Progress Isn’t Always Pretty

A friend of mine is taking serious steps to get aligned with God, and he has all sorts of problems. People let him down constantly. Things go wrong for him. He got in trouble with the law, in a moment of completely inexplicable irresponsibility. He has all sorts of financial issues because of his credit history, and because his legal problems–combined with Miami’s Spanish-first policy–make it hard for him to get employers interested.

If you think bilingualism is a great idea, wait until you try to get a job in Miami. It’s no wonder Cubans think it’s heaven. They get first dibs on every job because of their remarkable and unique refusal to learn the language of the country that saved them. Strange way to thank us.

He still makes a lot of mistakes, but I keep working with him, because I know he’s not joking about fixing his life. Also, I know I’m going through the same thing, even if my experience is not nearly as difficult as his.

The other day while I was in prayer, I got a picture in my mind. I don’t mean a magical vision; just something that occurred to me. I thought of a dirty, blind canal full of dead fish, floating turtle grass, and junk.

When you aren’t led by the Holy Spirit, you’re off course. You’re like a boat that has turned up a blind canal. A canal that goes nowhere will fill up with crap over time, and at the end of it, there is nothing but a concrete wall.

If you cruise up a blind canal, you will have to go by all sorts of obstacles. The debris in the canal will be in your way the whole time. When you wise up and turn around, things don’t improve right away. In order to get out, you’ll have to go through the same mess you passed on the way in.

My friend and I–you are probably in the same situation–putted our way up our blind canals for a long time. Then we reluctantly, grudgingly turned around, and we expected everything to be fine. Of course, that isn’t what happened. The junk was still there, and now we are cruising through it.

Today I thought of this, in connection with the work I’m doing, putting my dad’s financial transactions in Quickbooks. I don’t mean to whine (this time), but it’s the opposite of fun. I had to study accounting briefly, which is just about the most boring thing a human being can do, and then I had to learn how to use the program. I also had to get special materials to make it work with rental properties. Now I sit for hours every day, entering checks and bills.

It’s a drag, but it was predictable. For years, I tried to get my dad to keep track of things week by week instead of all at once, during a yearly two-month period of hell. He would not listen. By the time I got ahold of things, over a year’s worth of transactions had to be dealt with.

The work I’m doing is not fun, but the main reason it’s not fun is because my dad sowed for it over a period of decades. If he had been doing what he should, I would be entering current transactions, which would be relatively quick. Because he didn’t, I’ve been entering things going back to December of 2014. The work of entering transactions has been multiplied by about 18.

In a couple of weeks, I won’t hate Quickbooks any more. I’ll love it. I’ll tell people how wonderful it is. I’ll be living in the world of a responsible person doing maintenance, not that of a goofball doing tons of remedial work.

I brought it all on myself. I’m not saying other people didn’t screw up. I’m saying I let a lot of things pile up over the years, and now I’m paying for it. I don’t know if I could have made my dad use accounting software, but I am confident that one way or another, God would have arranged things so this experience would have been much better.

The Quickbooks thing is but one example of old, creaky problems I’m having to fix now.

God aligns things. He straightens our paths. The promises of the Bible are true, but they’re only true for people who truly give themselves to him, and when you change your ways, things don’t necessarily change instantaneously.

God doesn’t just do repairs; he also puts thorns in our paths to show us we’re screwing up. Or he merely lets others put thorns in our paths.

When I was living in Israel, I saw a very strange thing: impenetrable walls of thistles. You would really have to see these things for yourself in order to believe it. They looked like something out of a movie. The plants they grew on were very tall; they must have been seven or eight feet in height. They grew right against each other, so you couldn’t walk between them. They were covered with razor-sharp thorns. There is no way a human being could get through them. I couldn’t even see through them.

I think about that sometimes. Israel was arranged by God to illustrate Biblical principles. I think those creepy thistles were there to show the Jews what life was like without his help.

In some ways, we expect too little from God, and in other ways we expect too much. We don’t think he’ll fix our lives, so we stick with our own stupid plans. Once we turn around, we expect him to make everything wonderful overnight.

The things at which you fail are signposts, telling you you’re going the wrong way. It’s that simple. If you want to get past them, you have to stop leading yourself. When you accept God’s leadership, you will start to defeat your obstacles, but you shouldn’t be surprised if they don’t clear up all at once.

I eagerly await the day when I can honestly say I like Quickbooks. I may throw a party. Unfortunately, I don’t think it will be deductible.

The Pun Mine is Deep Indeed

I watched a little bit of Top Gear with breakfast today. What a horror.

Chris Evans showed up, wearing the same seemingly smelly outfit he has worn on every episode, topped off with a plaid hunter’s cap that would make Elmer Fudd turn up his nose. He screamed his way through a review of a British lightweight roadster, and after two or three minutes, I had to fast forward. Up side: if he threw up, I didn’t have to see it.

Matt LeBlanc followed up, reviewing a gorgeous blue Rolls-Royce convertible. What a contrast. He was relaxed, as though buzzed on warm bitter. He was witty. His comic delivery was magnificent.

It made me realize there are two things wrong with Top Gear. First, they hired Matt LeBlanc. Second, the talent is the talent.

Hiring Matt LeBlanc was a bad idea, because he’s so good, he throws the badness of the rest of the crew into very sharp relief. They stink on ice. They are unredeemable. But for the presence of LeBlanc, their lack of ability might cause me less suffering.

The young guys are a big danger to the show, because neither one does a good job, yet they look better than Evans, so the suits are pretty likely to bump Evans off and promote one or both of them. It would be a classic tone-deaf corporate move.

Chris Harris, the angry-looking bald guy, has almost no personality. He hollers a fair amount, although less than Chris Evans, but he never says anything funny or interesting. Top Gear is a comedy show; an unfunny host can’t be made to function within that frame. He needs to go.

Rory Reid, the nonthreatening black guy, has the soft, reassuring presence of a chubby maiden aunt with whiskers. He is just as not funny as Harris, and his personality has no edges. Watching him is like being a girl in a movie theater sitting next to a guy who will always, always be in the friend zone. It’s like a sympathy date.

As for the show’s second problem, I guess I need to clarify. When I say, “The talent is the talent,” I mean all the talent that matters is on screen. The writers and producers didn’t make the show work. Clarkson, Hammond, and May did. That’s why they succeed on other shows, even when they’re apart.

Many shows are not like that. Take Breaking Bad, for example. When the show ended, people scrambled to hire Bryan Cranston, thinking he would pack theaters the same way he packed living rooms. It didn’t happen. Why? Because he wasn’t the engine pulling the train. Vince Gilligan (the creator) and the writers did that. Vince Gilligan could create a great show using crash test dummies. It really doesn’t matter who the actors are. They’re just sock puppets.

Joss Whedon is like Vince Gilligan. He created some shows that were very good, and when you watch them, you think the actors are fantastic. They’re not. Joss Whedon and his writers are fantastic. Usually (ahem Ultron). Firefly is my favorite show of all time, but I don’t flip channels looking for Jewel Staite and Nathan Fillion, because they didn’t create the magic.

The Beeb needs to fire everyone except LeBlanc and Eddie Jordan and start over. But they won’t. They’ll fire Evans eventually, probably after another awful year, and they’ll promote the boring kids, who will fail worse than he did. LeBlanc will disappear unless–maybe even if–they open the British treasury to him. Although with Britain’s welfare system, it’s probably full of old biscuit tins and IOU’s.

Like ours.

Except not biscuit tins. Maybe Cheetos bags and Air Jordan boxes.

Does this mean the Clarkson triumvirate won? I don’t think so. Not exactly.

The triplets moved on to Amazon Prime, which nobody watches. Okay, yes, they’ll get paid a lot, and they’ll have a huge budget, but what difference does it make if no one sees it?

Jeff Bezos thinks he can make people watch Amazon the way they watch cable. He’s probably right. In 2025. He’s like Elon Musk; he has a great idea that doesn’t work yet. I think Clarkson, Hammond and Mays will sacrifice two years out of the primes of their careers in the name of electronic progress.

Will Bezos syndicate the show so people can actually see it? I think so, although he’s nuts, so he might not. He may have the Apple psychosis. He may want to keep everything in the family, to the point where he makes his company a marginal player perpetually on life support. If he does syndicate, it will be at least spring of 2017 before we get our fix. By the time a sizeable demographic gets to see fresh shows with the troika again, the boys may be doing their mobility scooter episode all over, for totally different reasons.

The US version of the show has been canceled again (thank you, inept History Channel execs and Rutledge Wood), so at least we don’t have to worry about being plagued with that. I hope this time they pounded a stake into it and buried it under garlic. Last time, the execution didn’t take.

Fairly credible news stories now say LeBlanc (and everyone else in the organization) can’t bear Chris Evans, and that LeBlanc will leave if Evans stays. I guess there is hope, but there are a lot of ways for the Beeb to make things worse, and there aren’t many ways to make it right. When you rely on blind luck instead of competence, you are chance’s plaything, and the odds in this game are not good.

I still say they should hire Jason Statham and pay him anything he wants, plus all the rain and bad British food he can handle.

That’s today’s gripe. Now I must go and do something useful. Briefly.

Humans Bury Them; Satan Cremates Them

First, some housekeeping. Or at least some trivia to warm up.

Do you have a Windows 10 computer? Do you have an SSD (solid state hard drive)? Is your system still taking a long time to boot up? If so, kill Cortana. You may have killed this wretched, intrusive, domineering fishwife before, but she has a tendency to come back to life, like a tumor driven into remission.

You will want a program called Unlocker. Go get it. Install it. Then navigate to Cortana’s filthy hidden burrow, position her carefully, and give her a curb stomp. I’ll paste directions I found elsewhere:

Navigate to the following folder: “C:/Windows/SystemApps/Microsoft.Windows.Cortana_cw5n1h2txyewy”
Right click “SearchUI.exe” and select “Unlocker”
Under the action menu, select “Rename”
Give it a new name such as “Disabled.SearchUI.exe”
Click OK.

Recently, I’ve been tormenting myself with the Oresteia of Aeschylus. I recommend renaming Cortana “Clytaemnestra.exe.”

Cortana will come back one day, and when she does, just stomp her again.

I guess I’m out of touch, but I do not want a computerized nanny. I don’t want to be able to talk to my PC, because that means it listens to me. I don’t want to be able to communicate with hand signals, because that means it watches me. I don’t want it to hear my questions and give me totally inappropriate and useless answers. I have Google and ten fingers (the table saw has been treating me well).

I don’t want my computer to take forty minutes to boot so it can bring me the latest sports scores every time I turn it on. I hate professional sports. I don’t want to see headlines. I don’t want to see great new stuff that just popped up on Amazon or Ebay. LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE AND SERVE ME. That’s what I want.

I think the nerds who run the world are involved in a race nobody wanted them to run in the first place. They’re trying to recreate Tony Stark’s Jarvis on everyone’s desk or in the pocket of their fashionable but not stylish Banana Republic hipster shirts.

I guess if you were accepted by Cal Tech at the age of five and you’ve never had a date, you may think having a computer take care of you is cool. Just like having our wonderful government take care of you is cool, because hey, no government has ever gone overboard and done things like genocide or thought control.

The fact that you can do a thing doesn’t mean you should; just because you can write a presumptuous, paternalistic program doesn’t mean you should. I’m a big boy; I can pull up my own pants and wipe my own nose. I don’t need a computer to do absolutely everything for me.

I have a bloatware Siri copy on my Android phone. I never use it. I need to root the phone and get rid of it, along with Google- (did I mistype that?) and Google Hangouts.

I rejected Google+, so now I can’t get comment feedback on Youtube. Probably for the best, considering my tendency to get on people’s nerves.

Some of our modern electronic minder programs are useful, for certain people. I got my dad an Android phone because I needed to be able to find him at any time, using his GPS signal. That’s nice. The phone has a program that will help emergency responders if something happens to him. Wonderful. But as far as I know, I’m not suffering from dementia yet, so I would like to dodder along unassisted until the shapes on the wallpaper start talking to me.

Naturally, my dad’s phone only works with Android Device Manager about a third of the time, and every time he puts it in the holster, the flashlight comes on and kills the battery. But I give the nerds credit for trying. I’m sure it will be 100% successful at gathering information that could potentially be used against him.

I still can’t believe Google tracks our movements by default. If you haven’t checked out your giant Google GPS map yet, you really need to. I looked at mine. It showed trips I had made years before. I’m sure Obama would never use that to put me in prison or anything.

What else was I going to write about? Oh, yeah.

Yesterday I continued working my way through a book called Death Dealer. The author (or at least the person who wrote most of it) is Rudolf Hoess (not Rudolf Hess), a man who served as Kommandant of Auschwitz. He describes himself as the greatest mass murderer in history.

I find reading about the Holocaust instructive, because God uses it to show me Satan’s patterns of behavior. Hoess’s book has shown me a lot. For one thing, it has shown me the great similarities between Nazi genocide and the child-sacrifice (better known as “abortion”) movement.

I’ve always compared abortion to peeing in the pool. If you stand on the side of the pool and pee into it from above, people are outraged. If you jump in, you can pee all you want, and no one cares, even if they know it’s happening.

Everyone who uses a public pool knows it’s full of pee. People jump in at noon and get out at two, and they never go to the toilet. People don’t mind, because we are used to shutting down disturbing thoughts about things we can’t, or don’t want, to change.

Abortion works the same way. If unwanted babies had to be torn apart publicly, we would be lynching abortionists, the way we used to. No question about it. Satan got around this issue by arranging for executions inside the uterus, inside medical exam rooms, where the carnage goes unseen. We rip babies’ bellies open and twist their limbs off without even the courtesy of an anaesthetic, and we tell the mothers they’re losing “clumps of cells.” They decide to believe it, and instead of going home with immediate, crushing guilt, they go home with hidden guilt that grows inside them and reemerges later.

The Germans and Austrians (and many other anti-Semites around the world) treated genocide the way we treat abortion.

The Nazis committed a lot of murders publicly, but they eventually adopted a practice of hiding the killing. They started out with rifles, but they later opted for cyanide gas. Why?

In his book, Hoess reveals that violent, open killings were very hard on the SS!

Hoess says that when SS members were required to line people up and shoot them, they became depressed. They hated the Jews, but they were not completely blind. They had to get large groups of strangers to dig pits, strip naked, and stand beside the pits while they were shot and shoved inside. Among these groups, there were many children, women, and old people. For some reason, murdering the weak bothers people more than murdering the strong. Anyway, SS men became drunks, and a number committed suicide.

Zyklon B, a cyanide preparation originally created to kill bugs and rats, changed all that.

When the gas chambers were built, the whole process became relatively free of stress. The Jews were ushered into the stripping rooms and told they were going to be showered and then relocated. Other Jews, the Sonderkommandos, were forced to do most of the work of herding them, lying to them, carrying off their possessions, and burning the bodies.

It was very much like abortion.

Today, if you want to kill your unborn baby, you drive to the abattoir in the privacy of your own car. You go into a privately owned building (or a public hospital with security), where employees work to suppress your guilt and fear, just as the Sonderkommandos lied to the Jews. You and your family never see the baby you kill. Some of the employees see, because they have to count the parts and make sure every finger and toe has been removed from you, but you don’t have to deal with it.

You’re just like Adolf Eichmann, who issued extermination orders and then sat in his office and let people like Hoess carry the water.

Here’s a remarkable parallel: Hitler burned dead Jews, in a Satanic effort to violate Jewish law and remove not just the Jews, but all evidence of their existence, from the earth. We burn aborted babies.

After the war, we found out that almost no Germans or Austrians knew about the slaughter. Neither did the Poles who collaborated. Almost no one knew! But that’s not surprising, because there were no former Nazis. After the way\r, we learned that everyone who had been in Germany and Austria had hated Hitler and his ideas. I wonder where the Nazis went. Maybe they’re still there, hiding in basements.

Obviously, people knew, and most Germans and Austrians adored Hitler and supported him with all their hearts. They were thrilled to see the Jews go, and they helped Hitler get rid of them. They smelled the burning flesh and rotting meat. They saw the ashes. They saw the full train cars going one way and the empty cars coming back. They heard from witnesses who worked in the camps. But they didn’t have to see the killing, and they got all the stuff the dead Jews left behind, so they were okay with it.

Hoess’s book is remarkable. From the tone, you would think he was describing his stint as a Wal-Mart manager. Eichmann and his other superiors didn’t understand his problems. His underlings didn’t obey orders. Bad things happened, and he couldn’t stop them. He couldn’t get enough food or water. There weren’t enough guards. The pastries in the conference room were never fresh. It’s all very cold and matter-of-fact, and he’s talking about a place where babies were fried alive in the hot fat of burning Jews.

Kermit Gosnell could not be any less empathetic.

Hoess never repented of anti-Semitism. In his book, he complains about anti-Semitic propaganda that pandered to the lowest instincts of the Germans…because it undermined “scientific” anti-Semitism. He continued to call the Jews Germany’s greatest enemies. He firmly believed that if even a stump of the tree were left, it would grow back and annihilate the Germans and Austrians.

He remained faithful to National Socialism. He thought it was the answer to his people’s problems.

He sounded a lot like people who defend abortion. They talk about the unborn as though they were landmines that need to be dug up; as though they were plague-carrying lice. You don’t get emotional about landmines. You say, “There are lots of old landmines in this region of the map, and here is the most efficient way to get rid of them.”

Abortion-lovers say, “They will grow up to be unwanted (i.e. black). They will grow up to be criminals (i.e. black). They will grow up to be poor (i.e. black) and have to go on welfare. They will be unhappy. They will cost us a lot of money. The most efficient way to prevent them from causing problems is to ‘terminate’ them before they fully arrive.”

Abortion is all about getting rid of black people. Don’t fool yourself.

If you want to get people to participate in something horrible, first you hide the horror from them. You make it look clean and peaceful. Later, you convince them that it’s holy. You make them think anyone who opposes it is filthy and evil.

If the Nazis had won, we would now be arresting and killing anyone who tried to keep a Jew alive. Such people would be enemies of the state. They would be reviled. Similarly, we now treat abortion opponents, who are simply objecting to the murder of babies, the way baby-murderers used to be treated.

Evil is good, and good is evil. That’s how the depraved think; this kind of thinking defines depravity. It’s the reason God destroyed the world, and it’s the reason he’s going to destroy it again. Depravity is worse than mere sin, because it makes you incapable of being corrected. It’s the reason hell exists. Our loving God, who is always right, throws depraved people into it every day, because he can’t fix them, and they are a danger to the rest of us.

American Christians are strange. Many think abortion is wonderful. Many of those same people read about the ancient Jews sacrificing their children to Moloch, and they feel superior. We’ve murdered dozens of millions of babies in the name of convenience. The ancient Jews never began to approach that kind of body count. Who will be judged more harshly?

At least the Jews had the courage and honesty to deliver their babies and kill them openly.

The story of God versus Satan is the story of a race war. No one seems to understand it. Genocide is an integral part of it. God’s people are one race, and Satan’s people are the other.

Christians will be wiped out eventually, and very few Jews will be left on earth. The devil will win the earth, and then God will come and take it back. It’s like the Nazi notion of liebensraum (“room to live”), which was used to justify conquest and genocide. One big difference is that in the war between Christians and the lost, the victors will be the ones who die. Strange.

Christians who believe in organizing and taking over are crazy. It will never work. God’s kingdom is not of this world. He will not help you. Your enemies will have his permission to defeat you. If you want to own guns for self-defense, great, but you will never be able to conquer America for God with them. You will just give the lost ammunition for propaganda.

It’s good to know what you have permission to do and what is forbidden. It helps you avoid wasting time and working toward defeat.

Try to get in touch with the Holy Spirit and get his guidance. Without it, you will just have to learn from hard knocks, and some of those knocks are very, very hard.

Mars Attacks…my Last Nerve

Yesterday I decided to watch The Martian to kill time while the birds were out. Now I am annoyed.

Spoilers ahead. Duck and cover.

This movie is about an astronaut (Matt Damon) who gets left behind on Mars. The rest of the crew thinks he’s dead, so they go back to earth. Then they find out he’s alive, so NASA goes nuts trying to bring him back. Because life on earth without Matt Damon is unthinkable. Without him, his duty to preach sanctimoniously to the public would fall on Leo DiCaprio, making it necessary for him to charter twice as many carbon-belching jets.

The rescue job is not easy, because Mars is not very close to the earth. At best, in the story, it takes over a year just to get him new couture underpants from Dolce & Gabbana, let alone bring him back.

I don’t care about the nerd issues. Some people, I’m sure, are flipping out because of minor technical errors and deceptions. They’re probably upset because the sand storm that drives the crew off Mars couldn’t possibly be as damaging as it is in the movie. Stuff like that. Hey, this isn’t science class. News flash: there is no such thing as warp drive, either, and during your lifetime, there never will be. Get over it.

The plot issues are what bug me.

First, the deus ex machina problem. More accurately, let’s cut off two letters and call it what it is: deus ex China.

Ancient Greek dramatists often ran out of bad ideas, just as dramatists do today, and one of their fixes was the god machine. They would rig up a contraption that lowered a totally new character onto the stage. This was the machina, or machine. The character was the deus, or god. The god would wave his magic wand, click his heels together three times, and make the gorgon disappear or afflict the Spartans with the pox. Or whatever.

These days we don’t see Greeks being lowered with pulleys all that much, except in German nightclubs, but we do see similarly unsatisfying copouts in movies and shows. It’s a crappy trick to play on an audience. You spend an hour or more developing a terrible problem for your protagonist, and the audience tries to guess how he will fix it, and then you slap them in the face with Proteus or Poseidon or Steve Jobs, swinging in on a rope.

I mean, obviously, it wouldn’t be Proteus today. It would be Bruce Willis or maybe Sylvester Stallone, whose machina would probably be a walker or mobility scooter. “Stop, or my Certified Nursing Assistant Will Shoot!”

I love obscure references.

Screenwriters should take the time to come up with clever solutions, instead of sandbagging people with unsatisfying cavalry charges from left field.

I also love mixing metaphors. And to joyfully split infinitives.

In The Martian, NASA tries to send a supply ship to Mars, and it blows up. Matt Damon is a dead man, right? And he can forget about that crate of Clinique moisturizer. Or maybe they’ll come up with some clever plan! But no, nothing like that happens. Instead, they cut to a mysterious office in China, where two Chinese people start talking about giving their secret Chinese rocket to NASA for another shot.

Come on. Where was this rocket six months earlier, when the whole world was clamoring over the potential earth-shattering loss of Matt Damon? Nowhere. The writer hadn’t thought of it yet.

Cheap.

Maybe it was still on the truck to Harbor Freight.

By the way, the rocket doesn’t have a fuse or a colorful wrapper with something like “Dancing Fire Dragon Cluster” printed on it, and it’s not launched from a bottle. Chinese technology has improved a lot.

I think it’s safe to assume the owner’s manual is incomprehensible. “For make mission Mars, to apply pressure dial A in direction of Mongolia.”

Here’s another thing: one of Damon’s main torments is the presence of disco music. The mission’s commander is a woman, and woman have hellish taste in music, so she only brings disco, ignoring the desires of the rest of the crew. When the crew leaves the planet, the only music Damon can find in the Mars shelter’s computers is garbage like “Ring my Bell” and “Push Push in the Bush.”

The cruelty is appalling.

Here’s the question: how does anyone get to Mars in the smartphone/micro SD card age without a ton of MP3’s? It can’t happen. Totally impossible. I think my phone has 80 gigs of storage. Not sure; whatever it is, it’s full of demotivational posters and pictures of Grumpy Cat. Anyway, there is no way NASA would let a crazy woman strand people in outer space with Leo Sayer, in an age when you can store 400 albums in a card smaller than a Chiclet. And if she did, he would kill himself after a week. He would boogie-oogie-oogie out of the airlock and do the hustle with his helmet off until he died.

Pretty lame, right?

When Damon sets up a communications link to earth, he is able to send email. If he can send email, he can receive music files, right? Apparently not. We can put a man on Mars, but we can’t send him The White Album.

Here’s another problem. NASA decides to send the crew transport ship back to Mars with stuff for Matt. He has to launch a rocket NASA left on Mars and rendezvous with the crew ship to get food. Being Matt Damon, he’s probably hoping for Evian and organic free-trade seaweed paleo yogurt.

Okay…if he can rendezvous with the ship and pick up food…WHY CAN’T HE GET ON THE SHIP AND LEAVE?

Final problem: Apollo 13. Hello? We’ve been here before. Unforeseen technical problems on a space mission, followed by frantic cooperation between astronauts and brilliant people on the ground, garnished with numerous astonishing McGyverisms that keep people alive. And Apollo 13 was a real mission, and the movie was better. So what’s the point of The Martian? It’s not even the first survival movie sited on Mars. Does anyone remember Robinson Crusoe on Mars? Maybe not. But it happened.

I haven’t seen the end of the movie yet. I assume Matt will live, although the person who wrote this thing may have the unfortunate idea that it would be original to let him die. Unhappy endings are not new to cinema, so I feel like he might as well live. If the movie ends with him sitting on a rock, watching the sun set on Mars, feeling peaceful about becoming a piece of frozen jerky, I will probably have another rant to throw.

They say there are no original plots. Maybe that’s true, but we can do better than this. The movie is entertaining; it shows what NASA disasters would be like in the lolcats era. But it’s not The Third Man. More like The Thirdteenth Reheating of the Corpse of Apollo 13.

I guess I’ll fire up the DVR and see if Matt Damon dies. I’m not optimistic. I own a lot of Chinese tools.

More

Well, now I’m even more upset. It looks like the plan was to bring Will Hunting back, not to drop off Chinese food. I totally misunderstood. But I still feel vindicated, because I remembered another plot hole.

To take off to get to the mother ship, Damon has to get to another rocket. His crew left on one rocket, and NASA had another one miles away, waiting for a new crew.

So…he’s sitting around for months, starving, scrounging for tools and food…and he knows he can get in his rover and go to the other rocket, where he can find useful goodies.

Why doesn’t he go? Why? Why?

I much prefer space entertainment that doesn’t even try to involve reality. Give me Captain Kirk with a flip phone and a phaser, engaging openly in intergalactic racism and genocide without a care in the world. Hipsters in space? You can have them.

People Who Live in the Real World Wouldn’t Understand

I had to clean bird cages today, so now I’m in the mood for anything other than bird cage cleaning. I will write again.

Yesterday I was reminded of one of the big paradoxes of the Internet: being able to shop for things from the convenience of your home results in giant delays instead of time savings.

That’s kind of a distortion, but here’s what I mean: when you try to buy anything on the Internet–even paper clips–you will learn so much about the choices you have that you will spend more time studying and searching than buying.

Yesterday I had to solder something, and I saw that I was out of good solder. I still had bad solder; the kind that never seems to work right. I needed the good kind.

Two years ago, I would have driven to Radio Shack and bought whatever I saw. I would have been finished in 20 minutes. This time, it took me something like three hours. I learned things about solder while I was shopping, and I fell through the Internet-shopping looking glass, where you find out that the thousand things you believed before breakfast are, sadly, impossible.

There are lots of different kinds of solder. I did not know this. I knew about two types: lead-free, which sounded unwholesome, deluded, and leftist, and leaded, which, I figured, had to be the best, because, hey…lead. Anything that contains ingredients hippies hate will always turn out to be the best kind available.

I am not even a little scared of lead. I used to chew lead split shots because I liked the taste, and while I may be strange, I never got stupid or incontinent or whatever. Based on what I’ve read, I think the government keeps adjusting lead standards to silly levels in order to keep EPA bureaucrats employed. If lead was that big a deal, I’d be in an institution. I’m sure it’s toxic, but lots of stuff is toxic, and most of us manage to survive.

I started rooting around on the web, and I learned that there are lots of solder types. When it comes to electronics, the three main types are plain old rosin-cored, RMA (rosin mildly activated), and RA (rosin activated). Also, there are different leaded alloys. Two of the popular ones are 63% lead/37% tin and 60% lead/40% tin. I think. Maybe the tin goes first. On top of this, cored solder can contain 1.1%, 2.2%, or 3.3% flux. The word “flux” refers to the rosin, which is a substance that eats oxidation when it gets hot. Again: I think. Basically it cleans the joint.

Let’s see. There’s more. Solder comes in lots of diameters. You can get 0.015″, 0.020″, 0.025″, 0.031″, and up. If solder is too big, it tends to go all over the place when you solder little things. If it’s too small, it takes forever to fill a joint.

It gets worse. Chinese solder is not reliable. Big shock there. So you have to look for quality brands.

You have to wonder how bad Chinese solder is, since most of our electronic devices are full of it.

I also found out you’re supposed to clean solder joints. I had never heard of that. When you solder, you may unintentionally (or in my case, intentionally) leave melted flux on your joints. It’s ugly, and if I understand things correctly (doubtful), some types of flux can cause corrosion.

I went nuts researching this stuff. I looked at all sorts of nerd forums. I wanted to spend $20-$30 on a pound roll of solder, and I did not want to get the wrong thing.

By the time my eyes had gone buggy from scrolling, I had determined that what I wanted, probably, was 63/37 0.025″ 2.2% RMA solder, from Kester, AIM, Alpha Metals, or Multicore. And it’s impossible to find.

I’m sitting here thinking about the guitar amps I’ve built. Are they going to explode because I used the wrong solder?

I learned that it’s really hard to find the solder I specified above without paying a ton. I had to compromise and get 3.3% flux, which some people say is better anyway.

Now I have to wonder: was I better off when I simply drove to Radio Shack and bought the wrong thing?

The bad solder I already had came from Home Depot. I took a look at it and saw that it was Bernzomatic brand solder. It’s for electrical connections, but it’s not the right thing for electronics. I threw it out. Then I thought maybe I would need it for something, so I took it out of the trash. Then I thought about throwing it out again. Then I put it on the desk and stared at it.

I should also admit that I solder incorrectly a lot of all the time. When you solder, you are not supposed to heat the new solder directly and melt it onto the tip. You’re supposed to heat the wire and apply the solder to it, so the wire melts the solder.

Yeah, right. Try that some time. Your insulation will drip off or go up in smoke, unless it’s Teflon. In real life, you do whatever you have to. I plan to try to solder better, but I’m not going to melt components and insulation.

As for cleaning the joints, I don’t even know how. I think you use a Q-Tip with alcohol on it. I have never had a joint go bad, but maybe I need to try to do things right.

I read that rosin fumes cause asthma. Geez. What am I supposed to do? Solder in the front yard when the wind is blowing? Wear a sweaty respirator? But then I think about the hundreds of guys I know who’ve developed serious asthma from soldering. The ones who didn’t die first from lead poisoning.

I jest.

As I researched, I learned more stuff. You have to try to set your soldering iron so the heat is right. Different solders melt at different temperatures, and some electronic parts can be damaged by excess heat. I sort of knew that. My iron goes to 5, and I have been known to operate it at 4 because it seemed to be hard on PCB’s. But there are irons that actually display the temperature with digital meters. I’m not going that far. That’s just crazy.

Arrgh. I’ll probably go that far. Some day.

It’s frustrating when you splurge for what you think is the best tool available, and then you find out it’s second-rate. I feel like a guy who bought a Bose stereo and showed it off for his friends before learning the awful, humiliating truth.

I’m not sure what my advice is. I’m tempted to tell people to pretend they never read this.

The solder I finally ended up with is Kester 24-6337-9718. If it’s horrible, I’ll tell you. I fully expect to be unable to tell the difference between this stuff and Radio Shack Random Idiot Solder.

If you’re still going to real stores and buying wrong stuff, you should probably keep it up. You will never know the difference, and you will save lots of time. I love the Internet, but sometimes you just want toothpicks; you don’t need the best OSHA-approved, fair trade, organic, North American hardwood toothpicks.

If you use rosin-cored solder and you get asthma, leave me alone. If I told you to jump off the Empire State Building, would you do that, too?

This is Where Trees go When They Die

Life is changing rapidly.

My dad’s problems took another plunge a couple of weeks back, and now I have to handle his business. I have to get his tax stuff fixed up. I have to sort his monumental collection of papers. I have to set his home office up so it actually functions. I also have to apologize to a few people, because some things got screwed up before my dad threw me in the deep end of the pool.

I have realized I don’t know how to set up an office. That’s today’s main challenge.

How can a lawyer not know how to set up an office? Actually, it’s not as crazy as it sounds. Practicing law at home requires very little paperwork. You create paper files for your cases, but as a sole practitioner (I hate “solo practitioner,” and I’m convinced it’s a corruption perpetuated by lemmings), you aren’t going to get into cases that generate tons and tons of discovery, invoices, and checks.

When you start fooling with business, you have to deal with more stuff. You have invoices coming in all the time. You have a lot more bookkeeping.

There is a hoarding streak in my family, and it comes from my dad. We hold onto junk. Over the last year, I’ve been going into my dad’s home office and throwing out pounds and pounds of papers. Do you really need ten pounds (or even one ounce) of The Florida Bar Journal, dating back seven years? I think not. You also don’t need ancient legal files or emails you, for some odd reason, felt the need to print.

Old people (older than I am) seem to think they are legally obligated to print everything they see. I think one reason is that they are way too lazy to learn to use the built-in filing systems on their computers. This takes about three and a half minutes, so I’m not sure why it’s intimidating. They prefer to print everything so they know where it is, and then they put it in random piles which people like me throw out without telling them.

Never buy a printer from an old person. They wear them out.

A friend of mine told me her mother has ONE Word document. When she writes something, she opens the document, modifies it, prints it, and closes it without saving. When she dies, there will be no record that she ever wrote anything. Well…there WILL be the giant, unconstitutional backup the NSA keeps, but they won’t let us access it. That’s a real shame. It would be great to be able to call Obama for a download, every time something important gets deleted. Fortyish wives could send their husbands the naked pictures of themselves they took when they were in their twenties.

Okay, I’m not endorsing that.

Yo, Obama: we know you’re backing our stuff up, so why not let us retrieve it? We could save a lot of money on “cloud” services.

In the future, the government will be happy to produce everything bad we’ve ever said about homosexuality and socialism so they can persecute us. They will be happy to document our porn downloads and sexts in order to discredit us. Seems to me they should also be willing to provide copies when we accidentally delete term papers and family photos.

My dad had ONE folder for everything. Briefs, research, offensive chain emails sent by his incorrigible heathen friends…everything. It had thousands of items in it. Going through that was fun. I’m glad I got the opportunity, though, because it was like having a six-foot-tall pile of horse manure in the middle of the office floor.

As for objects that are physical, not virtual, I will guess that I have thrown out 350 pounds of useless items. As far as I know, he has never missed anything.

Here is a tip for anyone who has to clean up someone else’s business PC: get a solid state hard drive. If you have a separate drive for storage, replace the boot drive with solid state. This will speed the computer up like you would not believe. It makes a big difference when you have 12 years’ worth of files to go through, and you’re searching for every document that refers to “roof” or “plumbing.” You can get a very nice 240 GB solid state drive for sixty bucks, and they’re simple to install. I guess you will have problems if your computer doesn’t use SATA cables, but if it does, a solid state drive will pop right in.

I stuck such a drive in my dad’s office computer, and now Quickbooks opens in fifteen seconds instead of two years. The computer boots so fast you don’t even need to walk away and get coffee.

That boot thing is important, because it’s really hard to convince older people not to use “Shut Down.” They think “Sleep” wears out the computer and drives up their electric bills. Or maybe they think that if they click it, they’ll fall asleep. If you have to work on an old person’s PC, you will get really tired of doing a full three-minute boot every time you sit down.

Today I’m looking around for information on setting up offices; I do not want to reinvent the wheel, although I will probably have to. My dad has investments, so things come in, and things go out. I think I need to put an In/Out thing on his desk, but I’m not sure. I definitely need to cut a hole in his wall and install a new electric socket, and some of his cords and cables need to be made longer or shorter.

I learned something interesting while I was trying to use his PC. Windows 10 has a huge pile of spyware in it. I mean, more than I already suspected. It logs keystrokes. It tracks your location. It tries to send you ads it thinks you will like, so when you let your mom use your PC, it puts up banners advertising midget porn. It listens to you through your mike. It watches you through your webcam.

There is nothing we can do to bring privacy back; the inhuman sociopath nerds won that battle. But you can dig up your Windows 10 privacy settings and turn off a whole bunch of crap, making your PC run better. I had to do that today because I was getting keyboard hesitation. Seems like it’s all cleared up now.

Or not. I had a little issue there. Maybe the keyboard needs batteries. Maybe the computer hiccuped while the NSA installed new stuff to compensate for me turning their crap off.

You may be 95 years old and not too interested in Worlds of Warcraft, but if you have Windows 10, it is taking information from you and putting it in a database for gamers, and I think it’s safe to bet this slows down your PC. It’s hard to believe Microsoft/NSA/Hitler puts this worthless junk in computers by default, but there it is, so you need to root around and minimize the footprint.

I almost look forward to the day when Christians will be banned from the Internet. Think how relaxing it will be. Until they gas us, I mean. I suppose that will be relaxing, too, though.

I should put more thought into the things I write online. One day they may be downloaded and displayed at my homophobia/nondiversity/refusal-to-worship-Emperor-Warren trial, and I really want to make a good impression.

And now back to my search for office advice. I am not optimistic.

Here’s the Check

Once again, I am very glad God got me off of social media.

In case you don’t know, the social media tyrants are mounting a new initiative to censor “hate speech.” The obvious issue: who gets to define “hate speech,” and who holds them accountable? The answers: the social media tyrants, and no one.

The article I linked to says the point of the initiative is to “combat the use of social media by terrorists.” Comforting, right? Not really. This is the same excuse George Bush and Barack Obama used to erase the Fourth Amendment and destroy the privacy of every American citizen. It’s the reason your vehicle is tracked every time you drive in an American city or on a major highway.

Uncle Sam’s rationale seems to be this: you can’t limit government surveillance to terrorists unless you know who the terrorists are, and the only way to find out who the terrorists are is to direct government surveillance at everyone. Instead of netting the fish you want, you net everyone, scooping up their private information in wholesale fashion, and then you look at the information and other factors to decide who deserved the intrusion.

If you look at the article, you will see that the initiative was spurred partly by a lawsuit filed in France by a French group dedicated to protecting Jews from hate speech. They didn’t just complain about anti-Semitism, though. They complained about “homophobic” speech, as well as “racist” speech.

Who decides what “homophobic” means? Is it homophobic to say you believe what the Bible says about sodomy? Of course it is, as homophobia (a new word designed as a weapon) is now defined. Who decides what “racist” means? Is it racist to use the word “illegal” to describe aliens who are inside the US illegally?

The lawsuit was filed in France, but the social media tyrants operate all over the world. Are they going to have different standards in different countries? If I live in the US, will I be allowed to tweet, “Sodomy will ruin your relationship with God,” on a platform that will be seen in France?

It’s amazing how blind we are to Internet trends. We can’t see the obvious. We didn’t anticipate the corporate takeover of blogs. We didn’t see the liberal conquest of the Internet coming. Now we don’t see that social media sites are going to be used to destroy free speech.

Back when Myspace and Facebook were minor players, people blogged and used independent forums, or they avoided the web altogether. They advertised in the Yellow Pages and newspapers. They didn’t need social media.

Now, people who used to have their own independent Internet outlets are abandoning them for outlets that are controlled by small groups of godless leftist technocrats. And the worst thing about these outlets is that they have no accountability. They don’t charge, so they don’t owe us good service. They don’t work for the government, so they aren’t obligated to tolerate diverse opinions. They can throw you out or delete your writing whenever they feel like it, fairly or unfairly, and they wield their power very arbitrarily. Twitter seems to be the holdout, but they’re part of the new initiative.

It seemed like a great deal when we were given Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, and the other outlets, free of charge. They let us advertise for nothing. They let us air our views without the need for hosting. People became addicted. There are companies and individuals that have integrated all this free stuff into their operations, to the degree that they might fail if they were expelled.

Think about that. Imagine what it would be like to wake up one day and learn that your company’s Facebook site, Youtube ads, and promotional tweets were gone forever, because you expressed your Biblical opinion about gay marriage. What if you also lost your LinkedIn and Google contacts? What would you do?

It’s going to happen. Don’t fool yourself. People who are financially dependent on these services are going to be faced with abrupt, bitter choices. Want to make payroll? Disavow the things you said in good conscience. Retract the things the Holy Spirit told you to say.

Most Christians will cave in, just like the Jews who rejected circumcision in Greek-occupied Israel.

If you have your own blog, and you don’t use social media to make money, you have a little freedom. It won’t last, but for now you can say what you like. There is no safe haven, but when a ship sinks, it’s a good idea to run to the part that sinks last.

I wonder when the ghost of Nuremberg is going to make its formal debut. Right now, it’s hiding in the wings, waiting for its cue, teasing us by exposing a foot or a hand. The stage has to be set. Pretty soon it will leap out in all its glory, and we’ll see how leftists and God-haters really feel about mercy and tolerance.

The devil suffers from fear of the truth, also known by the recently coined term “alethophobia.” The truth is that his ideas destroy people. The more power he has over communication, the better he can hide the truth. He coats his poison with candy, and he doesn’t want anyone to pull back the curtain and show him at work. Always the angel of light, with God always the punisher and mad dictator. Control of the Internet will be a huge coup for the supernatural propaganda machine.

The people who run our world used to go after people who were building bombs and amassing weapons. Now they’re starting to go after people simply for disagreeing with them.

It’s a wonderful end-run around the First Amendment. Entities that aren’t part of the government aren’t barred from restricting speech, and the Internet oligarchs aren’t part of the government. Not officially, even though Mark Zuckerberg visits the White House so often he probably has his own dresser drawer in the Lincoln bedroom. Now that a large percentage of public speech goes through social media, powerful, legal restrictions are possible.

I’m not going to worry about it (or about anything else), but people should be made aware. You have to have your prayer life together. You have to pick a side, because to refuse to pick a side is to pick the devil’s side. The one that loses.

It’s sad to see the great wealth and technological advances of the current age come with such a cost. Human beings find ways to ruin everything.

We Live in Beeblebroxian Denial

Herodotus’ Histories is not a book. It’s a maze. You enter through the front page, and you never get out.

The Columbia University Lit. Hum. syllabus says to start with pages 1-140. I believe I’m on about 120, and I have really been trying. It is slow work, unless you skim it and let the confusing things lie.

The print is tiny, the margins are small, and I keep running into things I have to look up. For instance, there was an ancient nation that used swipes for irrigation. That’s not even in the dictionary. It’s a counterweighted crane operated by a miserable, but very buff, peasant.

One interesting thing about Herodotus is that he draws connections between Egypt and Greece. I suppose every educated person has heard that the Greeks stole their culture and technology from the Egyptians, but most of us haven’t troubled ourselves to dig into the matter. Apparently, the Greek “gods” were worshiped in Egypt at the time of Herodotus (fifth century B.C.), and if Herodotus is to be believed, many of them were old Egyptian “gods” with new names.

Isis, for example is sort of like Hera, the wife of Zeus. She is also conflated with Aphrodite to some extent. This is the same failed angel or whatever that was worshiped alongside of Yahweh by the ancient Jews. They called her “the queen of heaven,” and they put little Isis/Ashtoreth/Hera/whatever altars in their places of worship.

Zeus is apparently our old acquaintance Baal (or Bel), which means he’s really the devil. The Egyptians called him Amun and Amun-Ra. There was an Egyptian city called Ammon, and Zeus had himself an oracle there. People went to give him offerings and have their fortunes told.

Zeus is an interesting character, because he is the supreme god (I will give up the annoying quotation marks) of the Greeks, and he is strong enough to fight all the others at once, but he is the grandson of the first supreme male god. He had a beginning. His grandfather was Ouranos (Uranus to you and me; Greek for “sky”), and his son was Kronos (Greek for “time”). Gaia, the earth, was the wife of Ouranos and the father of Zeus. She got angry at Ouranos for some reason I forget, and Kronos sided with her and castrated Ouranos. The organs and drops of his blood landed in the sea and became various peoples, Aphrodite, and/or assorted giants, depending on whom you ask.

Kronos fell out with Gaia, and Zeus overcame him and replaced him.

It’s all very interesting, because in reality, the battle between Satan and God is about reproduction. It’s genocidal. Each one is working to exterminate the seed of the other. Satan’s greatest desire is to emasculate God and replace him, and to replace God’s children with his own.

Herodotus is full of accurate pagan prophecies. Modern scholars discount these, saying the prophecies were made up after the events they addressed. Who is to say, though? False religions have real power; talk to a Haitian some day if you don’t believe it.

Herodotus writes a lot about Croesus, the ancient king who is known for his wealth. Supposedly Croesus sent messengers to a bunch of oracles, and he told the messengers to go to the oracles on a certain day and ask what he was doing. On that day, says Herodotus, Croesus put turtle meat and lamb together and cooked them in a bronze pot. The oracle of Delphi spoke of turtle meat and lamb cooking in a bronze pot. After that, Croesus was a major fan of the Oracle of Delphi, and he donated all sorts of treasure.

Are any of the stories true? I don’t know, but I suppose some of them are. The fact that a religious person serves a false deity doesn’t mean his practices don’t work.

Back when I was an armorbearer at Trinity Church, I worked alongside a very reserved, serious Haitian man. He told me about an event he had been to in Haiti. A woman who was a servant in a house presided over it. She was a priestess.

They built a bonfire, and the woman started dancing around it. As things progressed, people became more and more emotional, and she got more excited. She danced closer and closer to the flames. At the end, according to my friend, she was dancing in the fire, unharmed.

This was a guy who talked very little, never gossiped, and never tried to impress anyone. I have no reason to doubt what he said, and I can’t pass judgment on the tales Herodotus passed on. Herodotus made lots of mistakes, and he handed down a lot of gossip. That is true. On the other hand, he went out of his way to distinguish rumors from facts.

My guess is that many of the prophecy stories are true; particularly the ones about Cyrus. His rise was predicted by Jeremiah. He truly did depose his grandfather, as predicted by a heathen. He truly did defeat Croesus and become emperor.

One of the unfortunate things about technology is that we use it to convince ourselves the supernatural doesn’t exist, and that we don’t need God. We can’t seem to measure the supernatural with instruments. When we try to document it, it slips out of our hands. Our earthly power keeps increasing. We cure more and more diseases. We find better ways to protect ourselves from nature. We have decided that we are gods, or if not gods, close enough to gods to justify reliance on ourselves.

We think we’re stronger than we are, so we have stopped looking for help. That’s sad, because the supernatural realm is where all the power and answers are. And our beliefs don’t change God’s order. When you die and find yourself dealing with supernatural beings, you won’t be able to escape judgment by saying you’re an atheist.

I’m glad I’m reading these crusty old books. As I’ve said, I have a couple of huge books about the early church, and knowing a little bit about the world from which the church emerged will surely help me understand them.

I’m also glad I’m not reading on the Columbia University schedule. They give people seven days to cover all the readings in Herodotus. There is no way to do it justice in that time while keeping up with other courses. But that’s how college is. It’s like a bus full of Japanese tourists at the Eiffel Tower. Have you seen what they do? Everyone assembles outside the bus. One person runs forward and takes a picture of the group. He rejoins the group. Then another person does the same thing. When everyone has taken a picture, they get back in the bus and leave.

I always feel lucky to live in a time when we have things like air conditioning, fairly good medical knowledge, and power tools. But when I look at Herodotus, I see him referring to “ancient” people, and he lived 2400 years ago. His “modern” is our “primitive.” That means we are primitive, too. We just can’t see it. I always think it would kill me to go back and live in an age of lesser technology, but I suppose the age I live in is also pretty bad. We can cure a toothache or burn off a wart, but the world is still full of hardship and agony.

I feel like Arthur Dent, who lived in a world surrounded by astounding space ships he couldn’t see, yet thought his own crappy digital watch was pretty cool.

Now I’m bummed. I think I’ll fix a steak.

We’re All Exhibitionists Now

I did my time today working on Quickbooks, and then I relaxed with Herodotus, after which I flew the drone. People probably don’t believe me when I write about my thrilling life.

Accounting is still a horror. I’ve gotten to the point where I understand it well enough to enter things in Quickbooks, and I will be glad to have the skill and knowledge, but once again, I am reminded of one of my dad’s courtroom stories. His client passed out in the street drunk, and a man backed over him and broke his leg. The defendant’s lawyer testified that the man had no damages because a broken bone that has healed is stronger than a bone that has never been broken at all. My dad asked him how much he would charge to break the other leg.

That which has not killed me has made me stronger, but it definitely has not put a smile on my face.

Herodotus is surprisingly entertaining, but after Homer and Sappho, the phone book would be entertaining, so my perceptions may be distorted. I have the Robin Waterfield translation, and I would describe the tone as “folksy.” When you read it, the voice you hear in your head is like an American talk radio host. Somewhat irreverent, not altogether serious, and very informal.

I have been reading about the rise of Cyrus, the Persian emperor who helped the Jews. In case you don’t know, a prophet mentioned Cyrus by name in the Old Testament. I am too lazy to look it up, but the prophet spoke long before Cyrus was born.

I don’t know if Herodotus ever mentions the Jews, but he mentions lots of figures who are either in the Bible or separated from it by only one or two degrees. Sennacherib, Ashurbanipal, Darius, and a bunch of others.

Herodotus wrote about Cyaxares, a Median emperor who married a daughter off to Nebuchadnezzar II, who happens to be the guy who sacked the temple in 586 B.C. Cyaxares was the grandfather of Astyages, and Astyages was the grandfather of Cyrus. Herodotus says Astyages had two dreams that indicated that Cyrus, whose father was a Persian, not a Mede, would depose him and take his empire. Astyages told his consigliere Harpagus to kill the child, and Harpagus delegated the job to a herdsman. You can guess the rest. It’s a lot like the stories of Jesus and Moses. A deliverer is promised, so a heathen ruler tries to kill children.

Cyrus reminds me of Donald Trump. He was extremely bold and decisive, and things went well for him, as though a higher power had given him extraordinary favor. Of course, that’s the correct explanation.

I cant’ say I approve of Cyrus, any more than I completely approve of Trump. Cyrus was not a good person, but he served a purpose, and he did a job.

Herodotus is incomprehensible if you just read what he wrote; you have to look at external sources. I use the Internet to explain things and fill gaps. I use it to put dates beside things. For example, the Scythians ruled the area the Medes later ruled from around 553 B.C. to about 525 B.C., until Cyaxares got them. If you put dates next to things, you get a picture of what was happening outside of Israel when various things happened in the Bible. The dates are highly dubious, but they’re better than nothing.

I don’t know if I would call Herodotus a historian. To me, he’s more of a gossip. He can’t verify what he says, and he admits it, but he passes it along all the same.

It’s a funny coincidence (if that’s what it is), but a good friend of mine generously sent me two huge books about the Revelation, at about the time I started going back over the books from Columbia University’s Lit. Hum. course. I’ve written about this. Evangelist Rick Renner wrote the books, and they’re stuffed with information about the ancient world.

The neat thing about going back over the torment of Lit. Hum. is that it will help me understand Renner’s books. Herodotus will not cover the time period of the early church, which appears to be Renner’s focus; Herodotus died in the fifth century B.C. But he provides a lot of groundwork on the ancient world that provided the foundation of the world that existed in the time of Jesus and the disciples.

After the Greeks and Virgil, Lit. Hum. shoots directly to Augustine, who lived in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D.

I don’t know how anyone learned anything before the Internet. It makes this stuff so much easier.

Abusing my brain with accounting and ancient literature has to be countered with pleasure, so I keep working on my drone skills. Sometimes I’m able to stay aloft for maybe 20 seconds now. The drone doesn’t drop out of the air as often as it used to. Maybe something in the power trains has loosened up.

I made a fourth drone purchase. Revell, a company that makes the kind of plastic airplane models we all used to set on fire when we were 12, makes drones now, and they have a neat one with six props. It has lots of lights on it. Clearly I needed it.

Once my second drone arrives, I’ll have the ability to fly more or less continuously for maybe 15 minutes (my flights are lengthened by frequent pauses to retrieve the drone from behind furniture). That will help me practice efficiently. When I have four drones, I’ll be able to practice considerably more than I want to.

Some day I’ll get a drone with a camera. Sounds extravagant, but you can get all sorts of cool ones for under a hundred bucks. I don’t have any neighbors who sunbathe naked (as far as I know), so I don’t think I can be condemned for operating a camera drone.

Of course, I may get a surprise when I fly it. Hmm.

I think the most annoying thing about camera drones is that the punks who use them to torment us have put us on the defensive. When people complain about drones in their yards, the punks will actually say things like, “You can always stay inside and draw your blinds.”

Technology is going to get incredibly cool, and we will lose all semblance of privacy and liberty. Then Jesus will return. That’s my guess. So I feel like I need to get my droning in while I can.

As I have said before, I don’t think God will tolerate the destruction of privacy and free will. Without them, you can’t have judgment or reward. A world like that serves no purpose.

I’ll put up a Youtube of the hexacopter. I hope you like it. After all, we bought these toys with the rights we held precious.

My Trove of Useless Knowledge Increases

I feel like regaling you with more tales of my drone adventures.

Yesterday I spent quite a long time trying to fly my new Sky Viper M200 Nano drone. I learned a whole lot, but I did not fly all that well.

The most obvious reason is that I have no skill, but there is another reason. This drone doesn’t work.

The drone kept quitting and falling, usually when I tried to reduce altitude. Sometimes it quit when I was doing other things. I could not figure it out. I saw various “solutions” posted on the web.

One guy said the controller was weak, and that it was overwhelmed by nearby 2.4 GHz signals. That apparently includes things like cell phones, routers, and your neighbors’ routers. I put neighbors’ routers in a special category, because you can’t turn those off. You can turn off your phone and router, but there is nothing you can do about the fat guy next door who spends 19 hours per day beating nine-year-olds at Worlds of Warcraft or whatever it is they play now.

Doesn’t matter; it looks like that explanation was wrong.

Another guy claimed the batteries weren’t soldered correctly. I reject that explanation, because the dropping problem is pretty much universal. They can’t be doing all the batteries wrong.

The third theory is that the props are no good.

I don’t know a whole lot about drones, but I know that even the little ones are highly sophisticated. Think about it. How would you like to balance something in the air using four fans? That takes some electronics. Drones sense various things, including increased current draw due to prop obstruction. The drone I have shuts down when it thinks the props are stuck.

My guess is that under certain conditions, bad props will behave in a way that makes the motors quit.

Anyway, a Youtube guy who calls himself Frequent Flyer RC had trouble with the Sky Viper M200, and the problems stopped when he put different props on it. He uses props from a drone called the Hoverdrone Nano, and he says you can also use certain other props. He has a video where he flies an M200 all over the neighborhood.

I’ll put the video up. Look at the tiny space where he flies that thing…without losing it!

The M200 I bought dropped and dropped, and finally one engine quit.

I took the drone back to Toys R Us and got a new one. I am being careful with it. It drops like the other one, but I ordered new props from China, so I expect it to work eventually. If not, Toys R Us will eat it.

In the meantime, I found a better drone: the Cheerson CX-10.

The Cheerson is even smaller than the M200, and it flies like crazy. It comes in colors other than lost-in-tree-camouflage green and black. Best of all, you can get it for twelve bucks, delivered, on Amazon. There is a newer version which has something called “headless mode” (?), and it’s more expensive. The original is supposedly better.

The CX-10 is supposed to be very good for indoor flight, due to its yaw rate, whatever that is.

I ordered TWO Cheersons. I mean, come on. Twelve bucks. That’s lunch money. And I got orange ones because they show up well when you drop them in foliage.

The CX-10’s colors are pretty bad, but you can’t have everything. Not for twelve bucks.

I ordered one from China for twelve dollars, and I ordered one from the US for a few dollars more. The Chinese one will take forever to get here. I figured I would get one fast so I could use it and then have the other as a backup/relief drone when it arrives.

Too cool.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get a full-size drone. They cost hundreds, and I have nowhere to fly it.

While I wait for the Cheerson, I am practicing with the M200 at very low altitude, like under three feet. I don’t want it to bang itself to death.

I can’t believe I got here starting from an argument about cordless tools. What’s next? My own nuclear sub?

I will now post a couple of videos, and I’m sure someone who sees them will be just as immature as I am. Someone will buy a Cheerson.

Keep it away from your pets. They do not like drones, and the props can injure their eyeballs.

For the Next Five Minutes, I Own the Skies

Everyone knows I’m nuts, so I suppose it will do no harm to provide further evidence. I bought a drone.

I hate drones. The whole point of drones, for most people, is to take naked pictures of women through their bathroom windows, and they are also useful for violating the sanctity of your neighbors’ yards and generally making an intolerable ass of yourself. But I don’t plan to involve myself in the primary uses of drones, so I felt like it was okay to get one. I wanted to see what the fuss was about.

I got myself a Sky Viper Nano, which is about the smallest drone you can buy unless you’re the CIA. It’s literally the size of two Hot Wheels cars side-by-side. I knew it was small when I saw it online, but when I bought it and opened the box, it still gave me a jolt. In my yard there are grasshoppers bigger than this thing. No exaggeration. Look up “lubber.”

It was nearly charged when I bought it, so I barely had time to read the totally patronizing and unneeded instructions.

Okay, I did read them. I just hate instructions, on general principles.

When you buy this drone, you get the drone itself, a video-game-style controller, and a USB charging cord. That’s about it. You charge it until the LED on the cord turns green, and off you go.

The controller is pretty cool. It takes AAA batteries. It has two joysticks, four trim buttons, and a “stunt” button. One joystick controls the direction in which the drone is turned; it can spin it while the drone hovers in place. It also controls the speed of the props, making the drone go up and down. The other joystick tells the drone to move in whatever compass direction you choose, at whatever speed you choose. The trim buttons adjust it so doesn’t run off or spin when the joysticks are in their home positions. For example, if you lift off and the drone spins, you push a trim button until it stops.

The stunt button makes the drone turn over once. If you’re going forward, it does a barrel roll.

I figured I would destroy it if I took it outside, so I tried it indoors. It was impossible. I could get it off the floor, but then it really liked to scuttle sideways or backward. Then it would go under furniture and sulk, or it would simply bang into things and stop.

With effort, I got it to where I could make three-foot trips that were not very uneventful. At that point I got brave and took it outside. About ten minutes later, it went straight up about sixty feet and disappeared behind me, over the roof.

I probably had something to do with that.

I looked all over the neighborhood. This drone is tiny, but it will fly 200 feet before losing the signal and stopping. I no way of locating it. They don’t beep when they’re lost.

If you’re shy and you want to meet your neighbors, buy a drone. Sooner or later, you will have to knock on their doors and ask if they’ve seen it.

I finally got a ladder and got on the roof, where I saw that a new herd of bees had moved into my soffit. Great. Time to call the bee people again. Oh well. Free honey.

I found the drone and took it back indoors. I had to go somewhere earlier, so I stopped playing with it, but now I’m back, and I’m determined to get it under control.

A few things surprised me.

1. It goes a very long way. Theoretically, you can fly this thing throughout an imaginary 400-foot hemisphere, with you at the center. That’s bigger than a football field, with a ceiling that reaches 200 feet when you go straight up.

2. It really moves. It seems like it goes about 30 miles per hour horizontally. That’s probably an illusion related to its small size. But there is no way a human being could run and keep up with it. And it flies straight up in a big hurry. When it went over the house, I had about a second to react, and clearly, that was not enough.

One reason I picked this drone is that I saw people talking about 7-minute and 10-minute flights. That may not seem like a lot, but its competitors are said to check in at 3-4 minutes, and I knew that would drive me nuts. Every time it stops, you have to charge it for maybe 20 minutes. How much can you learn in 4 minutes? Not a whole lot.

I had some problems with the drone quitting suddenly. I think that was because the props were pushed on too far. They’re held on by friction, so it’s up to you how far onto the shafts they go. I think they were rubbing. It stops automatically when it thinks it’s obstructed.

I wanted to give this thing a try so I would have some tiny acquaintance with the technology. I’m not a fan of drone users; they’re like the creepy people who get thrown out of restaurants for filming people with Google glass. But drones are not going away, so I might as well learn a little bit about them. It’s even conceivable (barely) that I might one day have a use for one.

Also, I wanted one because it was cool, and hey…30 bucks.

If I get comfortable with it, I may blow $80 on a bigger drone with a built-in camera. I found a model with a phone mount on the controller. You put the phone on the mount, and you watch the camera video while the drone flies. Hilarious. I’ll bet all sorts of punks have used that rig to watch startled women reaching for their tops beside their swimming pools.

It looks like you need a big field and a calm day to really enjoy a drone, and you definitely don’t want to be near a swimming pool. One more reason to find a piece of land far from other human beings.

Under current law, you can fly your drone all around your neighbor’s house and look in the windows, and there is nothing she (it’s always a she) can do about it. That’s unfortunate. I think you should be allowed to shoot down anything below, say, 300 feet. Anything a shotgun can reach. Maybe the law will change. On the other hand, you don’t want to be the drone equivalent of the grumpy old man who won’t give the basketball back because it rolled onto his grass.

Technology is fun and dreadful, all at the same time. It has stolen our privacy and our power, but it has given us all sorts of crazy abilities we enjoy but don’t need.

It may be a long time before I get a new toy this interesting. If you have nothing better to do, run down to Toys R Us and get one for yourself. If you can’t shoot your neighbor’s drones down, at least you can go on the offensive. Maybe he’ll back down after you Youtube a few videos of him sitting on the toilet.

Soap Scum and Ancient History

I have all sorts of fascinating wisdom and knowledge to impart, so gather around.

I know all five of my readers are wondering how things went with my homemade daily shower spray. I am finally ready to pronounce it a success.

I probably should have told you to sit down before reading that.

The recipe is dishwasher rinse agent, dishwashing liquid, scrub-free bath and shower cleaner, and water. I already posted it, but anyway:

INGREDIENTS

6 ounces no-scrub shower and tub cleaner
1 tbsp. dishwashing liquid
1 tbsp. dishwasher rinse agent, like Jet-Dry (exactly like Jet-Dry, since that’s what I use)

Put it in a 1-quart spray bottle, fill with water, and use. If you start with a Tilex Daily Shower spray bottle, you will be glad you did, because they suck from the bottom of the bottle, so you won’t have a spray that quits when you still have a pint of stuff left. Tilex molds a suction tube into the bottle itself, and it goes all the way down.

The shower is magnificent. Even the Florida-limestone scale is coming off of things over time. I use the spray on even-numbered days, and it lasts maybe ten days. Cheap and effective.

The bathroom is now a cinch to maintain. I never, ever scrub the shower now, so three-fourths of the work of cleaning the bathroom is gone. A couple of times a week I mop the floor and toilet with water, bleach, and dishwashing liquid, I use toilet cleaner inside the toilet, and I clean the counter with various things. I wipe everything down so I don’t get water spots and so on, and I’m done.

Except for the hairs. I seem to shed about a pound a day. I got a stick vacuum. It helps, but I never get ahead of the game.

Note to self: in future, buy flooring materials the same color as my hair.

Another major improvement: I finally got decent bathroom rugs.

I guess that will not impress female readers, but I am a man, so I don’t think in terms of luxury all that much. To me, it’s a big change. If the bathroom floor is clean, I’m happy. I had a crummy old cotton rug, and I thought it was swell, but it started to give out, so I went to Bed, Bath & Beyond and got some fluffy synthetic rugs that look and feel like sheepskins. You can bleach them, because the fuzz is basically plastic.

Now whenever I go in the bathroom with bare feet, the pleasure of the sensation of the rug against my soles reminds me how stupid I was all my life. I should have gotten these rugs sooner.

Thank God for blogs. Without them, the world would be deprived of paradigm-changing posts like this one.

I finished The Odyssey. I’m very happy about that. It was a lot shorter than The Iliad, but it still took a long time. I read much faster than most people, and I still took days to get it done. It makes me wonder how college students survive, with their relatively tight deadlines.

More than ever, I feel certain I didn’t read it in college. Mr. Cliff, you are a foul temptress. You stole my education. Like glancing-eyed Circe, you drugged me and robbed me of my ambition, and I found myself dwelling among the lotus-eaters.

My verdict: The Odyssey is much, much better than The Iliad, and not just because it’s shorter, although that would suffice. The Odyssey has a plot. It has a limited number of characters. It has structure. It’s like a real book, whereas The Iliad is like a dull blogger live-blogging a dull war.

I still say every character in both books is a jerk. Odysseus is a murderer, pirate, thief, human trafficker, and Zeus knows what else. He deserves to suffer and die, and he deserves to lose his wife and his kingdom. But Homer is so full of utterly vile characters, you find yourself rooting for the merely despicable, so it works.

I don’t have a lot of boring deep insights about the book. Odysseus takes twenty years to come home from Troy, and on the way he kills all sorts of people, and then he gets home and kills even more people. That about sums it up.

It’s a lot like a Steven Seagal movie, now that I think about it. Steven Seagal is an enlightened semi-Buddhist pacifist cop who has also dedicated his life to learning how to murder and maim people. He has a partner/wife/dad/war buddy who gets killed, or someone puts him in a coma, or someone kidnaps his family or something. He spends roughly 80 minutes plotting against the people who wronged him, and then he exacts his unbelievably vicious, sadistic, gory Buddhist pacifist revenge.

I can see the trailer now. “Odysseus IS…MARKED for DEATH.”

I guess scholars will fume and fuss if they read this. Yes, okay, Homer is important. I read it, so leave me alone.

Today I started the next reading, which is the first 140 pages of Herodotus.

The book started out with a surprise. I probably knew this already, but I tend to forget boring things: Paris and Helen were real people, and so was Priam. The sacking of Troy actually happened. If Herodotus and his sources are right.

Reading Homer sets you up to read about the Persian Wars by telling the story of the woman-stealing that started them. Paris (AKA Alexander) was part of it. A bunch of Arabs stole a Greek princess, and the Greeks reciprocated, and eventually things got so bad, Alexander figured wife-stealing was acceptable behavior, so he stole Helen.

There is a certain amount of dispute as to whether “stealing” is the right term, since it is not unheard of for women to be sluts. It may be that some of the women actually ran off (one may have done so in order to cover her pregnancy) and then blamed their “abductors.”

No, that could never happen. A woman would never sleaze around and then claim she was forced. Women never blame men for their sexual indiscretions. Oh, no. Impossible!

Maybe Tawana Brawley or a Duke Lacrosse player will leave a comment here.

The funny thing about Herodotus is that he says the Persians, who were caught up in this mess, would not have started the wars themselves. It had to be the Greeks. The reason? The Persians didn’t think it was a big deal if a woman was stolen. Apparently they felt it was like having your dog kidnapped. Annoying, but you don’t go to war over it. You buy a new dog.

Don’t get mad at me. This is the Persians talking.

I guess the profs at Columbia University thought about all this when they put the Lit. Hum. syllabus together. They thought about the way Homer connected with Herodotus. In their off time from burning American flags, blaming Islamic aggression on Israel, and vilifying capitalism while occupying chairs endowed by capitalists.

For a few brief moments I thought about this stuff today, and I thought about the Hellenizing influence of reading all this Greek nonsense. I thought about the tension between Hellenism and the followers of Yahweh. It seemed to me that even today, the Western world is fundamentally Greek and Jewish.

If you walk down any street in any American city, what do you see? Roman architecture and Roman letters. Modern people use eagles as the symbols of their nation, just as the Romans did. Roman culture is all around us.

If we’re surrounded by Roman culture, why mention the Greeks? Because Roman culture is Greek culture (which may be Egyptian culture). The Romans stole Greek ideas. Roman temples look like Greek temples, and all over the US, we have buildings with ridiculous bits of Roman temple architecture tacked onto them. Ayn Rand made fun of it in The Fountainhead.

We have republics, just like the Romans. We have civil rights codified in law, just like the Romans. We have a moronic, idolatrous obsession with sports, just like the Romans. We even have their dangerous welfare system!

Opposing all this, we have Jewish religion. Jews don’t like to hear it, but Christianity is fundamentally Jewish. It’s not the same, and we have filled it with pagan ideas, but the God of our religion is Jewish. Our Messiah is Jewish. The underlying concepts are Jewish. We believe the Jewish Bible is true. Jews don’t like Christianity, but let’s face it. It entered the world as an entirely Jewish sect, founded by a Jew and spread by Jews, and centuries later, the connection can’t be erased.

Christianity is more Jewish than Islam. Jews think otherwise, but it’s true. Islam is cruel and silly. It’s carnal and juvenile. It denies the truth of the Jewish Tanakh. The Jewish and Christian notions of the afterlife are much more alike than the Jewish and Islamic notions.

So many centuries after the deaths of Jesus and Homer, westerners still have tension between Jewish thought and Greek thought. We are like the Jews of Greek-occupied Israel, who renounced the dietary laws and tried to undo their circumcisions. The Greek-influenced world pulls at us all the time, and we give in. Every day we cede more territory. This is why America is lost. We ceded too much.

Interesting stuff. But Homer is still boring.

I feel another Steven Seagal trailer coming on. “Paul IS…ABOVE the LAW.”

That’s all I have time for today. I have to go to Toys R Us and buy a drone. I’m going to my godson’s birthday party later.

Okay, I am trying to con you. My godson is two, so he can’t use a drone. I want one for myself.

As part of my online scuffling about the worthlessness of cordless tools, I Googled around and learned about drone batteries, and somehow I found out that you can get drones for thirty bucks. I didn’t know they were that cheap. I would like to get one and see what all the fuss is about.

I don’t plan to use it to film my neighbors naked, however. This is where I part company with most drone users. I just want to fiddle around with it and learn a bit about RC technology. “RC” means “radio-controlled,” although it also means a fine brand of cola which Pepsi and Coke have destroyed through predatory marketing practices.

Here’s how I see it. I know I’m going to spend the rest of my life shaking my cane at young punks and criticizing them and their technology. That’s a given. So I might as well learn a little bit about their technology, if only to insult them in a more insightful and scathing way.

Enjoy your Saturday. Even if it is named after Saturn.

Tools Renewed

A few days back, on a hobby machining forum, I made an offhand remark about cordless tools. I said the more I used them, the less I liked them.

People adore their cordless tools, so my statement provoked a torrent of emotional argument, as though I had said people’s kids were ugly. I didn’t say cordless tools were bad, or that no one should use them. I just said my own infatuation with them was wearing thin, and I can back that up.

I believe the first two cordless tools I had experience with were screwdrivers. One, which was really primitive, was from Brookstone. The other, which came later, was a Black & Decker. They were nice to have, but the batteries didn’t last long, either short-term or long-term. They didn’t run very long on one charge, and they gave up the ghost completely after relatively short lives.

After that, I believe my next tool was a Panasonic impact driver. It came with a drill, which was silly, because once you have an impact driver, you don’t need a drill. You need a HAMMER drill, sure, but not a DRILL drill. The impact driver does everything the drill can do, better, while using less energy. Impact drivers run longer on a single charge, because of the way they generate torque.

I think I used the drill one time. I only bought it because the combination of the drill and impact driver was cheaper than the impact driver by itself.

The impact driver used NiMH batteries, which stands for, “Lame and Destined to Die Real Soon.” Okay, it doesn’t. Clearly. But it should. NiMH batteries don’t last long, and they have a memory effect, which means that if you top them off, you can end up with a situation in which the batteries will only hold a partial charge. Something like that. Look it up, because I’m on a roll right now.

I thought the impact driver was the greatest tool in existence. It magically turned fasteners without imparting the torque back to my wrist (drills can’t do that). It applied more torque than a drill. It gave much better control, so I didn’t have problems driving screws too far into things. It was much harder to strip screw heads with the impact driver. It ran longer than a drill. It had pretty LED’s.

I would have felt differently had I known the batteries were going to conk out while I was still getting to know the tool.

Before too long, the tool would only run a short time after a charge. I looked up the price of new batteries. I believe they are still sold, and they run about $85.

I also got a hammer drill. It was an 18-volt Bosch. I loved it. I used it to drive a 5/8″ bit through 12″ of aged concrete (concrete gets harder with time) without stopping. It was wonderful.

The drill had Nicad batteries. Like NiMH batteries, Nicads have serious issues. They die young, and they also discharge quickly when you’re not using them.

My love affair with the drill ended when the batteries stopped holding a useful charge. I can still use it for brief periods, but the batteries are not well at all.

Since then I have bought other cordless items. I got a top-rated hand vacuum for kitchen messes. It runs maybe four minutes, so you really need to have your sweeping planned out when you pick it up. I have a leaf blower. It runs long enough to blow crap off the porch, and then you’re done. It’s pretty weak, so when you use it, you have to choose your battles.

I got a screwdriver and a Jobmax as well. I also got a corded Jobmax. I don’t think I would have gotten the cordless one had I thought about the corded one sooner.

My newer tools have lithium-ion batteries, which are better than NiMH and Nicad, but they will still die and need replacement.

With this experience behind me, I will explain why I don’t love cordless tools.

1. They cost three times as much as real tools, and that doesn’t include replacement batteries.

The drill cost about $275. When I replaced it with a very good Bosch corded hammer drill, I paid about $90. I was flabbergasted. I didn’t really know what hammer drills cost when I got the cordless one. The Panasonic combo cost me about the same amount as the Bosch drill. I replaced it with an infinitely superior corded Makita for less than half the price.

2. Real tools are often better than cordless.

The Makita impact driver I bought is a lot stronger than the Panasonic it replaced. It doesn’t have as many toys on it, but then they’re not actually useful. You pull the trigger, and it turns. The corded hammer drill I bought has a real chuck, unlike the cordless one, with a real key. I paid less and got more.

3. In order to make cordless tools useful, you have to become a battery nursemaid.

You are things you can do to screw up tool batteries. You have to be careful. If you want to be safe, you have to make sure they never discharge too much. Also, you can’t tell how much time a charge has left on it by looking at the battery. You have to guess. A dead battery looks like a fresh one. So if you forget to charge a battery, it’s easy to get ambushed. You have to make sure you charge the batteries all the time, but not too much, because too much cycling wears them out.

If you screw up, you can find yourself holding a tool that insists on a 30-minute nap, right when you need it to finish a job.

The solution to this is to buy more batteries. That’s not cheap, and they’re heavy.

4. Tools use batteries that are incompatible with each other, so you have to have lots of batteries and chargers.

If you’re really confident that every one of a single company’s cordless tools are what you want, you can buy a huge combination kit that comes with two batteries. They won’t be the company’s best batteries, but let’s pretend that’s not true. You can get six tools, two batteries, and a charger for a grand or so. What if the kit comes with tools you don’t want? Tough. You take what they offer. What if you want the super-duper high-capacity batteries? You have to buy them separately, so instead of a grand, think about $1400.

If, like most people, you want a grinder from this company and a drill from that company, you will be stuck with incompatible batteries and multiple chargers. You won’t be able to prepare for a day of work by charging all four of your Milwaukee batteries. You’ll have to charge three Milwaukees, two Dewalts, a Ridgid, and four Bosches. You will have to keep all the chargers plugged in, and they will suck up room.

5. The need to buy new batteries will never, ever go away. Ever. Even if you break it down over time, it doesn’t feel good, paying $25 per year in perpetuity to use a tool worth $90.

Here is how corded tools work:

1. They are always, always, always ready to work, even if you just spent the last week in jail and could not get home to charge them.

2. They do not stop working because you forgot to feed them.

3. They almost never become obsolete.

4. You will never, ever have to worry about not being able to get new batteries or support from the manufacturers.

5. They generally work better.

6. They are lighter.

7. They cost a third as much. Not 75% as much. A third.

Does that mean I hate cordless tools? No. It just means I don’t need them badly enough to put up with the crap.

If I had to work far from electricity several times a week, I would get cordless tools. If I were a professional construction worker, I would get cordless tools. If I could deduct the prices of the tools and the never-ending cost of replacing batteries on my taxes, I might get cordless tools. None of those criteria apply to me. I do everything well within reach of electrical sockets, preferably with the air conditioning on and the stereo playing.

So anyway, I got the cordless guys going, and they seemed to feel like I was saying all cordless tools are evil and that no one should ever have one. Nuance. You know how that goes.

I will probably buy another cordless screwdriver if the one I have dies, and I do like the Jobmax, but I’m not in a hurry to get anything else.

With all that said, listening to the pro-cordless crowd got me thinking, and I decided to poke around on the web and look into cost-effective ways to save the drill and impact driver. I knew there were ways to get around the high cost of new batteries, so I Googled.

I saw some interesting options, so I got out the charger for the hammer drill and plugged it in. Nothing happened. So right away, I was off on a detour.

The charger is a Bosch BC130. I believe it’s the second one I’ve bought. They have a tendency to drop dead for no reason. There was no way in hell I was going to put down fifty or seventy bucks or whatever for a charger for a drill that doesn’t work, so I tried to find out what was wrong with it. I will relay that information here in case anyone else has the same problem in the future.

The BC130 has a resistor between the big main caps on the circuit board. It burns up. It’s said to be a 1/2-watt 180K resistor, and the solution is a 1-watt (minimum) resistor.

I’ll tell you what you need to know to get it fixed.

First, the case is held on by five Phillips screws. Take them out. Now you will find that the case sticks at one corner when you try to open it. Relax. There is a smaller circuit board that holds the charging prongs, and it’s attached to the upper part of the case. It is held in place by three black 20-gauge wires that are way too short.

You can pry the small board down out of its place. It’s held there by two plastic pins, and friction is the only thing that keeps it from coming off. Just pry carefully.

Don’t touch anything until you discharge the capacitors on the main circuit board. They hold lots of charge, and they can hang onto it for quite some time. The only sure way I saw to discharge them was to short their leads with a wire.

To get access to their leads, you need to get at the underside of the board. There are two plastic tabs you have to push back with a screwdriver, and they will release the board from the case bottom. The big problem here is that when you do this, you may short the caps with your fingers, so try not to do that, because you will die.

If your resistor is fried, you will probably see charring and so on when you examine it. To release it, you can attach a hemostat to one of the resistor’s leads and pull on it from above the board while you heat the soldered connection underneath the board. The lead will come out, and then you can do the other one. Don’t use too much heat, because the foil traces under the board are easy to melt loose.

Now all you have to do is stick a new resistor in there.

Unbelievably, I did not have a 2-watt 180K resistor, so I made an assembly using two 150K’s and a 470K. It comes out to almost exactly 180K, and because there are three resistors instead of one, the heat is spread out more. Hopefully it won’t fry like the resistor Bosch put in there. It was bigger than the old resistor, so I let it stand up on the leads in the space between the caps. I was thinking this might allow it to give off heat better, since it won’t be against the circuit board.

You might want to increase the lengths of the 3 black leads that go from the main board to the secondary board, to make reassembly easier. I didn’t have to.

That’s it. Hopefully your charger will work.

I did this today, and I charged up the old drill batteries. It may still be useful for short jobs.

I also looked around and found a Youtuber who has a video on replacing the guts of Nicad batteries with lithium. I may try that, just for fun. If I can have new batteries for $20 each instead of $100 each, I may want to keep the drill.

I don’t know much about lithium batteries, but supposedly they die permanently if you let them discharge too far. You can prevent this by monitoring the voltage while you use them. The Youtube guy found little meters that cost a few bucks each, and he stuck them in his modified batteries. Pretty cool. I suppose it would be bad if he dropped the tool and broke a meter; you probably lose some of the original battery’s toughness.

If you have the same batteries I have (Bosch BAT181), you may find them hard to open. The nice damen und herren at Bosch have decided that opening the case is VERBOTEN and NICHT for das konsumer. Because, hey, if you can open it, you can fix it, and then they can’t charge you a könig’s ransom for new batteries.

Bosch closes the battery case with five Torx screws (so intimidating, *yawn*). They try to make it look worse than it is by covering one screw with a piece of plastic that looks like metal. If you drill a small hole in the center of it, you can insert a sharp tool and yank it out. Then you can get at the Torx screw.

Good luck.

One more thing. I found out that Nicads often lose capacity due to whiskering. Because the green lunatics have gone way overboard in ridding the world of lead (one of the world’s most useful metals), electronic devices tend to grow metal whiskers on their soldered connections. These whiskers create shorts and do bad stuff.

Some brave people de-whisker their batteries using high currents. You find yourself a decent current supply at a fairly high voltage, and you apply it to your battery’s terminals. There may be stuff you have to bypass; I’m not sure. Anyway, if you have whiskers and you get rid of them by running jolts of current through them, you may find your batteries work again. You don’t want to leave the current on for a long time. You just want to whack the batteries briefly. Just pop them.

Speaking of “pop,” the down side is that sometimes the batteries explode. So you could die or be blinded or horribly disfigured. Things to think about.

I may try this on my batteries, after hiding behind a garage door.

You never know what I’ll do when I get bored.

Maybe this will be useful to someone. It kept me amused for a couple of hours.

As for cordless tools, yes, they have their place. But I’m glad I’m not sitting here trusting my work to a cordless compu

Sweet Freedom

I finally finished reading The Iliad. It happened yesterday. I feel like a runaway slave.

I got one good thing out of it: new empathy for my college-age self. I had forgotten how mind-numbingly boring liberal arts courses are, and The Iliad brought it all back to me. I criticize myself for being lazy in college, and I am correct to do so, but in my partial defense, college is really, really dull.

It’s not always dull. It’s mainly dull when you’re taking stupid the wrong courses.

I always did well at verbal tasks when I was a kid, winning the city spelling bee and so forth. I was an excellent writer. I understood literature without much help. I won a couple of statewide prizes in French.

When I was ready to apply to college, the head of the English department at Columbia College of Columbia University, a Mr. Carl Hovde, sent me a letter inviting me to apply. Columbia was top five, as American universities go. They claimed.

It was sort of assumed that I would be a liberal arts guy.

Further [seeming] confirmation came from my poor grades in math. I didn’t dislike math, but you can’t cram very well in math courses, so it’s an area where lazy students get eaten alive. I procrastinated doggedly, and my grades reflected it. My advisor “recommended” I stop taking math courses after the 11th grade.

It was bizarre, really. I got a D- in Algebra II, and then I got an A- in Geometry the class that followed it. Then I believe I failed the next course, which was called Math Analysis.

Why would anyone get an A- between a D- and an F?

In subjects like history and literature, you can do almost nothing until right before your exams and still get A’s or B’s. This is why most students gravitate toward them.

Incidentally, I always feel funny using the term “liberal arts” to describe the basket-weaving, distaffy side of the curriculum. Today we use it to mean anything except math, engineering, and science, but in reality, it’s supposed to include math and science. I don’t know where we lost track of that.

But I will persist in using the misnomer.

I thought of myself as someone not destined to be involved with math or science, and that was a big mistake. When I got to college and started taking classes in subjects like literature and philosophy, I did not have a good time. It was a lot like the past week. “I can’t believe how boring this is.” “I can’t believe they’re paying this guy to tell me about Don Quixote.” “Why does this book have to be so long?”

The literature courses I took were generally a complete waste of money and time. I am not saying that as a surly kid with a weed habit. I am saying that as a surly old person who actually knows.

Having graduated from college and ready many books, and having sat through many literature lectures, I can say with assurance that there is nothing, nothing, nothing you can learn from a literature professor that you can’t learn with a library card or an Internet connection. College runs around a thousand dollars per credit, so if you take a literature course, it will cost you several thousand dollars to have an old hippie explain Huckleberry Finn to you. There is no way in HELL you can convince a reasonable person that this makes sense.

I’ll bet there are literature lectures online for nothing, if you are really determined to suffer. I’ll check.

Of COURSE. There was no way I could have been wrong. Here’s a Harvard Shakespeare course, presented free of charge.

On top of the issue of waste, when you let other people charge you to explain books to you, you are very likely to be taught ancient, revered error few have the guts to correct.

I’ve been going through the Columbia College Literature Humanities syllabus, and today I read Sappho’s Lyrics. Don’t read it; trust me. I’m just mentioning it in order to make a point. Everyone thinks Sappho was a lesbian. The word “lesbian” comes from “Lesbos,” which is where she lived. “Sapphic” means “lesbian.” If you go to college, there’s a good chance your prof will tell you Sappho was a lesbian. I read her book today, and there is absolutely no way you can conclude that from the fragments of manic-depressive verse she left behind.

I went online and read up on her. Guess what? There is no proof that she was a lesbian. There are real scholars who say so. They must be lesbian deniers; they reject settled literary consensus.

Liberal arts professors generally aren’t all that smart, and they’re not original. They memorize and parrot. If one makes a mistake in 1100 A.D., another is likely to repeat it for money in 2016. Think about that while your life savings are paying for creaky, dubious insights on Dickens and Proust.

If you’re smart, you’re smart enough to make your own mistakes instead of swallowing someone else’s.

I realize our culture has to be preserved, and people have to take literature and art courses and pay for them. I’m just suggesting that you–the person reading this–would be smart to let someone else shoulder the burden. Take something useful instead. It doesn’t have to be math or science. Learn a language…well, Rosetta Stone software is probably better than college. Okay; study music. It’s tough to form a jazz orchestra on your own.

Some liberal arts professors are really good, but come on. No literature or history teacher is $3000-per-semester good. Especially not in the age of Youtube.

When I finally took some left-brain courses, it was a lot more fun than poring over the grey pages of Machiavelli and Joyce. I still did badly. I had never learned study habits, and I was perpetually depressed about the divorce-related drama going on in my family, so I didn’t have much energy. I had no self-confidence at all, as a result of growing up with abuse. But at least I enjoyed the lectures and labs.

I did well at gut courses I hated, because they were easy. I did poorly in great courses I liked, because they were hard.

Liberal arts people love to say left-brain people are not smarter; just different. That’s a load. They’re smarter. No one ever graduates from college and says, “Man, Survey of American Cinema was tough.” Everyone complains about physics.

Left-brain people are usually less capable when it comes to verbal stuff, but they are not as stupid as right-brain people trying to do math.

I thought I was a right-brainer because I did well in that area, but in reality I was just a shocking left-brained underachiever.

I could never be a literature professor. I can read it. I can understand it. I can come up with BS insights with the best of them. It’s still dull. It’s fun to read for recreational purposes, but choking down boring tomes in 100-page daily doses in order to be prepared for mildewed lectures your prof wrote 50 years ago and never revised…that’s not my idea of stimulation.

I still plan to read these books, for the same reason kids memorize the alphabet. There are some things a civilized person should know, and also, I will feel like I’ve partially compensated for avoiding reading them when I was young.

I got started on The Odyssey today. It’s only 400 pages, and some of that is surely notes which I can ignore. After that comes Genesis, which I can skip for obvious reasons. Then Herodotus, which I skipped in high school as well as college. Herodotus isn’t literature, so I plan to get a translation I can read, not one that makes literature profs happy.

It looks like The Iliad is the real Sunday punch of first semester Literature Humanities. It’s the longest and presumably most boring book.

When this is over, my understanding of the classics will be not unlike the understanding of Europe you get from a ten-cities-in-three-days tour of Europe. But that will more than suffice.

I expect praise. People may even say this was my aristeia.

ASUS Deserves a Kick in the Butt

In 2012, I got myself an ASUS Transformer Prime tablet. The reviews said it was the greatest thing that had ever happened to the world.

I wanted to be able to read ebooks. That was all I cared about. I could have gotten a Kindle or some other dedicated reader, but I figured I might as well get something versatile in case I wanted apps or whatever. The Transformer seemed like the right move.

After I did all my research and got the tablet home, I discovered that it had major wifi and GPS problems. The case on the tablet is aluminum, not the usual plastic, and it (DUH) interferes with radio waves. The antennas are inside the box, and they do not communicate very well with…anything.

On top of that, the little card holding the antennas connects to the tablet using pogo pins. These are little nipply pins that hold circuit boards in place. My understanding is that they’re not intended to be used as connectors, but they’re metallic, so ASUS figured what the hell.

When you close the ASUS case, two pogo pins on one side push against two copper strips on the antenna card, and you have contact. Or not. If something isn’t aligned right, or if the contacts are dirty (mine were), you get squat.

The pogo problem is so stupid it can sometimes be fixed by squeezing the tablet while you use it. This pushes the pins into the copper and improves conduction.

That’s not a great solution. You don’t want to sit in Starbucks squeezing your tablet with one hand and holding your $7 latte in the other while you try to look at Scrib’d.

By the way, some applications are useless when your Wifi is bad, even if they claim you can use them offline. Scrib’d is a prime (pun or whatever not intended) example. It won’t save your place in books. It takes forever to open books you have supposedly saved to your device. It’s horrible.

I’m not sure what to do about GPS, and I’m not sure I care, but I can tell you want to do about the Wifi. First, install a free app called Wifi Analyzer and check your reception. Don’t rely on those stupid bars.

The Transformer opens very easily. No, seriously. You can find sites online that show you how to do it. Basically, you pull two rubber stoppers out of the side where the USB hole is, and inside you find two latches. You push them to the left using the tip of a tiny Phillips screwdriver, and that releases the case from the screen.

The screen has a gaskety thing under it, against the aluminum case, and it’s sticky. You separate it by shoving a guitar pick (only the tip) in the gap and sliding it around the case perimeter. It will try to close up behind the pick, so as you go, put shims in there to hold it open.

Eventually, the case opens. You open the USB side first, and the other side acts sort of like a hinge. Don’t rely on my instructions. Find pictures online.

Don’t use metal tools. You’ll gouge everything.

Once you’re inside, you’ll see the antenna card stuck to the underside of the screen side of the tablet. On the outside edge of the case, you’ll see two copper tabs labeled GPS and WLAN (Wifi) or something like that. I don’t have it in front of me.

On the other half of the tablet, opposite the card, you’ll see two gold pogo pins that touch the card when the case is closed.

I took a burnishing tool and polished the pins and the copper foil contacts on the card. A burnishing tool is a little stick with a very fine abrasive on it. You can probably use 2000-grit sandpaper if you have a light touch. Maybe this is a mistake, though, because it’s possible that the crap I removed from my foil was actually some sort of grease intended to prevent oxidation. We’ll see. You can always grease it again.

To fix the Wifi problem, cut a piece of insulated stranded (not solid) wire 2.75″ long. You want very thin wire. Expose about 1/4″. Yank the exposed portion so the other end of the wire sinks slightly into the insulation. This will hide it so it doesn’t touch anything conductive.

Flatten the exposed part of the wire. Then rest it on the WLAN foil and close the case. You want the metal to be pinched between the case halves. This holds the wire in place. Don’t let the insulation come between the halves, because it’s thick, and it will obstruct them when you close the case. I suppose this could crack the glass. If you’re a real man, take a diamond burr or a file and make a little notch in the aluminum side of the case so the insulation will have a place to go, and then close it. I did not find this necessary, because the case holds the metal strands very tightly.

You want the wire to be slightly over 2.5″ long, because that’s a good length for wifi. The length affects the reception. The wavelength is 4.92″, so you want a nice even fraction, like ~2.5″ or ~1.25″. I am not an EE, so I may be wrong.

If you’re getting good contact, you should see a gigantic reception improvement when you turn on Wifi Analyzer. If not, maybe the pogo pin is too short, and you need to put a wad of foil or soldering braid between it and the antenna card.

I considered soldering a wire directly to the pogo pin, which would be the really manly move, but I decided to try the other way first, because it was easy to do and easy to reverse.

If you solder a wire to your pogo pin, you might lose the ability to remove the card (if you’re bad at removing solder), but come on. Do you plan to remove it?

Now you have a wire sticking out of your tablet. How will you live? It shouldn’t be a problem. Unless you’re crazy, you have a protective case on your tablet, and the wire will be easy to conceal.

Look, do you want wifi or not?

I used a 22-gauge black Teflon wire. It’s very thin and hard to see. I would guess that a thinner wire would work about as well.

The tablet works now. Very exciting.

I assume this will also work for GPS, but I haven’t tried it. I don’t know what the wavelength is or how long the wire should be. ASUS supplies a worthless attachment for improving the GPS performance. Everyone hates it, so I’m not trying it. They actually had a class-action suit and gave people a free attachment (“dongle”) and $17. I read that the dongle obstructs the USB port, so you can’t connect a charger. Yeah, that’s what you want. Power-sucking GPS and no DC supply.

I may to back in later and solder the wire to the pogo pin, but I probably won’t unless something blows up.

Enjoy your now-working tablet.