I Did Not Understand the Way it Worked

You know, I have judged Hillary Clinton too harshly. Maybe this “redistribution of wealth” business isn’t such a bad idea.

Hillary and her husband are overweight White Anglo Saxon Protestants with millions in the bank, and they earn millions every year. And they’re nearly eligible to collect Social Security and get free medical care. But Hillary went way into debt, financing her failed Presidential campaign, and she wants shoeless, toothless Democrats on welfare to take the money they earn collecting cans and selling blood, and send it to her. Even though she will still be rich whether they send money or not.

I can’t see anything wrong with that! Poor people should do everything they can to make a rich old white lady and her even richer old white husband MORE RICH. As a conservative, I think it makes complete sense. Conservatives love redistribution of wealth, as long as it goes in the direction Hillary suggests. If I had realized I could be a Democrat and support robbing the poor to pay the rich, I would have signed up years ago.

Is there any law that says I can’t ask the poor to send me money, too? I mean, I’m not a politician or a TV evangelist, but I have needs, just like everybody else. Shouldn’t I have a mansion in Chappaqua, just like Bill and Hillsy? Of course I should. And if you’re poor, you’re never going to have anything anyway, so if you send twenty or thirty bucks to me, it won’t make your life any worse.

I’m more deserving than Hillary. She’s way richer than I am! Studies have shown that the gap between her net worth and my net worth gets bigger every year. Is that fair? Hell no. Redistribute a little of that wealth in my direction, to relieve this disgraceful inequity. In return, I promise to donate two percent of all net proceeds to Donald Trump.

That’s NET, now. Not gross. Whatever I have left over after I get done shopping.

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Moxie, the queen gun-totin’ capitalist of the world, has beat me to the idea. Go send her Paypal bucks just because she wants them.

One Day These Things Will Rule the Earth

The bees have won. Just when I felt cocky about defeating the incredible ghost ants, I went outside and found that the bees in the chimney are doing very well, after numerous attempts to plug their escape holes.

I can’t believe how tough bees are. Any hippie who tells you we’re wiping out our bees needs to be punched in the mouth. Cockroaches are wimps compared to bees. I have killed maybe twenty pounds of these things, and they keep coming back. They’re like tiny Hillary Clintons with wings. And I don’t just mean the queens.

A nut who makes his living hacking up houses and removing bees has been called. This will be fun.

I should really take up beekeeping. How can I lose, with animals that refuse to die when you do your best to kill them?

It’s on a Sandisk Card in Silicon Valley

For a few years, a question has been rolling around in my mind. I’ve been wondering what would happen when CGI got so good audiences were no longer able to distinguish animated characters from actors. Think about it. Why would you pay an aging, grey, saggy George Clooney 20 million dollars to make a movie, when for a fraction of the price, you could get a perpetually toned and tanned CGI character who is never late to the set, doesn’t go to rehab, and doesn’t have to be insured?

We just saw another Indiana Jones movie hit the silver screen. It was pretty bad, but it made money anyway, and because Harrison Ford looked old even when he was young, the 27-year hiatus didn’t completely ruin his credibility. But clearly, the movie’s makers would have had more and better options had he not aged. And think about James Bond. Sean Connery was fired because he looked awful in Diamonds are Forever. Then we suffered through Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton. It wasn’t until Pierce Brosnan was hired that the series became watchable again. What if they had had a CGI Bond on a hard drive somewhere? Forty years of top-quality Bond, without interruption. Something to think about.

Enter Emily. Have you seen her? She’s completely artificial. And she’s hot. She’s a pretty young actress who will never wrinkle or go gray, and she was created by a company called Image Metrics. You can see her here.

Emily never gets sick. She never sleeps. Her body is amazing. She doesn’t charge extra for nudity. She can dance. She can play any instrument. She can fly; no wires. If she can be taught to act–not that lofty a goal–she’ll be superior to 95% of Hollywood’s flesh and blood actresses. She may never have the charisma of a top-flight actress, but then neither does Angelina Jolie. Whose naked body was recently replaced by that of a CGI character, in Beowulf. She’s a nice-looking woman, but she never saw the day she could compare to the body the nerds made for her.

Men won’t care if male actors are replaced. That’s how men are. We’re not threatened by idealized role models. In fact, we prefer them. Feminists, however, will howl like never before, when Emily’s descendants start populating movie screens. Their tiny waists and perfect breasts will draw shrieks of rage from female liberals everywhere. If you think they were mad when Barbie was nine inches tall and came in a box, wait until she starts making movies. Wait until spoiled actresses find themselves competing with teams of mostly-male programmers. And what if they’re outsourced Indian programmers, who work for twenty bucks a day? Oh, man.

In a fairly short time, movies with completely realistic all-CGI casts will be within our reach. It won’t happen next week, but it won’t take twenty years, either. What’s going to happen to SAG? How are you going to force studios to pay extras and supporting cast members well, when they can be replaced with sprites? In long shots, it has already been done, many times. They did it in Titanic, which is an old movie now. In a few years, they’ll be able to do it for every character in a movie. Think of all the black, red-shirted ensigns who got vaporized on Star Trek. In the future, those guys will be clip art.

One of the sad things about Hollywood is that writers, who are chiefly responsible for all the magic, are cheated and underpaid. Stars, who are usually fungible, are overpaid. Will that situation continue to exist? In a hundred years, it may be possible to replace a writer with a machine. But actors are going to have real electronic competition much sooner.

Another question: how liberal will Hollywood be, if the population of performers is dramatically reduced? Imagine Hollywood without its hordes of far-left fringe nuts. Hollywood’s politics would be dictated by management. Are the executives, directors, and producers as uniformly liberal as the actors? I wonder.

Here’s a funny thing to consider. Using CGI actors is incredibly green. They don’t fly in private jets. They don’t ride in limos. They don’t have giant portable homes on wheels, the way real actors do, to keep them happy between takes. They can do many types of scenes without expensive, carbon-intensive sets. Why, it would be immoral to continue using real actors. It would be an environmental atrocity. Like Barbra Streisand’s house. Think of all the mansions that would no longer need to exist!

I’m all for CGI. Anything that takes power and money away from venal, toxic people is fine by me. Now if they start replacing audiences with CGI characters, all bets are off. Then I’ll be concerned.

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Here’s a link to the real Emily’s site.

Do we Dare Hope?

Here is my .17 HMR situation. The rifle will be in my sweaty paws next week. Midsouth has Hornady V-Max ammunition for under ten bucks a box, so I’m getting some of that. And I found a good deal on a Burris Fullfield II 4-14x scope, so that’s on the way. If it turns out to be more magnification than I want, I’ll put it on the K31 and move the 3-9x to the .17. Picked up a .17-caliber Boresnake when I ordered the rifle, so I’m all set RE cleaning.

I found a strange thing at Midsouth. They charge $33.00 for 500 9mm LRN Speer bullets. This is the size I use for the .38 Super. How is that possible? Oregon Trail, which is usually cheap, charges $52.75 (including shipping, before 10% Internet discount). Speer bullets are jim-dandy. I’ve shot billions of Blazers. I can’t figure it out. Is the price of lead tanking?

I’m checking. Lead has plummeted in price. Over the last year, it has gone from around $1.75 per pound to a present level of 86¢. Damn, maybe we’re in for some relief. That would sure be nice.

Now copper…hmm, it’s dropping, but nothing like lead. Maybe cast-bullet reloading is getting cheaper, faster than the price of finished ammunition, which includes brass casings, which are mostly copper.

I wonder if the lead drop is reflected in the price of finished lead ammunition, which has no copper jacketing. Doesn’t look like it. Cheaper Than Dirt’s lowest jacketed and non-jacketed .45 ACP prices are about the same.

I can’t find out how hard the Speer bullets are. That’s a problem. Laser-Cast bullets work fine in a .38 Super, but the speed may be too much for Speer’s bullets.

Crap.

Anyway, the information might be useful to some of you.

Capoeira Guy Lacks CHI

Seems like the older a person is, the more likely he is to forward funny material to you via email.

Here’s one my dad forwarded today:

.17 HMR

I did it. I bought myself a rifle. Not used. Not a milsurp. A totally new, supposedly super-accurate bolt-action rifle. I picked a Savage .17 HMR with a varmint barrel. You can see it at this link. I decided to go for stainless. Not sure why. I just felt like it.

Finally, I should be able to get a grip on rifle shooting. I won’t have to worry about putting a weird mount on a gun not made for a scope. I won’t have to worry about Romanian trigger slap or the flexing of a nylon stock. Just point and shoot.

I think I’ll get a Burris Fullfield II scope, with a maximum magnification of 14. That ought to be about right, and it’s not obscenely expensive. I already have a Fullfield on my K31, and it seems very nice.

Hopefully next week I’ll be able to get to the range and wring this thing out.

I don’t know what the .17 HMR is good for. I mentioned Varmint Al, the guy who shoots ground squirrels with .17 HMR rifles. I don’t think they’ll make a prairie dog pop in a satisfying way. But it should be a very good and economical range gun.

By da Gubbermint Uh da United Nations

I have stuff to do today. I have to mail a CD to a television producer. I have to mail books to a radio station, because they gave them away to listeners and my publisher hasn’t managed to get copies to them. I need to poison everything on this entire parcel of land, except for humans and parrots.

But I’ve decided I have time to do one more thing. I am going to get me a new gun.

The only question is, .22 or .17 HMR?

Tried to get my kitchen-table dealer to get me a .22, but he never got back to me. I have waited long enough.

It’s MEDICINAL

You won’t believe what Sondra K. is growing.

But I Think Baldilocks is Real Worried About her Bills

As you know, Baldilocks created a nonprofit and put up a site to benefit the Senator Obama Kogelo Secondary School, in Kenya. That’s the school Obama said he would help, but did not. Well, she just got herself interviewed in LA Weekly. Go take a look.

Lawn Chair I Bought at the Drugstore

I think it will take at least a week for the giddiness over the new kitchen faucet to subside. This was one of those repair jobs that have effects far beyond the obvious. The old faucet worked okay, but the area under it was never dry, because the faucet was just plain worn out. And crappy to start with. It was the classic one-lever job so many homes ended up with in the Seventies and Eighties, with the little ball on top of the lever. Total garbage. And it stuck nearly straight out over the sink, so it was impossible to get a big pot under it. And washing your hands under a low faucet is a pain, if there’s anything in the sink. You have to move stuff out of the way.

The Bradys probably had one of these next to their avocado-colored refrigerator.

Whatever rot was going on because of the dripping will now be arrested. I no longer have to worry that the floor will cave in.

It’s amazing, the things that can go wrong with a house. And if you come from a white-collar family, you may have no idea what’s happening. White-collar people are often extremely ignorant about home maintenance. Houses deteriorate constantly. You have to be the immune system. And if you don’t know what happens to houses that aren’t maintained, you need to read up and find out.

My great-grandfather owned a few houses in the Depression. He let people live in them, free of charge. Why? Because empty houses fall apart. When you can’t get rent, you can at least get a certain basic level of maintenance.

I can’t believe the suffering I’ve endured because of ignorance. For example, I had no idea black ants and carpenter ants were bad, so I didn’t bother killing them. The carpenter ants ate a bunch of my physics texts, which I had kept for sentimental reasons. They also killed my tomatoes by putting aphids on them. I don’t know what mischief the black ants got up to, but I’m sure they did something bad. They’re dead now.

Cars are just like houses. It turns out you have to replace your tires every six years, even on vehicles you don’t drive. Otherwise the sidewalls crack open; I’ve seen it happen. Tires rot with age. They don’t tell you this when you buy tires, because sometimes you’re buying tires that are already two or three years old. Tires have a code on them; you can figure out how old they are. No one told me about that when I was a kid. Pretty scary, if you’re driving your children around on old tires.

Entropy is a real dirtbag. It never lets up for a second. Maybe it’s best to think of life as a treadmill instead of an easy chair.

By the way, the sucrose/boric acid syrup seems to be wiping out the ghost ants. I’m going to make some more and pour it on the exterior walls near ant nests. I guess I’m turning into one of those annoying old guys who never stops working on his house, and who irritates his neighbors by pointing out their maintenance problems. Maybe in ten years I’ll be raising the flag every morning and taking it down at night, and strolling around the yard in Bermuda shorts and black socks, with a tall boy of Milwaukee’s Best in one hand.

Actually, those guys are pretty cool compared to jaded, dysfunctional neighbors whose kids egg your house all the time.

New Faucet

I went to Home Depot and bought a new kitchen faucet; the old one was dripping into the cabinet and encouraging the ants and roaches. They had various wrenches to use on faucet parts. They had a $30 basin wrench and some weird new plastic thing for $10. I had no idea which was right, so I got both, figuring I could return the one that was most useless.

It turns out the plastic one kicks ass, so I didn’t have to open the $30 one. And man, are faucets better than they used to be. The old one had the usual crappy copper tubing on it, and it was fastened to the sink with some kind of hard crap that had set up like ceramic. The new one came with a gasket, and everything that had to be tightened could be tightened nearly all the way by hand.

I bought a couple of 30″ braided lines to put on it–the plastic wrench will hold these in place and screw them on–and I got them attached, and then I realized they were the wrong size for the wall valves. So I have to go back to Home Depot. I will have spent about $20 on a tool and some parts I banged up and could not return, but I didn’t have to hire a slackjaw and have the job done wrong AGAIN.

This job was intimidating, but in practice, it wasn’t undoable. There were no moments when I realized I was doomed or inadequate. Beyond my usual baseline sensations along those lines. I am really mad at everyone who ever worked on the kitchen. I will have to get a grip on myself and put that behind me, as a good Christian who doesn’t chase bad plumbers with a cattle prod or a horsewhip.

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IT’S FINISHED! IT WORKS! THE WATER RUNS! THERE ARE NO LEAKS! THE ROACHES ARE SITTING IN SACKCLOTH AND ASHES!

This is glorious. It’s so nice to see a job done right, while savoring the pleasure of not paying for labor.

Possible Solution

I’m blogging a lot because my plans to do repairs and stuff today are being disrupted by rain. And laziness. Here I go again.

I have exciting news for Floridians who are suffering with ghost ants. These things are tiny; maybe a millimeter long. They have white rear ends. Not really white; more of a light beige. They can’t be kept out. Once you have them, they’re hell to get rid of. And they’re extremely annoying.

I have been fighting these things for what seems like eternity. None of the products sold locally are worth a damn. Yesterday I realized I had the answer. The Internet. When I’m in trouble because I don’t have information I need, only the Internet can provide it.

I found an article from New Zealand, of all places. It said that ghost ants were easily wiped out with a mixture of sucrose syrup and boric acid. They eat it, carry it home, feed it to their queen, and die.

I have sucrose! I have boric acid!

Last night I made a mixture, guessing at the 1% concentration the article suggested. I smeared it on the wall, in an area the ants have turned into a highway. Sure enough, the ants glommed around it and ate it up.

I poured about half a cup of this stuff on the ground, outside the kitchen. There are nests out there. I’m hoping they’ll suck it up and kill themselves. I may smear it on the wall by the bushes.

If your house is clean, ghost ants are easier to control. But due to an old plumbing issue, my ants have access to a large supply of old grease, inside the exterior wall. It will take them a thousand years to eat it all, and it can’t be cleaned out. So it’s poison or nothing.

One frustrating thing about ghost ants is that they eat different things at different times of year. Maybe that’s because worker ants are always female; you know how women are. Sometimes the ants like sugar, and sometimes they like grease or protein. Luckily, they’re in sugar mode this week.

I don’t know if this will kill them or not, but they are damn sure eating it.

The Nonexistent Secret to China’s Imaginary Boxing Wins

Earlier I wrote about fraud and BS, and I mentioned the ridiculous board-breaking demonstrations martial artists put on. You’ve seen it. Some doofus who runs a dojo has his assistant hold a thin board up, and the doofus kicks or hits it, and it breaks…right along the grain. Oooh. Impressive!

Here’s some amusing text from James Randi’s site:

I went to my nearby lumber-yard and asked for some 1″ X 8″ X 14″ pine boards, and the clerk immediately asked if I wanted them for karate demonstrations. Yes, I said, and I wanted the grain going across the boards, not along the length. Well, he told me, we have those already cut, for karate schools — but be careful not to let them bounce around in the car, because they split very easily….

He also told me they carried paving-bricks specially made for the schools, too. These were very high in sand-content, he said, so they crumbled easily.

I love it. Whatever you may think of Randi, there is no evidence that he lies.

Here is what would convince me that martial artists have a special ability to break things. Let me provide a single two-by-six section, two feet long. I’ll put it between two sturdy objects one foot apart. I promise you, no man alive could break it, regardless of what part of his body he used. Let me use oak or hickory instead of softwood, and I’ll gladly use a two-by-four instead of a two-by-six. For even the best Chi Boy, it would be a ticket to the emergency room.

In fact, I should do a Youtube. I should take my 13-pound sledge and try to break a two-by-six. Or maybe I could park a car tire on it, resting over 900 pounds on it.

It’s funny; chi never seems to make it into the ring. You can watch UFC all day, and the fighters are highly motivated and very knowledgeable, yet you never see a magical chi strike that kills the opponent instantly. A boxer can make tens of millions of dollars in a single fight. How come none of them learn how to use chi? Uh…because it does not exist. You better believe, with that kind of money on the line, someone would have brung the chi by now, if it were possible.

You don’t even see magical chi in Asian fights, filmed in the birthplace of chi. If chi existed, the Chinese boxers would be slaughtering the opposition at the Olympics. It’s not happening. Wake up and smell the green tea.

Fay Takes her Toll

It was thoughtless of me to make fun of KILLER STORM Fay. Although I wasn’t harmed, others suffered terribly. I am ashamed of my selfish viewpoint.

If you want to do your part to end the suffering caused by global warming, stop by Babalublog today and click the Paypal tip jar. No one should have to be alone, facing a situation like this.

Rubber Gorilla Suit = Ticket to National TV Exposure

It seems like the news these days contains one shocking story after another. Now, unbelievably, they are telling us that the frozen bigfoot found by two highly reputable North Georgia men who wear baseball caps when talking to the press, is a fake. I really can’t believe it. I was totally convinced.

No I wasn’t. I said it was a fraud days ago, basing my conclusion purely on my knowledge of human nature. The sad thing about this is that if, by some miracle, an actual bigfoot turned out to exist, no one would pay any attention.

Actually, they would. People will believe almost anything, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Most American women still believe in socialism, especially when the male candidate promoting it is cute. Conservative men see the state as a bumbling, meddlesome, thieving nanny. Women see it as a rich husband who doesn’t hog the remote or expect sex.

College graduates in New York still play three-card Monte, a decades-old game which only exists for the purpose of ripping suckers off. Intelligent individuals all over the country still pay total strangers in rusty trucks to put “spare blacktop from another job” on their driveways. Somewhere a man with a high-school education, wearing a stolen white lab coat, is selling laetrile to cancer patients. And half of the the American population believes global warming exists, even as thermometers tell us the world is cooling. Would most Americans believe a good bigfoot story? Hell, yes. And some of us would even be willing to vote for him. Look at Ron Paul’s numbers.

There is no bigfoot. There is no yeti. There is no Loch Ness monster. We aren’t being visited by aliens. There is no karate master on earth who can break a thick hardwood board, across the grain, with any part of his body; they break thin softwood boards along the grain. It is impossible to bend a spoon with your mind. Chi is a myth. Nothing that happens in the Bermuda Triangle is any weirder than the stuff that happens everywhere else. WD40 is not made from fish oil. And Social Security is a Ponzi scheme that will eventually have to be reformed by slashing benefits to the bone.

John Kennedy did not read 2000 words per minute. Nothing interesting is going on at Area 51. The thing that crashed at Roswell really was a weather balloon. Elvish is spoken only by human nerds, because there are no elves. We will never find life on Mars. There are no alligators living in sewers, except for those that were flushed during the last five minutes and which are in the process of drowning. Transcendental meditation is a crock. Hurricane Andrew did not kill hundreds of people, and there are no government freezers full of bodies. We don’t have enough arable land to grow sufficient corn to end the energy crisis. Finally, Oprah is not a genius; she is merely a skilled, moderately bright panderer and possibly the luckiest woman who ever lived.

Now you won’t have to watch Penn and Teller or Mythbusters for a solid three months.

Life is so full of truly weird and extraordinary things; why do we have to make up lies in order to be amazed? Here’s an example. I own a parrot who can tell when I think something is funny, even when I’m in another room and I’m not speaking. When I get an urge to laugh, Marvin laughs first. That’s more impressive to me than John Kennedy pretending to read 40 newspapers every morning. Or whatever the number was. And I’m not stupid enough to believe it makes Marv a psychic. Obviously, there is some clue he picks up on, which I can’t perceive. Like the clue that tells him he’s over something expensive, so it’s time to drop a watery deuce.

For that matter, the experiences that have confirmed God’s existence to me are more impressive than, say, a hairy Israeli pretending to bend spoons on the Merv Griffin Show. Maybe our sick thirst for the bizarre is a consequence of rejecting God. People who believe see more than enough weird things to make them happy.

I kind of miss the Amazing Kreskin. He did all sorts of wonderful tricks, admitting the entire time that it was all BS. Penn and Teller ought to send him ten percent of their income; he invented their shtick.

At least one of the bigfoot grifters is going to be fired from his job. That’s a good thing. He’s a cop, and what did he just do? He faked evidence. In front of the entire country. Imagine him on a witness stand in a criminal case.

DEFENSE ATTORNEY: So Officer Jim Bob. You say you found my client’s .357 next to the body, with his fingerprints all over it.

OFFICER JIM BOB: Yep.

DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Here’s a photo you took at the crime scene. What do you see in the lower left corner?

OFFICER JIM BOB: A leprechaun holding a unicorn horn.

JUDGE: Bailiff, pimpslap that man.

I appreciate you reading this, and I know you thought it was funny. How do I know? I asked Marv.