I don’t know about you all, but weekends sure do seem to take a lot out of me. But it’s a lot better than going to work, which is why I’m glad I have today off. Especially since I neglected to cut the grass (though it’s kind of wet out there, so I’m not sure if I’ll get to it today, either). I also have a new $11 plastic mailbox to install. Kind of decided that since the snowplow’s just gonna take it sooner or later anyway, there’s no point in getting anything but the cheapest shit available.
Not that I didn’t manage to spend more money than I’d have liked to this weekend. When I went to buy a window to stick in my office, it of course turned out that they didn’t have what I wanted in the size that I wanted, so I was forced to spend more on something better. So my cheap little $120 air conditioner will probably wind up costing me close to $500 (of course, some of that’s paint and screws and stuff I can use for other things down the road) when all’s said and done. But, what the hell, I’ll never have to buy another one. And it improved my view greatly, for where once when I was sitting in my chair facing north, I was looking at a wall, I now see this:
So now I see trees on two sides of me, which helps compensate for the total lack of a view in my windowless workplace. Now I just need to finish finishing it.
Which I suppose I better get started on (easier said than done, because I seem to be surrounded by about 240 pounds of dog, and there aint a lot of room to move).
Seems i caan post from my ipad
Looks like the spam thing was broken. It was updated and seems to work now.
Nobel scientist Tim Hunt: female scientists cause trouble for men in labs
Sadly, Tim, it isn’t just scientists who suffer with this curse. Females are constantly falling in love with me at work, and then when I offer constructive criticism or tell them, hey, sorry, but I’m married, they start bawling away. I mean, I hate to break their hearts and all, but, geez, keep it in your pants, ladies!
The young, hot women are the worst.
I like the response here:
What is both shocking and bewildering about Hunt’s jovial after-dinner remarks is that this is the considered view of someone whose life has been devoted to not taking the world for what it seems to be.
How bizarre that someone so entirely unreflective about his immediate surroundings can win a Nobel prize for original work. How bizarre that when he delivers his Nobel laureate lecture he describes (with a self-deprecation that is the luxury of an unchallenged inner sense of rectitude) the way that breakthroughs in his understanding came from mistakes, like running a centrifuge for too long or attributing unexpected results to contamination, but it never occurs to him to examine his own assumptions about the people with whom he works.
So here’s a hypothesis, Sir Tim. It’s not the women who are the problem. It’s you.
Speaking of irresistable older men….
Graham went on to say:
I would be really pleased with a mailbox, especially if the post office put the mail in it. This winter, when the snow kept getting higher, a daily trip to the post office was quite difficult at times. I used to think that eventually the post office would decide it was cheaper and less confusing to have a post person deliver the mail instead of maintaining 2 post offices with 2 different zip codes, neither of which refer to a geographic area. But, I think that probably a pipe dream now.
It would be nice to not have our mail eaten by dogs. We have a mail slot in our door and if we forget to put up a barracade, it is a free-for-all. Shhhh we have to have one of the last walking postal carriers in the country…..
PJ, I envy your resourcefulness and physical ability. I would love to be able to knock out a wall and insert a window. There was a time when I maybe could have physically done some of it, but certainly not now. Plus, you have to have courage to knock a hole in an outside wall. I would be thinking about that for weeks.
The key in this (as in most things in life) is to function, as the Car Talk guys used to say”Non Impediti Ratione Cogitationis” (unencumbered by the thought process). First, you make a hole in the side of your house. Then you stand back and say, “oh my god, what the f*ck have I done?” At which point you have to figure out what to do to fix it.
This is where a corollary to the Infinte Monkey Theorem (called the Infinite Caulk Theorem) comes in handy. With an infinite amount of time and an infinite amount of caulk, even a monkey like me can fix a hole in the wall. It’s also good to have plywood handy.
The scariest thing I ever did was replace all the galvanized pipes in a house I used to live in. With a window, you can always cover the hole with a poster or something until you get it figured out. But once you cut out all your plumbing, you kinda have to fix it if you don’t want to have to take a dump in the back yard.
I had the misfortune of hearing Paul Ryan talking about King vs Burwell, the lawsuit that says the subsidies are only for states that established their own exchanges. Ryan said the suit was about the unconstitutionality of how the law was rammed through congress and that he and the other members of his GOP were about freeing people from Obamacare.
Ugh!
Hopefully he’ll be able to free me from my Social Security, too. I only have about 7½ years to go, so he better get busy.
I’ll just make a list of passings besides Ornette Coleman…
James Last-big band leader
Vincent Bugliosi-Manson prosecutor and author of Helter Skelter as well as a fine book on SCotUS stealing the 2000 election.
For some reason coffee on the east end of Long Island is awful AND expensive. I think it is the Starbucks model of coffee vending. (Forgive me if any of you are Starbucks coffee drinkers.) So, yesterday, we took a 2 hour ride to Lake Grove to buy 4 pounds of coffee from Fairway at 1/2 of what we pay out here and this morning I had a cup of coffee that was not bitter. We also ate at a chinese restaurant that did not think grease should be the main ingredient in any meal.
If I could cook I guess life would be tastier. Unfortunately, I hate to cook.
Ugh Starbucks is not coffee — I don’t know what it is, but it’s horrible. That was quite a schlep for you from Shelter Island. Glad you found decent coffee — too bad it involved such a schlep!! I used to live in Lake Ronkonkoma (where Edith Bunker spent her summers probably at Yerks Beach which was 3 blocks from where I lived — and I don’t know whatever became of that) which in Lake Grove country. I’m sure it has changed a lot. Left there at the end of 1980 shortly after John Lennon was assassinated to move to Poplar Bluff, Missouri. That wasn’t so great, either, although it was where I first saw “ET” at the Rodgers Theater and couldn’t stop crying because I felt so bad for the little guy and my sleeves were soaking wet — who brings tissues to movies???? That is an unforgettable movie. Drew Barrymore was so darn cute. And so was E.T.
Oh, well, time to get my old brain outta the WABAC Machine and get some sleep to re-energize to face the dysfunction and abuse of tomorrow.
Starbucks. Bleh.
I don’t understand how Starbucks has become so popular as I have never met anyone who likes the coffee. However, the cappuccino and lattes are OK. Probably because they are more milk and sugar than coffee. Maybe they are what people drink. They are what I drink when I’m someplace and Starbucks is the only coffee store.
They have good marketing, a standaradized exerience, and high prices. For some reason, this seems to appeal a large class of people. Personally, I really don’t care for “dark roast” (which I think is a eupemism for burnt, bitter coffee), and the thought of putting milk and sugar in coffee nauseates me.
I think one reason they took off is because before they started sprouting up everywhere, there were a lots of places that didn’t have anyone selling ‘high-end’ coffee. My Cajun band friends were delighted to find one after suffering through bad road coffee. Several of them took to carrying equipment to make their own. They really prefer Peet’s when available. They probably agree with your assessment about over-roasting.