The Love Grows Cold

On Friday, I went to see my metal dealer (who was sick), and I spent about $33 on steel so I could build a stand for my steel gong targets. Yesterday, I finished the main part of the fabrication. Here’s the result.

I plan to paint it, since it will stand in a cow pasture permanently. Until the cows knock it over and walk around on it, which will probably happen 15 minutes after I set it up. I didn’t know cows were mischievous, but it turns out they are.

The long square bits are 1″ tubing. The round bits are galvanized conduit, which I had lying around. I also used some scrap, including two short pieces of a spear for a Hawaiian sling. Look it up.

Wait…you can’t weld galvanized steel! It gives off poisonous gas! Not to worry. If you dip it in muriatic acid for a few seconds, the zinc goes away. Cheap galvanized stuff is a great resource for hobby welders.

I have a piece of round tubing that will slip over the horizontal bar. I’m going to cut the round tubing in several pieces. I’ll weld long pieces of 1″ by 1/8″ bar to the round tubing, and I’ll fasten my gongs to the other ends. This will give me targets that can swing vertically but not from side to side.

I have considered welding the targets to the steel bar, but welding will surely anneal the gongs in small areas. Soft metal can cause ricochets. I don’t know if a tiny bit of soft steel will be dangerous enough to worry about. After all, people all over the world shoot hardened gongs held up on mild steel frames that are soft, and obviously, the frames get hit. Welding would be quick and easy compared to using bolts.

I think it would be smarter to insert bolts in the gong holes and weld the ends of the bolts to the flat bar. I wouldn’t have to drill holes in the bar, and I wouldn’t soften the gongs. I don’t want the gongs to be right up against the bar. I want to put some distance in there. This will make the gongs hang so they tilt forward a little, which may make spent lead more likely to be deflected toward the ground. I guess the bolt idea is good.

When this is finished, I will have a strong stand that comes apart with two screws.

If I were making the stand today, I would change the design a little, but it will be fantastic, so I don’t care.

People knock steel, saying it’s heavy, but they forget that it hasn’t been that long since steel was considered a wonder material. The abundance of iron and the versatility of steel have changed the world. If you think steel is heavy, try building a wooden or masonry skyscraper. We haven’t always had lighter metals, and they’re more expensive and harder to work with. Steel is an incredible material. You just don’t realize it because you’re spoiled.

In other news, when I got up this morning and checked the coronavirus numbers, my latest coeffient’s results had me within a few hundred cases of the actual toll. Shocking. Maybe the equation I constructed will work fairly well for the next couple of weeks. Sooner or later, factors like recovery and saturation should mess it up, however.

I read some very comforting news today. I don’t know if it’s true. I read that MOST Americans get the flu once a year. I had read that about 36,000,000 of us caught it this year. If “most” is correct, we’re looking at a figure over 170,000,000.

That would be comforting, because it would make coronavirus look even less significant compared to the flu.

I have my doubts about it, to say the least.

A reader has suggested that Italians screwed up their data by calling all respiratory-disease deaths that in anyway involved the new bug coronavirus deaths. I wonder if that’s true, and I wonder how many other countries are doing similar things.

Don’t forget: Chinese researchers put the percentage of false positives at 40% to 80%. How would you feel, taking a cancer test that unreliable? What if you got charged with murder, and you found out juries had a 40% false-guilty rate?

Actually, that wouldn’t shock me. I’m amazed they ever get it right.

I have finally been impacted by coronavirus. Almost. A week or two ago, I noticed that my local Winn-Dixie sold store-brand shredded whole-milk mozzarella. This is not an easy thing to get even in sane times. If the cheese is good, it would be perfect for pizza. Low-fat mozzarella turns brown in the oven. You can reduce this by covering it with provolone or some other whole-milk cheese, or you can butter your mozzarella, but it’s better to start with good cheese.

Yesterday, I thought I might get some bagged cheese and Ragu for emergency pizza, just in case. Too late. The hoarders got both. They should be forced to go out in orange vests and pick up dog poop. They should have all their toilet paper confiscated and replaced with corn cobs. Or bastard files.

Another store had plenty of sliced provolone, so I grabbed some. I bought crushed tomatoes and paste. Can’t hurt. Still low on flour, but the kind of person who hoards food isn’t likely to cook from scratch, so maybe I can find some.

Hoarders don’t eat most fruits and vegetables, either. They cleaned out my local store’s potatoes the other day, while apples and all types of green vegetables sat in a big lonely display, untouched. When you see hoarder carts, they’re full of sugar cereal, Pop Tarts, Hot Pockets, and so on. Hoarding doesn’t appeal much to people who have it together.

I wonder what’s happening with cigarettes! I’ll bet they’re gone. People with poor values hoard, and they also smoke.

If you think about it, maybe the hoarders are onto something. They eat garbage and they smoke. They tend to be obese. These are coronavirus’s favorite things. Maybe hoarders are more likely to die if they get infected, so we should let them hoard!

Hoarders seem to miss some obvious things. Stores are having temporary problems, but you can go to McDonald’s or any other takeout restaurant and get all the food you want. You would think this would be a clue that there is not going to be a food shortage.

The only thing that could cause a real food shortage would be a lack of workers at the fundamental level. If there is no one to work on farms because insane politicians have made them stay home, yes, we will have shortages. The disease itself won’t hurt enough people to cause a problem. The US food supply chain is very, very flexible, and it has a lot of backup storage built into it. People need to read about it instead of filling their homes with food other folks should have.

I have a policy. I always try new pizza restaurants that open near me. In Miami, this was usually not a fruitful effort, because Miami is a pizza desert. Cubans make very bad pizza. Ocala is different. The pizza here is as good or better than New York pizza. Don’t ask me why. And yes, there is bad pizza in New York. There is plenty of it.

There is a chain here called Five Star. They opened a location near a grocery I use. Twice, I went in and tried to get slices. This was weeks ago. They were having professionalism issues, so I could not get served in a reasonable time. Yesterday, I finally got lucky. I got a couple of slices. Wonderful. I’m thinking of heading over there today.

Coincidentally, Five Star left a flyer in my mailbox yesterday. It says they use 100% actual cheese, which is something Papa John’s and Domino’s can’t say. They use fake cheese. Look it up. They mix cheese with things like starch.

Five Star also uses tomatoes which are packed ripe. This is hugely important. It’s very hard to find this kind of tomato sauce in grocery stores. Hunt’s Contadina, Cento, and the others generally do not use ripe tomatoes, and they mistreat the green tomatoes they do use. Five Star probably uses Bonta or Stanislaus sauce, from California.

I may try to hit the store tomorrow early, because I am very curious about the bagged cheese. Oldsters get exclusive shopping rights before 9 a.m. After that, I can pounce. But maybe there are lines and fistfights in the morning. Wouldn’t surprise me.

I had another plague problem. I tried to order a GoPro from Best Buy. Ordinarily, I have very good experiences with this chain, but not this week. They’re cowering behind their counters with their doors locked, but you can still pick things up in the parking lot. My understanding is that you drive by with your hatch up, and an employee in a nomex burqa fires your purchase into the back of your car with some kind of cannon. Then he goes back in, and they give him a squirt with a flamethrower.

Anyway, I tried to place the order three times, and Best Buy canceled it every time, saying they couldn’t verify my info. Their site said to call them. I called. They routed me to someone who was in the wrong department. That person routed me to another department. That department’s system told me I could expect to wait over 60 minutes to hear a human voice.

Tomorrow, Amazon will be delivering my GoPro. They promised a Thursday delivery, but it’s going to be Tuesday.

I have a Yi-brand camera I bought in ’17, but it’s junk. It turns itself on and off. When you’re shooting video, it switches to still photos and fills your SD card with them. It takes many tries to connect it to a computer or wifi. I decided to give up and buy the real thing. Do NOT buy a Yi camera.

You can imagine my stress, missing out on unnecessary cheese and having to buy toys online instead of in person. It’s hard, but I’m a natural hero and saint, so don’t make a big thing out of it. It would embarrass me, because I’m humble. And charismatic.

This morning, I realized something really bad about the stay-home orders and business closures. When people are stuck at home and they can only shop for essentials, what are they going to do? They’ll shop out of boredom. So the bans are increasing hoarding. How about that?

I’m going to see if I can get paint for my target stand. If the hardware store has paint, I’ll just buy ALL OF IT! I HAVE TO HAVE IT! SOMEONE ELSE MIGHT GET IT FIRST! I WANT IT ALL!

Whew. I’m back now.

I guess I’ll put up a photo of the stand when I set it up. May be a couple of days.