Message from a Shoe-Shine Boy

Homemade Cider and Current Reading

Blue Sky and sunshine returns. The temp is a touch lower today (cloud cover is a great insulator) at 45℉ with humidity pretty stable at 30.2 in/Hg.  There is a whisper of a breeze.

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I have always been suspicious of anything that comes out of the collective mouths of major governments or media or humanities professors.  Experience has taught me that by the time these folks have worked up a rationale for action that will benefit one subset of the population at the expense of another subset, the actual physical characteristics of that action will be so shrouded in hand-waving and false advertising that I have to grade them, oscar-like, on the quality of their performance rather than the truth of their utterings.

I do spend time every morning (≅ 1.5 hours) going through a series of websites to try and get a bare breath of the winds that day.  I can’t for a minute say that any estimate is all that accurate, but I do flatter myself that by reading different discussions my overall accuracy goes up (I figure that any single “article” tells you around 30-35% of the entire picture.  When you read different POV’s, you can usually manage to get up to around 50-60%.  You will still be misinformed a substantial percentage of the time, but you have a better chance of a better (but imperfect) understanding and will thusly be better equipped to make accommodations in the truly minor part of the picture that is your individual life.

Reading today about all the folks in major capitals talking about war and making preparations for such leads me to think that this is hand waving trying to distract you from the fact that the economy is in the toilet and a hand is on the flush lever.

For a while there (2018 to late 2024) the gloomy/doomy economic types were in the background bleating half-hearted beats.  The bezzle was going to well for them to make much a fuss.  But lately the bezzle has been tapering off and they have ramped up their “reporting” to enhance their wallet thickness.

Now, this does not contradict my suspicions, but it does increase (in my estimation) that the dollars and cents aspect of my life might start looking more tenuous.  

All I am saying is that all the shouting is just about the simple fact that you may well be living leaner soon.  It might well behoove you to make provisions for that decline in choices.

The Memory of Mrs Lake

Long ago and far away in Isan

Another gray day.  Same as yesterday (52℉ and 30.3 in/Hg) no wind to speak of.

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Mrs. Lake was my high school English teacher during my senior year.  She had a moderate success in instilling a love of the language, but she did lead me to understand that I only liked poetry and literature when it was written in my own language.  Reading translations of Dante and Dostoevsky that were assigned by Mrs. Lake  was my first experience with “furriner writin’” (How does one use nested quote symbols anyway) and my position on this opinion has only hardened in the decades that have followed.

I was quite surprised and pleased when JMG announced that he was going the spen the next little while going over Yeat’s book “A Vision”.  Yeats is the only Poet that I have ever spent money on.  And to this day I still say that he is the only poet that I have allowed the dubious honor of enjoying most of the published works.  Now there are some other poets that have rung the bell occasionally, but Yeats has by far (>75% by best guess analysis) of poetry and prose worth reading.

So I am going over the first three “chapters” of that book and trying to sort out what I should be learning/understanding and trying to sort out what other people are trying to learn/teach/propagandize.  The Internet Archive has a text and scanned and OCR’ed versions available, but the OCR is riddled with OCR errors.

So I am going through the OCR and correcting the errors that I find and I will be publishing chapters as I complete them.  But, heresy of heresies, when I find something that I don’t understand (Like where is Rapallo), I am going to stick in a wikipedia link.  

Since I am completely blasé about my current coursework at the local diploma mill, I am going to take advantage of JMG and the internet to maybe learn something.  You get to watch my struggle.

Choices

One of the fond memories from my working days.  On the way home

High gray again today, temps is a little low (46℉), barometer is the same (30.1 in/Hg) and it looks to be a bog-standard gray spring day.  Sigh.

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The current foofooraw concerning “artificial intelligence” has made me sit back and think about just what the fuck people are all het up about.

This in turn got me thinking about what and how I write here on the internet.  Then I got to thinking about what my expectations for this seemingly pointless activity are.  All of this made me question why I am so damn paranoid.

I consider what I write here to be more of a diary than anything.  I do expect that someone will drop by but I don’t presume to charge them for the effort.  I think that isn’t all that unusual, but there on the edges of my brain, I occasionally hear a quiet voice whisper to me “charge for it!”.

But somewhere in the mess of changing technologies and competing corporate skullduggery, I needlessly switch things up and every couple of years I go haring after a new platform that meets with my latest half-baked moral imperative.  

I have been pretty content with Dreamwidth as a service.  I have been “screeding” here for the past 7+ years and it suits the purpose just fine.  But I only moved here in a fit of pique concerning how Blogger changed things to make the process more idiot proof and I had to learn different ways to do the same thing.  That and I was (am?) a JMG fanboy and decided to be a copycat.

But the last couple of months have got me thinking about my motivations and my reasoning and mostly I am not impressed with the quality I see there.

The world has changed since 2005 when I started blogging.  Blogging has become sort of passé though it hangs on with a devoted fan base.  

I will be playing around with the publication medium on both Dreamwidth and Blogger.  I suppose that right now I am thinking that it might be easier to just publish on both.  Google isn’t going anywhere but is a problem in terms of its power.  Dreamwidth is free, but I went through a couple of small internet service providers a long ago and Dreamwidth is trying to maintain a niche business which is always dicey during bad times.

Been a while

I published here for years and years, I really do need to sit down for a day to figure out how to download everything and move it over to another site. I will spend time on this pretty soon. But not today