I Only Need ONE More Math Book…

Against my better judgment, I am stirring the moldy stew of my abandoned STEM education some more.

I’ve been watching videos made by a physics grad student. Today I watched one in which he listed the math courses he had taken. He always sounds extremely smart, and sometimes I have wondered if he was a much better student than I was, so I am curious to find out what he actually knows. I don’t want to think I was a complete idiot back when I was part of the shared agony of the physics community.

This morning I thought about something my undergrad advisor said. He told me I was “weak in math.” I don’t recall when he said that. Maybe he said it before I got it together, or maybe it was something he said to fill me with confidence right after I told him I had been accepted by the University of Texas.

I don’t know what “weak in math” meant to him, either. Maybe he thought John von Neumann was weak in math. After I recalled his remark, I remembered that four of my math professors had been pretty impressed with me. I wonder what they thought about people who were strong in math.

I remember messing with my PDE professor’s mind. He gave us a problem to solve, and I used a contour integral. I didn’t know he wanted us to use another method. He was pretty surprised. At first, he just said I was wrong. Then I talked to him about it. He took my work home, looked at it, and returned the next day and confirmed that I was right. It wasn’t obvious to him right away. He was impressed. That was one of my math glory moments.

But maybe I really was weak in math, and the math professors were so used to people so incompetent, I just looked good.

I looked at the video, and I was surprised to find out that the video guy had taken fewer math courses than I had. He didn’t take a complex analysis course. I didn’t even know it was possible to get a physics degree without complex variables.

I guess it was, though, because this guy did it, and when my advisor told me to take the course, he spoke as though it were optional.

Let’s see.

Calc I
Calc II
Multivariable Calc
ODE
PDE
Complex Analysis
Mathematical Methods for Physicists
Linear Algebra
Real Analysis

That’s all I remember. The course for physicists was taught by a physicist. Very useful. They used Arfken’s book, which wasn’t bad at all.

I don’t think I took a statistics and probability course, because I don’t know anything about probability.

Needless to say, I also took a ton of physics courses, every single one involved calculus and other types of advanced math, and sometimes I had to learn math that wasn’t covered in my math courses.

When I was a grad student, my mechanics prof taught us differential geometry in about a week. Did anyone actually learn it? I doubt it. The name is deceptive. It’s not trigonometry. It’s calculus on weird spaces. It’s a very demanding subject to which entire courses are dedicated.

I never got a grip on it. Ordinarily, when professors slammed us with new math during physics lectures, we picked it up. Differential geometry was the only exception for me.

The class started with a full room, and at the end of the semester, there were five people, including Dr. Matzner, a quiet and pleasant man who had written the thin but scary textbook. I got an A, and I didn’t really use differential geometry. Sometimes I think I got an A for not dropping the course.

I had taken…let’s see…three mechanics courses as an undergrad, so presumably, I knew a couple of things before I showed up.

The graduate program was very hard. Most people dropped that particular mechanics class because it was so hard. We were expected to teach two labs and take three courses. Teaching assistants in other departments had to take three courses, so we did, too, even though one physics course is as hard as about 50 history courses. Liberal arts majors don’t like to hear that their work is easy, but BOY, is it easy.

UT gave us an escape hatch, which is ridiculous. We could use “the colloquium” as our third course. They pretended it was a physics course. I think the course name was 398T, but I’m probably wrong. The colloquium was a weekly informal lecture given by a guest. I recall watching a guy from the Electrosource battery company, telling us about his lead-and-fiberglass composite batteries.

The colloquium was a joke, but it was necessary, because otherwise we would have been so buried in work there would have been no time for things like bathing and eating, and participating in research would have been unthinkable.

UT was like a machine that made French fries. Student/potatoes went in one end, they were forced through the array of sharpened blades, and they fell out as fries at the other end. There was no pity or flexibility. Had intelligent people run the place, the requirements for physics students would have been different from those for people who were taking drama classes, learning how to be convincing trees, but you could not bend the rules at UT. Not when it was so much easier to bend students.

Here’s how sensitive UT was to students. I went to the gym once to look it over. They had a row of toilets against a wall. Not stalls. Toilets. There must have been 20 of them. French fries don’t need privacy! Man up and poop in front of your professors, your fellow students, and anyone else who walks in! Audie Murphy didn’t have a stall when he was fighting the Nazis!

Maybe they were trying to discourage gay trysts, for which bathroom stalls have traditionally been prime venues, although having no privacy at all certainly encouraged voyeurism.

Anyway, I did not learn much about differential geometry, and it has always bothered me. I am sorely tempted to get a book and see what I can do with the subject.

If anyone else is interested in this brand of self-torture, I think I’ve found the correct book. A guy named John Lee wrote a text called Introduction to Smooth Manifolds, and it’s supposed to be “wordy,” “readable,” and “suitable for self-study.” To a physicists, those are fighting words, because physicists are crazy, but to a student, they are dog whistles of hope.

People in STEM fields often criticize books that explain things, which is bizarre. Explanation is the primary purpose of a book. The only other purpose is reference, and reference is only useful to people WHO ALREADY KNOW THE MATERIAL. I’ve seen people insult books that explain things well yet don’t cover their subjects exhaustively. Hello? You’re not supposed to cover a subject exhaustively in one book or course. It’s okay to write two separate books.

I made it through graduate electrodynamics (with a weak B) but that certainly didn’t mean I knew everything in the horrible, exhaustive textbook. My professor didn’t know it all, either. If no one could possibly learn everything in the book, how was its exhaustiveness helpful to anyone, EXCEPT people who wanted a reference book?

“Reference” and “instruction.” Two totally different concepts a person with an IQ of 170 ought to be able to comprehend. But then these are verbal concepts, so maybe it’s not fair to expect STEM people to get it.

I think maybe STEM people should swing their heads in a circle for a few minutes every day, so some of the brains slosh over into the language/emotion/common sense areas.

If I get this book, I’ll probably read it for two days, put it down, and forget about it. Still tempting, though.

It’s a bad idea. There is no reason to buy it.

Still might, though.

Smoke Signals from a Kindred Spirit

I feel like writing something that isn’t about Christianity or tools.

I have never completely given up my interest in math and physics. I quit graduate school in 1996 because the University of Texas and ADD drugs had pretty much crushed my soul, but I have kept all my texts, other than the ones ants ate in Miami, and I still do problems from time to time. I remember about 5% of what I learned. I can’t understand a lot of my old homework papers. Still, I am way ahead of a typical college graduate, and I like to use what remains of my old skills.

If you told me I had to take the midterm and final for a calculus class, I could be ready to nail them in a month. Same should go for what is known as “University Physics.” That’s about the best I can say for myself. I wouldn’t even be able to read a graduate-level quantum exam.

Sometimes I watch science videos on Youtube. There are some excellent lectures available. It’s no exaggeration to say that a smart person could use Youtube and Amazon to get the equivalent of a Ph.D. without ever applying to graduate school. A really disciplined person could copy down the curricula from a couple of good institutions, go through the courses online, and end up just as able as someone who studied at a university.

Because I occasionally watch this stuff, Youtube suggests STEM videos from time to time. The other day, it suggested videos by Andrew Dotson, a man who is currently in graduate school. His videos are about the physics grad school experience, which, I hope, is like no other. I hope medical students and math students and so on are not as miserable as physics students. Law students aren’t; I can tell you that. I did virtually nothing in law school, had a great time, and graduated cum laude.

A high percentage of physicists are incredibly bad teachers. There is no way to make you understand how bad they are unless you’ve been there. There are some wonderful instructors out there, but many professors, especially those who write textbooks, are really obstacles to your success. They hurt more than they help.

Here’s a story I like to tell people about my experience. I took Quantum Mechanics at UT. The undergrad version is very hard. The graduate version is exponentially worse. My professor gave us a set of homework problems one week. One of the problems was so hard, I refused to try to write out the endless pages of vector mathematics that gushed out of it. I knew it would be so cumbersome it would be nearly impossible to write or read. I got so desperate, I splurged on Mathematica, a math program which, I hoped, would spew out and print the math for me.

It was a nightmare.

At some point, I talked to my professor about it. He said, “I couldn’t solve that one. How did you do with it?”

This is not an exceptional physics story. It’s totally normal.

Physics is very hard even when you have good teachers. At the University of Miami, my undergrad teachers were generally good. Some were fantastic. I had one guy, Harry Robertson, who was so bad he actually caused a riot in the 1950’s. He gave an exam and failed most of an undergrad class, and they drove their cars around campus, honking their horns to protest. This was long before protesting was cool. I always thought he was sadistic. He never showed any sympathy when people complained. I took his Mechanics class (because I didn’t know about him), and nearly everyone, including grad students, pretty much died on the first exam. We talked to him as a group. He actually laughed at my entire class as if we were complaining about a pea under a mattress. Our futures were on the line, and he truly thought our distress was amusing. Strange guy.

You would think that once a professor causes a riot, his university would take some sort of action to improve his teaching methods, but I took his class around 35 years after the riot, and he hadn’t changed. He just smirked at us. Smirking was just about the only facial expression we saw from him. He was in his seventies and looked ten years older, so it was strange to see such apparent immaturity.

Here’s a fact: when most of a class fails a test, the professor is the problem. You can lose 10% of your class because they’re lazy or simply not smart enough. You can’t lose most of them. In order to get into the class, they had to prove they were qualified, and they were not failing all of their other classes.

He used a book written by a couple of guys named Fetter and Walecka. There are lots of great mechanics books out there, notably Goldstein’s Classical Mechanics, but he picked the worst one in existence. It was not much better than having no book at all. My wild guess is that either Fetter or Walecka was one of his buddies. Or maybe he hadn’t bothered to read it because he cared so little about his students. The book was total garbage, so between the instructor and the book, we were really up against it.

When my Mechanics class bombed on the first test, Robertson’s defense was that one Chinese guy got a good grade. He didn’t ask himself how much help this student got from the Chinese government, which was paying his tuition and expenses. For all he knew, this student was faxing his homework to China so government employees could help him do well. Or maybe he was a true genius. But you don’t flunk most of a class simply because Norbert Wiener strolls in and aces your test.

There is no such thing as an independent Chinese exchange student. They are government projects from a collectivist culture. They don’t just send them over here and let them flounder, or rebel, on their own.

Regarding Robertson’s demeanor and behavior, it’s not exactly rare for STEM people to have no social skills, and sadism is not unusual, either. My undergrad advisor had a touch of it. Most people don’t get a brain with two big halves. If you’re a mathematical genius, you probably won’t break the 60th percentile on the verbal SAT, and you will probably have trouble forming normal relationships. Of course, there are many exceptions. I was one of them. I’m not saying I was a math genius, but I was capable of doing physics well, and I also had a very high verbal aptitude. In physics, I got to know (or at least be acquainted with) a lot of guys who were missing some important psychological components.

You may need to click the gif to make it work.

It’s disturbing to realize that technology, which rules our lives, is in the hands of people who are generally somewhat maladjusted and often extremely hostile. Nothing can be done about it, though.

I quit physics, and it hurt a lot, because I knew I could succeed with a little time and rest. It’s a good thing I quit, because physicists are generally unhappy in their careers, not just in graduate school. But no one likes to fly close to the sun and then plummet to the sidewalk.

I had a legitimate medical problem which made studying very difficult. I was full of drugs that made sleep impossible and had all sorts of powerful emotional effects. UT was not helpful. Their main concern was getting sued. A professor named David Gavenda had had some kind of run-in with an undergrad who was being treated for ADD, and when I went to the department for help, they mentioned Gavenda more than once. They processed students the way a Perdue plant processes chickens, and they did not want any grit in the machinery. If students dedicated years of undergrad study to physics and then moved across the country to study at UT, and if the school’s unwillingness to provide any assistance when they were in need caused them great hardship, it was not important. It wasn’t that UT wanted to hurt them. It was just the inconvenience to the list, as the Nazi officer in Schindler’s List said concerning his unwillingness to help Itzhak Stern get off the train to Auschwitz.

The professor who was supposed to be helping me was Tom Griffy. He was an avuncular Oklahoman who seemed like a great guy at first, but the impression I got whenever I probed for signs of support was that his only concern was to do the least he could do for me in order to prevent an ADA lawsuit. It was extremely obvious that he was being advised by attorneys, not educators.

I was sleeping one or two hours per day at best, and I was under tremendous stress. I asked to be allowed to drop a course and concentrate on another course I felt I could do well in. His response was to force me to take a D in the course I wanted to drop. In the end, after I had to take a medical leave because a misguided doctor tried to treat my ADD with Prozac, he took away my teaching job and said I could only stay if I agreed to settle for a master’s degree.

He did do me one favor. He gave his E&M class a take-home exam, and my computer crashed while I was working on it, so I had to start over by hand. After I submitted the result, my computer functioned again, and I printed out the answer I had originally intended to give him. I put it in his faculty mail box just so he would realize I was not a moron. To my amazement, he accepted it even though it was late. That was a grand gesture by UT standards, and I did appreciate it.

Dealing with the school showed me, repeatedly, exactly how I measured up in the ecosystem. I was getting $15 per hour to tutor students privately. UT contacted the grad students and asked us if we wanted to tutor their athletes for less than half of that. Bag boys at the grocery a few blocks from my apartment made more. Kaplan was paying $12.

When I went to the student pharmacy to get my Ritalin prescription filled, a lady who worked there told me they had it, but I couldn’t have it. She said it was discrimination. That’s the word she used. She said they had a female athlete who was taking huge doses, and she got all the Ritalin. You know how that works. The athlete probably didn’t graduate, and if she did, she’s probably stocking shelves at a store somewhere. She was still important, because UT was all about sports.

It was truly bizarre. Like any university, UT had a socialist mindset, so they provided inexpensive medical insurance which was supposed to cover just about any need I had. And I could not use it. I had to go to pharmacies and pay full retail for drugs. They never tried to explain this. Good thing I didn’t have cancer. Maybe Bevo, UT’s mascot, might have come down with bovine leukemia, and he would have gotten my chemotherapy drugs.

UT had a reputation for treating students like worthless and fungible objects, so I could not say I had not been warned.

There is no way to make other people understand how miserable I was after things went sour at UT. I did not have a single friend, which is not unusual for grad students in physics. I couldn’t even get away from my stress by sleeping, because the pills would not permit it. I actually found myself lying in bed making a sort of rocking motion to distract myself, like a zoo animal that had been kept isolated for 20 years. It was the best I could do.

I had pinned all my hopes on physics, so I had no other plan for my life. Law school wasn’t a tantalizing, prestigious alternative. To me, it was like running home and flipping burgers.

I was away from God, so when I prayed, I felt as though I were in a concrete cistern and the prayers bounced off the ceiling.

When you don’t even have God to talk to, you have serious problems.

Since leaving UT, I have had no one to talk to about my experience. I can tell people about it, but they can’t understand.

Youtube surprised me with promoting Andrew Dotson’s videos, and I’ve watched several. It’s crazy to see how right I was about grad school. People have gaslighted me, trying to make me feel I wasn’t physics material, and some have said the teaching and books weren’t the problem. Now I have someone who confirms what I’ve said. I’ve never really had that before. For some reason, many people defend the physics education apparatus, and that’s completely nuts.

The other day, I saw a thumbnail for one of his videos, and I saw that it was supposedly about the most infamous graduate text. I knew instantly what he had to be talking about! Classical Electrodynamics, by J.D. Jackson. This was the book Tom Griffy used. Behind the scenes, the graduate students advised each other to read books by people like Leonard Eyges.

I don’t know where to start criticizing Jackson.

Jackson had a hard act to follow. My undergrad E&M book was written by a man named Griffiths. His book was extraordinary. It started with pages of mathematical preparation. Then he explained physics pretty well. His problems were chosen wisely, too. Someone must not have told him the proper way to write a physics book.

Jackson abandoned mks units for cgs (centimeter-gram-second). Why? I had been using mks (meter-kilogram-second) for several years. Every other class I took used mks. There is nothing wrong with mks. Griffiths used it. Someone tried to tell me it was because centimeters were more useful for the small measurements in E&M. Seriously? Can you really “see” a light wavelength in your mind’s eye? They’re measured in nanometers. Is it really helpful to measure them in nanometers times a hundred? You can’t imagine either measurement, so why not stick to the system every other course uses?

The big issue was that Jackson didn’t explain anything. Also, his problems were diabolically hard.

If you’re not going to explain anything, what is the purpose of your textbook?

There is no satisfactory answer to that question.

Here are some snippets from glowing reviews on the book’s Amazon page:

“[A]lmost no exposition is given for the concepts presented in the book.”

“Pedagogically, the book is about as bad as it gets.”

“[I]t doesn’t teach it at all, it just holds you accountable for it.”

“Sometimes he skips about 20 steps and tells you it’s obvious how he got to the next equation. Even my professor and TA could not explain how Jackson arrived at some of his equations.”

“Folks, find something else to use for education! This book is for someone who knows EM and needs a reference. It has no place in a classroom.”

“wtf some one write a new book.”

“There’s got to be a better way. But I’m told this is the best out there. Very depressing.”

“This is without a doubt the absolute worst textbook I have ever used. The material is presented is a random illogical order, as if it were written with the sole purpose to confuse readers.”

“The only reason this stinking rotting pile of crap is used in American universities is because the professors themselves were forced to use this book.”

Perhaps the best comment, from a physics professor:

“As a course text it is a bad choice and the tradition of using it is akin to hazing. Those who continue to teach lecture courses using Jackson are lazy.”

I always say math is much easier than physics. That’s not really true, of course. Math seems much easier than physics when you’re studying it. Why? Several reasons.

First, when you study an area of math, and you get homework problems, you know what kind of math you’re going to be using. If you’re studying calculus I, you know you’re not going to have to do a contour integral. Physics…not the same. You can’t even guess what kind of math you’re going to need until you see the problem.

Second, physics requires you to understand how the physical world works. If you can’t draw a picture and come up with a physical model that makes sense, you can’t even define the problem. Math doesn’t work like that. They just give you an expression or two and tell you what to do to them. It’s all handed to you.

Third, math problems generally have answers. I’ve never had a math professor give me a problem he knew had no answer. Physics professors do that all the time. Not helpful, when you’re already doing 30 hours of homework a week. You start in on a problem at 5 p.m., assuming it will take 45 minutes, and at 3 a.m., you’re still banging away at it, ignoring other problems you can actually solve, because you think that if it was assigned to you, there has to be an answer.

I had a professor assign a problem with an integral that diverged, and he didn’t tell us the answer was nonsense. What’s the point?

Fourth, math professors and their books explain things. I can’t understand why physics people are different. A math book will give you a long derivation to study. Someone like Jackson will omit it and tell you to figure it out yourself as an exercise.

Fifth, physics professors think it’s perfectly fine to give an exam on which a 30 is an A. Everyone in the class walks out thinking they’ve failed, they feel depressed until the grades come in, and then they find out the only guy who got a high score is the Chinese guy who never leaves his Chinese-government-subsidized dorm room.

Here’s something funny about physics: when a math instructor teaches a subject, he gives it a week or a month or a semester. If a physics professor knows you need to have a certain skill AND he condescends to show it to you, he will slap it on the board and devote maybe 20 minutes to it. What a math student learns over a period of days, you have to absorb in a few minutes.

Math isn’t always easier than physics. It’s as hard as you want to make it, and…you don’t have to make it hard. You can get an undergrad degree in math, taking courses that are much easier than physics courses, but if you deliberately look for hard subjects, you can torment yourself pretty badly.

I have a math minor, which means I have all the credits for a math degree, except that I was advised to take a certain course instead of another course that would have made me a math major. I don’t know how many credits I have, but if a math major was required to have 45, for example, that’s how many I have. I used to do maybe 4 hours of math homework per week, and I never had a problem. Undergrad physics took up at least three times that long.

I’m sure there were math courses that would have been more challenging. Graduate-level course, I would imagine. I didn’t take them.

I never took one hard math course, and I did complex variables, real analysis, partial differential equations…the works. Physics made everything seem easy.

To get back to the videos, here is Andrew Dotson’s video on J.D. Jackson. If you’re still reading, you may find it amusing. For me, it was vindication. There may be profanity; I can’t remember.

Here’s his video on the difference between undergrad and graduate courses in physics. It’s 100% true.

I was a little intimidated when I heard him talking about his work. I didn’t understand a lot of what he said. Then I looked him up. He got his degree from Old Dominion, which is not quite Harvard, and he’s studying at New Mexico State University. I looked the school up, and it’s ranked 124 by US News and World Report. When I studied at UT, it was ranked 22. He got rejected by lots of places. He can’t be any better than I was. I guess I just don’t remember all the things he talks about in his videos, so I feel as though I’ve never studied them.

I cannot remember anything about Bessel functions. Not for the life of me. I assume I must have encountered them.

Why am I writing this? I suppose it’s because it’s so rare for anyone to touch these particular nerves.

I’m going to try to quit watching his videos, but I did break down and buy a new copy of Mathews and Walker, to replace the one the ants ate. I don’t know if I’ll use it. I’m just mad at the ants. RE the ants, I want closure.

I hope this young man does well. He has chosen a very hard road which pays very poorly considering how long it takes to become qualified and how extreme the qualifications are.

Getting Ahead by Copying Other People’s Work

I think I have the answer to my latest welding puzzle.

To complete my Offroad Swag finger brake kit, I have to weld a big angle iron into a channel. The angle iron will open upward, and the outer edges will be welded to the upper edges of the channel. Other people who have done this have gotten warped projects.

I now have a copy of Design of Weldments, which is a useful book a Youtuber recommended. You don’t have to be a welder to find it useful. I don’t think the Youtuber welds. It’s useful for anyone who builds stuff. This morning I checked the book to see if it could help me, and I found the answer in chapter 6.

The correct procedure for my welds is to preset. This means I need to clamp the work down so it can’t bend during or after welding. I can clamp it down as it is, or I can put a slight bend in it, away from the anticipated warp. Presetting is what the pros do.

I thought about peening the welds. This means beating them with a hammer to flatten and lengthen them while they’re still hot. The book says this is a waste of time.

It says I should do the welds in small segments, and I should wait for each set of segments to cool before welding the next set. I say “set” because I plan to do one segment on each side of the project at a time, so they will balance each other. The project can warp back-to-front as well as vertically, so you can’t just weld the front and then turn it around and weld the back. Funny how no one on Youtube has checked to see if he has warpage in the horizontal plane! It’s surprising that I figured that out and they didn’t.

I can clamp the project to my table saw, with sheet metal on the saw table to keep spatter off, or I can put it in the press and weld it. The press would be better, but it may be hard to do, because I’ll need something longer than arbor plates to support the project.

I can use the table saw easily because I now have a 25-foot extension cord for my welders and plasma cutter. I won’t have to shove the 700-pound saw across the shop.

Incidentally, Harbor Freight provides good arbor plates with its presses. They used to use cast iron, which is brittle and snaps suddenly. Now they’re steel. Good thing to know. If you have cast iron, you should get new plates. It’s dangerous when a plate snaps.

Right now, I have two jobs on my mind. One is to practice MIG until I feel good about doing the welding, and the other is to rearrange the workshop so I can make a final decision about where to put my machine tools. Right now, I’m leaning toward putting them out there instead of in the garage. I would need some serious electrical work.

If you think your shop is too small, spend a whole day rearranging it. It will expand by at least a third. Trust me.

I should be able to finish my tractor front end loader brace today, except for the paint, which takes a while to cure. Then I have to decide what to do with the tractor. I intended to park it inside with the loader up, but maybe it’s okay to park it outside with a sturdy cover over the seat. It is, after all, a tractor, and I will probably have another solution in a year or so, so it would not be out there long.

I’ll bet someone sells tractor seat covers. I’ll check.

I can’t find temporary covers, like grill covers, for tractor seats. There are a lot of permanent covers which would probably be a hassle to take off when I mow. You can’t sit in a wet seat cover.

A small tarp will work fine. That’s what I should get.

I’m still making the brace. I want to be able to walk under the loader and work on the tractor.

God told me three great things the other day.

1. All strength comes from inheritance.

2. There is no strength without inheritance.

3. Satan hates inheritance.

When you inherit, you don’t earn. You just receive. Other people do the work for you. This works with knowledge as well as wealth. When you inherit knowledge, other people make the mistakes and suffer the resulting problems. You come along later and get the knowledge that works, so you don’t suffer or waste time.

When you get knowledge from other people by any method, it’s like inheriting. They do the work, and you get the benefit.

I could sit around and theorize about how to weld things, and that would be my natural inclination, but it’s a lot better to open a book and get the truth–BAM–like that.

Think how rich and informed you would be if your all of your ancestors had understood and applied the principles of inheritance. Every generation would have made the next one stronger. You would have been born into a life of privilege and power. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work this way. People forget and waste, and their kids have to start with little or nothing.

Fred Trump was rich. Donald Trump is rich. Eric Trump is rich. His kids are too young to have jobs, but they’re rich, too. This is how life is supposed to be. The Trump patriarchs pass on wealth and knowledge so their kids hit the ground running. Making your children grovel and toil like mules in order to get where you are is stupid and often based in a sick desire to see them fail.

I could never figure out all the things in the book on my own. I like coming up with my own solutions to problems, but it’s smarter to find out what other people have done.

You can see why physicists are so useless compared to engineers. When a physicist has a problem involving building something, his skills will only help him to write equations and work from scratch. An engineer will pick up a book, look at a table, and copy the answer. Or he’ll stand up and ask the guy in the next cubicle. Some engineers complain that they never get to do math or design anything at work. Everything is laid out for them. That’s a good problem to have.

Engineers inherit things physicists have to build.

Interesting stuff.

If You Squint You Can See Hillary Clinton Dodging Sniper Fire

I keep complaining about TV people who discuss hurricanes lying and exaggerating. The other day I cited the NHC as a better source. Well last night, I saw something discouraging on the NHC website.

When hurricanes approach you, there are two types of alerts the NHC will issue: watches and warnings. I will give you the OFFICIAL definitions of these alerts. A watch means winds of a certain speed are POSSIBLE at your location. A warning means they are EXPECTED at your location.

Those definitions come from the NHC, not my imagination.

If the NHC says your house is in a hurricane warning area, that necessarily means they believe it is MORE LIKELY THAN NOT that you will get hurricane-force winds. If the likelihood is less than 50%, you shouldn’t be under a warning. Obvious. In fact, “expected” should imply a probability near 100%.

Last night, the NHC had much of Florida’s east coast under a hurricane warning. That means they were saying the probability of hurricane-force winds was better than 50%. Okay, then. If this was true, then their wind speed probability map should agree.

I looked at the map. These maps are color-coded. The map showed the warning areas following the border between yellow and light green. Yellow means 30-40%. Light green means 20-30%. These are the very most-imperiled areas in the state.

How can hurricane winds be “expected” if the chance of hurricane winds is at, or far below, 40%?

I don’t see how this could happen accidentally. You would think the people who make the probability maps would be in agreement with the people who make the maps labeling the watch and warning areas.

Either the definitions are wrong, or someone posted watch and warning information which is not even close to right.

Most people aren’t going to examine this stuff the way I do. Most will listen to the TV hysteria, believe everything they hear, and leave it at that. Those that look at the NHC site aren’t likely to compare maps.

I’m not happy with the NHC. It’s unfortunate that I have to root around on the web to find out what’s really happening. When one of the best sources posts dubious information, it makes it worse.

The storm is way out at sea. The maximum wind is about 110 mph, or category 2. The winds are dropping. The storm’s eye is forecast to miss the United States completely. The little “M’s” on the forecast track, indicating “major hurricane,” are now gone. They have been replaced with “H’s.”

This is very consistent with the REAL news I’ve been accessing for the last few days. It’s sad that it conflicts with the histrionics of the TV performers and the beliefs of the people who rely on them.

In other wind-related news, I’ve been looking into air compressors. I have a 5-HP Curtis, which is a very nice compressor for a home shop, but its output is right on the borderline between fail and pass. It puts out 17.3 cubic feet per minute, which is wonderful for most purposes, but there are a lot of tools that require just a little bit more. If your output is too low, your tool will slow down until it’s not working adequately, and then you have to sit and wait for the compressor to catch up.

My compressor is in Coral Gables. I was planning to have it moved to me here, but now I’m wondering if it’s worth it. I can get a 7.5-HP job and sell the Curtis. I would get 23 cfm. This should make for a better experience when using things like buffers, die grinders, and sanders.

I could sell the Curtis and order a 7.5-HP Curtis or Quincy. I would be set for life, pretty much. But then I have to ask myself: what will I do for a compressor in my other shop? I’m going to want the bigger one for metalwork, mainly. I would have to use it for sanding wood, too, so sometimes I would have to move the wood to an area outside the metal shop temporarily. I would need the other compressor for things like inflating tires and air hammering. I could get a small compressor for maybe $500, tax included. I have a small Eaton Chinese compressor already, but it has started leaking oil, and I’m tired of fixing it.

I could also put the big new compressor in the wood shop and run a 1″ PVC line underground to the metal shop.

I guess that was troll bait. People will see “PVC” and get hysterical. PVC air lines explode sometimes, and they throw shrapnel. But it’s okay to run them underground, where they can’t hurt anyone except moles and gophers.

I’m researching it. If you bury air line, water condenses in it. You can blow the water out occasionally, which is annoying, or you can use an air dryer every single time you use the compressor, which is also, but less, annoying. I have a great electric air dryer, but I don’t want to run it every time I use air.

I could just put the big compressor in one shop and the old Curtis in the other shop. It’s going to cost me a certain amount of money to move my machine tools, and adding the old compressor won’t change the figure, so maybe selling it is a bad idea.

I guess I should keep it and consider getting a second machine later.

My most pressing shop-related job is getting the table saw running and mobile. If I can do that, I can reduce the gigantic shelf complex that sucks up one corner of the building, and I can turn the wood into smaller shelves that are actually useful. Then I can store more stuff and get it out of the way.

Here’s hoping the Atlantic doesn’t try to send me any more presents this year.

Dorian Brings Much-Needed Fresh Air to Marion County

The forecast for Hurricane Dorian is looking so good, there is not much point in talking about it. The odds of problems here are dropping off to the point where I should start writing about other things.

Again, never watch the news when hurricanes approach. They will always lie and exaggerate, in order to benefit themselves. Always go to the Internet and look at sources as close to the actual data as possible.

This morning, it occurred to me that Bryan Norcross may be a major reason why TV heads shriek and whimper during hurricane season. Back in ’92, Andrew hit Miami, and afterward, Norcross was the main source of information for many people in the area. He worked as a meteorologist at Miami’s WTVJ. I don’t recall exactly what happened, but I seem to have a dim memory of other channels being knocked off the air.

Before Norcross, WTVJ’s main weather personality was Bob Weaver, a chatty, overweight New Yorker who was more than 20 years older. Norcross was young and thin, and the ladies liked him, so my guess is that Norcross was hired to be a glamour boy. Norcross supposedly didn’t like the ladies back, if you know what I mean. That piece of information popped up long after Andrew.

A lot of weathermen are gay. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because it’s the most flamboyant position in many newsrooms. Weathermen are generally entertainers.

When Andrew hit and people were desperate for news, Norcross took the throne and became South Florida’s premier hurricane guru. He was adored. He was in the kind of situation in which women you have never met mail you their underwear. Media outlets interviewed him. One publication featured a photo of him on the beach in a Speedo.

The stories about his orientation broke a lot of hearts.

After Andrew, his career cooled off a lot, and it never again attained its post-Andrew heights, but for a while, he was big news all over America.

The rise of Bryan Norcross made it clear that hurricanes could make people considerably more famous and, potentially, wealthy. I’m sure other TV personalities noticed. Maybe that partially explains their undignified antics.

To get back to the storm, the projected path is firming up, and it is expected to turn north very soon and head for the general area of South Carolina. The storm is weakening. The top winds have dropped 30 mph, into the Category 4 region. Hurricane-speed winds only extend out 25 miles from the center, so there is a good chance that Florida won’t get them.

The Bahamas really got whacked. It’s astounding. The storm hit Grand Bahama as a 5, and then it just sat there. It’s bad to get hit by a storm at all, but at least they usually move on quickly. I can’t imagine spending an entire day in hurricane winds, especially with the flooding the Bahamas are getting.

The up side is that the Bahamas are sparsely inhabited. The population of Grand Bahama is under 30,000 people.

I have been praying for God to turn the storm north and away from land, and I feel very strong faith for it. I would like to see it move off the Bahamas so the people can get some relief.

I think people forget that hurricanes weaken as they go north. Also, my guess is that the winds generally slow down as storms get wider, due to the conservation of angular momentum. I don’t really know. Maybe Google can tell me.

Wow. Those search results look really boring. Never mind.

Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but the forecast for my area is considerably nicer than it would have been without a hurricane. July and August were very, very unpleasant for outdoor activities, but now we are expected to have strong breezes and considerable cloud cover for a while. I was able to work in my workshop during the last two days without coming back in completely soaked in sweat, and Dorian will extend that benefit and make it easier to wait for the pleasant days of October.

It should be breezy enough to make outdoor work somewhat difficult, but it will probably be very nice inside the workshop with the doors partially opened.

If I were going to stay here, I would get a propane generator and build a new shop. As it is, I’m thrilled to have several days of relatively pleasant weather, with 7 months of cool weather to follow not long after.

I spent over $40 on hurricane supplies. Don’t I feel silly.

Keep That Garbage to Yourself

Man, it’s tough dealing with people when you have faith in God.

Someone I know keeps texting me, telling me Hurricane Dorian is headed for me. This morning, she told me the TV heads said the storm didn’t turn away from Florida the way it was supposed to. This message arrived after I had already checked and confirmed that the storm was, in fact, still expected to turn.

I have no reason to doubt that she was telling the truth, given the historically disgraceful behavior of TV journalists and meteorologists. They do their best to mischaracterize hurricane news every year.

I have had to tell her more than once that I have been through many storms and watches and that I know what I’m doing. It’s strange that she doesn’t have faith in me. When you’re used to sitting in front of a screen searching out the best and most current hurricane information, you don’t need correction from people who listen to the ranting of TV know-nothings who have a long, long history of lying.

She is trying to help me, but it’s not helpful at all. My duty as a Christian is to fight worry, not to absorb and incubate it.

I’m concerned about the way she focuses on external problems and then magnifies them. She lives a very stress-filled life, and she always has. She needs to be set free.

Dorian is still projected to miss Florida and Georgia entirely. That’s what the ECMWF and GFS models say, and the NAM model agrees, as far as it goes. It doesn’t go past Tuesday, so it doesn’t say what will happen when Dorian passes Florida.

My area is now given about a 45% chance of tropical-storm-force winds. You know what that means? It means there’s a 45% chance that at some point, someone near me will measure a breeze of 39 mph or more lasting at least 60 seconds. So if we have 25-mph winds for a hour, and then we have 39-mph winds for a minute, and then we go back to 25-mph winds, the weather people will say we got tropical-storm-force winds.

It’s not a scary forecast.

Aside from the fact that our best science tells us the storm is very unlikely to hit me, there is also the more important fact that I keep hearing the same thing in prayer. Who tells storms where they can and can’t go? Not the NHC.

I got a little testy yesterday and criticized the hurricane-panic media somewhat more harshly than I should have. I didn’t get the facts wrong, but my tone wasn’t that nice. I was angry from years of being goaded and gaslighted during times of considerable stress, and I let that rule me. I should not have done that. I’ll try to avoid it from here on out.

I’m surprised at how hard people here are still working to prepare. I saw numerous generators at Home Depot yesterday, blocking aisles. Buying things like bread is still a hit-or-miss proposition. I saw some people with a rented truck full of new generators, sitting in the parking lot at Lowe’s. They must be here to price-gouge, which is a crime. You can’t make money paying retail for generators and then selling them for the same price.

Cubans are famous for price-gouging in Miami. The whole county turns into a black market after a storm.

Here’s what I wonder: are the people who are still preparing trying to be extra cautious, or are they just duped because they watch broadcast TV? They may think we’re about to get a direct hit for all I know.

You don’t buy a generator the week before a storm. You buy it when they go on sale or you wait for a Craigslist deal.

My own generator runs like a dream now, which is more evidence that we won’t get hit by major winds. The more you prepare, the less happens.

I got my drill press’s VFD wired up and installed yesterday, and I’m going to drill a hole in my generator’s cord cover so I can start it with a drill without removing any parts. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do this. Starter cords can be exhausting to pull over and over, and they’re hard on joints and spines. You have to be very sure to pull the drill off the nut when the generator starts. You don’t want the generator spinning you around by the wrist.

When this storm passes, I’m going to look into a big Predator generator that puts out more juice. I want to be able to use big tools out of my truck, and I also want to be able to run one water heater if the power goes out. I haven’t checked my water heater, but the web says they put out 4500 watts. My generator tops out at 5500, which doesn’t leave much room for ceiling fans and the fridge. A big Predator will give me another 1750 watts.

I could actually create a separate 250V outlet for the water heater and use two generators. As long as the circuits are separate, it ought to work. A clever person would create a switch that moves the juice from the water heater to my smaller central air unit. I could turn on the water heater before showers, and at night, I could use the generator to keep my bedroom cool.

Predator is Harbor Freight’s brand. Should I be afraid to use a Harbor Freight generator? I don’t think so. All the Chinese “Chonda” generator brands appear to sell the same products. My generator is a Champion, and it is not particularly impressive. Definitely Chinese. It seems like there are really only two brands of portable generator: Honda, and everyone else. You will pay 4 times as much for a Honda, and the electricity will taste exactly the same.

A Predator will take a battery, too, so there would be no need to cut a hole to crank it with a drill.

You can tell Predator products are good, because Harbor Freight’s standard coupons exclude them. They always exclude the good stuff.

I wish more Christians understood that deliberate worry is a sin, not a virtue. It’s bad when other Christians worry on purpose, thinking it makes them better people, but when they try to put that mess on me, they’re compounding the sin. Trying to worry another Christian is a form of temptation. It’s not acceptable.

Really, if you want to help me, and you think worrying me is a good thing, you and I have different religious beliefs, and you will just offend me.

I’m not worried, although I am out of Pop Tarts. I’ll work on that, and then life should be perfect.

Fixed Wireless Transports me Forward to 2005

I must say that this is an exciting day. I now have something resembling real Internet capability.

When I moved here with my dad, all we could get was DSL. If you don’t know what that is, you probably don’t remember what life was like in 1995.

I probably exaggerate, but DSL is a primitive type of Internet connection that works over a phone wire. At peak speeds, it’s terrible. When your neighbors’ kids are all trying to download porn and free MP3’s at the same time, it slows to a crawl, or whatever is beneath a crawl. My top speeds were something like 1.5 MBPS.

Rural Internet providers don’t have a lot of customers per square mile, so there is no money in running serious cables to every house. This is why the Internet is so slow. I guess we should consider ourselves lucky the phone companies are willing to run wires out here.

A somewhat new alternative has become available: fixed wireless. All it means is “cell phone connectivity for your house.” You get a router which is really a cell phone with no screen. It communicates with a local cell phone tower, and you get whatever speed the tower can provide.

For some reason, the big players don’t sell fixed wireless directly here, even though they provide cell service. You can’t call Verizon and tell them you want an Internet connection. Nonetheless, the towers that provide the service belong to real wireless companies. Small companies buy bandwidth from them and resell it. I can choose among towers operated by or for Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile. Verizon has a fantastic signal here, but their data cap is pathetic. I would run through it in three days of Youtube. The other companies have true unlimited data. I had to guess which one would give me the best speed when I ordered my plan.

I knew T-Mobile was hopeless here, and I also knew AT&T had a tower down the road, so I rolled the dice with AT&T. Now I have an Internet connection worthy of 2005. It’s not great, but for people who don’t stream porn all day, it’s fast enough. I may look into Sprint.

There used to be some websites I simply could not use except on my phone. They were written badly or something. They took so long to load, they would simply quit. Very annoying. Now I should be able to connect.

The wireless company sent me a router plus a funny-looking directional antenna. I’m supposed to mount it outdoors. I have to figure out where to put it. I know where the tower is. I assume I need to put the antenna as high up as I can, on the side of the house facing the antenna.

It’s very nice to know that if I absolutely had to, I could upload a video to Youtube. Maybe I could even fix things so my security cameras could send me real-time video with a useful level of quality.

I guess I can finally get rid of Centurylink and DSL. That will be great. In addition to the low speed, Centurylink gave me a router which disconnects from my computer for no reason, so when I sit down at the PC every day, I have to go through a routine to make it connect. I look forward to bypassing that mess.

Wow. I may go watch HD cat videos just because I can.

Welcome, Loving Father

I truly believe God is helping me get it together in the natural, now that my dad and the spirits that swarmed around him are gone. I keep finding new ways to improve things around me.

I have always hated waxing cars. Because I hated waxing, which involved sweating in the Miami sun, I also neglected washing. I would run vehicles through a gas station car wash once in a while, but that was it.

This week, I got my dad’s old pressure washer running. A fantastic Youtube video showed me how to get the ethanol crud out of the carb’s main jet in a hurry, and I bought a new hose and an extended wand for cleaning my house. I even have some new metal parts on the way, to make the pressure washer look better. I may remove the frame and paint it.

The first thing I cleaned with the pressure washer was the pressure washer. I knocked some decals off, but I can live without them.

Once the machine was running, I thought about the SUV I inherited. It’s not very old, and I would like to keep it in good shape. I’ve learned a lot of things about pressure washers and cars.

First, a gas-powered pressure washer is not too strong for car washing. Some people say otherwise. Yes, it will damage your car if you hold the nozzle too close. There is a way to avoid that. Hold it farther away.

Second, you can use ordinary car wash soaps in pressure washers. I found that people liked Turtle Wax products. They wash and wax at the same time, and they’re not expensive.

My machine dilutes soap at a ratio of 20:1. The soap should be applied at 128:1. That means I have to dilute the soap at around 7:1 before I put it in the pressure washer’s tank. It will work. Other people do it, and the people who make car wash soap endorse it.

Do you just load the machine and blast away? NO! You need a foam cannon. This is an attachment that turns soap into heavy foam. You cover your car with the foam, wait a while, and blow it off. Job done. I suppose you can work on details after that, but the foam will get the basic mission accomplished.

I can handle that!

I needed a foam cannon that could handle 3100 psi, and Amazon had one, for around $20. I’m all set. Now I don’t have to wash by hand. I don’t have to wax by hand. I don’t have to drive to a car wash and pay to use their pressure machine. I don’t have to drive to a hand car wash and sit for 90 minutes.

Simple.

The wax probably can’t compare to hand-applied wax, but who cares? I can wash the car twice a month with very little effort. Even bad wax will look good if you apply it twice a month.

The pressure washer surges a little. Oh, no! What will I do?

1. Chinese carbs sell for under $20 on the Internet, and replacing a carb takes less than 10 minutes.

2. The same guy who did the video about cleaning main jets did a video about cleaning idle jets. Ethanol crud in the idle jet causes surging.

His channel is wonderful. He introduced me to a new tool called a wire gauge drill bit. These are tiny bits that bend. You buy a 0.013″ bit, put it in a pin vise, and ream out your idle jet. Just takes a minute.

It’s not easy to get information about wire gauge drill bits. I’ll save you time. There are two main types: carbon steel and high-speed steel. HSS (as we tool nerds call it) is a superior material because it stays sharp longer, but carbon steel is what you want for a carb, because it bends without snapping.

I already have a bunch of carbide bits in small gauges, but they’re very brittle. I don’t want to have to retrieve a broken bit from my carb.

My bits will arrive today or tomorrow, and then I’ll be ready to fix the carb. If I fail, $15 or so will get me a new one.

I’ll link to the set I bought. It comes with bits and a pin vise. Here it is.

A pin vise is a pen-shaped tool that clamps onto pin-like objects such as drill bits. It’s sort of like the body of an X-Acto knife.

While I was fooling around with the bits, I decided to do something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. I bought some special tools for working on electronic devices. I already have a lot of electronics tools, but they’re for old-fashioned products. Newer things like smartphones and tablets require weird new tools like spudgers and suction cups.

There is a great website called Ifixit. They have a forum. They are “right to repair” fanatics. Manufacturers (*cough* Apple) like to make products hard to work on so we give up and buy new ones instead of fixing them. Right-to-repairers are fighting them. They’re even getting lawmakers to protect the right to repair without voiding warranties.

Ifixit has a neat set of electronics tools. Unfortunately, it’s worth about $25, and they charge $60. I found several items which were better and cheaper. When combined, they will do what the Ifixit kit will do, much cheaper.

Example: the Nanch precision screwdriver set. I already have precision screwdrivers, but this set has a bunch of tiny weird bits to help you remove fasteners Apple and Samsung and the others use to keep you out of their products. The Ifixit set has screwdrivers and bits, but people complain that the bits fall apart. This set has better steel.

I also ordered a couple of suction cups. My 2016 Samsung phone came apart easily. The new phone I had to get is different. It’s full of goo. In order to waterproof it, Samsung glued the shells together. To get them apart, you have to put a suction cup on each side and pull. Many phones and tablets work this way. If you want to replace the battery, you have to open the phone, scrape off the old goo, and put in new goo. You can buy new goo online. A goo-based gaskety sort of thing for my phone is readily available.

My phone used to run for 24 hours with no problem, but it seems to be losing its stamina. Replacing the battery costs $70 locally, and the tech would keep the phone for a while. Now if I get tired of the battery, I can fix it myself for about $20.

The pressure washer carb gave me an excuse to get more tools, so color me happy.

I’m also planning to have my pickup painted. It’s in great mechanical shape, but Dodge paint is not very tough. Two-part paint is garbage, if you ask me. The stuff they used in the 70’s lasted forever, and you could repaint your car yourself if you wanted. The new stuff lasts exactly 7 years in the Florida sun, even if you wax, and once the clearcoat cracks, the whole car has to be sanded and painted.

I figure the SUV will need paint by 2023, but I will probably be ready to buy something else by then.

Let’s see. What else has changed? My arms were starting to hurt from holding my cell phone. I get a lot of long calls these days. Friends want to talk about God. There is something about the shape or size of a smartphone that makes it unpleasant to hold for long periods; it puts strain on the muscles around the elbow. I finally ordered a Bluetooth rig. I was going to get a Plantronics for somewhere in the area of $100, but I found a Chinese job everyone raves about for $20, so I’m giving it a whirl.

I never thought I would talk on the phone so much it would be a problem. Historically, my cell phones have gotten very little use apart from texting.

I’m spending a lot of money this month, but with a few exceptions, it’s all stuff I should have bought long ago. I may even upgrade to fixed wireless Internet, since my current service is about what the Flintstones had. You tell the mammoth whose head sticks through a hole in your wall that you want to see cat memes, and he tells a pterodactyl, and the pterodactyl flies off and tells a guy who chisels memes on slabs of rock.

I’m also getting rid of some things. I’m canceling my dad’s newspaper subscriptions. I can tell God doesn’t want me reading or watching the news right now, and the unread papers keep piling up. I’ve been looking into ways to get newsprint for my birds, and it looks like rolls are cheaper than newspapers.

UPDATE

I started writing this blog post on the 26th, but I forgot about it. I am here to continue.

My Amazon foam cannon was a failure. It’s Chinese, so no surprise. Sometimes Chinese products just don’t work. I’m returning it. I found a new one at Lowe’s. The packaging says it’s good for 3700 psi, and my machine is 3100, so the high pressure of the machine should not be a problem.

The Lowe’s cannon cost $35, and I’m not happy about it, but I don’t want to spend the next month sending foam cannons back to Amazon.

I keep learning new things about 2-cycle tools.

I thought ethanol, all by itself, was the thing that ruined engines. Now I’m wondering. Ethanol is unquestionably poison, and it cuts fuel storage life in half, but the Youtube guy I watch claims that even ethanol-free gas is bad. He says it contains olefins, which create varnish, and benzene, which ruins diaphragms.

Saw makers sell ethanol-free premixed fuel for $20 and up per gallon. The Youtube dude claims this fuel doesn’t contain olefins or benzene in significant amounts. He says you should fill your saw with Gucci gas before you store it, run it for 5 minutes to get the bad gas out, and then put it away with the tank full.

Question: why put it away with the tank full? The gas in the tank won’t get into your carb, so it can’t help your engine. A cynical person would say the manufacturers just want to make sure you spend a hundred bucks a year on their products instead of 6 dollars.

Where I live, there is no such thing as “winterizing.” I am equally likely to use a saw in any season. I might put a saw away three times a year. I’m not spending $10 on Gucci gas every time I do that. In my case, it adds up to $30 per incident, because I have three saws.

I’m thinking I may spend 6 dollars on a small can of super gas and run one ounce through each saw when I think I’m not going to use it for a while. If one ounce won’t work, neither will half a gallon.

Alternatively, I could use an ounce of Sea Foam. It can’t turn into gum, so it’s probably better than Gucci gas. You can run a saw on 100% Sea Foam without problems.

I have reached another conclusion: when you buy a new chainsaw, you should remove the carb, sell it, and buy a Chinese carb. You can make a $60 profit, and Chinese carbs are better, because they can be adjusted and they are easier to repair. The original carb will probably be Chinese, too, so the quality is the same. You should keep the old carb long enough to get past early warranty issues, and then you should pull it.

There is no point in playing along with the hippie nanny-state ethanol/emissions drama any longer than you absolutely have to. Some day, we may have practical saws that run fine on bad gas and don’t pollute unnecessarily (or we might wake up and get rid of ethanol), and that would be great, but until then, you may have to break the rules unless you want saws that sit unused or require repairs that effectively boost their prices by 30%.

While I’m bloviating, I found what may be the most amazing Harbor Freight tool ever: the circular saw sharpening machine. For the pre-coupon price of $55, this thing will sharpen any blade up to 16″ in diameter, whether steel or carbide. Reviewers love it, although it takes some effort to make it work right.

I have a ton of blades, and I’ve always felt that paying a big percentage of a blade’s price to have it sharpened was a bad deal. I have a 14″ dry cut blade, and when I lived in Miami, I would have had to mail it to someone. Imagine the hassle and expense. I’ve been putting up with a moderately dull blade. Sharpening was a pain, and a new blade was $140. If I buy the tool, I can fix the blade myself, right here.

So there will be some redemption in this blog post, I will relate a couple of words God gave me this morning.

1. Thank you for freeing me from the world.

I feel that very bad supernatural events must be coming, because I am disconnecting from the world more and more. Fiction movies and TV shows seem juvenile to me; people who run around in spandex pretending to be superheroes look especially undignified. I no longer have newspapers coming to the house. I’m extremely grateful because I don’t have a regular job, in which I would be coerced to go along with the system. I’m very glad I am less dependent on the Satanic world we live in, but I am concerned for everyone else.

I used to wonder if it was right for God’s people to flee areas and let Satan’s people have them. This week, I thought about that, and I realized it’s a very Biblical thing. Noah and his family fled, and they were saved. Lot and his daughters fled. Abraham fled. Joseph and Mary fled to Egypt. God has a history of pulling his people out of places, and sometimes it precedes disaster and judgment. If God is moving people like me to the country, to areas where Christians predominate, it seems likely that some kind of supernatural catastrophe is coming to areas the ungodly control. My guess is that demonic activity, including persecution, will explode soon. We’re already seeing signs.

2. Thank you for humiliating the losers.

Satan is a loser. He is the “god” of all losers. He is the father of all losers. He is the biggest loser there is. He is an outsider and outlaw. His crowd is like the family at the end of the street with the lawn that never gets mowed, with a living room full of stolen goods and a backyard full of marijuana plants. We all know what losers are like.

These days, we think it’s cute to call yourself an outlaw. In the old days, it was like being called a maggot. It was a huge insult. It should be, still.

The spirits that serve Satan are losers. They threw their futures away. Now they come after us, just as human losers do, selling their tired, stinking wares, hoping we’ll become losers, too, so God will suffer.

I’m very grateful that God is humiliating the losers in my life. I want these spirits to be degraded and abased all the time, and I want the Holy Spirit to be honored and empowered.

God showed me something today. All Christians know that demons want to enter and live in bodies. While I was watching Derek Prince this morning, he taught about God’s desire to make us his temples, and I realized the Holy Spirit wants bodies, too. He doesn’t want to control or ruin us, but he wants to live inside us, just as demons do.

I already knew this, but somehow God has given it new emphasis in my heart.

The symmetry of the supernatural is amazing. Satan copies everything from God. He is the China of spirits.

Over the years, I invited losers to live in me and turn me into a house gone to seed. Now God lives in me, and the losers are being humiliated and evicted. This is what God wants for us.

The losers have no future but pain and humiliation. I’m very glad to see God break them. I wish I had gotten on board sooner.

That’s all for today. I may go foam my car.

Antifa Gas Costs me Another Day of Work

This week I finally got some use out of my big Echo chainsaw, which had been out of commission for months. What a relief.

I screwed the saw up in a number of ways. First, I used Democrat gas. I used 10% ethanol fuel, which ruins small engines. There is no way to defend this stuff. It doesn’t save us money on fuel. It’s not really good for the environment. It makes food and animal feed more expensive by removing corn from the market. It’s bad, bad, bad. It’s stupid. And the motivation for making it is greed, not a desire to improve the environment.

I left socialist gas in my saw for something like two months. My understanding was that you had to leave it a lot longer before it would clog a carburetor. I was mistaken. My saw would not start. I tried all sorts of things. I took it to an authorized repair place, and they kept it 4 weeks, did nothing except put an ancient carb on it to replace my new one, and then returned it to me in a non-functioning state.

I replaced the carb at my own expense, and I sort of got the saw running. Unfortunately, I wrecked it while trying to get the new carb adjusted. The problem–and this is only a guess, based on faulty memories–is that I revved it a lot with the brake on. This caused a bunch of failures. It warped the clutch drum. I am told it melted a line which supplied oil to the chain. I am also told it ruined the clutch springs.

I was told about the oil line and clutch springs by the people who finally fixed the saw.

When you rev a saw with the brake on, you engage the centrifugal clutch with a drum (which is also a sprocket) which is locked in place. The drum can’t turn, so the clutch rubs on it and heats it up. Then the drum warps. After that, disengaging the brake doesn’t work, because the new bulges in the drum rub against the brake whether or not the brake is on.

A chainsaw’s chain carries heat away from the hot parts. When you rev the saw with the chain locked, heat builds up where it should not. I think this screwed up my oil line, assuming the repair people were being truthful when they said it was melted.

Anyway, the place that finally got the saw running was another authorized repair center. They took 4 weeks, but they managed to repair the saw. Unfortunately, they did things I didn’t want done. They claimed they sharpened the chain, and they also said they put Loctite on the saw’s screws. I can sharpen a chain in 5 minutes, and I don’t want screws I can’t remove. Sometimes Loctite is too much.

I took the saw out this week and did some work. It ran well, although I’m not sure it’s running wide open.

When I looked at the wood being ejected from the saw, I was not happy. It looked fine, which is to say, it did not look coarse. When a chain is sharp, it will produce big chunks of cut wood. When a saw sprays dust, it’s dull.

I sharpened the saw today, and I got really big chunks and curls of wood. Happiness. But what about the money I paid to have it sharpened?

I was also disturbed to see that the bar looked dry. It oiled fine before I wrecked the saw. I had to adjust the oiler, which makes you wonder how much the repair guy knows.

I was still reasonably happy with the repairs, until I put the saw down today, turned it off, and then returned and tried to start it. Three of the screws around the starter cover had vibrated out, in a pasture. They are gone forever.

What about that Loctite? If it was there, it didn’t work.

You don’t actually need Loctite to hold screws in a plastic saw case. You just need to tighten them correctly. Someone didn’t do that. Now I’m wondering: did the repair guy loosen those screws? They said they Loctited screws, but did they mean every screw on the saw? Maybe they didn’t work on the starter cover, so maybe they never intended to Loctite those screws. It could be my fault. Perhaps I put the wrong screws in (some are shorter than others), or maybe I left them loose.

Seems to me that when you work on a saw for money, you tighten every screw that holds the covers on. It takes 30 seconds, and it’s common sense.

Now I can’t use my saw.

I found new screws on Ebay. I was going to talk to the repair people, but they close at noon on Saturdays, so they’re at home drinking beer when I need them. I’ll have the screws on Thursday. I ordered two sizes. The ones I’m sure I need arrive Thursday (or sooner), and the ones I MAY need arrive Friday. I ordered enough so I’ll have spares.

I’m feeling some guilt about the screws. I learned what they were on a parts website, but I got them from Ebay. I don’t feel right about getting information about a product from one company and then buying from another, unless there are special circumstances. I’ve bought things from the parts site in the past. The main reason I went with Ebay was time. They’re faster. I’ve waited a long time for this saw to work, and I really need to get some trees moved. Maybe I should put in a token order from the parts place to soothe my conscience.

In case you’re wondering, Echo Timberwolf saws have a number of M5 20mm and 16mm T27 Torx bolts with a tapping thread. That’s what you need. You don’t need Echo-brand screws, which are obscenely overpriced. Stihl saws also use these screws.

The big saw will be offline for several days, so I’m not cutting tree trunks any more. I have a 16″ saw for bucking, but it’s just not the same.

Today I cut a big oak that fell during hurricane Irma. It’s in my pasture. I left it alone originally because I liked the way it blocked the view from the road. The leaves fell off, so I had to do something.

I’ve been thinking of getting an anvil, because…anvil. Anvils are cool and useful, and I may want to forge something some day for fun. You can get a very good Chinese 66-pound anvil from Amazon for about $170. Less on Ebay. To use an anvil, you need a stump to rest it on. Today I thought about that while I was cutting the oak, and I decided to make a stump.

The bit of oak trunk I chose was about 22″ in diameter, judging by the extent to which it was too big for my 20″ saw. You would think cutting a stump for an anvil would be simple, but it isn’t. It’s not easy to make a chainsaw cut perpendicularly to the axis of a tree trunk. It will usually be off by a considerable extent. Today I found that it’s possible to do surprisingly fine work, adjusting and massaging a cut with a chainsaw. I ended up with a stump that should work fine.

I read that certain stumps sold for anvil purposes (they exist) are 22-1/2″ tall, so I shot for 23-24″. I got a fairly decent piece cut, and I sprayed the ends with metal primer to slow drying and prevent the wood from checking and splitting.

Why did I use metal primer? It was handy. Nearly any kind of paint will prevent checking.

The stump I cut has spalting (mild rot) around the circumference, but I don’t think that matters. Spalted wood is fairly solid, and the anvil will be sitting on sound wood in the center of the stump. We’ll see what happens. I stood the stump up on the porch of my workshop to keep the rain off of it, and if I go through with my plan, I’ll find a permanent location for it indoors.

I’m sure the stump will work. It’s possible that bits may come off the circumference with time. I’m not worried. It should be fixable, and if not, stumps are not hard to find here.

I was wondering how to make the stump sit on concrete without rocking. I think I have the answer. I can use a chainsaw to shape the bottom of the stump so there are three big parts that contact the floor. Anything with three feet will sit flat on a flat surface.

Marxist gas didn’t just do my chainsaw in; it also choked my Echo pole pruner. I have been working on it for a while. I believe there is varnish in the fast jet. Carb cleaning stuff doesn’t help much. I think the only real answer is to remove the metal plug the greenies have put over the fast jet screw (to prevent it from working correctly), remove the screw, and use carb cleaner on everything. That would be hard, so instead, I bought a Chinese carb.

Echo pruners, like Echo chainsaws, use carbs made by a company named Walbro. A tiny, simple Walbro carb for my pruner costs $100. Amazon and Ebay sell Chinese clones for…wait for it…$11. Hmm. Do I pay the repair people a huge sum to fix my Walbro carb every time Bolshevik gas clogs it? Do I pay $100 for a new Walbro carb every time? Uh…no. I will simply buy a new Chinese carb whenever the saw doesn’t run. It takes 5 minutes to install, and it looks like the quality is no different from Walbro. My guess is that Walbro has Chinese people make its carbs. I doubt there is any difference at all.

I finally have the gas problem under control. I go to Sunoco and buy ethanol-free 91-octane gas for nearly the same price as 89-octane Bernie Sanders engine poison. Then I treat it with Biobor Ethanol buster (Sta-bil doesn’t really work). I put it in a new gas can that has had the dangerous, useless socialist spout and cap replaced with old-fashioned ones from Amazon.

There are so many obstacles to making small engines work, it’s a wonder anyone succeeds. The gas is poison. The cans don’t work. Most fuel stabilizers don’t work. Running the engines dry between uses doesn’t work. Home Depot charges something like $40 per gallon for real gas.

I’m hoping the lessons I’ve learned will work. It’s amazing to me that people aren’t marching in the streets over this stuff. Everyone has the ethanol problem, and most of the solutions we are given do not work at all. It shouldn’t have taken me, an intelligent person, a year to get past the lies and fables. Why not just tell us the truth up front? “This gas is garbage. Only a couple of fuel stabilizers work, and you will find out the others don’t work when you try to start your engine next spring. Running your engine dry in the fall won’t help. Your EPA gas can cannot be made to function correctly, and we don’t care, but you can buy parts for it on Amazon and turn it into a functioning 1980 gas can.”

It’s bad to have people jamming us up, but it’s worse when they try to hide it from us. Just tell us the truth. We’ll pay for your bad gas and accept the fact that its real purpose is to make corn growers rich so they can contribute to political campaigns. We’ll pay for the gas can parts. We’ll pay for additives that work; just tell us which ones they are.

I’ll work with the system. I will not pay $40 for Home Depot gas, but other than that, I am willing to tolerate the farce, as long as I can keep my engines clear.

Arrggh.

My pruner carb should be here Monday, so I can use the pruner on Wednesday. That will be nice. I may go ahead and hack up the old Walbro carb, since Echo’s multi-year warranty doesn’t apply to carbs (the parts which usually malfunction). If I can get the Walbro clean, I can hold it in reserve and save myself $11 when the China carb (the other China carb, not the Walbro) poops out.

Considering the BS I had to deal with, I got a hell of a lot done this week. The oak is ready to burn, and I have the beginnings of a good anvil stump. I only worked maybe three hours. Imagine what I could get done in a world without ethanol.

Bring on the electric era. We’re already starting to see a few electric products that are actually practical. The greenies are making the use of fossil fuel such a torture, I’m starting to look forward to an electric car. As soon as we reach the point where you can get a charge in 5 minutes instead of half an hour or more, I will be ready to join the dance. Make me an electric chainsaw that will run for 5 hours on two batteries and then get out of the way and take my money.

Raise Your Hands for Service

Couple of interesting things today.

First, I have been trying to get my .204 Ruger rifle and ATN X-Sight II night scope working again. I have had a certain amount of success.

The X-Sight is low-end for night optics, and it’s full of gee-whiz features (often an indication of a focus that is not on quality), so I don’t expect the world. I have had a few problems. First, the battery life is so bad, you pretty much have to buy their external battery pack. Second, the battery pack is hinky. Sometimes you have to unplug it and plug it back in to make the scope boot, and you can’t tell when it’s about to shut down for lack of juice. I haven’t upgraded the scope’s software in a while. Maybe they’ve fixed this.

The scope keeps shutting down after very few shots. I bought 200 rounds of ammo, I have used the rifle three times, and I am still on the first 50-round box.

That being said, it’s a pleasant rifle to shoot, when you can shoot it. I am shooting a consistent 2 MOA at 100 yards, including what I think of as flyers. I’ll post a photo of a target representing what I think is around 13 shots. It’s hard to keep count when you’re aggravated.

Will the rifle do better? I have no idea. I can’t shoot it long enough to find out. Also, my setup is not good. I have a rabbit ear rear bag, a bipod, and a cheap Caldwell front rest. Sometimes the target is at a level where neither the bipod nor the rest will allow me to aim at it comfortably, and the bag keeps sliding around on me. I don’t know what I’m doing. I have to work on that.

The ammunition is fairly cheap. It’s Fiocchi, with 40-grain V-Max bullets. Fiocchi has made a lot of inexpensive ammunition, but the quality is excellent. They have a big factory in Italy, with real machines and everything. It’s funny how you can’t assume price is related to quality.

Another “cheap” ammo maker, Sellier & Bellot, has a magnificent factory you wouldn’t believe. You can “tour” it on Youtube. They do it right. On the other hand, CCI, which is an American maker with a great reputation, has a facility that looks like a converted garage.

Anyway, the ammunition is cheap, and I don’t know what it can do. Some cheap ammo is laser-accurate. I use Hornady .17 HRM ammo, and it will do sub-MOA at $11.50 for 50 rounds. You can’t assume anything without experience.

Speaking of .17 HMR, when my ATN battery died unexpectedly, again, I got the .17 HMR out and shot a while. At first, I was all over the target. I was adjusting the scope knobs between shots, so it was not pretty. On the second target, I shot pretty well, with a couple of flyers. I was coping with the sliding rabbit bag and so on. I’m convinced flyers are caused by concentration issues, period, and when the rests slide around, it makes you want to forget about concentration and get the shot over with.

I cheap out on targets by firing off-center. I pick a place where the yellow lines cross, fire a few rounds at it, move to another place, and so on. If you fire everything at the center of the target, you go through targets fast.

I’m thinking of getting a real glass scope for the .204 Ruger. The ATN is fun, but it’s getting on my nerves. I have a couple of Burris Fullfield II scopes, and they seem very nice. I have a Leupold which cost more, and the Burrises seem just as clear. I may get a Burris Fullfield E1, which is a newer model. It has an illuminated reticle.

Magnification is hard to choose. A scope that only has one setting will be cheap, but you’re stuck with that setting and field of view. When a variable scope’s magnification is maxed out, the field of view shrinks, and it makes it hard for you to find animals that are moving around. If you have variable magnification, you can crank it down and see more of the area where you’re shooting.

Some people say nothing more than 9X is needed, up to 300 yards. I can’t believe that, but then I’m used to shooting targets, trying to get sub-MOA accuracy. I want serious detail. When you shoot animals, 3 MOA is supposedly fine. Not sure how that can be true, since it means you would be hitting somewhere in a huge 6″ circle on a little scrawny coyote, but it’s what I’ve read. Seems like it would be easy to miss.

I would like 20X, but I’m thinking maybe I should grit my teeth and settle for 14-ish.

If I knew what I were doing, this would be easier.

My Leuopold is 20X, and it’s not currently on a rifle. I took it off my .308 for some reason. I was planning to put it back on, and I don’t like playing musical scopes, so I would like to have one scope for each rifle. I could put it on the .204 temporarily, but the idea bothers me.

In other news, I seem to have stumbled onto some powerful information about God. Maybe I should say he directed me to it. There appears to be something about lifting your hands in worship that improves prayer.

Generally, God is not overly formal in his relationship with us. He doesn’t want us to buy books of prayers other people have written and recite them verbatim, for example. He doesn’t require us to use Hebrew when we address him. He doesn’t care whether we call him Jesus or Yeshua. Sometimes, however, he expects us to do things a certain way.

In 1986, Jesus visited me. I have written about it. I was trying to sleep, and a beam of supernatural energy shone down on me and roamed around over me. Wherever it touched me, I felt complete peace and joy. The beam was Jesus. I knew it, without doubt.

I didn’t know what to do, and after a while, I fell asleep. I woke up instantly, on my back, with both hands raised in worship. I felt energy running into my palms, like arcs of electricity flowing into anodes.

A friend of mine was an armorbearer at Trinity Church in Miami. His name is Cedric. He went to the hospital for heart problems. One night he had some sort of issue, and he woke up on his back, with both hands raised in worship. Like me, he hadn’t raised his arms, himself. Something raised them while he was asleep.

In Exodus 17, Moses and the Hebrews fought the Amalekites. Moses held his hand up, holding the rod of God. As long as he held his hand up, the Hebrews prevailed. When he took it down, they began to lose. Aaron and Hur put a stone under him to sit on, and they held his hand up. It was acceptable for him to sit, but it appears that human beings had to hold up his hand. Otherwise, they would have propped it up somehow.

While Job was suffering, one of his friends told him to stretch his hands out to God and prepare his heart so he would be delivered. He obviously believed the raising of the hands was important.

In Psalm 28, the author asks God to hear him “when I lift up my hands toward thy holy oracle.”

In Psalm 44, the author defends Israel, saying they haven’t stretched out their hands to a strange “god.”

Psalm 63 says, “Thus will I bless thee while I live; I will lift up my hands in thy name.”

Psalm 68 predicts that a defeated Ethiopia will stretch out her hands to God in submission.

Psalm 88 says, “I have called daily upon thee; I have stretched out my hands unto thee.”

Psalm 119 says, “My hands also will I lift up unto thy commandments.”

Psalm 134 says, “Lift up your hands in the sanctuary, and bless the Lord.”

Psalm 143 says, “I stretch forth my hands unto thee; my soul thirsteth after thee, as a thirsty land.”

Psalm 141 says, “Let my prayer be set before thee as incense, and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.”

Lamentations 3:41 says, “Let us lift up our heart with our hands unto God in the heavens.”

Praising God, Habakkuk says, “The deep uttered his voice, and lifted up his hands on high.”

In the New Testament, believers laid their hands on people to heal them, to impart the Holy Spirit, and to initiate them into leadership.

Obviously, something is going on with hands. God moves power through them. It seems that God wants us to show him our palms when we want his power to flow.

I got this idea the other day, and I tried it. I held my hands up during prayer, for a long time. I could sense new faith and power. It was wonderful. I believe I was doing things God’s way, finally using the lesson he gave me in 1986.

Many preachers tell us to kneel. I don’t do it. I don’t like it. Kneeling is mentioned a few times in the Bible, but it doesn’t work for me.

I have no problem with lying down, sitting, or positioning myself on all fours in God’s presence, but kneeling is uncomfortable, and it makes it hard to look up or raise your hands. Daniel kneeled to pray three times a day, but he probably had a lower center of gravity than I do. Maybe he had a special piece of furniture that helped him.

The Psalms mention communing with God while lying in bed. That’s for me. That or sitting. I want to focus on God, not on effort. Also, when you’re on your back, it’s easier to raise your hands. When you stand, you have to pump blood over a vertical expanse of around six feet and when you lift your hands, you may be pumping blood seven feet up in order to reach them. It’s tiring. When you recline, your heart has less work to do, so you don’t feel burdened.

Anyway, I plan to continue raising my hands for long periods. It seems to make a big difference. I should have realized God was trying to teach me this.

God Will Take it From Here

Tonight I saw some extraordinary things at the home where my dad lives.

For nearly all of his life, my dad hated Christianity and wanted nothing to do with God, but after he moved to the ALF, he forgot about his atheism and became a Christian. It was very startling to me. Now when I visit him every day, I play Christian music while we talk. I also play a recording of Wayne Cochran reciting helpful scriptures. My dad has reacted positively to all this.

When I decided to play audio for him, I thought I needed an MP3 player. When I looked at the current technology, I decided to get a bluetooth speaker instead. I checked various alternatives, and I chose a product called a Wonderboom. It was available locally, it was cheap, and it was sturdy. Here’s a picture of it. It’s dirty because I haul it around a lot.

I guess I don’t have to tell you why I posted the picture. It’s kind of shocking that a tech company would release a product that looks like that.

I didn’t choose it for its appearance. I wanted something else, but this was the practical choice.

A short time ago, it occurred to me that I could play video for my dad. I could take a laptop. I could show him Derek Prince videos.

Derek Prince was a British preacher. He studied philosophy at Cambridge, but his career was cut off when God manifested himself to him. Baldilocks recommended him to me. At first I didn’t listen, because I thought she was talking about Joseph Prince. I should have realized she wouldn’t recommend someone like that.

I watch a lot of Derek Prince videos, and I thought they might appeal to my dad.

I keep forgetting to take the laptop to the ALF, but tonight while I was sitting with my dad, it occurred to me that I could use the speaker to play audio from Youtube. We were listening to Wayne Cochran, and my dad was saying nice things about him, and I realized I could give Derek Prince a try. My dad didn’t object. I found some short videos and started playing them.

I needed to do something. Usually, my dad talks a lot, but tonight he was quiet, so the conversation was slow. Derek Prince was just what we needed.

I am conditioned to expect my dad to reject God. Every time we talk about God, I wonder if this will be the day he’s going to respond with the familiar ridicule and contempt. As Derek Prince spoke, I wondered what was going to happen.

I thought my dad was falling asleep. His eyes closed. He leaned back. I didn’t know if he was listening. Then he started telling me how good Prince made him feel. He wasn’t passing out; he was feeling peace.

He was thinking about the God Derek Prince described. He said, “‘Come on in!,’ he says.”

Somehow, he had decided God was telling him, “Come on in!” That wasn’t in the videos I played.

It made me a little nervous. My dad’s skin seemed to lose color and go to yellow. I wondered if he was drifting toward death.

He said he wanted to go inside, because it was cool in the courtyard. I reminded him I had left homemade cookies in the ALF kitchen. He didn’t want any, but he praised them. He said, “Those cookies are good, and they’re blessed.”

When things like this happen, you realize you’re not pushing the car any more. I had felt alone in trying to change my dad, but God was behind it the whole time, and I could see he had taken over. I never said anything about blessed cookies.

We prayed together before we went inside. I asked what he wanted to pray for. Usually, he lets me choose. Today he said something like, “To truly believe.”

We moved to the dining room, and I put my speaker on the table. My dad’s friend Charles, who talks to him about gambling, rolled over to the table and started talking to us. He’s a very nice guy, but he has delusions. He said something about how we needed to come pick him up later at his house on the mountain.

Charles picked up the speaker and said something about the “cross” on it. It doesn’t really have a cross on it. It has a plus button and a minus button. He crossed himself, and he and my dad started talking about God. I became a spectator at that point. Charles said something about how we have to believe, and my dad said he did. Charles said, “Jesus does’t make it hard for us. He makes it easy.”

Charles really likes both of us, and tonight, for some reason, he was moved. He gave his hand to both of us before he went on his way. He told my dad his hands were too cold and that he should put them between his thighs to warm them up. Again, I wondered if my dad was drifting off.

My dad wanted to sleep, so I wheeled him to his bed and drove home. That’s the end of the story.

I feel like God has taken him out of my hands. I don’t know what’s happening.

I hope I’m right, because I don’t have the power to fix my dad. I don’t want to carry the burden any more. I’m uncertain. I get discouraged. I need to hand my dad off to someone stronger who will take over.

One thing is for sure. I have a testimony.

Escaping the Pull of Planet Gilligan

Do people get bored when I write about my TV problems? I hope not, but…no, I don’t care. I write what I want.

I killed DirecTV a while back. It was very expensive. The interface was torture. I could not download new programs. The channels were so bad, it was worse than parody. I made a great decision. I will never have another cable or satellite provider. I hope.

I tried the upgraded Youtube. It wasn’t worth the money. I killed it before the auto-renew kicked in.

I tried Hulu with live TV added. It seemed great at first, but after I had been watching a while, I started running into blocks of ads that seemed to take up about half of my time, and they could not be dodged, even with their “ad-free” add-on, which is a farce.

I complained on Hulu’s forum, and they deleted my complaint and lied, saying they had “merged” it with another thread. I asked about the complaint, and they refused to answer.

That wraps it up for Hulu. I killed it today. Actually, I left the cheaper part of it, without live TV (never used it), but I think I’m going to go back and kill that, too.

I have been watching Youtube and Amazon Prime exclusively for a while. I never felt tempted to look at Hulu, so I now realize Hulu is a waste of money.

Why does Hulu treat customers this way? No idea. Youtube’s management of ads is far superior; you can click away from them so you don’t have to hear about Grammarly or resources for AIDS patients 300 times a week. Also, the targeted ads Youtube provides are actually interesting sometimes. My guess is that Hulu’s few advertisers are aware that people hate their ads, so they force Hulu to shove them down our throats.

I don’t know if Hulu can compete with Youtube’s ad system. It may be an unprofitable. Perhaps Youtube loses money because of its ad policy, but Google pumps cash in to keep things working. Hulu wouldn’t be able to compete with a subsidized competitor. I doubt it works this way, because Youtube is paying creators a fortune. There are people who make millions of dollars every year. I don’t think Google would fund that without some kind of return.

There is an alternate explanation, which, of course, is Hulu incompetence. This is the one I’m betting on. When your guess is that someone else’s bizarre actions are caused by incompetence or dishonesty, you will be right maybe 95% of the time.

Youtube gets better all the time, which serves to prove my point, in a way. Youtube now has content which is far superior to the stuff big companies have been feeding us for decades. If the pros were not incompetent, how could little guys making videos in their basements with cell phones stomp them so easily?

When you have cable (let’s lump satellite into “cable”), here is what happens. You sit down and turn on the TV. You find 900 channels. You can’t find anything good to watch. You settle for garbage. There are PPV channels. There are shopping channels. There is an abundance of porn. There are Spanish channels. There are endless sports channels. There are pay channels featuring silly movies and creepy shows. There are Kardashians and Jenners, with their horrifying, incomprehensible TV slut academy. If you’re intelligent and even a little bit moral, there isn’t much out there.

Let’s say you have Youtube, and you want to learn about, oh, the history of Russia. It’s there, trust me. I won’t even check, but it’s there. Shakespeare? It’s there. Sewing? Plumbing? Computer programming? You name it; it’s there somewhere.

If it’s not there today, it will be in a year. Content and creators continually accumulate.

When TV was created, people floated a lot of BS about how it would be a conduit for education. TV was going to make ignorance a thing of the past. Look how that worked out! “Now sit right back, and you’ll hear a tale…” But now that TV has merged with computers, the prediction is coming true, in spite of the strenuous efforts of the hacks who used to control the system. We are also receiving more garbage than ever, but at least now there is some relief.

One nice thing about Youtube is that it’s helping decent people connect. Christians who post videos on Youtube network outside the system now. Also, the people I watch (tool and gun people) are networking. It’s turning out that many of us share a conservative Christian outlook. Sometimes when I’m watching a guy do machining or something, he’ll let the cat out of the bag. He’ll say something that confirms his status as a deplorable. That’s nice.

Leftists don’t seem very interested in tools, although they’re big in IT. Leftists are about taking, not making.

One of the bad things about Youtube is that it’s encouraging good people to rely on it for money. If a famous slut starts a channel and makes money, she can count on getting paid for as long as Youtube exists. Satan runs the Internet, and he is fine with sexual sin and female rebellion. If a Christian or conservative starts a channel, it’s another story. They will eventually ban us. A bunch of guys who thought they had careers will find out they were suckered by Satan. Wait and see.

Youtube recently had an event called “Adpocalypse 2.” It’s very strange. In today’s world, sexual perversion is rampant. It’s like the days of Noah. Perverts who want to have sex with little kids are EVERYWHERE. A bunch of them roam Youtube, making sexual comments on videos. If you post videos, and your young son often appears in the frame, these future inhabitants of hell will gather to make smutty remarks about him. Youtube decided to fight back. They found channels that occasionally featured kids, and they demonetized them. They took away the money. One day, your video is bringing money into your house, and the next day, it’s dead, and Youtube doesn’t answer questions. There is nothing you can do.

Meanwhile, your old job is gone, and you still have to pay for cameras, editing software, and whatever else.

It shows how quickly Youtube can change a person’s life, and with how little accountability.

No one seems to be talking about the risk. Everyone wants to become a full-time Youtuber, but no one asks whether the job will exist in 6 months. It will hurt, crawling back to Tractor Supply to talk to your former boss after giving him the finger and doing doughnuts in his parking lot.

The government has to abide by a constitution and statutes. The tech kiddies are much freer than the government. They can discriminate very freely without having to answer for it.

I’m on a tangent. I don’t know where Youtube is going, but for now, it’s the best source of video entertainment and education, and it’s free with your Internet service. Hulu, on the other hand, is shady and disappointing. It seemed good at first, but I seriously suspect they suppressed their horrible ads until I started paying for the service.

It’s remarkable, how little I miss cable. When I say I don’t miss it at all, I’m not exaggerating. I never feel myself wishing I could turn it back on.

Movies and network TV seem very stupid to me now. When I watch movies and non-reality shows, I think about what’s really in front of me: maladjusted adults playing make-believe, following scripts written by mercenary, cynical fringe nuts whose parents wish they had gotten real jobs.

Harrison Ford has never been on a starship because there is no such thing; he’s just an old man who carries a plastic gun. Robert Downey would be among the most useless people to have with you in a terrorist attack, and his suit is plastic, too (when it’s not 100% CGI). Hugh Laurie isn’t qualified to freeze a wart, let alone cure mysterious diseases, and he isn’t a genius. If Gal Gadot got in a serious fight with a random middle-aged man on the street, she would lose in two minutes or less, and she would need to be hospitalized afterward.

Historically, actors have generally been shiftless, unaccomplished, unscrupulous people the rest of society shunned for good reason. Nothing has changed, except for the way we see them.

Acting talent is extremely common, and it has no relationship to intelligence. There are very unintelligent people who can play smart people convincingly. It’s just mimicry. Birds do it. Many of our actors are of below-average intelligence, yet we esteem them as though they were the sharp, invincible fantasy characters they play.

When you watch a show and see characters living out adventures, it’s entertaining. When you see neurotic, narcissistic ignoramuses playing make-believe, it’s different.

I don’t know how long Youtube will continue to provide good content, but until it poops out, I’m going to stick with it. George Clooney and Chadwick Boseman (“Yes, daddy dresses like a cat for a living”) will have to make ends meet without my help.

I might conceivably go back to upgraded Youtube to kill ads, but that’s as fancy as I plan to get.

Repetitive Ads You Can’t Skip Rival Waterboarding

I am now weeks into the cable-free lifestyle, so I guess I’ll report.

I do not miss cable (in my case, actually satellite) at all. I have Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Youtube. I watch Youtube for the most part. I watch Hulu maybe 5 days per week. I watch Amazon Prime rarely, but since the video portion of Amazon Prime comes with the free shipping at no extra charge, I plan to keep it.

Here is the breakdown.

Youtube is far and away the best source of video entertainment and education, and the price is right. I can learn about absolutely anything on Youtube. I could become a very credible engineer or mathematician using only Youtube and used textbooks. Youtube is packed with tool videos. If you want to do any type of metalworking or woodworking, Youtube should be your second stop, after joining an online forum. Youtube is also the best source for religious material. No contest.

Hulu is not as good as DirecTV for my purposes, but on the other hand, it doesn’t cost $200 per month. I have no use for nudie channels or network TV. I don’t watch sports. I like Motor Trend, TCM, History, and Discovery, and that’s about it. For a person like me, Hulu fills in all the non-Youtube blanks.

There are problems with Hulu. First, the ads are a horror. They charge you something like $50 per month for the basic service, and then they nail you for a few more dollars to get rid of ads. Then they give you ads anyway.

Hulu is EXTREMELY DISHONEST about ads. When you watch a Hulu show, you can bring up a bar at the bottom of the screen. The bar will contain long unbroken stretches which represent programming. The breaks represent ads. The breaks look very small compared to the unbroken stretches, giving you the idea that ads don’t take up a lot of time. In reality, a typical stretch of programming runs maybe 7 minutes, and ads will often go three minutes. I haven’t timed programs with a stopwatch, but it appears that maybe a third of a typical program’s running time is ads.

You can’t fast-forward past Hulu ads. If Hulu says you have 170 seconds of ads to sit through, you will darned well sit through them. Also, because Hulu isn’t a highly successful company, the ads lack variety. They don’t have a lot of advertisers. This means you will generally see the same ad several times during a show. It’s a form of torture.

Hulu has a DVR feature. You can record shows and watch them later. You only get 50 hours of cloud time, which is not much. If you record a show, you also record the ads. Then when you replay it, you get the recorded ads PLUS the Hulu-inserted ads. You can blow through the recorded ads, but you are still stuck with the inserted ads.

How do I know Hulu needs to fix its ad problem? Simple. When I watch a Hulu show that really tortures me with ads, I switch to Youtube or Amazon in frustration. Hulu is conditioning me to watch other services which beat them on price, so clearly, their methods are not smart.

It seemed like I didn’t get many ads when I first started using Hulu. Maybe they ramp them up once you’re hooked. I think Hulu is a crooked company, so it would not surprise me.

Other companies have better ways of handling ads. Cable and satellite companies let you fast-forward through recorded ads. Youtube generally allows you to opt out of ads after the first 5 seconds, which is brilliant. You may conceivably see an ad you like, and you are free to watch it in its entirety. On the other hand, you don’t have to watch the same ad about living with AIDS 900 times in one week.

Youtube is convinced I have AIDS. I keep seeing the same two AIDS ads.

I think you can pay for ad-free Youtube, but the ads on Youtube are so painless, I see no point in it.

Amazon doesn’t have ads, unless ads for Amazon shows count. Those ads play before your chosen programs, so your programs don’t get interrupted.

Hulu has a forum where you can complain and make suggestions. If they don’t like your posts, they delete them. When you ask why your posts were deleted, they pretend they can’t hear you.

I may dump Hulu. Nearly all of my TV shows are Motor Trend shows, and I can get the Motor Trend channel, ad-free, for $5 per month. I watch a couple of shows from other channels, but there are honest ways to get those programs without Hulu. I still have an Xfinity account, for reasons too boring to go into, and I can use that to get online access to some of the stuff I watch. I like Turner Classic Movies, which Hulu offers. Guess what? TCM movies are available online, free of charge.

Amazon Prime has a lot of mediocre shows I don’t want to watch. It also has The Grand Tour, which is nice, but you can go through a whole season in 4 days, and I’m already done with season three. There are some good “free” things on Amazon Prime, but generally, you have to pay if you want quality.

I like Better Call Saul, which is an AMC product. AMC puts all of the episodes on the Internet. There goes that problem.

I think shedding Hulu is a good idea. I may kill it and see how it goes. I can start again whenever I want. I could put part of the saved money into killing Youtube ads.

Final thing…I may be about to get fixed wireless Internet. I have DSL right now. Wireless speeds are much better. I have been waiting for unlimited wireless data, and it has finally become available. It’s not cheap; I would pay around $100 per month. I think it would be worth it. Life on 1.5 MBps is not normal.

The company that would sell me wireless access would use towers provided by Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile. Verizon would be optimal, because they give me 35 MPps on my phone on this property. Problem: Verizon is greedy. They throttle data after a certain point. After three days of TV, I would be cut off. That means I need to find out what the other towers can do for me.

The phone rep for the reseller said I might get 8 MBps. Hey, that’s four times what I get now. Hard to complain.

The more I think about it, the less I feel I can recommend Hulu. Their practices seem shady, and their ad policies sometimes make watching TV very unpleasant.

To sum up, Youtube is great, Amazon is okay, TCM is free, and the Hulu honeymoon is over. DSL is a horror. Fixed wireless is in my future, once I find a good way to get it.

Anything, including most diseases, is better than DirecTV.

God’s Presence is my Quantum of Solace

If you use the email address on my blog to get in touch with me, you may be disappointed. For some reason, it likes to put people in the junk folder, and it marks messages read, so I have no idea they’re in there. Last night I happened to check the folder, and I found a message from a college buddy. I think we last communicated in the 90’s, but I’m not sure.

We were classmates at Columbia College, back before the internal combustion engine, cell phones under 20 pounds, and lolcats. He’s a successful radiologist, which is a little funny, because he used to despair of getting into medical school. He came up with some kind of improvement in the bone marrow transplant procedure, and he was then accepted by Columbia’s medical school. I believe his invention was a very big deal, because he used to appear in TV interviews. If I recall correctly, he went to Australia to talk about it.

I don’t know why anyone worries about getting into medical school. I have high school classmates I wouldn’t trust to take a splinter out of a rat’s butt, yet who are now successful physicians. One is the son of a former mayor. I remember him as kind of a goof. Nice guy, but not someone you would bet on if he appeared on Jeopardy.

One day while I was walking around drunk during a free period, I saw him leaning against a classroom door. I had no idea what was going on. I figured he was playing a joke on a girl. He told me to hold the door for him, so I did. After he ran off, I let go, and Mr. Bond burst into the hallway. Mr. Bond was a teacher, which is why I call him “Mr.” He wasn’t all that interested in my explanation, so I soon found myself sitting in the headmaster’s office. I guess the headmaster didn’t respect Mr. Bond any more than my classmate did, because we never got past the waiting room. Mr. Bond gave me a lecture, and off I went.

Later on, he caught me in a school parking lot, riding drunk on the trunk of a friend’s car. That, I want to stress, was not my fault. Being drunk was my fault, but my friend decided to hit the gas on his own. I had no control over that.

I feel like I got framed both times. I couldn’t tell who was behind the door. It certainly felt like a girl.

My college friend is considerably smarter than the mayor’s son. Generally, doctors aren’t all that smart, so my friend should have realized he was better than the competition.

My friend gets most of the credit for getting me interested in science and math. I had entered college as a verbal person.

When I took the SAT’s, the chairman of Columbia’s English department sent me a letter, asking me to apply. I can’t understand that at all. Yes, I had a high verbal score, but how does that translate to an aptitude for studying literature? A high verbal aptitude makes you really good at crossword puzzles. It doesn’t mean you automatically want to become a leading authority on Chaucer.

The older I get, the more convinced I am that extreme verbal aptitude is useless. Maybe it’s good for cryptography? I don’t know. Nobody pays anyone to do crossword puzzles, and most English professors are middle-of-the-road intellects. You don’t need to be smart to teach people about J.D. Salinger. I don’t think brains would even be helpful.

At some point, I got the idea that I would rather be a doctor than a useless English major, and my friend…I will call him “Stan,” since I need a pseudonym…was the perfect resource. His dad was a podiatrist, and he was taking really neat classes. He told me about vertebrate anatomy, and we both signed up. Each of us got a dead cat and a dogfish, and we worked side by side at a dissection table. Stan’s dad generously supplied real scalpels so we didn’t have to use the junk most students used.

Sadly, I had no study habits, and I was clinically depressed because my disintegrating family drove me nuts. I was a real mess. I ended up bailing out and taking the class a second time. I bailed on a number of classes. I didn’t finish the class the second time around, and then I dropped out of college.

I suppose it’s a good thing I didn’t end up in medical school. Doctors tend to be unhappy, like lawyers, and they used to suffer a lot on the way up. I don’t know if I could have survived the long shifts and systematic abuse that characterized the system back then.

I couldn’t survive the pre-med experience, so I think it’s silly to even suggest that I could have made it through a residency.

Law school was a joke. Drink all you want, hang out with your friends, and then work hard for one week at the end of every semester. I quit taking notes during my third year. It was a good fit for me.

When you get out of law school, you don’t work 36-hour shifts. You go to work at 9, and you leave by 6. On the weekends, you stay home. If you work harder than that, you’re working for the wrong firm. Truthfully, I think the hardest workers are people who should not have gone to law school. If you’re not talented enough to get a good job, you would be better off doing something else.

Stan also helped me get hooked on tools. In his room in our suite, he had a special drawer with lots of fascinating items in it. Stuff from Brookstone and so on. Weird little hand tools I had not realized I needed. He may deserve a lot of the credit or blame for the fact that I own several tons of tools. He would probably like the little tool station I’ve set up in my man room.

I had a sort of family of 5 friends. Four of us shared a suite. Stan was the resident leftist, although he wasn’t very good at it. He didn’t chain himself to anything or take part in marches. He was just farther to the left than the group average. He used to have long political discussions with my friend (and fellow blogger) Aaron, who was also part of the group. We used to call Aaron “Point” and Stan “Counterpoint.” Or maybe it was the other way around.

When Stan got in touch with me, he did it through this blog, so I knew he had seen some of my writing. I wondered how a person like me could fit into his world. I’m a far-right religious nut.

Stan surprised me. He apparently has a carry permit, and he’s a fanatical bird hunter. He says he’s upset because Californian invaders are ruining Colorado, the state where he lives. My take on this is that he’s a closeted conservative. Maybe he’ll have a Dennis Miller moment and come out one of these days.

It was nice to learn he wasn’t a transsexual vegan in a micro house with hemp walls.

I think Stan and Aaron had more influence on me than my other college friends. Stan helped me rediscover my STEM roots, and Aaron got me into blogging. He also got me interested in Israel, which is why I spent four life-changing months on a kibbutz.

I don’t communicate with a couple of the guys these days. One, a Jew who went through college with a very low opinion of Arabs, became a hard core anti-Israel activist, and he seems to be an extreme leftist. Another simply wore me down. I eventually realized I was not satisfied with the way he treated me or his influence on me, and there were some things about his character that made me uncomfortable, so I let him go.

I haven’t heard from the fifth guy in some time. He was always different. I always knew he was gay, but when we were in college, he was trying to make heterosexuality work. Years later, I found out his mother had died, and I called to express my sympathy. I heard another man’s voice on his answering machine, saying “we” were not home. I knew what had happened. I had always expected him to come out once his mother was gone.

I eventually wrote him. I told him I was a Christian, and that I couldn’t exactly congratulate him. I said I still considered him a friend, and I probably said I hoped he understood. He did not. He thought I was rejecting him or putting him down. I don’t recall, exactly. Anyway, we didn’t communicate for a while after that.

We eventually reestablished contact, and we got along fine once we cleared things up. I don’t know what he’s up to now, though. I pray for him sometimes. No matter how much you care about someone in that lifestyle, as a Christian, there is a limit to how close you can get. I’m very open about my concerns about the way homosexuality and sexual confusion are being used to as tools of persecution, and I would guess that my positions would not go over well with him.

Friends are friends, but God is God. When there is a conflict, you don’t have to weigh things and make a decision. There is only one choice.

The anti-Israel guy called me after I sent the letter to my gay friend, and while ostensibly trying to catch up with me and rekindle our friendship, he told me my letter was “evil.” That killed the relationship for me. It wasn’t his disagreement that bothered me. It was the arrogance and rudeness, combined with his incomprehensible belief that the matter was any of his business. It was startling to be confronted with such nonchalant condescension and close-mindedness.

Also, it showed how much he had changed. In college, he had been interested in learning more about his Jewish faith, and when he told me my letter was evil, I knew he had given up on the God of Leviticus. It seemed to me that he had allowed politics to become an excuse for venting rage that came from other sources.

That’s how political rage and other types of activist rage usually work. You can’t resolve things with your parents, so you join Greenpeace and go around ramming whaling ships. Activism is a wonderful, classic cover for cruelty and inability to forgive. If you dream of sending people mail bombs, but you’re having a hard time justifying it, come up with a cause, and you’ll be putting tacks and dynamite in boxes in no time.

Columbia was a terrible choice for me. The people were nuts. I have blamed myself more than anyone for my problems there, but the truth is that the atmosphere was sick.

I guess things would have been different if my parents had been helpful. Many people take their kids to colleges to look them over. Most educated people discuss college and career choices with their kids. They look to see what their kids are good at when they’re young, and they spend money on their interests and help them progress. My parents didn’t do any of those things. When I filled out college applications, I only did it because I knew I needed to have something to do the following year. I only got two applications in on time: Columbia and Dartmouth. Dartmouth waitlisted me, so I went to Columbia.

I didn’t do well with girls at Columbia. I used to think that was because I was a maladjusted kid, and there is a lot of truth to that, but I have looked up some of the women I knew, and they’re a mess. I wasn’t wrong about them. Some ended up in extreme-leftist academia or activism. None I checked up on had husbands. They were poisonous. Imagine being married to someone like that and being “corrected” 24 hours a day.

I remember a beautiful young engineer named June. She used to come to my dorm and hang out in the TV lounge on my floor. She talked about rape a lot. She would pop off with gems like, “Rape isn’t a crime of sex! It’s a crime of violence!” Out of nowhere.

Okay, fine, but what does that have to do with General Hospital? Am I supposed to ask you out now, or should I just jump out the window? Very strange. And she wasn’t odd by Columbia/Barnard standards. She was well within a standard deviation of normal.

Then there was Angela. I think she was an engineer. She was a gorgeous (by Columbia standards) Italian girl. She used to hang out with my friend Sam and his pack. She seemed like an airhead when I first met her. I remember watching her stand and grin while Sam slapped her buttocks to make them jiggle. He marveled at the motion. A year or two later, she was a feminist avenger with no sense of humor at all. It was as though an emasculating spirit had entered her body and taken control.

The previous version of Angela had been disappointing because she seemed unaware that she was selling herself cheap. The newer version was a pure horror.

I recall talking to her about a couple of people we knew. I had been speaking to them while they tried to cram for exams. I told Angela the woman’s “pre-med boyfriend” wanted to study. She said, “I find it interesting that you call him ‘pre-med’ but you don’t say what she was studying.” Ouch. Where did that come from? There go all my reasons for ever talking to you again.

She ended up working for one of the networks, helping make soap operas. She made a lot of money, but I don’t think she advanced the cause of feminism. I haven’t change the world, but I’m glad I don’t have to say I spent my life making soap operas.

Anyway, most of the women were highly maladjusted and completely unacceptable, and their nature said a lot about the institution itself.

As for the academics, there was no way I could have made it in the liberal arts, even if I had studied. To make it among liberal intellectuals (a tragic misnomer), you have to join the club, and I would not have done that. I would have been blackballed right and left for years before figuring out what was wrong.

The chairman of the English department should have added this sentence to his letter: “If you’re not a leftist nut, you are still welcome to study here, but you should forget about the possibility of making a living in academia or the arts afterward.”

Who wants to teach English or literature anyway? Could anything be more boring?

If I had had a sharp person to mentor me (instead of no one at all), I would have gone into a STEM field from day one. I would still have been in a hostile environment, but I could have gotten my degree and gotten out.

My parents didn’t introduce me to God. They didn’t prepare a path for me with prayer. I was not sharp enough to get connected on my own. Things went pretty well for me, considering. I didn’t end up dead or in prison.

I should have taken up STEM pursuits in high school and forgotten all about things like writing. Then I could have gone to a relatively normal technical college and minimized the friction with the more corrosive elements of the left.

When I look back on the opportunity I had, I can’t believe I dropped the ball. Columbia, for all its problems, was the equal of Harvard or Stanford. I could have been a mechanical engineer, an EE, or a physicist. I could have done medicine, had I chosen and prepared correctly. I had a horrible attitude, and I was not prepared at all. I wish I hadn’t gone to Columbia, but once I was there, blew a gigantic opportunity. What percentage of American 18-year-olds get four years at a top-10 university, with no student loans?

I busted my butt when I went back to school for physics. I was a different person. It’s too bad it happened so late, at the wrong school. I’m glad I got my degree, and I will always be grateful to the University of Miami for giving me a chance, but it would have been great to study at Caltech or MIT instead. Or Georgia Tech. A somewhat normal place.

Interesting stuff, at least to me.

It was good to hear from Stan, and it’s great to know he did well in life. He really got me thinking, too. Maybe now I’ll have more useful input the next time a young person who is not a leftist asks me for advice.

I Will Never Forgive Rob Lowe

I am dying to get rid of my landline and DirecTV.

My dad is in an ALF. I am moving him to a better ALF next week. My dad, Fox News, and Turner Classic Movies are the only reasons I have TV service at all.

Having DirecTV is like having stinging sores all over your body. The receiver is molasses-slow. The vast majority of channels are sales and pay-per-view channels. If you want to buy Dr. Ho’s magic back belt or a Dr. Oz chakra-stimulation girdle, DirecTV will be of great help to you. If you want to watch actual TV programming, it’s nearly as useless as not having a TV.

I got my dad some kind of premium movie package because he was complaining. I have never been able to watch a premium channel. When you try to select HBO or any other premium channel, you get a message offering to charge you a fee to watch. I don’t know if my dad ever managed to watch a premium channel, but the complaining went away for some reason, so I decided not to look into it.

DirecTV has several Ultra 4K channels. When you land on one, the receiver locks you there. You can’t flip to a new channel. It tells you to ask for 4K information, which you don’t actually receive when you click the virtual button. You have to bang on random remote buttons until you escape the channel. Imagine how much I have enjoyed helping my dad get free, over and over. His TV won’t play Ultra 4K, and DirecTV won’t provide it anyway, but there is no way to block the Ultra 4K channels to keep my dad out of trouble.

My latest connectivity bill was $263, for basic channels, the torment I have described above, 1.5 MBPs Internet, and a landline I only got to make my dad happy.

Why haven’t I killed my TV and phone service? You must wonder.

My dad is not yet installed in the new ALF. I don’t want to cancel everything and then find out there is some kind of problem that will keep him at home for another week or month. Life with a dementia patient and no TV service is unthinkable.

I would also like to dump my Internet provider and get fixed wireless. It would be much, much faster than my current provider. Right now, the fee is supposedly about $90 per month, so I figure that means the real price is $150 per month (local taxes, state taxes, federal taxes, free-TV-for-strangers-who-don’t-want-to-work fee, environmental damage fee, oxygen surcharge, male gender penalty, white privilege fine, transgender amercement, anti-bullying assessment…). That’s expensive but doable, but the problem is the stingy data allotment. They give you 20GB for $90 nominal. I figure I would blow through that in a week. Who, in his right mind, would pay three figures for a week’s worth of data?

I never, ever watch network TV. I don’t know how to watch the local news; I believe people here watch the Orlando channels. I don’t watch sports. I do not want nudie channels like HBO. I should really quit watching Turner Classic Movies. I have burned through the best of their inventory already. Youtube is much better. I can go to Youtube and get Christianity, tool videos, gun videos, math, physics, electronics, and all sorts of other useful things.

Basically, I’m paying three figures for two channels, and to be really honest, I don’t actually watch Fox News. I feel like I should have it available, but I suppose that’s stupid. I should cut it loose. So three figures for one channel.

There are services for people who occcasionally want to see something other than the Internet. Youtube has an enhanced version. There are outfits called Sling and Hulu. I already have a Vudu account, which is useful for movies. I can’t get resolution better than 720, but I started out in life with a 19″ black-and-white TV with four channels, so 720 looks great to me.

I’m glad I’ve seen so many old movies over the last year or so. It reminds me that America used to be a better place. Please don’t get on my back about racist laws, lead paint, bell bottoms, slow cars, the 55 mph speed limit, and all the other problems we used to have. I am aware we had very serious problems. I’m just saying the people were far superior to the current crop.

It has been nice to see G-rated movies featuring men who wore ties and women who wore dresses, and I have enjoyed getting familiar with classics I had overlooked, but TCM only has so many good movies. Once you run through them, you start sifting through the dregs. I may have to start watching musicals soon. I cannot stand musicals. I thought I could, but I was wrong. I think The Wizard of Oz is the only movie musical I’ve ever enjoyed. The other day I watched some musical or other, and I kept fast-forwarding through the songs. Apart from that one movie, Judy Garland is unbearable. She always looked like her corset was about to burst, and they put so much makeup on her to repair the self-inflicted damage, she resembled a Romulan. I guess her bleak, dissipated lifestyle was always on the verge of killing her.

I don’t know which service to get. Maybe I shouldn’t get a service. I have Amazon Prime (The Grand Tour’s third season is even better than pre-Clarkson-punchup Top Gear), I have Youtube, and I should be able to get by with one or two hours’ worth of video per day anyway.

I tried Netflix a few years back. It was horrible. They somehow managed to avoid buying every good movie made in the last 20 years.

I may do a Sling free trial. PC Magazine says it’s the best for cord-cutters, and free is free. If I can just remember to end it before they start charging me…

You know how that works. It takes two mouse clicks to sign up. Then when you cancel, you have to dial an 800 number, wait on hold for two days, and then speak to a hostile CSR in Bangladesh.

I can’t wait to get my dad moved permanently so I can cancel this tripe. I’ll start out with an Internet connection and nothing else, and we’ll see where it goes from there. I don’t think I need a streaming service.

Whenever I get rid of anything that reminds me of my dad, it makes me sad. There are still two containers of his ice cream in the freezer. I know that if I throw it out, I’m acknowledging that he’ll never come home again. I have been hoping to bring him home for visits, but I have learned that this can be destructive. You bring them home, they think they’re moving in for good, and then you have to take them back to their institutions. They’re happier if you leave them where they are.

I have to throw out his bed and give away his furniture. If I do that and then move into his bedroom, I’ll be saying, “He is never coming back.” If I leave his bed alone, I can tell myself he’ll need it when he visits. There is no other bedroom on the first floor, so there is nowhere else he can stay. Throwing that bed out will be a very final step.

He still has clothes here. Since 2017, I have been throwing clothes out. He’s a natural hoarder, so his closet was so full the clothes were pressed against each other. You had to pry them apart to hang things up. I would guess he had 150 pounds of clothing, dating back 40 years. At the ALF, he has slacks and guayaberas, plus a sweater he doesn’t wear. Nothing else. I kept a few other things here because I told myself he might wear them, but he won’t. I thought I should keep a suit for his funeral, but he chose cremation. There will be no viewing. He won’t even need to be dressed up.

I have to throw the remaining useless clothing out. This week.

It shouldn’t take 5 years to for a person’s mind to die. Taking 5 years to die from a purely physical disease isn’t as bad. Everyone adjusts, preparations are made, and then it’s over. The patient is still with you the whole time. With dementia, it’s like living with a ghost or a replica. The patient is mostly dead, but the body walks around your house, reminding you of him without giving you real access to him. Imagine how you would feel if your mother died from cancer and then got up the next day and sat at the breakfast table, talking nonsense.

My phone was set to remind me to give him his pills every morning. Today it reminded me at 9 a.m., as always, and I went to Google calendar and deleted all future events. I will never see that alert again. From now on, until he dies, other people will give him his pills. I used to be sort of glad he was getting painkillers, because it meant I could always set a few aside in case I had an accident or a kidney stone. I didn’t do that before I put him in the ALF, so if anything happens, I’m on my own! I should have grabbed a few, but I thought I had time.

Everyone should have a bottle of Percocet or Vicodin on hand, drug nannies and their meddling notwithstanding. When you have real pain, the last thing you need is to sit in a waiting room for three hours without drugs.

I am eager to have my life back, but it’s still hard to be decisive about it.

Okay, I just made a plan. Get Dad installed, cancel the landline and DirecTV, and see how it goes. After that, I can make little adjustments.

Then I can decide if I want to move farther north.