.

An oval of irregular rocks in your yard says, “I am cheap and lacking in good taste and common sense.”

A natural rock formation can look nice, but decorating your yard with obvious landscaping debris is tacky and doesn’t fool anyone.

Putting these rocks around the flowerbed was extremely unwise. It looked bad, and it caused lots of problems. We have a neighbor who has flowerbeds with pavers, and his yard looks spectacular.

Today I put the bucket on the tractor and rammed it into the rocks surrounding the big flowerbed, dislodging them so I could move them. Some went right into the bucket. Most, I had to put there myself. There were a few big ones weighing up to, perhaps, 150 pounds. There were dozens of smaller ones ranging from maybe 100 pounds to the size of a golf ball.

The big ones, I rolled into the bucket. The smaller ones, I picked up and threw. In maybe 90 minutes, I must have moved over a ton. I wanted to do more, but it was getting dark.

I’m so grateful to God for my energy. I am too lazy to do serious exercise, but I had no problem yanking rocks out of the ground and getting them into the bucket. I worked fast. My heart rate was elevated. I was sweating. I didn’t die or anything. I felt great.

I have prayed for God to keep me going so I can be here on Earth for my wife and son. I got so used to envying Christians who died and left this place, I think I started to welcome death. I apologized to God and repented. I don’t like Earth, but I am eager to sacrifice in order to be with my loved ones and help them.

I won’t pretend my motivation is completely altruistic. I want to be with them. I would hate to find myself leaving them prematurely. I want to see him grow up, and I want him to know me.

I think God has graciously agreed to help me, in spite of my wickedness and selfishness.

I told my wife to keep my son away from me for a couple of minutes so I could drink something and get it together, but he just ran in, stood up beside my chair, and started clawing at my shirt while screaming with joy. Then he speed-crawled away. Now he’s back.

He seems to have the same kind of energy I have. God’s joy, I believe.

She came and got him. I have to get up and join him in playing with his toys in a minute.

I’m sure there are still rocks out there. I’ll have to take a pitchfork and sift through the dirt to get rid of the ones I missed. After that, I’ll be able to mow over the flowerbed every week to kill weeds and puree the dead leaves.

I have hit rocks by the flowerbed with mowers several times. The rock border was formed so irregularly, I could not guess where it ended.

My theory is that the original owner and his wife told their kids, “Take the rocks we’ve found in the yard and pile them up around those two oaks by the driveway! It will be a fun project!” Then the kids moved a couple of huge rocks there, realized they wanted to be doing something else, and started using smaller and smaller rocks and arranging them with a sloppiness that increased with time.

Then the wife planted a magnolia between the oaks, which were about 7 feet apart, leaving me no choice but to rip it out after I moved here.

My wife and I have decided to make this place our own and abandon all reverence for the original owners’ ideas. I used to give them deference, thinking they had to know things I didn’t know, but over time, I have realized they made lots of dumb decisions I need to undo.

I plan to leave the flowerbed alone so grass covers it. It’s in the shade, in a place where oak leaves fall and kill things. It would take a ton of work to keep it up and make anything grow.

They also left a huge, sick oak in the middle of the driveway island. I had to cut that and get rid of it after it snapped 30 feet up. Next to it, there was a dense shrub about three feet high, encircling a scraggly dwarf magnolia that looked like it had tuberculosis. You don’t plant a tree inside a shrub. Is this not obvious?

A few weeks back, I tore out the shrub and the magnolia. Of course, there were also two ugly rocks, which I removed. I am thinking of making a proper flowerbed there with pavers around it. I’ll fill it with mulch and put some kind of attractive low-maintenance tree in the middle. Maybe a peach tree or a crape myrtle. Around here, the crape myrtle is the go-to answer to poor soil and hostile bugs and weeds. It’s not the greatest tree, but it thrives, and it doesn’t need much care.

No one should ever buy a dwarf magnolia. They always look like the tree Charlie Brown brought to school for the Christmas play.

I also had a magnolia about 15 inches from my expensive brick front walk. That was not a smart choice. You never put a tree close to a house unless you like buying new roofs, siding, pavement, and ceilings.

I murdered that magnolia, too, and I’m also going to murder the two rows of boxwoods that line the walk. Boxwoods always look like they’re dying, and you shouldn’t use shrubs to wall a walk in and get in the way.

I have other boxwoods, and they will die soon. I also killed some kind of scraggly tree beside the workshop. It got in the way when I mowed, and it looked awful.

I bought a flail mower, and I finally assembled it. I have a couple of things left to do to make it work better. Then the boxwoods will meet its spinning blades and become sawdust.

This property will never make Architectural Digest, but I should be able to make it presentable and arrange things so taking care of it doesn’t break my back.

I killed the original owner’s wife’s roses a long time ago. Roses always look terrible unless they receive perfect care and pruning, and they were in a bad location. I’ve killed many of her plants.

She put hideous, enormous bromeliads near the front door. I paid a friends’ kids to do some weeding, and they tore them out because they didn’t know what they were doing. That’s fine by me, because I think bromeliads look sort of evil.

I had a very satisfying time with the tractor. I can’t wait to see this place looking better.

Local Smith Prices Herself Out of Business

I am wiped out from installing a new dishwasher. It should have been pretty fast, but like most quick, easy jobs, it had complications.

I bought a Bosch dishwasher to replace a Bosch dishwasher in the same series, and of course, Bosch changed the inlet fitting and did not include a threaded elbow to connect to it. I went to the local Ace, and unfortunately, the person who helped me was a friendly and earnest young man who hasn’t learned everything about the hardware business yet.

We could not find the elbow, which was confusing to me because I knew it had to be a common part. Bosch equals Thermador equals Whirlpool and so on these days. He sent me home with a couple of parts to screw together as a substitute, and I had to locate the correct part on the web, go back to Ace, and show them the SKU.

I did an excellent job of installing it because a) I am capable of doing simple things well, and b) I actually care about the quality of my work, which may not have been the case with the guys Lowe’s wanted to send for $217.

I may want to adjust the dishwasher’s position in the sagittal plane by 3/32″ or so, but that can wait.

If you need a dishwasher right now, jump on one of these Bosches while they’re on sale.

I’m still waiting for something else I ordered. You will never guess. Yes, it’s a rifle.

Four or 5 years back, I bought a Thompson Center Venture bolt action rifle in .204 Ruger. I thought I was going to shoot a lot of varmints. So far, that has not been the case. I also hoped to use it for target shooting to improve my shooting without spending money on pricier ammo.

Until just now, I thought it was a Venture Predator, but it turns out it’s just a Venture. I believe “Predator” means “with a green plastic stock.”

We live in amazing times. Fifty years ago, which was the 1970’s, believe it or not old people, a rifle that shot maybe 5 minutes of angle (about 5.25″ at 100 yards) was considered very accurate. Now, any bolt rifle that doesn’t shoot 1.5 MOA is considered lame, and you can walk into any sporting goods store and choose from a selection of 1-MOA rifles.

I chose the Thompson Center partly because it came with a 1-MOA guarantee. Three shots at 100 yards. Based on photos of targets I shot back then with cheap Fiocchi ammo, it looks like the gun came through, although I also shot some bad groups. That guarantee was pretty clever, because any gun will eventually shoot one three-shot 1-MOA group if you keep trying.

I wasn’t ecstatic about the trigger, so I looked for options, and there were none. Sadly, TC was not doing well, and its guns were not all that popular. In fact, it was going out of business, even though it belonged to Smith & Wesson. I don’t recall how that worked.

TC has been bought by the guy who sold it to S&W, but I don’t think they’ve actually made any new guns. Will they ever start? Who knows?

If you buy a popular gun like a Remington or Tikka, you will be able to find a lot of aftermarket triggers for it. I suppose no trigger maker thought it was a good idea to spend time and money on a trigger for an unpopular gun, however.

I put a lighter spring on it, and that was about all I could do.

Flash forward to a year or two ago. Suddenly I had a silencer. I wanted to get back to shooting. But two bolt guns I wanted to shoot did not have threaded barrels: the TC and a Tikka T3x.

By the way, the Tikka IS a 1-MOA gun, with factory ammo and no excuses. I managed to shoot a few rounds to zero it. It seems like it always rained when I started shooting for accuracy, so I have had a lot of sessions cut short. Anyway, even the zeroing shots, made while I was turning scope screws, looked very good.

I’ll post photo of a target I shot with “garbage” Sellier & Bellot ammo. This is a modestly-priced deer rifle on a modestly-priced bipod, shooting cheap ammunition. I shot these rounds while still adjusting the scope. There is one flyer which was probably caused by me shooting one round and then cranking the screws, and then there are at least 6 rounds that are 1 MOA or extremely close to it.

Checking my blog history, I see that I went indoors because I wanted to see if the scope was loose, not because of rain. When I shot another target with different ammo, the point of impact changed in a way that didn’t make sense to me. And target above was shot at both 50 and 100 yards. I shot one round at 50. It was very low. I adjusted the scope and shot two rounds into the same hole. Then I backed up to 100 and shot pretty much into the same POI. I was confused, because the 50-yard POI was essentially the same as the 100-yard POI. I didn’t understand how flat the gun shot at these distances.

That S&B FMJ 6.5 Creedmoor is nothing to sneeze at, at least at 100 yards. I bought a ton of it. It shoots great in the Tikka and also in my RPR.

If the domestic enemies of Christ finally started their war and I somehow found myself in a situation where I had no choice but to go out with the militia nuts and fend off guerrilla murder squads in floral print dresses, I would be able to do what was necessary over and over while they were too far away to see me without binoculars.

I think I paid $16.00 per box when I bought them one at a time, and I didn’t buy most of mine one at a time.

Of course, I have zero interest in participating in a civil war. If it weren’t for my family, I think I would prefer being among the early casualties than staying here and treating demonized jerks like paper targets. The word says David was a bloody man. I have no desire to follow suit. I would rather be a man of love.

So anyway, I had the Tikka and the TC, and they were not threaded.

I looked into having them threaded. In spite of living in a huge 2A area, I could not find anyone close to me who would do it, and I really did not want to do it myself. Most machining is easy, but barrels are not made to fit in the usual lathe tooling, and they are hard to remove from actions. Also, it’s easy to mar them up, and aligning them in lathes so the bullets won’t hit the silencers later is more complex than you would think.

I found someone in the next county, and she wanted $195-$275, which is insane. I paid $450 for the TC.

I let it go, but recently I learned something that changed the picture. Silencer Central now offers mail-in threading for $165, including muzzle protectors. The price is lower if you ship two barrels at once. The shipping is about $40 whether you send one or two.

Great. I am sold. It’s fantastic news. I’m sending the Tikka in, because even though it is not a high-priced rifle, it is 100% worth it. But the Thompson Center?

I can’t get a trigger for it. I don’t know if I’ll ever get fun-level accuracy out of it. Thompson Center has been bought and reanimated, but there is no guarantee they will provide warranty service or that they’ll exist next year.

It looks like a quagmire to me.

I figure I can sell it for $350, so that’s $350 I can put toward something else. That something else is a Ruger American Predator in the same caliber. I want the same caliber because I have a boatload of ammunition, and I still think the .204 Ruger has potential.

It has a light, fluted barrel. The metal bits are Cerakoted. It’s threaded. It has a pretty good trigger out of the box. There are lots of aftermarket parts for it, including Timney triggers. It will probably shoot 1 MOA the day I bring it home. Lots of guys are getting that kind of performance in other calibers.

I’m sold. I don’t need any more hassle.

I’m getting the rifle plus a Timney. I’ll take the scope off my TC and put it on the Ruger. Done deal.

Now I have to ask: is it really necessary for two different companies to put “Predator” in the names of their guns? It sounds kind of silly. AMERICAN HE-MAN HAIRY-CHESTED CARNIVORE PREDATOR!

Yes, I am a predator. I have killed more fish than red tide, and I have managed to make a tiny dent in the hunting realm by murdering squirrels. And I eat hamburgers. But come on. You can call the gun something a little less steroidy-sounding, and I will still buy it. I mean, I did.

It bugs me that people call the Tikka, the Ruger, and the TC budget guns. Why do they do that? I guess you get more refinement in guns costing two or three times as much, and you get walnut instead of plastic, but I feel like any quality gun should be respected. If a gun can hit rats repeatedly at 100 yards, it is durable, and it is pleasant to shoot, calling it a budget gun sounds a little snobby.

I think the Tikka ran me $950 or so. Budget? Really?

The TC may not be long for my armory, but it seems very well made to me. All the machining is neat and tidy. It’s actually pretty tight because of the tolerances.

I don’t know if I’ll stick with .204 Ruger. It’s kind of a novelty round. I like it because it’s modern, with modern ballistics something like .223 can’t match, but on the other hand, .223 is more powerful, and it can hit anything I am likely to shoot at. It’s just as accurate, even if it doesn’t shoot as flat. I could blow through my .204 ammo and then rebarrel.

I have another .204 rifle besides the TC, so putting a .223 barrel on the TC would not deprive me of the ability to shoot .204 well even if I sold the TC.

Maybe I shouldn’t have bought the new rifle. It just bugged me that the TC had so many issues.

It should be here soon. I hope I actually use it.

Comforting Art From a Long-Lost Place

I have two exciting deliveries coming today. A new dishwasher and a less-than-mediocre art print.

My Bosch dishwasher left production in 2016, if the web’s guess is correct. I have had it for 9 years, and it may have been here almost 6 years when I arrived. A web source thinks it became available at around the start of 2012.

My dishwasher is not smart. I can’t communicate with it at all. No app. No wifi. No Bluetooth. But it did function for somewhere between 9 and 15 years with only a moderate amount of trouble.

I had to replace the front door panel containing the handle once. There is no latch. You just pull until it gives up. The part you pull on is around 3/16″ thick on each side, plastic, with no reinforcement. It eventually gave way because it was stupidly designed, and I had to spend about $80 on a new panel.

I got some special JB Weld for plastics, and before I installed the new panel, I shot the problem areas full. Now it has the strongest Bosch dishwasher door handle on Earth.

It also leaked a couple of times. I could not figure out why. I was going to tear into it, and then the leaking stopped.

It leaked again recently, and it refused to repair itself, so I took to AI to figure out what was wrong. I had to keep correcting Grok, and eventually it led me to a couple of likely parts. One cost $20, so I ordered it and replaced it.

Installing it should have been an easy job, but I had to lie on the floor on my face and turn a hex fitting 1/16 of a turn at a time, and there were other issues. Bosch could have made it much easier by using some brains. The order of installation operations caused the problem. It’s much easier to remove the hose from the part if the part is out, but you have to remove the hose in order to take the part out. That kind of thing. Stupid.

It still leaked, so I looked into the other part. It was a pump, it was discontinued, it would have cost something like $250 if I had been able to find it, and replacing it would have been a very unpleasant job. I would have had to turn the dishwasher upside down, and there was no guarantee the new part would fix the issue.

I could have called a repairman and blown a hundred bucks or so to be told I was wrong, but I was almost certainly right, and other parts would have been replaced, so I would have been out maybe $200 at the least, and I would have still had an old machine with a vanishing parts supply.

I found a successor model on sale at Lowe’s for $400 off for no clear reason, so I jumped on that. They wanted $217 for installation, which I did not jump on. It’s two screws, two tubes, and a cord. I need to open a dishwasher installation business and charge $150 per trip.

I went with Bosch in spite of the stupid bits. Basically, the machine has impressed me. It worked well, and working on it was surprisingly easy for the most part. And the parts are not terribly expensive. It looks like they gave it parts support for a reasonable amount of time. Could have been better, but I have seen worse. And getting over 40% off the price was a deal I could not miss out on.

Oh, boy. Here comes the truck.

I’m paying them $50 to haul off the old machine. I could do that myself, but in a time when a visit to Cracker Barrel costs over $30, $50 seems cheap for what I’m getting.

It’s here. Life can now go on. We can cook again.

I know I’m spoiled, but if the dishwasher quits, it means I can’t cook. It doesn’t mean I can cook and wash dishes by hand. No.

My other package is a Nellie Meadows print.

Nellie Meadows was an artist from Clay City, Kentucky. My grandfather owned a lot of land in her area. Was she a great artist? No. Was she a good artist? Mmmm…no. Let’s be honest. I would say that she was not quite good enough to make it as a commercial artist drawing new Buicks for newspaper ads. She misunderstood perspective and composition, and she chose subjects poorly.

On the other hand, her work was very popular with people in the area because she, along with a guy named Al Cornett, was a scarce commodity. They were the only artists within miles.

Al’s work is better but still not good.

Actually, man who made quasi-pornographic sculptures lived about 50 yards from my grandparents, and his work is in the Smithsonian. His name was Edgar Tolson. I wouldn’t want any of that stuff in my house.

He carved anatomically-correct figures of Adam and Eve in the buff. He also did carvings that lacked genitalia. I guess it would be okay to have one of those. Antiques Roadshow appraised one of his pieces for $2,000-$3,000, so he’s not up there with Picasso.

I think the fuss over Tolson’s work is sort of like the reverse racism of soft expectations, applied to white people. If he had lived in New York, his work would all be in landfills.

My grandparents had some Nellie Meadows and Al Cornett prints in their house, and I didn’t get any of them when they died. My sister glommed at least one Cornett print and utterly destroyed it. I had never seen an art print stained with black mold until she got ahold of it. I would guess my aunt glommed the others while glomming things for her kids without going through the will or probate or my grandparents’ wishes. But I’m not sure.

My grandparents had a painting called “Kentucky the Great State;” a title which was not intended to be sarcastic. It wasn’t good, but I used to sleep in the bedroom where it hung, so I want a copy.

I have Ebay set up to send me Nellie Meadows and Al Cornett items, and it sent me a listing for a painting of Natural Bridge. This is a bridge created by erosion, and it is located in the Red River Gorge, near my grandparents’ town.

It’s one of her better works, meaning it’s good enough for a post card. It has what looks to be a wormy chestnut frame. It wasn’t expensive. I got the seller down to $42 plus shipping. I took it.

We plan to clean it up and put it in one of the upstairs bedrooms. It’s good enough for kids and guests. I already have one of her paintings in the guest toilet.

I have given up on Eastern Kentucky as a place to live or visit. The culture is just not up to par. The childishness, racism, violence, machismo, drunkenness, ignorance, spousal abuse, and so on are too much for me to deal with, and I would also find it awkward to live near my relatives who have pretty much rejected me in favor of bits of my grandparents’ estates. I’m also bummed out because so many people there are conservative in their hearts yet vote for Democrats so the government will give them money.

Nonetheless, I have very fond memories of Kentucky, and I often think about what it could be if the people would just grow up.

I hope the painting is in good shape when it arrives. Now I have to install a dishwasher.

The new dishwasher is “smart.” Notice the quotation marks. Bosch expects me to use an app to set it up and use it. I can do it without the app, but then I lose elite features. I won’t be able to set a delayed start, and I won’t be able to change the dishwasher’s gender.

I’ll bet that smart junk added $75 to the MSRP.

I wonder when we’ll get over the smart idiocy and resume making appliances that make sense.

Anyway, here’s to our mechanical and electronic slaves. Thank you, God, because I don’t have to wash clothes or dishes by hand, travel on foot or on a cart, take cold showers, or accept the climate nature gave me. I appreciate it more than I can say.

Regretfully, I Must Pass on the Queers for Palestine Silent Auction

Today is this family’s day of rest and prayer. No laundry, no mowing, no welding, no painting, no repairs, no business.

We expect to do what we always do on Sunday: eat at Costco. I often wonder what my high school classmates would think of that. At least two were the children of a billionaire, and many were snobs. I really look forward to those cheap pizza slices and free-refill beverages, eaten on fiberglass picnic-style tables.

I have no interest in seeing any of my classmates again. Maybe one guy, but that’s it. When I knew them, they were unhappy worldly people with poor values.

I dreamed of one of them last night. John. We were in high school together. I would say we were friends, but we weren’t. Sometimes you spend a lot of time with a person and consider him a friend, and then after you part ways, you realize you just kept company for the sake of having company.

John isn’t an awful person, but he is insecure and competitive. He is selfish. He is extremely rigid. He has never thought for himself. Whatever the herd says is right is right. He finds people who reject the herd amusing, and he feels he is better than they are. Sometimes they make him angry, just because they’re different.

I don’t think he has changed. Maybe he has. I ran into a store maybe 10 years ago, and he seemed about the same. Personable, but condescending.

I cut back on hanging around with him because I realized he was condescending and didn’t treat me as an equal. Also, he stole a girl from me, which is a huge violation of the male friendship code.

The desire for a gradual parting was probably mutual. I don’t think he liked me all that much.

In high school, friendship is like looking for a seat in the lunchroom. You go where you’re accepted, and you take the good with the bad.

I couldn’t help John in his ambitions, so I don’t think he had much motivation to be my friend.

We didn’t have much in common. I had all sorts of interests. He was just an inside-the-box guy who wanted to watch sports, go to law school, practice law, and make money. If you know John, he isn’t inviting you to his house to see his paintings. He’s not climbing mountains in Nepal. He’s not composing music or fly fishing. He probably owns less than 10 tools.

I should have dropped him sooner, but I was too much of a person-pleaser. I think I’ve gotten over that! Most people who know me would surely agree.

In the dream, I was living in the house I lived in during high school. John came to the front door, dressed in his lawyer attire minus the jacket. He wanted to show me his car, which was parked by the curb behind him.

He said it was a Charger. It was very special. It had a thousand horsepower. He wanted me to see it.

When I walked out to see it, it was across the street. I had to walk a long way. I wondered why he had moved it. It was inconsiderate.

The car became a very fancy bicycle. It had big balloon tires, and at first, it had some kind of propulsion. The tires were not attached to the bike. They had no spokes. Somehow they stayed in place and spun anyway.

He started riding through a grassy field while telling me about the bike. He never offered to let me ride it. That was like the real John. I had to jog beside him.

I said there was no way it had a thousand horsepower.

For some reason, after a while, he had to pedal, so I guess it turned into a regular bike.

My high school was about half Jewish, and some of the Jewish guys were very competitive. Most were not competitive at all. If you befriended one of the competitive ones, you couldn’t be on the same level. You had to be above or below. John was like that. They said a lot of resentful things about other Jewish guys whose families had more money. There was a lot of competition when it came to bar mitzvah gifts.

I had another competitive friend. Ken. He tried to make valedictorian, but he was caught cheating. Got into Princeton anyway. He switched to the University of Florida because they had a short program that would give him a BS and an MD in a hurry.

Ken was miserable. One of the other Jewish kids came from a family worth hundreds of millions, and he used to tell Ken he would never be worth as much as he was. It bothered him. Ken’s father died, and Ken said his father was laughing at him from the afterlife because he would never be as successful as he had been.

Ken had his MD when he shot himself at 25. Seems like he was doing just fine in terms of worldly success.

His dad was tormented, too. Lots of money, but he was always anxious, driven, and unfulfilled, and he projected it onto Ken. When Ken said he wanted to play football, his dad said, “I’ll break your hands myself.” He had decided Ken was going to be a surgeon. He didn’t want him injuring his hands.

Anyway, I live on a farm, I wear work shorts or work jeans every day, I drive a 2016 Ford, and I love taking my wife and son to Costco for lunch. I drink XO brandy; that’s true. But it’s Kirkland XO, for $48 per fifth. An amazing bargain.

I wonder what would happen if I went to a high school reunion wearing work jeans and suspenders and proceeded to be very open about myself. “I voted for Trump three times.” “I pray in tongues every day.” “I have a law license, I was very good at law, and it was easy, but I refuse to practice.” “I carry a 10mm pistol with a laser everywhere.” “I drive a tractor and cut my own trees.” “I mow my own yard.”

“My wife believes in submission to her husband.” That would go over great. Among the divorcees and spinsters. Those fulfilled modern ladies. Living their best lives.

One girl from my school went on to become the top dog at Miami’s Planned Parenthood branch. A long time ago, they sent me an invitation to a fundraiser. I tore it in half and mailed it back.

“Come on down and help us fund tearing apart babies in the womb for selfish, irresponsible sluts in the hope of reducing the black population!” No, and I don’t thank you for asking. God will judge you.

Why would anyone assume I supported abortion? Talk about a faux pas. “We went to high school together, so I just assumed you would want to come help my organization burn a cross and lynch a black man!”

I have always hated abortion, but now that I have a son, my understanding of the evil involved is much deeper. My wife and I prayed so hard that he would be born alive and without problems. We still pray for him and bless him all the time. Like all normal parents who aren’t sick in the head, we would give our lives for him without thinking. The thought of seeing his little body torn up in a pan so his mother could look better in a bathing suit or avoid suing me for child support is as horrifying as any thought I could ever have. I would much rather see myself in that condition.

Not to defend lynching, but at least some of the victims were murderers or rapists. What crime has a baby committed other than wanting to live and be loved by his parents?

I don’t have to worry about how I would be received at a reunion because I would never to back to Miami again unless I were forced by a court. I don’t even feel comfortable in Gainesville.

It’s amazing what feminism has turned mainstream Americans into. What could make a woman proud she tore her precious, helpless baby up? It comes straight from hell. God is male, period. He expects men to lead families. He never wanted us to be ruled by women; in Isaiah, it is mentioned as a curse.

Feminist brainwashing made it challenging for me to take over as a proper patriarch. I have been indoctrinated for over 50 years. It hasn’t stopped just because I overcome it. Every day, I have to dismiss it all over again.

What if God hadn’t pulled me out of it? I might be a Will Smith. A defeated cuckold with a demonized wife who humiliates me in public. A beaten father who raised an androgynous homosexual son, along with a lesbian daughter who is considerably more masculine.

No man wants to see his seed fall to the ground and rot.

My wife tells me she will be ready to go soon. She is fasting, and she wants to be at Costco when it ends.

Who can blame her?

“Welcome to the Two Minutes Tim Cook Hate”

I got annoyed yesterday because I realized I had wasted $429 on a vacuum cleaner which is not as good as a $130 shop vac from Home Depot. Today I’m annoyed about refrigerators.

I had been hearing a lot about Samsung’s new policy of forcing refrigerator owners to allow fridges to display ads in their kitchens. You didn’t dream that last sentence; it’s actually happening.

Today I decided to take a look.

First, let me say that we have all been hoodwinked when it comes to fridges. We pay too much for refrigerators that do things 1) other than refrigerating 2) which are not actually very helpful.

When I was a kid, a fridge was a fridge, not a TV, video game console, telephone, camera, therapist, sex surrogate, French tutor, urologist, dog trainer, palm reader, thought leader, icemaker, or water fountain. Fridges had excellent mechanicals, they lasted 40 years if treated well, and they could be repaired easily.

In the 1960’s, things started to change. Clever marketers decided people wanted their fridges to make ice automatically and dispense cold water through the door. Over the ensuing decades, fridges got more complicated, the mechanicals started to fail after 10 years, and repair became less and less practical due to the use of cheap parts.

My grandparents built a beautiful home in about 1965. My grandmother put two deep freezes in the basement, along with the fridge from her old home. When she died in 2003, these appliances were still working, as were her Speed Queen washer and dryer.

I have seen modern fridges fail in under 5 years.

Consumers love shiny gadgets, so as technology improved, we started seeing truly ridiculous features in refrigerators.

Now you can talk to your refrigerator in America while you vacation in New Guinea. You can tell it what to do. You can make it show you video of its contents. If it gets lonely, it can text you.

They make fridges with external TV screens that allow you to see what you could see if you took your precious little hand and opened the doors.

I thought my old refrigerator was dying last year. Turned out it wasn’t true. We had been blocking the air from the freezer. Moving food around fixed it. Before we got it straightened out, we went to look at new fridges.

Spoiler alert: there aren’t any good refrigerators now. You think your Sub-Zero or Fisher & Paykel is going to last longer than a Frigidaire? It won’t. I talked to an appliance guy who was working on a dryer, trying to find out which brand of refrigerator was best. He was familiar with every brand. He said, “They’re all junk.” I asked if that included the boutique brands. Yes, it did.

Interesting side note: your new refrigerator is full of flammable gas. FLAMMABLE. Isn’t that nice? Good thing to know if you have a house fire. The greenies have panicked us through several iterations of refrigerant, probably needlessly, and now we have reached the point where they think it’s better to have a giant bomb in your kitchen than risk damage to the ozone layer, which seems to be doing very well.

We decided we did not want an icemaker or any type of dispenser. My current fridge has a door dispenser, and we almost never use it.

Here is the dirty little secret of all door water dispensers: they dispense warm water, not cold. At least compared to actual cold water you might keep in a jug inside the fridge. If “cold” means 5 degrees cooler than the tap water from your sink, then yes, they dispense cold water. To me, it means 35 degrees.

Icemakers fail frequently. They are the parts that go bad most often on refrigerators, and they aren’t very good. They have evolved to the point where they dispense ice in awkward semicircular chunks that block the flow of liquid to your mouth. Seems like the ice always smells, too. These machines make so much ice, it sits around absorbing odors for weeks or months. Are you a fisherman? Get ready for gin, tonic, and perch.

Another issue: icemakers and water dispensers kill cubic footage. They take up room. If you see a refrigerator advertised as 22 cubic feet, you have to deduct the volume of the water and ice apparatus, because the manufacturer won’t.

There’s more: these machines have unnecessary water filters. My water is just fine. The manufacturers have started putting digital chips on their filters so you get no ice and no water unless you use their OEM filters, and those can cost $50 to $80 each, although a filter probably costs Frigidaire $5. I saw a guy claim he needed to spend $250 per year to keep up. That’s like 70 cases of bottled water.

My fridge has a filter cartridge (non-OEM), and I never replace it. The water keeps flowing. Sometimes when I feel like it, I push the little button that says to reset the filter life, and the fridge obeys as though I had installed a new cartridge. It has no idea whether the filter is full. It apparently goes by time.

Making your own ice isn’t really that tough.

If I want a big, shiny stainless bottom-freezer fridge from one of the least-worthless brands, it will cost me at least $1500. That’s on sale. I can get a plain old white top-freezer fridge for $850. Nearly the same cubic footage. Maytag sells a 22-cubic-foot model for $1800 (regular price), and I can buy a 21-cubic-foot top-freezer fridge for half of that.

Am I being cheap? Well, sure, but the main thing is that I don’t have to be concerned about repairs to parts I don’t want to buy in the first place. I don’t like waiting for repairmen. I don’t like paying them. I don’t trust them. I don’t enjoy doing appliance repairs.

I could buy a top-freezer fridge and a standalone ice maker for less than the cost of a fancy fridge with no ice maker or dispenser.

The thing that really sticks in my craw, however, is not the ice and water problem. It’s the ad problem.

People bought Samsung refrigerators, thinking they were getting cool gadgets they actually owned, and then Samsung updated their firmware without permission and started showing them ads. That’s immoral. You don’t change a deal once you make it.

I hate unsolicited ads. When I see ads playing on a gas station pump, I face the other way until my tank is full. I have smart TV’s, and I do everything I can to disable their ad functions (which didn’t exist when I bought them). I block and report all spam emails. I put a spam filter on this blog. I pay for Youtube Premium because it kills ads. I quit watching Amazon videos for multiple reasons, and one was that they swindled me on ads. They sold me Prime with the promise that I would see no ads, and then they started showing me ads anyway.

Call me spoiled, but I would rather watch nothing than watch a really good show interrupted by the same ad 30 times.

Video ads are pathetic these days. Some shows can’t get a lot of sponsors, so they run the same three sponsors’ ads over and over. They also increase the frequency of ads as the shows progress. You get a short interruption every 8 minutes toward the beginning, then you get hooked, and then you get a longer interruption, featuring the same ads, every two minutes until the show is over.

It’s also common for video providers to lock up ads while you look at other browser tabs. You move to a new tab while the ad is running, hoping to avoid it, and when you go back, the ad resumes at exactly the same point where you abandoned it.

If I don’t want to buy your silly product during the first three seconds of the ad, I still won’t want to buy it after being forced to see the other 27 or 157 seconds.

I quit watching secular entertainment, so I suffer much less than I used to. I still watch videos related to my interests.

I can’t imagine the misery of going through the work of minimizing the ads in my life and then having them forced on me, on a big screen, in my kitchen.

Do they have sound? Can you shut it off? I certainly hope they default to silence, but I’ll bet they don’t.

The ad-forcing TV’s don’t cost less than the ones that have no screens. They cost more. So where is the ad revenue going? To Samsung, of course. Samsung is subjecting you to torment and taking money for it. You get nothing for your service.

You’re like a prisoner on a chain gang, working for 50 cents per hour while the state charges private land owners for your services. Except you don’t get the 50 cents.

If Samsung put a billboard in my yard, they would have to pay me, not themselves. Common sense?

Samsung fridges have cameras inside them. I’m not kidding. I’m going to guess they film your food and send you ads based on what you eat. They sell the information to other jerks.

I hope some prankster starts putting dummy grenades and pipe bombs in his Samsung fridge.

Samsung says the ads are “curated.” This is a nonsense term intended to make products seem special and consumers feel important. It just means someone chose the ads. This is true of all ads. Also, Samsung’s “curator” is a computer that belongs to Samsung. It’s not a human being. “Curated” means “chosen to appeal to you based on information we shouldn’t have, and provided by predatory corporations.”

It’s odd to use the term “curated” to apply to products which are…advertisements. Ordinarily, marketers use it to apply to things we like and want, not things we hate. Assortments of skin care products. Music playlists.

“We hope you’re enjoying your stay at the Tower of London. Next in our series of curated experiences for valued subjects, the iron muzzle with spikes on the inside!”

Samsung lies and says the ads are intended to benefit you. It’s all about you. For the children. So you can live your best life. Because we are stronger together. And it takes a village. Love trumps hate. Coexist.

If you’re going to lie, at least try to come up with lies that would fool a two-year-old. The lies make this worse, not better.

It will get worse. If our government wanted to do anything about it, they would have done it by now. Our laws are made by people lobbyists pay for service, lobbyists have lots of money, and you can’t expect the same people who take bribes to ban bribes.

Here’s a critical video about Samsung’s disgusting actions. Here is the height of irony: the video was clearly made using AI. AI will defend you against creeping tech tyranny. Yeah. That will happen.

Why are Man Tools Always Better Than Girl Tools?

I’m sitting here today, wondering if I’m stupid.

Something like 18 years ago, I bought a Ridgid shop vac. It looks like it has leprosy. The surface of the plastic case is badly faded. I don’t know what caused this. Apparently, this particular plastic fades with time, and the texture roughens.

This is the only thing wrong with it.

I have used it on machining chips, all sorts of metal debris, sawdust, wood chips, leaves, dirt, bugs, and wet spills. I have used it as a spot cleaner on furniture, wetting the fabric with window cleaner and then sucking it out. I have failed to clean the filter for years on end. Nothing bothers it.

It is reasonable to expect this vacuum to continue working for at least another 30 years without repairs.

You can buy a similar Ridgid for under $130.

Move forward to September of 2022.

I thought I should man up, spend serious money, and get a real house vacuum cleaner. I already had an Electrolux, and it was okay, but the cord rewind mechanism was broken, somehow the main floor attachment had gotten lost, and it was a canister vacuum I had to drag around. I wanted an upright.

The Electrolux had its good points. It was very quiet. It was light. It seemed to do an okay job. But I had to drag it, and Electrolux is extremely feeble when it comes to parts. I had to buy a Chinese floor attachment. Electrolux discontinued the cord retractor, which is a part that fails frequently.

I bought a Shark upright for the low, low sale price of $429.

How can a vacuum cleaner cost $429? That’s a great question. A motor and a cheap body, all made in Asia. You can get a canister vacuum from another respected manufacturer for around $120, so what’s up with Shark?

It’s supposed to have unusually powerful suction. I’ll give it that. It does. Other than that, it’s just bells and whistles, like the motor that speeds up when the vacuum sees more dirt in front of it. Personally, I want my vacuum to run fast all the time. I am offended by products that charge me extra to save energy, unless they save me serious money.

Do you hate it when your TV turns itself off when you leave the room? Me, too.

Like just about everything these days, the Shark came with a proprietary part which has to be replaced regularly. It’s a fragrance cartridge. You put it in the base, and until it runs out of irritating chemicals, it makes your house smell like the perfume counter at Target. Shark charges $13 each, and you have to buy two at a time. Market price for knockoffs: two dollars and change.

The only reason I keep the original cartridge in my machine is to block the hole it fits in. I’m afraid leaving it open will kill the suction. I don’t care about running out of perfume.

I also have a Shark cordless upright, which I will defend. It works very well for what it is, and it’s convenient. It’s no match for a powerful vacuum, but it handles most types of dirt with acceptable success.

The Sharks work pretty well. The corded job sucks like crazy, and the cordless one is probably stronger than my Electrolux. They both choke on anything bigger than 3/4″, though, and wet spills will ruin them.

When a Shark chokes, you have to take the filthy floor part apart. Lovely experience.

Move forward to 2025.

Louis Rossmann is one of my favorite Youtubers. He runs a big electronics repair business in Texas. He used to operate in New York City, but he left because he couldn’t take it any more. New York treats business owners like criminals.

Now that I think about it, it treats criminals like business owners.

Rossmann is big in the right-to-repair movement. He got his start while servicing Apple products.

Apple is one of the most ruthless, immoral, greedy, dishonest companies on Earth. Apple will not give repairmen schematics and OEM parts, and it cheats customers who need repairs.

Apple has a history of cheating us silly, not just with inflated initial costs, but with dishonest repair bills. If you take your Apple product to an Apple repair center with a problem that can be fixed with a cheap part or a cleaning, there is a good chance they will lie to you and tell you to buy a new product.

Forcing people to buy new products is not a small wrong. It’s a big deal when a repair that should cost $35 turns into a $1500 purchase. We’re not all as rich as Tim Cook.

Rossmann saw the replacement swindle more than once, and he was frustrated because he had to find technical documents through back channels. He also had to buy real Apple parts this way, and he had to use questionable aftermarket parts in some repairs.

Now he puts out video after video about RTR, and he goes after companies other than Apple. One of his big beefs right now concerns unwanted ads. Example: Samsung just started forcing refrigerator owners to put up with ads on their fridge doors. They bought the fridges with no ads, Samsung updated the software without consulting them, and now they get annoying commercials while trying to get bologna for sandwiches.

He’s mad at Shark right now because a customer needed new wheels for a 6-month-old machine, and Shark construed its own warranty, which they try to tell us is generous, to exclude just about everything except the motor.

In a recent video, Rossman told the world about his home vacuum: a Ridgid shop vac.

It’s cheap. It’s powerful. You can get attachments to make it work indoors like a home vacuum. It can suck up just about anything, wet or dry. It has a huge capacity.

Need a part? Ridgid will sell it to you. They have a big selection of parts on their site, and Home Depot stocks a lot of parts.

I ruled out shop vacs for indoor use a long time ago, assuming they had to be unsuitable. I guess I was wrong.

Watching Rossman, I tried to rationalize my spending. I thought, “Well, it won’t work on floors. The primitive floor things on my two shop vacs are made for things like garages.” No; you can buy a floor attachment which will actually work. It’s simple and cheap, and it won’t give you a pretty LED light show, but it does work.

I kept trying to defend my expenditures. I said, “It won’t filter the air nearly as well as a Shark. It has no HEPA filter.”

There are problems with that notion.

1. Houses and buildings used to get very clean without HEPA filters. I think the initialism “HEPA” is just a tool to make you feel bad about not spending more money, unless you have some kind of freak allergy. You probably shouldn’t breathe dust while sanding drywall, but the stuff that collects on your exercise bike will not send you to the ER.

2. Ridgid sells HEPA filters for their vacuums.

The video made me think about wet spills.

I have a baby. He poops. He throws up. He spills stuff. My $429 Shark will not help me with any of that.

I have two Rug Doctor shampoo machines. I have the big one for floors and the little one for furniture and stairs. I got them years ago when I was looking after my dad. He spilled stuff. I guess I have $350 invested in these machines.

If I wanted to, I could spray cleaning solution on big carpet spills, suck it out with a Ridgid, and get things just as clean as the Rug Doctors would. I could do this for furniture and stairs, too.

Using a Rug Doctor is unpleasant. You have to fill a clean-fluid tank and then remove and clean out a dirty-fluid tank. Your hands get involved with the filth way too much. With a shop vac, you just carry it outside, pull the lid, dump the water, and put the lid back on.

Here is the thought rolling around in my head: while the big Rug Doctor is superior for shampooing wall-to-wall carpet, a shop vac is better for every other kind of spill.

If I cared enough, I could use a pump sprayer to apply fluid to rugs and then suck it out with a shop vac. Something to consider.

You can’t clean a dirty carpet with a Rug Doctor until you vacuum it. I know this, because I had to take a Rug Doctor apart to remove dog hair after a friend abused it. A shop vac loves dog hair. And nails. And rocks.

The big Rug Doctor is designed to break down. It uses a water pump to shoot cleaning solution onto rugs. The pump is not designed to resist corrosion well. Every so often, the pumps quit, and they have to be replaced. This is a nightmare job. I did it recently.

The little Rug Doctor probably has the same problem. I am waiting for it. If it happens, I’ll probably take it to the dump.

It appears to be a machine with no legimitate reason to exist.

I don’t think a Ridgid cordless can replace a Shark cordless. I have a really good Ridgid cordless I got for sucking goo out of air conditioners. You have to carry it like a suitcase. The suction doesn’t seem all that impressive. Maybe I’m wrong, though.

Shop vacs are incredibly loud, so that’s a problem, but it’s nothing earmuffs can’t fix.

It looks like I spent hundreds of dollars buying myself unnecessary problems. Something to think about for the future.

MORE

I checked, and it appears the Ridgid WD0319 cordless shop vac sucks considerably harder than a cordless Shark Stratos and runs a lot longer on one charge. It lacks motorized rollers and so on, however, and the Shark may seal to rugs better.

I doubt the business about the Shark sealing better, since you can get a rug attachment for a Ridgid.

It Means You’re Doing Well

Not long ago, I was praying and prophesying, and I got this sentence: “The world hates me.”

I already knew that. The world hates everyone who might possibly be favored by God. The world hates people who really are close to God, and it hates people it thinks could be close to God now or in the future. It hates people preemptively, just in case they get close to God.

You can see this in action in the press coverage of Israel, a perennial victim of actual, openly confessed, state-sponsored, Muslim-sponsored genocide. The press tells us Israel is committing genocide when, in reality, the Jews are simply responding to a state of siege that has existed ever since Jacob’s time.

Jewish religious authorities missed the Messiah and think they please God when they make turning people away from him their life’s work, so you might say they’re not close to God, but he has not forgotten them. He has said a woman can forget a baby she breastfed, but he can’t forget Zion:

But Zion said, The Lord hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me.

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.

Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me.

If God has not forgotten you, Satan and his children will remember you, too.

When God reminded me that the world hates me, it was helpful, because every so often, while I’m getting along with Satan’s children, one of them lets me know they can turn on me at any time.

I belong to a forum, and people were discussing Popular Mechanics. This used to be a wonderful magazine full of information about tool projects and methods. People were criticizing Pop Mech because, well, it stinks. It’s a horrible, boring magazine of little use to anyone.

As a former subscriber, I mentioned a couple of things I didn’t like about it.

Pop Mech has a relationship with Glenn Reynolds. This makes no sense at all. He has never shown any signs of knowing anything about tools or technology. He teaches law and posts links to things other people wrote on his blog. Far as I know, that’s about it. You might as well hire Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow to tell people about tools.

They should have been able to find someone, in the entire United States, who was familiar with tools and could also write.

Who will he write for next? The Lancet?

I didn’t like the articles I saw, either. In the old days, they might tell you how to run a water pipe under a concrete walk or build a meter for testing resistance. When my magazines started rolling in, they were full of useless junk.

First, the articles about tools were lame. “Find Out Which Inadequate Chinese Sustainable Organic Plastic-Handled Toolkit is Best to Keep in Your Frunk.” Stuff like that. And they published articles about “great tools” that were pretty clearly paid placement.

Second, the projects were awful. Simple plans for ugly furniture made of plywood, for example. It was like they had realized American men had stopped producing testosterone decades ago and were no longer capable of operating real tools with any degree of skill, so they pandered to men they assumed were afraid to use tools for fear of scratching their nail polish.

Maybe they dumbed down the projects in a futile effort to fan the flames of women’s nonexistent interest in tools. Women are different from men. They will always be in the minority in STEM fields and anything involving tools. There will probably always be 8 employed male engineers for every female, mainly because women are not interested in engineering. These truths don’t penetrate the skulls of people who are determined to convince the world nurture is everything.

Third, there was a lot of political fluff that was clearly intended to be social engineering. “Meet 10 CEO’s Under 30 who Made it in Spite of Being Gay/Asian/Black/Female/Crippled/Whatever.” Articles like that are a waste of paper. Put them in Mother Jones or something. Nobody opens Popular Mechanics hoping to find out a lesbian illegal alien is running a successful CNC shop that makes can openers from recycled cans.

Girls can use tools, too! Talk about the soft sexism of low expectations. Wow; a woman operated a drill press. Next, they’ll be walking on their hind feet and using iPads to ask for banana slices.

The magazine was boring and of no use whatsoever, so I did not renew my subscription.

Here is a link to the kind of article I never saw when I subscribed: How to do a Complete Brake System Checkout.

Does Glenn Reynolds do his own brakes? Doubtful. I do. Google “Glenn Reynolds” and “wrench” or “tools” and see what comes up. Nothing.

Doing your own brakes is near the very bottom of the list of things you should be able to do if you want to be tool-literate. It’s down there with changing your oil and cleaning a dryer vent. It’s something millions of American men do all the time. Saying I do my own brakes is not much of a boast.

So anyway, I voiced the above concerns on the forum, and my post was deleted. I was accused of “thinly-veiled racism” and “personal attacks.”

This is where we are now. Complaining about worthless and off-topic material in a magazine that spent roughly a century telling people about tools and things that could be done with them is racism and personal attacks.

They didn’t say who I attacked. I think they just threw that in because their feelings were hurt.

I doubt they were talking about Reynolds, because all I said was that he didn’t know anything about tools. Which is true. Ordinarily, when you get in trouble for making personal attacks on a forum, it has something to do with other forum members, but I didn’t say anything critical about members.

Apparently, using the terms “minorities” and “illegal alien” is racism per se now. But what I said was true, of course. Pop Mech praised minority members and women for being successful in spite of being minority members and women. I don’t know if any of the people I saw the magazine promote were illegals. I just threw that in because it was the kind of thing I thought the editors would do. Poetic license.

By the way, “thinly-veiled racism” usually isn’t racism. The hackneyed phrase “thinly-veiled” is a verbal booster seat. It was created so leftists could accuse people of racism when they weren’t. It’s an evil tool designed to put innocent people on the defensive.

The person who deleted my comment was wrong and unfair, and maybe not very bright, but it’s not my place to tell people how to run their Internet forums. They are allowed to be wrong, unfair, and self-righteous, all day, every day.

So what is the connection between God and being slandered on a forum about tools?

The connection is that I have been treated unfairly all my life, in every area of life. Things I earned were given to others. Positions. Titles. Jobs. Money. I have been slandered so much, I can’t begin to recall the instances. When the world hates you because you might be important to God, it doesn’t treat you well in matters not involving religion and then jump in to attack when religion is relevant; it abuses you all the time.

It’s important to realize this, because otherwise you come to trust the world. You think, “If I do what everyone else does, I’ll get what everyone else gets.” It doesn’t work that way.

Look at Israel. The only civilized nation in the Middle East. A nation what works very, very hard to protect enemy noncombatants. A nation that is among the first to offer aid when bitter enemies have earthquakes and so on. But Satan’s children are busy every day, comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and praising its abusers as martyrs and victims.

Look at the way Christians are portrayed on TV and in the movies. They come in two varieties. The first type is a man who seems kind of gay and gains admiration for standing up to people who criticize sin. The other is a vicious, abusive, controlling ogre–often racist–who needs to be exposed and taken down.

How often have you seen real Christians portrayed favorably on screen? Nearly never. Satan owns Hollywood, and real Christians are a threat to his empire.

If Satan thinks you look like someone God might be planning to save and put to work, you are going to be abused. Satan will send people to destroy you. Backstabbing coworkers. Bosses who promote everyone but you. Whorish women. Friends who work to make you fail. Abusive parents and teachers. Prosecutors. The police. Random criminals. Homeless demoniacs.

People who belong to fraternities and secret organizations will blackball your business. Exciting business opportunities that look like they will be your big breaks will disappear after you put in a lot of time and work.

If you expect it, you can avoid that feeling you get when your trust is betrayed. That sensation of having your legs sliced off at the knees or taking a cannonball to the stomach. You can also avoid big losses. Satan likes getting people to invest heavily in schemes that look good but disintegrate like mirages when they think they’re getting close.

If you know the world hates you, you can take such good things as the world offers you, without great risk. You can accept the little bribes and baits without sticking your neck out and going all in.

Satan wants you to keep jumping back on the treadmill. He wants you to think persistence is the key. It’s not. You’ll never be his favorite. You’ll never get the blue ribbon or the gold medal. Your tech startup will never make you a billionaire. Other people will get things you think you deserve. If you know you were not created to be honored and promoted by the world, you will learn to be happy with very good things God provides instead of the outrageous gifts Satan gives the Elon Musks, Jeff Bezoses, Barack Obamas, and Jay Z’s.

Eventually you will learn that the things you thought you wanted were not as good as the things you got.

In 2003, God gave me this: “Our preachers are antichrists.” I learned that by trying to serve preachers, but God reminded me after I quit.

When I belonged to churches, I was frustrated, because I wanted to do so much for people, but worthless preachers and hypocritical, conceited volunteers always shot me down and kept me on the bottom.

Sometimes I wished I could talk to people from the stage, so I could tell them what God had shown me. Things that had been extremely helpful.

At my last church, they let me speak for a few minutes. This was a place where a false prophet could hold the mike and yell all day with the pastor’s encouragement. When they handed me the mike, a horrible stench hit me. They never cleaned it! Perhaps a decade of dried and fresh spit belonging to dozens of people was in the sponge cover. The smell was like the worst bad breath you’ve ever smelled, because that’s what it was: a huge colony of pulsing, multiplying bad breath germs.

Being me, I said something like, “Wow, this thing really stinks!” I probably said they needed to clean it. They wanted me to hold it close to my mouth, but I wouldn’t do it. It was disgusting and probably dangerous. I’m sure I offended people, but they had it coming.

It’s astonishing to me that no one else ever said anything about the smell of a microphone. In my entire life, I have never seen anyone else mention it. Maybe it’s hard to criticize something you love and crave.

I know everyone who used that church’s mikes smelled that stench.

To me, this is a picture of getting something you think is good and then realizing it’s not.

I have been on stage a few times in my life, playing music, speaking, and acting. I don’t like it much. I’m not afraid of it. I have no fear at all of speaking; I don’t understand people who are scared of it. I just don’t like being on a stage. Talking to, or making music with, a few people you know is different. Being on a stage is a job. And if there are lights, you can barely see the people you’re talking to. It’s like you’re performing for the lights.

Making music on a stage is not much fun. The sound is too loud. There are cords everywhere.

I think that when I smelled that microphone, God was telling me I was more blessed than the people who had to hold mikes to their mouths for hours in order to make a living. I could talk to individuals without dealing with microphones, lights, and so on. I could choose the people I talked to instead of spraying throngs of hypocrites with information they had no interest in.

John the Baptist didn’t get a microphone. His father was a temple priest, so he was entitled to be a priest, too, but he ended up in the wilderness eating bugs and talking to people who were willing to walk out and listen to him. On the other hand, the honored religious officials who murdered Yeshua worked in the temple and had riches and glory.

What I have found is that God will look after me financially and otherwise, regardless of the demon-inspired hatred human beings feel for me. I didn’t get many of the prizes and honors I earned in life, but I live in a nice house in a wonderful county. I have no debts. I don’t work. My wife stays here and takes care of our baby, and if you tried to give her a career, she might punch you in the face. I have been able to make a bunch of overseas trips since 2020. My wife and I aren’t afraid to eat in restaurants from time to time.

I consider that abundance. I can feel that I’m well off even if I know someone else has thousands of times as much as I have, or that I don’t have as much as I could have had if I had done things differently.

I didn’t have to wreck my life or sell my soul to get here. God looked after me.

I have very few friends, but then most people who have a lot of friends actually have NO friends. I doubt Oprah has a single friend; she will never know unless she loses her fortune. I have a small number of quality friends. That’s very good. When I was a kid, my mother told me most people are lucky to have one real friend.

I don’t have a jet collection. I don’t have a Bentley or a Bugatti. I don’t own a villa on Laga di Como. Beautiful girls don’t run in and out of my home; they don’t have sex with me so I’ll cast them in movies. I’m not in charge of any armies. I don’t own a crown. I don’t have the stuff Satan gives his temporary favorites. But I wouldn’t know what to do with his gifts if I had them. They would be big, smelly microphones to me.

Get used to being cheated, but on the other hand, get used to being blessed behind the scenes and having a better life than any of the people who hate you. That’s what it all boils down to.

That’s a Wrap

It’s amazing how long it can take to do a simple job.

I bought a used Kubota ZD326 mower. I decided to adjust the rear anti-scalp wheels. This should take under two minutes. I am now weeks into it. They were seized to the deck by rust, due to Kubota’s stupid design. I had to drill one out, and I cut the other one off, along with its support, pushed it out with a hydraulic press, and welded the support back on the mower.

I also needed to replace a fender. Kubota’s plastic fenders break easily. My understanding is that they get brittle from sunlight, and the design is not strong to begin with. I applied a little pressure to a fender in order to make room so I could remove a fuel tank, and the fender split. Figuring I might as well have matching fenders, I ordered a fender for each side.

They arrived covered in bubble wrap. That seemed like a good idea, but when I tried to unwrap them, I learned that Kubota uses bubble wrap with glue on the back. This probably saves an enormous company a thousand dollars a decade in wages for cutting and applying two pieces of tape per fender.

The glue on my fenders was very strong. I had to pull very hard to get the bubble wrap loose. It took a long time because I was afraid I would break another fender if I wasn’t careful.

Great. Job finished. Right?

No.

The bubble wrap came off, but it left big spots of glue on the fenders.

I have a lot of respect for Kubota (still), so I thought maybe they used some new kind of glue that dissolved in water. I thought they might be that smart. I also thought no company could be stupid enough to ship a large, delicate product covered with glue that was hard to remove.

I tried a wet paper towel, and nothing happened.

In my experience, I have generally run into two kinds of glue. The water-soluble type, like the glue on the backs of stamps, and the kind that won’t come off without a solvent. When water didn’t work on my fenders, I started going through the solvent roster.

1. Alcohol. Worked very slowly, smearing the glue around over larger areas.

2. Goo-gone. About like alcohol. I didn’t try WD-40 or mineral spirits because they’re pretty similar to Goo-gone.

3. Acetone. Ate the plastic.

4. Lighter fluid. Better than 1,2, and 3, but not good.

5. Turpentine. This turned out to be the winner. It cut the glue quickly. I used it to clean both fenders, and then I cleaned them again, because when I did it the first time, the turpentine diluted the glue without getting all of it off. When I wiped a fender with turpentine, it cut the glue, but then the turpentine on the paper towel had glue in it, so you can see how that works.

Later on, a guy who works on Kubotas told me he used mild soap and water to take the bubble wrap off, and he says the whole process only takes him a few minutes. He claimed removing the bubble wrap was easy. Specifically, he mentioned fenders for a later model.

I don’t know what to say about that. Water was useless for me, so I had no reason to think soap and water would work. I would have used it if I had thought there was a chance, but I have removed all sorts of adhesive residue over the years, and not once have I seen a glue that dissolved well with soap and water yet resisted plain water.

As for removing the bubble wrap easily, my theory is that my fenders were hard to unwrap because the bubble wrap was old. My mower came out in 2007. The fenders I bought may have been sitting in hot warehouses for 15 years or more. A glue containing water would surely get thicker and harder over a period of years.

Before I used turpentine to finish the job, I used AI. I made it search the web, and when it failed, I made it do it over. It came up with stupid answers like vinegar. For some reason, everyone now thinks vinegar is a panacaea. It is recommended often for jobs it simply will not do. Maybe this has to do with the woke bias against chemicals that work. Better to waste your day trying to strip paint or kill roaches with vinegar than to use something Mother Gaia doesn’t like.

People also recommend Simple Green for a lot of jobs it won’t really do. I bought a gallon of it, and I found it nearly useless. The company has been sued by people claiming it’s not really good for the environment or human beings, and that’s pretty funny.

AI couldn’t find the correct answer, so you have to wonder how Kubota expected me to know it off the top of my head.

I still have the bubble wrap, and I am tempted to try removing the glue from a piece with soapy water.

I just tried it, and it seems to work. The soap makes a big difference.

By the time I was done with the bubble wrap, I had no appetite left for installing the fenders, so my wife and I went out to dinner.

At this point, I honestly wish I had bought a new $18,000 mower. My grass is a foot tall, and I still have at least 4 hours of unpleasant work in front of me, not including the time it takes primer and paint to dry, before I can mow.

After 18 years of collecting and using tools, I honestly thought I was capable of removing bubble wrap, but Kubota proved me wrong.

I find it remarkable that there is no readily-available information about this on the web. I searched. I made AI search. I made AI redo the search. It’s like no one has ever heard of sticky bubble wrap.

Now that I’ve written about it here, other people will be able to find the answer quickly.

I just wish a few other people had written about it before I did.

I Will Rule This Thing

Yesterday I moved one big step closer to having a working lawnmower.

The gauge wheel pins on my used Kubota ZD326 mower seized with light rust because Kubota made them too tight in their bare-steel bores. In a tight bore, even a tiny amount of rust will exert enormous internal pressure, to the point where a hydraulic press is required to fix it. This happened to me, or rather, it happened to the mower’s original owner, and I was stuck with the problem of fixing it.

The deck has two rear wheels, and they do not turn. The pins don’t move in the supports except when they are moved to adjust the height, and in a flat state like Florida, that may never happen. If they are moved often enough, presumably, the rust problem will be mitigated well enough to prevent seizing, but how often is often enough?

Kubota’s manual calls for zero maintenance of any kind on these pins, so you can do everything the manual says and still have the problem. It has also vexed many tractor owners, because some tractor decks have the same pins.

It’s a stupid and inexcusable bit of failed engineering, and 18 years after the mower was introduced, Kubota still hasn’t addressed it. The parts they sell for the affected decks have not changed, except that the plating on the pins is now inferior. They changed the assembly when they designed the next model, and they were definitely aware of it, because how could they not be?

I drilled one pin out, and it was a nightmare, so when I got to the other one, I cut its support off and put the whole thing in the hydraulic press.

Yesterday, I welded it back on the deck.

Welding was not fun.

One of the cardinal rules of welding is that you make yourself comfortable when you do it. If not, your hand may shake, you may have to change positions, and so on. You need to start with a comfortable positiong with good access and visibility.

In order to remove my deck, I have to turn the rear pins 90°. You can see the problem. The pins were locked. I couldn’t get the deck out without extraordinary exertions. Because the deck was on the mower, I couldn’t see well, access was poor, and I had to bend over in an uncomfortable position.

I got it done, sort of. I needed to replace 4 welds. I replaced three. The other one is under the mower, and I don’t want to flail at it blindly. What I have now is strong enough to allow me to remove the deck, improve the welds, and do the painting.

Not the prettiest welds on Earth, but in all likelihood, if I did nothing more, the mower would work just fine with three ugly beads until I died.

Look at that shoddy chrome. Nice work, Kubota.

I am trying to figure out how to prevent future seizures from happening. There are a few solutions.

1. Move the pins every single time I mow and several times during the season. The bore will never stop rusting, so the seizing process will start anew every time I get off the mower and move the pins. I don’t know how long it takes for the pins to seize, so moving them every week seems to be the only safe course. During the off season, I can take them out.

2. Slather the pins with anti-seize.

3. Reduce the diameter of the pins.

Moving the pins is not the answer. I’ll forget, for one thing. Even if I don’t, I may misjudge the necessary interval. Also, it’s a kludge, not a workmanlike solution.

Anti-seize is not the answer. Anti-seize is one of the messiest substances known to man. For some reason, it gets on everything. Worse than grease. I don’t want it all over me and my clothes every time I fool with the pins. It will also trap grit in the bores.

Now that I think about it, I have no reason to expect anti-seize to prevent corrosion. That isn’t exactly what it’s made for. Corrosion is what makes the rust form, and rust locks up the assemblies.

Trimming the pins is the way to go. On the lathe, it’s a sub-one-hour job. I happen to have a lot of copper sulfate, so I can plate the pins so the areas where I cut the chrome off will have some rust protection for cosmetic purposes. Later on, I can look into getting some zinc compound or other to put zinc on the pins.

Now I am looking for information on machining chromed parts. Chromium seems to be right up there with plutonium on the hazard scale. It causes cancer and other things. Chrome plating is very hard, too. So I need to cut through hard plating, or remove it and then cut the steel under it, without poisoning myself.

Removing it with acid would release gas and put chromium compounds into a solution I would have to dispose of, and grinding it off would create a breathable dust.

I think the best thing is to just throw it on the lathe and see what carbide does. The lathe will produce chips too big to inhale. One hopes.

Before I can use the mower or remove the deck, I have to replace the plastic fenders. They are brittle from exposure, and I broke one by applying slight pressure in just the wrong way. The fenders attach to the mower with screws, and the screws go into nylon inserts that push into square holes in the fenders. Incredibly, Kubota sells the fenders without the inserts.

Removing the old inserts from the original inserts is an interesting process. They have little projections that extend outward to anchor them behind the plastic. I got two out using a screwdriver to push the inserts in, and then I realized I could just put the fender fragments in a vise and crush the parts that held the inserts. The plastic explodes, and the inserts fall on the floor.

Some day, I will mow again. And I will know more about this mower than the people who built it. Except for little things like the engine and transmission. But who cares about those, right?

Sometimes it’s not You

I am celebrating because I finally got the right-hand rear anti-scalp wheel shaft out of my Kubota mower deck.

What a nightmare this has been.

The old guy who first owned the mower failed to grease the front deck wheels, so the guy who sold it to me had to struggle to get rusted parts out of the tubes that supported them. That was consumer error. He also failed to remove the rear shafts regularly and apply anti-seize, which was not something Kubota mentioned in the manual, and which was only necessary because Kubota’s engineers created a laughably bad design. That was not the owner’s fault.

The front wheels turn, and their supports have zerks and grease journals. Greasing and reasonably frequent mowing might have prevented them from seizing. The rear wheels do not turn. They sit for years or months in the same position. There are no zerks. There are no journals. If you never have to adjust your mower’s height, and you have this mower, you could end up with stuck shafts.

The rear shafts are just about exactly the same diameter as the interiors of the bores they occupy. This is called a slip fit or transitional fit, depending on how tight the bores originally were. A slip fit, also called a clearance fit, involves a shaft small enough to go in a hole very easily. A transitional fit is very precise but not so tight it requires pressure to assemble the parts. A bore can be pretty snug without becoming a transitional fit. I think. Let me repeat: I took a wrong turn and got a physics degree instead of an engineering degree.

I believe the difference between the OD and ID I’m dealing with is under 0.005″, or 1/200 of the shaft’s diameter.

The shafts are carbon steel plated with what appears to be cadmium. Cadmium was commonly used in years past to prevent rust. The interiors of the bores are plain old steel. You can see the problem here. The cadmium should slow (not prevent) shaft corrosion, but it does nothing to prevent the bores from rusting. It’s also fragile, so it wears off. Then you have steel on steel.

Can you tell I’ve done a lot of research?

If even one part in the assembly is bare steel, the engineering is stupid and doomed to fail in any environment where there are temperature swings and condensation.

The reason my shafts sealed is that water condensed on their upper ends and then seeped down between the shafts and bores. This wet the bores and caused rust. Rust takes up more room than the steel it replaces. In a tight bore, this means you get pressure. You get a rusty shaft and a rusty bore pressing against each other, because there is no room for the rust to expand.

The pressure can become immense. In my case, heat didn’t work, and neither did a sledge or a three-foot pipe wrench.

Often, shafts are pressed into tight bores without adhesives or threads. It is common to press a shaft into a bore with an inner diameter smaller than the shaft’s diameter. This is called an interference fit. Rust can turn a slip or transitional fit into an interference fit.

A deliberate interference fit is not usually a problem to work with. Engineers usually design them so pins or shafts can be hammered or pressed out without trouble. Kubota’s accidental interference fit is different. It is way tighter, because it’s the result of an engineer’s failure to plan, not his careful and competent planning.

I really struggled to remove my left shaft. I knew I could take the support and tube off the mower and use the hydraulic press, but I tried to avoid it. I thought it wouldn’t be all that hard with the support still on the mower. Boy, was I wrong. It took hours and hours of miserable work.

As for the left shaft, I got smart. I cut the support off the tractor today, and I put it on the old hydraulic press.

The support is a piece of folded sheet metal welded to the tube the shaft goes through. To use the press, I needed something to support the tube, and it had to fit with the folded metal in place. I resigned myself to making something from metal stock I had lying around. I was going to fire up the mill and/or lathe. Instead, I decided to set the support on an impact socket with the shaft inside the hex end.

This worked perfectly, except for the fact that the ratchet end of the socket was obstructed. If I had used a simple tube, I would have been able to push the shaft all the way through in one shot. As it was, I had to flip the support maybe 20 times.

Talk about seized. The first time the shaft moved, it went about 3/32″ and then acted like it wanted to stop. Not wanting to damage the socket, I started the flipping process. I applied penetrating oil. I cleaned the shaft off between flips. It really did not want to come out.

I don’t think a 12-ton press would have done the job. A sledge didn’t, and my 3-ton arbor press didn’t do a thing.

Eventually, the shaft moved a lot farther, and it loosened up to where the arbor press would push it. I moved to the arbor press, which is easier to use. After a few more flips, I put the support on a vise and used a hammer and punch. Before long, the shaft fell out.

I used a belt grinder and wire wheel to clean the shaft up, and I used sandpaper inside the support’s tube. Then I tried to put the shaft back in. There was still friction. That’s how bad Kubota’s design is.

My John Deere 430 has similar shafts that are very loose. They can’t seize. Because they’re loose, water runs out of the tubes, and they dry instead of accumulating rust. Because of the gaps, the rust would have to be unrealistically thick to make anything seize. Because the shafts rattle a little, the rust can’t grow. I don’t like the 430, but JD’s anti-scalp strategy is completely superior, and they were using it at least as far back as 1984.

Kubota was watching them. That’s what companies do to their competitors. They still didn’t fix their own design.

Here’s a photo of John Deere’s utterly superior and obvious design:

This may be the only time John Deere did something as well or better than Kubota.

The only real difference is the clearance, which Kubota could not figure out.

It just occurred to me that there may have been a patent problem. That is easier to believe than the alternative, which is that real engineers thought tight-fitting shafts were a good move.

I don’t see how you could patent not making wheel support shafts too tight. Surely that was figured out in the 1700’s. The web says there were working metal lathes in the first quarter of the 18th century, so it was possible to size holes and shafts accurately back then. People would have noticed that tight bores caused problems, because people are smarter than monkeys.

I keep going on about how Kubota blew it because when I’ve looked for help on the web, people have gotten really angry at me for saying engineers made a mistake. Engineers, in particular, have gotten mad and said crazy, emotional things.

They are STEM people, and a lot of STEM people 1) don’t really grow up, and 2) lack a sense of humor.

When I was a physics teaching assistant, I was hit in the face with the reality of the STEM personality. It wasn’t much of an issue when I was an undergrad, because I knew people in Miami outside of physics, but as a grad student, STEM people were just about all I had.

All my life, I have made friends quickly, but in a year and a half in a physics department, the only friend I made was my girlfriend. Absolutely NO ONE cared when I left. No one ever visited my apartment. I never saw the inside of any of their apartments. Weird.

I saw the inside of the house where one of my students lived, so maybe that shows they were more normal than my peers.

I migrated to law school, and once there, I was the life of the party. Never lacked for company. Saw other people’s homes. Woke up on another student’s floor because I was so drunk I couldn’t drive home, and I didn’t even know her well. Took people fishing many times. Joined organizations.

I made friends at both of my last churches. I have godchildren. My friends still come to visit, and I left my last church in 2015.

I have probably written about one of my favorite TA’s. His name was Ian. His students called him “Fridge.” He had no facial expressions. He wore exactly what you would expect: non-denim pants and a plaid short-sleeve button-down shirt. Chuck Taylors.

Fridge told me he had no furniture in his apartment. I asked him where he did his homework. He said he held a clipboard and leaned against a wall.

Fridge was very droll, but you wouldn’t want to be his friend.

Then there was Todd. He liked Asian women. A lot. He told me, “It’s not a fetish. It’s a PREFERENCE.” The big smile on his face as he said “preference” was not wholesome. He said it in kind of a breathy way.

He said he was going to move to Japan to teach English. He told me other things I didn’t want to know.

Then there was an obese guy named Rich. The king of the TA office. He tormented other people for no reason. He was obnoxious to me. I think he may have thought this was the way to make friends, like a boy who can’t make himself say he has a crush. He had been in the department for a while, and I never saw any indication that he was friends with anyone.

Come to think of it, I can’t recall ever seeing anyone in that office who was there for social reasons, except for my girlfriend. One TA was married, and I think his wife may have made an appearance. Or maybe he just mentioned her.

Rich had a locking bookshelf, and he kept stealing my head TA’s expensive books and putting them in it. Like he was pulling his pigtails, I guess.

I wasn’t the problem back at the physics department, believe me.

I think the University of Texas (my school) did a horrible job of cultivating new physicists. It seems like most of the people I knew ended up doing other things.

My head TA, Bill, whose idea of useful activity was going on Usenet and telling people they should have read the FAQ before posting, ended up working at a civil engineering firm with no Ph.D., after working hard as a postdoc on accretion disk theory. Another guy left to create video games while I was there. The guy who shared my TA office desk got a Ph.D. in EE in 1999, which is what I should have done. It looks like Fridge teaches physics to high school students, but I’m not sure it’s him.

Rich was considered extraordinarily able, but the web says he is “self-employed” now.

UT really tortured the physics students, undergrad and graduate. The professors were so bad, they generally couldn’t teach poop to stink. They did stupid things like giving the undergrad students lab experiments about topics they hadn’t covered yet. I could not believe it when my lab students told me. I had to do Professor Frommhold’s work for him, in a few minutes here and there.

I’ve written about the quantum professor who gave my class a homework problem he couldn’t solve. Also, UT used an E&M textbook that was famous for making students want to kill themselves. It’s not like there weren’t better books. Jackson’s E&M was more like a hazing tool than a teaching tool. “We suffered with it, so you will, too.”

Jackson didn’t actually explain anything, so he didn’t perform the only essential function of a teacher. He was an idiot. He didn’t teach, and then he followed up with extremely hard problems.

Everyone in my TA office had the ability to get a Ph.D. in physics, including me. I was not the dunce in the room. The guy who seemed slowest is now an experimental physicist. But UT’s way of caring for students was like Roundup’s way of caring for weeds. It was like we had sprung up uninvited, and they needed to get rid of us. Unbelievably stupid.

It’s odd how really smart STEM types are known for doing some things that are brilliant and other things that are incredibly dumb, habitually.

Why would you invest time and other resources on collecting students, find most of them abandoned the entire field because of you, and then continue doing things the same way?

It is possible to teach students physics without abusing them, regardless of what bitter old academics may say. The end product would be a lot more working physicists. I understand the importance of weeding out the weak, but UT also weeded out the strong.

Part of it comes back to the “smartest boy in class” syndrome. Many physics people have had proud moms who showed them off all the time and talked about how smart they were. This makes them crave attention for their intelligence, which partly explains why so many of them get bullied. It makes them annoying. The physical bullying is sometimes revenge for intellectual bullying.

If you can drive off a bunch of students by teaching poorly and making them suffer unduly, you can then go sit with your colleagues and talk about how much smarter you are than the students who left. But it’s not true. Brilliant people leave physics every day. A lot of them do it to preserve their sanity.

Man, I should have been an engineer. It’s much easier. It’s practical. It leads to better jobs. The potential for high income is much greater. The people may be weird, but I don’t think anyone is weirder than physicists. Even mathematicians seem more human.

It’s funny, because my professors at the University of Miami were generally great, except for one ancient, smirking bully named Harry Robertson. The statistical physics guru. He was so sadistic and ineffective, he caused a riot once. Undergrads threw together a furious protest because he failed a huge percentage of them, and I know for a fact that he could not teach. This was before protesting was considered acceptable.

There was no humanity in this man at all. Other people’s feelings and futures meant absolutely nothing to him. He taught my advanced mechanics class, and a bunch of us failed the first exam. We met with him. He showed up in bedroom slippers, he smirked a lot, looked down at his desk, showed us a rattleback toy without explaining it in order to make himself look smart and us stupid, dismissed our concerns as though we were claiming we needed masseurs in class, and left.

To excuse his behavior, he pointed to the one student in the class who was doing well. A Chicom. Thing is, that guy probably had tons of support from China and other Chicom students.

If you think about it, it’s amazing that a statistics expert could claim a large group of students could slip by other instructors for years and then suddenly be exposed as morons by one professor. And that he could claim it had happened more than once. The undergrads he tormented would have numbered in three figures. So suddenly, UM admitted a hundred or more imbeciles, but it hadn’t happened the previous year, and it didn’t happen the next year. Okay, Harry.

Apart from Harry, who intentionally made things very hard for students and then blamed them, my profs at UM were exemplary instructors. I loved their classes. Same for my math and comp. sci. profs. For that matter, I had good instructors in the philosophy and literature courses I was forced to take. My UM instructors were generally much more effective than the instructors I had at Columbia University, now that I think about it.

Physics and math are beautiful and very enjoyable, they can be taught clearly and painlessly, and they deserve good instructors. Not guys who are still trying to get even with young people for being cruel to them in high school.

As for the mower, now I have to clean the parts up, removing burrs and oils, not to mention paint that could get in the way, and I have to weld the support back on the mower. Should be a one-hour job. Then I will apply primer and paint to the affected areas. After that, I should be able to put all my new parts on the mower and forget this problem ever happened.

I did not want to cut the deck up. It somehow seemed risky and almost presumptuous, although it was neither. The support is just a piece of sheet steel, like any other. It’s not like I’m cutting the fender off a Bentley.

There is a Youtube guy named Jimmy Diresta, and he makes all kinds of things. He welded some casters on a project. Usually, you use screws and nuts to attach casters. Using a welder seemed bold. He said, “I am the god of this thing.” He meant that if his welds turned out to be problematic, it didn’t matter, because he could do whatever was needed to fix it.

I would not call myself the god of anything, but I always think of him when I make what seems to be a bold use of tools. I can change it, so who cares? I have welded casters on a bunch of things, and I learned he had the right idea. Welding is better.

When you use screws, if you’re any kind of craftsman, you spend a lot of time locating the holes correctly. You use a punch to make dimples for the drill. Then you have to screw the casters on, using 8 washers, 4 screws, and 4 nuts per caster. With the welder, you just slap magnets down to hold the casters and let her rip. Then you get a cleaner project with casters that can’t fall off.

I can weld the support back on just as well as Kubota. I can make a new support. I can make a new tube. A new shaft. It’s silly to be intimidated.

I am really looking forward to mowing. I think it has been three weeks. I can’t stand the thought of giving up and using the John Deere, which I haven’t sold yet. The Kubota is a dream to use. Way faster. Better cut. Excellent mulching. I get a nice breeze because I sit in front. I don’t worry about breakdowns the way I did with the John Deere. It also holds lots of fuel, so I don’t have to fill it as often.

Nobody wants to be demoted after a big promotion.

As for the engineers who got mad at me, and the ones who claim most bad engineering is forced on engineers by people in management, accounting, marketing, and sales, I have an amazing story.

When the first Corvettes (plastic-bodied cars) were rolled out, they would not start. They had to be pushed out of the factory. Why? The batteries had been grounded to fiberglass.

Darn those accountants and marketers.

Engineers designed the Hindenburg.