I Would Kill for an Attention Span

I am all bummed out today. I completely forgot about the Pacquiao-de la Hoya fight. Boxing is the only sport I have the attention span to watch, and Pacquiao is someone I wanted to keep track of. Last night he pounded de la Hoya to bits, and I found out about it by reading an Internet headline.

De la Hoya is an interesting figure, because last year, a stripper released doctored photos of him, in which he appeared to be a transvestite. Ever since then, he has had to deal with the nickname “Oscar de la Homo.”

According to TMZ, when de la Hoya pointed out that the photos were fake, the stripper sued him. Knowing they were fake. They should have a Nobel Prize for gall.

Incidentally, can someone tell me why stripping is called “exotic dance”? What’s exotic about disrobing? Another thing: if you have to disrobe to make money dancing, aren’t you admitting you don’t really dance well? I assume women put the “dance” in this business, because women generally like to fantasize about being dancers. When women go to the gym, what do they put on? Exercise clothes? No, they put on dance costumes. Weird. You don’t see men at the gym, dressed like ballet dancers or the cast of Breakin’. Not heterosexual men, anyway.

The truth is, men would still pay strippers, even if they just stood there.

It’s a pretty sad way to make a living, especially after your kids (or grandkids) get old enough to realize what you do.

Yesterday, I had lunch with my father and my sister. That’s pretty remarkable. Things continue to improve. Eventually, my sister and I went to a Christian bookstore.

I guess I am not as good a Christian as I thought, because I could not help chuckling at the “Happy Birthday Jesus” lollipops, which were shaped like little birthday cakes. I still have some work to do. I thought of Ned Flanders.

The store had a little aisle labeled “Charismatic Interest.” I told my sister you weren’t allowed in that section unless you brought your own snake. I guess charismatics still don’t get much respect. The movement has had too many kooks and crooks.

I just checked, and it turns out Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker are charismatics. Great. I didn’t know that. If you don’t actually see a minister pray in tongues, it can be hard to figure out whether he’s charismatic.

It can be tough figuring out where in the church you belong. The charismatics seem to have a lot going on; they seem to experience God’s power daily, in a very direct way. On the other hand…Jimmy Swaggart. I don’t want to make a list of charismatics who are really embarrassing, but it’s not a hard thing to do. There are too many of them focusing people’s attention on how God can satisfy our earthly desires, and ministers like that don’t give nearly enough time to our obligations to God. On the other hand, the non-charismatic Bible-believing churches appear to understand duty very well, but compared to the charismatics, they seem sort of comatose.

Then there are the assimilated churches, where they ordain gays and tell us Jesus was just a positive thinker. If I only wanted positive thinking, I’d buy self-help books instead of Bibles. You can think positively and still enjoy all the sin you want. That’s not for me. Those churches aren’t churches. I want a living God who helps me when I’m in trouble and improves me and helps me help others and gives me eternal life. I don’t want Tony Robbins.

Finally, there are the old churches with saints and lots of structure. I cannot pray to another human being. I just can’t. Saul did that, and look what happened to him.

My hope is that the denominations will grow closer. Surely the charismatics can let go of the private jets and ridiculous prosperity preaching and hold onto the power of the Holy Spirit. I know many people from more traditional churches are opening up to the notion that God is among us, and that through the Holy Spirit, he is active in the lives of individuals. Maybe their numbers will increase.

I saw an interesting book about breaking curses. I didn’t read it, but the cover listed things that will ruin your life. I remember a few. Gossip, racism, failing to honor your parents, profiting from the mistreatment of the innocent, withholding tithes and offerings, and witchcraft. I can’t recall the others. The ones I remember seem pretty sound. I think my own family is screwed up largely because our cigarette tobacco killed so many people. That is profiting from the mistreatment of the innocent. You may claim it’s not, because smokers know what they’re getting into, but that wasn’t true before 1963, and even afterward, cigarette companies made sure their products were available to minors. They deliberately addicted kids, before they became mature enough to make wise decisions. And anyway, a pusher is many times more culpable than a drug addict, just as a prostitute is more culpable than a john. One party to the transaction acts out of weakness, in response to powerful temptation; the other acts in cold blood, purely for profit. Cold-blooded misdeeds are worse than misdeeds committed as a result of compulsion or external influences. That’s why contract killers get the death penalty and people who stab other customers in bar fights get two years.

I get so tired of people claiming johns are as bad as prostitutes. They’re not. The levels of guilt go like this, in increasing order: john, prostitute, pimp. That ought to be obvious. The same people who equate buying sex with selling it would never agree that we should punish casual drug users as badly as we punish dealers. There’s some fine logic for you.

In the cigarette guilt hierarchy, my family was somewhere between prostitute and pimp.

I bought a book. Josephus. He wrote about history, from a Jewish perspective. The book contains his complete works. I look forward to digging into it, although I will probably limit myself to bits that seem relevant to my religion. The book is huge. It would take a month to read it.

Maybe I’ll go crack it open. Seems like good reading for a Sunday.

Hope So

I took my new sliding miter saw out of the box and stuck it on the woodworking table today. It’s HUGE. I’m going to have to have the table a few inches out from the wall in order to use the saw. That’s not a problem, though, since I have to move the table out to get clearance for any wood I care to saw. I haven’t tried putting it on the Workmate yet. I may do that.

The other day I complained that I was going to need outfeed support for my tools. People suggested some roller doodads. I know I will irritate toolheads when I describe the solution I found. Kelly Mehler’s table saw video confronts the issue, and Mehler uses a sawhorse with a top surface half an inch lower than the saw table. You may wonder why he doesn’t use fancy rollers. He said rollers steer the work. The wood will naturally move perpendicularly to a roller’s axis. That means you have to have the roller aligned at a perfect right angle to the direction of the wood’s movement on the saw table. With a sawhorse and two-by-four, you don’t get this problem. And the total cost is about five bucks, plus scrap wood. Rollers are considerably more expensive.

The big miter saw should be a great convenience. The vast majority of cuts I make are short, and this thing goes up to 13.5″. You aren’t supposed to rip with it, though. Bummer. I wonder if I can get away with it for short rips, with the wood clamped in there real good. I’ve gotten away with it with my smaller miter saw.

A radial arm saw might have been a better answer, but try to find a nice used one in this area. And they say it’s easy to julienne yourself with a radial arm saw.

I think once I have a band saw and a drill press, I will feel like I can cope with almost every tool problem I am willing to face.

Of course, I am not known for my realistic expectations.

My Phone is Good Enough and Smart Enough

My experience as a smartphone owner is going well. I figured out how to schedule repeating obligations in Outlook, and I managed to fix my computer so it will sync with my Blackjack II. And I am learning to enjoy scheduling tasks on the fly. Look at this picture, which shows you how I am managing my hectic schedule, which is packed with momentous events.

I’ll tell you how that happened. I grabbed Maynard from his cage yesterday, and as I felt his claws penetrating my fingers, I realized it was time to get out the clippers. So I made an appointment. As we sat down on the couch to read Bill Hylton’s Ultimate Guide to the Router Table, I noticed that a bulb in the ceiling fan fixture was out. So I entered that, too.

At some point later today, the phone will begin nagging me. It’s like being married, only without the disappointing infrequent sex. The phone will tell me to get off my fat behind and fix the bulb. And I’ll hit the snooze button, giving myself another hour. Then it will start yapping at me again. More snooze. More yapping. More snooze. Finally I’ll tell the phone, “I’m only doing this to make you shut your hole,” and I’ll go get the ladder.

Then the phone and I will avoid communicating for a while, which I will interpret as peace, and the phone will interpret as proof that I never loved it to begin with. I don’t care. Listen, if the phone really cared about me, it would have come with a touch screen. You don’t have to hit me with a ton of bricks. I get the message.

George Moneo sent me a horrified email, reading “What? You didn’t buy an iPhone?!” I am pretty sure he was kidding. Let’s check AT&T’s site and find out why I didn’t buy an iPhone, apart from the idiotic, pretentious, ungrammatical tiny “i” in front of the capital “P.”

Okay. That was fast. The cheapest…CHEAPEST…Iphone (ha) plan is seventy dollars per month, before the added crap that rounds it up to a hundred dollars. My God, George. What are you smoking? And the real Iphone (the one that has more memory) is $300, with a two-year contract. Good Lord. I assume George’s wife has seen the bills. If not, sorry, George. You can sleep in my garage for a while.

Let’s do the math. Right now I pay $29 (really ~$40) per month. The Iphone is at least $30 more. Multiply by 24 months. It’s over 700 dollars. In real life, I’ll bet it’s more like a thousand. That’s not a thousand, total. That’s a thousand on top of the thousand I’ll be paying on my current plan.

In return, I get…

Okay, that part is not clear.

You can put music on the Iphone. But I can do that, too. Except I don’t want to. MP3 players are only for desperate times, like when you’re flying across the country, and you need something to drown out the screaming babies. The rest of the time, they’re a pain. And I have a great MP3 player that holds 40 gigs. Twice the capacity of the Iphone. It already has dozens of albums in it.

You can watch TV on the Iphone. I can do that on the Blackjack. Except I don’t want to. I don’t watch regular TV on a big screen. Why would I watch it on a tiny one I have to hold up in front of me?

I’m trying to watch the Iphone tour video. It’s some wuss in a black shirt. Why do post-2000 hippies insist on wearing black all the time? Maybe this is an old unwashed shirt that belonged to Steve Jobs. Maybe this guy wears it, hoping it has residue from The Force on it.

It’s so boring…it’s actually painful…help me…Ibuprofen…Vicodin…heroin…

I had to turn it off. It’s half an hour long! Who could sit through that?

Truthfully, I already feel like I bought too much phone. I wish I could have gotten a regular non-smart phone, plus a $75 PDA, but I couldn’t do that, because I refuse to add any more weight to my pockets. I keep my hair short, I have never owned a ring or necklace, and I resent it when I have to wear socks. I don’t need more junk hanging off me. The weight of my pistol is very annoying. I’m not adding any more heavy items.

When this PC craps out, I fully intend to go Apple, more out of anger at Microsoft than love for Steve Jobs. Windows has gotten so bad and so stupid, there is no possibility that Apple could be anything but better. But I wouldn’t buy an Iphone if I were a billionaire.

I’ll Just Get my Protractor and Line up These Wrenches

I am amazing.

I was reading my router table book–I bought Bill Hylton’s router table book–when I realized the garage was still a mess from all the stuff I did yesterday. So I went out and took all the screws and anchors out of their little packages and stuck them in drawers in the wall organizer thing, and I put a P-Touch label on each drawer! I should put a gold star on my forehead.

The book is very good. In the front, it says Bill Hylton was an editor before he wrote the book, and he only did it because he couldn’t find anyone else to do it. Maybe that explains why it’s a good book. He knew what bad tool books were like, because he used to fix them.

The woodworking table I am trying to build magically flattened itself overnight. I guess the pressure of the two-by-six I screwed onto it wore it out. I checked the flatness from front to back–the other direction–and damned if I don’t have another two-by-six to install. Oh, well. That should be easy. I think I’ll put one short board on either side of the router, to compensate for the weakness caused by cutting the hole for the lift.

It turned out I had some parts for my Grr-ripper I had failed to install, so I put those in, and I took the leftover stuff and put it in a little drawer in my electronics cabinet, marked “GRR-RIPPER.” I am too cool.

So far I mainly use tools to make things to help me use my tools. But eventually, I will work on something not tool-related. And then you will all go down on your knees and give me my props. Oh, yes. You WILL give me my props. Or at least one. Prop, I mean.

Teflon Wears Thin

Wow, an Internet source says O.J. Simpson just got 18 years for armed robbery!

Some people just don’t know when to leave well enough alone.

More

I don’t know how this story can be right. I don’t have a TV in front of me, so I’m not watching video, but no other website says O.J. has been sentenced.

I do not understand this man. What he did to his wife and Ron Goldman was an atrocity. And murdering the mother of your children is an especially evil deed. Somehow, he skated. His attorneys got him a prejudiced jury who would have found him innocent had they been standing three feet away during the murders. And instead of realizing he was one of the luckiest men alive, he continued behaving exactly as he pleased. Now look where he is.

I think of all the people out there who would have taken his kind of success and turned it into something beautiful. And I think of his children, who know exactly what he did.

My sister does criminal law, and she thinks he’ll do two-thirds of the time they give him. In Florida, a major felony buys you six months (overcrowding), but Nevada is probably different.

You have to wonder if this will make him realize he has to change.

More

See what I get for trusting websites in the former USSR. Or wherever it was. He hadn’t been sentenced when that story came out. It was wrong, but just barely. If the TV pundits are right, O.J. got 16 years. My sister claims it’s 21.

Anyway, he’s going to be away for a good long time.

New Phones Worse Than the Flu

I’m not sure what the worst part of getting a new cell phone is. It may be the expense, but maybe it’s really the chore of learning how to use it.

I broke down and got a Samsung Blackjack II, and it has driven me crazy all morning.

This thing has GPS. AT&T wants to charge you for using their GPS service. It’s hideously expensive, at 10 bucks per month. I don’t really want GPS, but if I can get it free, I’ll take it. And since I already paid for the phone, I should be allowed to use the GPS capability built into it, even if I don’t use AT&T’s service. AT&T disagrees, so they keep the GPS feature locked until you agree to pay them off.

I found a site that offers unlocking software today, and after a great deal of aggravation, I got it working. Now I can use Google Maps, which is FREE FREE FREE. Take that, AT&T.

I also had fun installing the software that syncs the phone with the computer. This is the main reason I got a smartphone. I want to be able to schedule reminders and so on. It turns out you can’t really do this if you install the Notesync software they include on the CD. It crashes Windows Mobile Sync. I am too lazy to check to see if I got the names of the programs right.

Outlook can also make it crash. I found I had two versions of Outlook installed, and I thought that might be a problem, so I removed Outlook Express. Don’t get me started on the total inadequacy and utter badness of the Windows “Remove Windows Components” tool. It installs stuff you don’t want. It uninstalls stuff you DO want. It’s ridiculous.

I went through all that, and it turned out the other thing was the problem.

I’m supposed to use Outlook to enter my stuff so it can be transferred to the phone. I hate Outlook. It’s primitive, especially since I can’t stand Office 2007 and therefore rely on Office 2000. I never use Outlook. I have opened it up this week to see if it would be of any use, and of course, it’s garbage. I used to have a wonderful piece of scheduling software that let me program all sorts of regular obligations into it, and I got reminders and so on. With Outlook 2000, if you want to get a haircut every Wednesday during the year 2009, you have to make 52 individual entries. As far as I can tell. Idiotic. Another fine Microsoft product.

I’m looking to see if I can download something better.

I hate the tiny QWERTY keyboard on this thing, but it’s miles ahead of my old LG, which required several presses just to type a single letter.

Here’s to sticking it to AT&T. I will never use Google Maps, but I have the satisfaction of knowing I can.

Interesting Movies on the Radar

I see Drudgebart has linked to a review of the new Clint Eastwood film, Gran Torino. I can’t wait to see this one.

Think about it. It’s about a crabby old guy who drinks beer and has too many guns, who sits on his porch glaring at punks who set foot on his lawn. I can relate! This is my dream lifestyle! I’m nearly there NOW! I just hope there are a couple of parrots in the film.

Looks like Jean Claude Van Damme has a film out, too. Weird. It’s called JCVD, and it appears to be a strange mixture of truth and fiction. Playing himself, Van Damme confronts things like his drug and domestic problems, as well as the difficulties of being an aging action star with a dead career.

Van Damme has made a lot of bad movies (and bad decisions), but he seems like a more sympathetic character than, say, Schwartzenegger, who has never publicly admitted wrong or questioned himself. Have you ever seen Arnold admit he did something dumb? I haven’t. I would be surprised if he was capable of admitting fault. People seem to love him now, but they’ve forgotten Pumping Iron, the old documentary in which he displayed his true personality. He was quite obnoxious.

People who never have a moment of humility are a little scary. Except for me, of course.

According to Wikipedia, Van Damme is not lying when he says he was a karate champion. True? I don’t know. It says he got a reputation for lying because people who checked out his claims didn’t realize he competed under his real name, which is not Van Damme.

Beat Your Power Tools With a Hammer

Okay, the sensation of manliness has worn off, and I feel like an idiot again.

I’ve been watching Taunton’s Router Joinery DVD, with Gary Rogowski. He says he has been making furniture for 20 years, so I guess he knows a few things.

Remember all the BS I’ve been through with my router aspirations? I got a big-ass plunge router with a huge motor. I wanted to be able to use it in a table, and I wanted to be able to change bits and so on without reaching under the table, so I bought a lift and a router plate. For days, I’ve been agonizing, trying to get my old MDF/melamine desk perfectly flat so I could mount the plate in it.

Guess what this guy uses for a router table? A crappy sheet of melamine with a hole in it. I am not kidding. It’s like two by three feet, and it has NO attachments except for a router base. It has no dust collection hole. No cutesy fence. Is it flat? I very much doubt it. He sets it up by putting about four inches of it on a workbench and holding it in place with TWO CLAMPS. There is no way it doesn’t flex when it has weight on it. I can’t believe it hasn’t snapped.

His router? It’s a Stanley. I know; I didn’t know they made routers, either. It’s probably thirty years old. It’s such a piece of crap, he has to bang on it with a hammer to make the bits come out. He has other routers, too, but he seems to use this one just to torment people like me, who actually spend money on tools.

His fence is a piece of scrap held in place with clamps. This guy is a professional woodworker, and it appears he has invested about two hundred dollars in tools.

I want to kill him.

I haven’t gone all that crazy. Some guys buy $300 lifts and $900 tables. I have a router and a lift and a cheesy old desk; that’s not so bad. But compared to Gary Rogowski, I’m wildly extravagant.

I was considering giving my old Sears router and table away, but now that I’ve seen what this man does with horrible tools, I may have to keep them. Although I really hate that router. You adjust the depth by turning the router inside a plastic collar which gets stuck once a certain amount of sawdust hits it. I hate it. I HATE it. Maybe the table is worth keeping.

I need a band saw.

Look, leave me alone.

Norm Abrams is a Loser

I just finished screwing a two-by-six to the underside of my routing-table-to-be. I only made one mistake, and it was one of those things people never find out about until they take things apart.

I got a funny result. The left half of the table is now absolutely true. The right half is damn near true, but not quite. And oddly, most of the problem is in the 3″ of the table that are beyond the two-by-six. I would say we are looking at maybe 0.2-0.3 millimeters. I don’t know if that’s bad enough to cause problems. I very much doubt it, considering the kind of crap I am likely to use the table for.

I learned one fun thing today. Melamine and MDF don’t like being drilled with Forstner bits. This stuff is pretty hard.

Question: how much MDF/melamine dust do I have to breathe to be sure of getting a gigantic tumor? I was a few holes into the project before it occurred to me to put on a mask. If that’s not a big enough dose, I can always go out there, put some dust in a spoon, and eat it.

The router lift will be here on Monday, more or less. Between now and then, I have time to play with shims. And the table might straighten up on its own, I suppose.

If I decide to try shimming, I think I’ll cut something out of thick paper instead of trying to make a wooden shim. I don’t think I would enjoy trying to cut a 0.3mm slice off a two-by six.

I feel all manly now. This is a rare sensation, so I am trying to enjoy it.

I had to get a 7/8″ Forstner bit at Home Depot today, and when I got there, they had a regular old bit for like five bucks, plus the super-amazing Porter Cable bit assortment, with slip-proof hex-shaped shafts as well as some remarkable improvement or other that makes them cut UP TO TWICE AS FAST AS REGULAR FORSTNER BITS and they were only $45, and they came with a box which, I’ll bet, would cost me like $25 to make, so it’s as if the bits were only $20, and, well, obviously I made the smart choice.

It’s a shame a person with my gift for rationalizing isn’t married. Look what I’m wasting.

More

Forgot to say, I ordered a router DVD, and it arrived today. I plan to break that out to enjoy with lunch. And here’s something crazy: Woodworking With the Router, by Bill Hylton, has gotten hard to find. A new version is coming out next year, and the 2006 one has disappeared. I found it online at McFeely’s, so I ordered that, too.

Heh heh. Life is sweet.

It’s amazing how much pleasure I get from things that are utterly trivial.

“I’ll Sneak up on Jeff Bob and Try to Insert a Tag”

Because I am a failure and I do not possess a 7/8″ Forstner bit, I had to quit working on my woodworking table pretty early yesterday. I get to bed between 8:30 and 9:00, so I’m glad things didn’t work out, because I think there is a good chance I would have stayed up late and ruined my morning.

I ended up watching a woodworking video with Marv and Maynard. It’s a Taunton.com video about table saws, featuring a guy named Kelly Mehler. It was so relaxing. When you have tools but still can’t get anything done, they cause anxiety. When you see someone tackle similar problems effortlessly, it’s incredibly soothing. I do not know why.

Maybe this is how women want to feel when they pick husbands. “Look at all the crap this guy can do; he can take CARE of me.”

Oh, hey, it looks like he has his own site: Kelly Mehler’s School of Woodworking.

He works in Berea, Kentucky, where my late mom went to boarding school. According to her, Berea was “arty.” I think that means a lot of yankees had descended on the place and tried to turn it into a bizarre and geographically inappropriate colony of longhairs. I don’t know too much about Berea, but I believe it’s one of those towns where they have a whole lot of people making butter churns with hand tools. It’s probably the kind of place where it’s very easy to buy a really good chisel.

I don’t know if the theme of the place has anything to do with Appalachian culture. To hear my mom tell it, the situation was pretty much the opposite.

Wikipedia says a past president of Berea College started the artsy-craftsy metamorphosis, hoping to capitalize on the national market for Kentucky crafts. I don’t want to break anybody’s rice bowl, but Eastern Kentucky is not known for finely crafted items. It’s just not. It’s not even known for good construction. The old houses tend to have crooked walls and sloping floors. I’ve been all over Appalachia, and one of the things I noticed was that old houses and buildings in North Carolina looked a hell of a lot better than they did in Kentucky. The difference is very obvious.

I’ll bet the vast majority of the people making this junk are from out of state, and that they have taught the locals ten times what the locals have taught them. I’m just being honest. People up there have always made great music and fantastic quilts, but I can’t think of anything else they do really well. The sad truth is, people who are good at things generally leave, to get away from the bad local economy. They call it “brain drain.” This is why I grew up in Florida.

Kentucky attracts people who are much more excited about its culture than they have any right to be. One example: Appalshop. This is an outfit in my dad’s hometown, Whitesburg. This town is located among some of the most nearly vertical terrain in the US. The hills aren’t all that high, but they’re about four feet apart. It’s very close to West Virginia. For some reason, a bunch of hippies showed up and started documenting the culture and recording the music. That’s Appalshop.

It’s kind of odd, because culturally, the hippies are about as much like the locals as Cambodians. Their values are utterly foreign. Nobody in Eastern Kentucky wants to hear about composting and tofu and recycling. People who preach that stuff are lucky if their houses don’t get burned down. The only liberal value people in Eastern Kentucky support is the desire to addict people to welfare checks. When it comes to government money, they are hardcore socialists, on the same page as Saul Alinsky.

Here’s a handout horror story. My aunt was a school principal up there. She said people in her town instructed their kids to fail ADD tests so they would get stuff from the government. Imagine that. “Honey, be sure you don’t bust 600 on the SAT, so mamaw can get free Ding Dongs.”

It’s kind of insulting, having hippies educated in New England show up and “help” the locals preserve their culture. But I guess they’re not going away. If I lived up there, and they came to record me playing the autoharp or the banjo, I’d feel like a monkey at the zoo. It’s funny; no one seems to notice the implicit condescension. There is nothing flattering about having yankees show up, take photos of you, your house, and your family, and treat you like a newly discovered aborigine.

I wonder why the hippie organizations don’t send people into black ghettos to preserve the wonderful culture. Okay, I don’t really wonder. It’s because it’s harder to get away with condescending to black people.

I think people from Appalachia should get in vans and go to places like Michigan and Massachusetts and document the culture. Problem is, people in places like that don’t have any discernible culture. “Here’s Lance and his wife Margaret. Let’s see if we can film them playing some indigenous music. Oh, wait. That’s right. They HAVE no indigenous music, because they’re exactly like people in California and Indiana. Well, maybe we can film them hitting a bucket of balls at the driving range.”

I want some more woodworking videos. I can’t get enough of this stuff. For some reason, they’re the best tool videos. The metalworking stuff just isn’t as satisfying. Maybe it’s because metalworking is so much easier. Metal does whatever you want. At least it seems that way.

Router Table may Conceivably Work

I am feeling unusually smug, and that is saying a lot.

I decided to make a final effort to stiffen up and flatten my old MDF desk, so I could put a router on one side and a miter saw on the other. I went to Home Depot today and got the stuff. Two two-by-sixes and a bunch of lag screws and washers. The idea is this: use the table saw to put straight sides on the two-by-sixes and then screw them to the underside of the desk. I was going to try to screw in from the bottom, but I decided to take Og’s advice and go down from the top. It’s just too hard, making straight holes all the way through a two-by-six with a hand drill. Going in from the top, I only need to go a couple of inches past the MDF, and if everything isn’t completely straight, I’ll never see it.

The table saw scares the daylights out of me. Ever since I saw a Sawstop promotional video featuring a guy with about six and two-thirds fingers, I have been afraid of the table saw, and if I ever get rich, I will buy a Sawstop in a heartbeat, just to put that video out of my mind.

I set it up today, and I even remembered to attach the shop-vac AND turn it on for some of the cuts. And guess what? It will true up the side of a piece of lumber. I didn’t think it would work, but it did. I now have a piece of 4 7/8″ wide lumber with a very straight side on it, and I’m going to screw it to the desk.

Unfortunately I underestimated the size of the Forstner bit I would need. I thought my 3/4″ bit would do it, but it looks like it will have to be 7/8″ to accommodate the washers under the heads of the screws. I am on hold until I get the bit.

I’m sure I used the table saw improperly. I got out my Fine Woodworking DVD and looked at parts of it, but it seems like every time I get ready to use a tool, the books and videos cease to apply to whatever it is I’m doing. I have no outfeed table, so I had to go around the saw and hold up the lumber myself, once it got to the point where it could tip. I’m not sure how this could be dangerous, but since I did it, I’m sure it is.

Any clues for handling outfeed would be appreciated. I don’t have anything approximating the height of the saw table. I guess some sort of roller deal is the easy way out. Let’s check the Home Depot site. “Roller stand.” I suppose that’s it. I need me some of those.

The two-by-six is still crooked in the other direction. That is, if you stand it on an edge and look down on it, you can see a bend. I have that figured out. I’ll pre-drill the screw holes in it, and I’ll attach a few at one end first. That will be easy, because the deflection over half the piece is small. Then I can shove the other end into line as I put the other screws in. I think.

The big question is, will the tabletop be flat once the lumber is screwed to it? If not, I’ll have to kill myself. It certainly should be. It would take a lot of force to flex that two-by-six, and the tabletop is not that rigid. I don’t even think it’s warped. I think it’s just sagging because it isn’t supported.

This is recreation, so if it doesn’t work, it’s still fun.

I impressed my father today. He has a newish copier, and the toner ran out. He also has a bunch of old toner from old machines. I told him to refill the cartridge from them. He brought it to me and told me to go to town on it.

Generally, toner cartridges have plugs you can rip out, in order to add toner. Canon has figured this out, and they don’t like people filling their cartridges, so they make their cartridges so you can’t get to the plug without destroying them. I took the Wecheer tool and a Dremel disk and cut out a rectangular piece of the cartridge, and I dumped everything out and filled it with toner. Then I covered the hole with duct tape. I saw that trick on the web. Now he has a $90 refill for absolutely nothing, and he can keep refilling the cartridge until it stops working. He probably has a pound of toner, which is a huge amount.

He can’t believe it. He thinks I’m a genius.

I absolutely love tool videos. It’s so beautiful, seeing people succeed easily at the impossible. I think I’m going to buy a few more and just watch them when I feel like I can’t cope. I’ll know that no matter how inept and pathetic I am, somewhere there is some guy who can make a dovetail joint.

I am GOING to have a woodworking table. You just watch.

What Exactly IS “Congress”?

I just took a look at Howobamagotelected.com. Man, is it funny. And sad. I’m sure you’ve seen it already. A conservative group sponsored a scientific poll, comparing the knowledge of McCain and Obama voters. And of course, the Obama voters came out behind.

That makes sense. Liberalism appeals to coddled ivory-tower eggheads with high IQs and the common sense of lemmings, but it also appeals very strongly to people who are either unintelligent or ill-informed. Like many conservatives, I have had the experience of explaining undisputed, verifiable facts to self-proclaimed liberals, and then having them tell me they agree with conservative positions. Awareness tends to lead to conservative opinions. But we live in a nation which no longer educates its people, and a huge percentage of Americans know almost nothing and make decisions purely on the basis of emotion or a desire for approval from others.

People tend to become more conservative as they age. That’s because we learn as we get older, and as a result, older people know more than young people. When you’re old, you know better than to run with scissors, make the minimum payment on your charge cards, or let random men in pickup trucks blacktop your driveway for “bargain” prices. And you may also know better than to vote for socialists who spout empty slogans and promise a return to the utterly discredited notions that destroyed the prosperity of Europe and caused more suffering than Nazism.

The more you know, the harder it is to fall for a leftist pseudo-messiah. Prison inmates are, on average, exceedingly dim, and they overwhelmingly support liberal policies. That ought to tell you something.

If the public had been better informed, Obama might well have lost. He’s a real zero, there is no reason whatsoever to expect him to be an able President, and McCain’s qualifications were clearly much better.

It’s an interesting situation. I used to think that the power of the new media would guarantee a fair shot for conservativism, and that as a result, the country would continue sliding to the right. But I underestimated the right’s power to fall on its sword–actually, to jump up and down on it like a pogo stick–and I also underestimated the old media’s willingness to openly whore for its chosen candidate, and to stifle the new media and blunt its effectiveness.

The conservative Blogosphere used to be a factor in politics, but that’s no longer true. We are dead. We are nearly powerless. No one pays any attention to us any more. Pajamas Media is part of the reason. There used to be a healthy exchange of links on the right, but when PJM contaminated the data stream, and especially when it became obvious that PJM was an utter failure, and the principals became desperate and started circling the wagons, the linkage became incestuous. I predicted this when PJM was created. People who used to communicate and exchange links quit. Glenn Reynolds started putting up ridiculous blind links to PJM’s mother site, in vain hopes of turning it into a significant web destination. Links that used to go to pieces of quality writing went to unremarkable blog entries of little merit.

Let me ask you something. Say it’s October of 2008, and I come up with something as damaging to Obama as the Rather memo was to CBS. Do you think the major PJs would link to me? Please. No one beyond my small circle of readers would ever hear about it.

There are bloggers I just don’t communicate with any more, and PJM is the reason, and I’m not alone. I wish they would just let it die instead of pretending it’s viable. PJM is never going to be anything but a flop. It has had years to succeed, and so far, we have seen nothing but failure. Certain pockets have been lined, and that was probably the only real purpose of the enterprise, and the funding has dried up (according to insiders), so why not close the lid on the coffin and say you gave it a darn good try? I suggest the Pee Wee Herman approach. Say “We meant to do that.”

The conservative old media didn’t help. They have a zero-sum mentality, and they deliberately ignore people who pose a threat to their franchises. They let a few new people get near the cameras–especially attractive but boring girls with no talent or knowledge or insight–but on the whole, we’ve been kept out. The tokens got all the gravy.

Meanwhile, the left was turning the Internet into the biggest cash and propaganda conduit in the history of American politics. Obama even managed to use it to suck up gigantic illegal donations from our enemies in China and the Muslim world. With no repercussions. Doodad Pro will never be called to testify before Congress. Obama got away with countless crimes, and nothing will ever be done about it. Meanwhile, John McCain got hoisted on his own remarkably ill-conceived campaign finance reform petard. Great law, John. That worked out real well.

It amazes me to see how the right threw away the Internet. We used to own it. And it’s a huge loss; it is still the future. If the Internet were TV, 2008 would be like 1950. The explosion, in its fullness, is not here yet.

Our online inferiority is going to be permanent; it will take years to begin digging our way out. The lingering PJ magic is still at work, like a daily dose of Roundup and Nonoxynol-9. The conservative old media has learned absolutely nothing, except this: the right is in trouble, so they need to work even harder to protect themselves from competition. The left wiped us completely off the map, and we helped. We are not a factor. We have been utterly crushed, and we aren’t smart or altruistic enough to do anything to fix it. I congratulate Markos Zuniga and George Soros. When your enemies are as inept as we are, a victory is nothing to brag about, but they beat us really, really badly. Their knees are on our throats, and they deserve credit. They sold our nation an Edsel, and Americans think it’s a Ferrari. We couldn’t sell raw meat to sharks.

I know it makes the cheerleaders mad when I say this stuff, but here’s something to think about: they have always been wrong. There is a difference between thinking positive and refusing to face reality.

I’ve been wrong, too. I was wrong when I said the future for the right was rosy.

I Will not Submit

Here is my latest trick. I tried to true my old desk, to make it into a router table, by screwing an L-shaped piece of aluminum to the underside. This effort was a failure. So I went back out and stuck shims between the aluminum and the desktop. That helped a lot. But not nearly enough.

I think I know the answer. I should scrap the desk’s legs and make a new desk out of wood. I could use my table saw to rip a few very straight pieces of lumber to put under the top. Then I could put the newly reinforced top on some new two-by-four legs. I would still get to use my nifty melamine/MDF top.

On the other hand, maybe I could get a couple of warped two-by-fours and fasten them under the top lengthwise. Then I could put long screws through them, into the table, and tighten the screws selectively to flex the table into line.

Hmm. I may have a better idea.

*#^%*#%%*#!!

I took a piece of scrap aluminum and screwed it to the bottom of my heavy MDF desk, in hopes that it might take a dip out of the center of the desk’s top. No dice. The aluminum is fairly sturdy, and I checked to see if it was straight before I attached it, but I guess the desk is too strong for it. Maybe I should have forced the desk into a true plane before I put in the screws. The aluminum exerted a lot of force on the table as I put in the screws to attach it, however, so I am sure it’s pushing against the bow.

I don’t know what to do now. I’m wondering if I could put a turnbuckle under the front of the table and connect it to the ends with cable. Then maybe if I tightened it, it would pull the table out of the bowed shape.

The steps I have taken so far cost about two dollars, so I don’t feel too bad.

I wonder if I could get a long threaded bolt and run it between the front feet of the table and use it to pull them together.

Clue me In

Say you’re building a router table, and the desk you’re basing it on is pretty big. Like 30″ deep.

How far back from the front edge should the router spindle be?

I’ve read that it shouldn’t be more than 16″ from the right edge, because a longer distance makes work uncomfortable.