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Book Review, 2022
I was on a bit of a non-fiction kick this year, and got a little irritated at the author of one of the books I read. More about that later. In no particular order, here's the list for 2022:
- The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane - I read this many years ago and decided to pick up a copy and read it again. If you're ever on Jeopardy!, the red badge is a bloody wound.
- The Lost Children, Shirley Dickson - Meh. The author never met a gerund she didn't like. She's written several other books about WWII and I doubt I'll read them.
- The Reivers, William Faulkner - A comic masterpiece. Faulkner has such a unique style of writing.
- The Real Anthony Fauci, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - A very well researched and heavily documented account of someone who should be tried for crimes against humanity. If you'd like to know what really went on during both the AIDS and COVID crises, I highly recommend this book. Almost every sentence is referenced.
- To Have and Have Not, Ernest Hemingway - Once again, you're hooked into rooting for the unsung hero, only to find out he gets crushed in the end. Curse you Hemingway!
- The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran - If you like memorizing quotes to deliver at a dinner toast, this book is full of good ones. My favorite: "Forget not that the earth delights in feeling your bare feet, and the winds long to play with your hair."
- Killing the Legends, Bill O'Reilly & Martin Dugard - The stories of how John Lennon, Muhammad Ali and Elvis Presley changed pop culture but were eventually ruined because of bad management. There are a lot of interesting facts that I didn't know, such as Lennon was a heroin addict and abandoned his wife and child in England while pursuing fame (and Yoko). The author points out the book should not be used to judge the subjects contained therein, however one can't help but doing so.
- Lost Boy Found, Kirsten Alexander - Based on a true story, an excellent read and the author's debut novel. Shows the lengths wealthy people will go to in order to have what they want, sometimes at the expense of everyone else. Here's a great line that sums it up, as spoken by the housemaid of one of the protagonists: "Mary Davenport, despite any kindnesses she'd shown Esmeralda, was the same as every rich white person: enraged and hurt when confronted with the idea that the world and everything in it was not hers for the having." I highly recommend this book.
- A Patriot's History of the United States, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen - More than 800 pages that document everything from Columbus's great discovery up to the war on terror. The facts are presented and opposing views that are often taught in history classes are debunked and shown for what they are, an attempt to destroy the legacy of men who risked everything to build a government that was unique at the time. Despite its flaws, what these men created stands out as the best attempt at freedom, provided we heed Jefferson's warning, "the price of Liberty is eternal vigilance."
- The Hamilton Collection, Dan Tucker - A collection of wisdom and writings of Alexander Hamilton, quite possibly the first man to demonstrate what is possible when you work hard and never give up. Born out of wedlock in the Caribbean, orphaned at 13, through sheer wit, talent and audacity he become a leader of the American Revolution and George Washington's right-hand man by the age of 21. The book contains excerpts of many of his letters, articles, and select passages he wrote for The Federalist Papers. Many of the institutions he created are still in use today, such as the financial system, U.S. Coast Guard, and the New York Post.
- Special and General Relativity, Albert Einstein - I've taken 3 semesters of Calculus plus Differential Equations and I still didn't understand most of this book. However, it was interesting to read about how he came about realizing the stunning notion of Relativity. Includes transcripts of lectures he gave to demonstrate his theories.
- Jack Reacher, Lee Child (and Andrew Child) - I read 3 or 4 more of these, once again, to take a break from having to think about what I'm reading. I guess Lee is planning to retire soon because the latest books were co-written with his son Andrew. As before, if you've read one you've read them all.
- 100 Great Philosophers Who Changed the World, Philip Stokes - Very well presented biographies, starting with the ancient Greeks and ending with the New Scientists. However, I felt some of his choices were questionable and at least one great was omitted. Here's why:
Stokes includes all the greats you'd expect: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Galileo, Newton, Decartes, Hume, Voltaire, they're all included. There's no doubt these men have had a profound impact on mankind's thinking and reasoning. When Stokes gets to modern times (19th Century and later), he includes some names I find questionable. For example, Nietzsche, Marx, Lenin, Freud, Keynes - no doubt these men have contributed greatly. But Einstein and Turing? Were they really philosophers, or merely genius scientists? Perhaps the same argument can be made about Galileo and Newton...? Additionally, Stokes included Thomas Paine and Adam Smith, but excluded Alexander Hamilton, who (IMHO) had more of an impact on the formation of the Constitution and the USA than either Paine and Smith. Maybe I'm wrong, or biased after having read The Hamilton Collection, feel free to include your opinion on this in the comments.
Happy New Year everyone!
Twenty Two: The Final Chapter
It’s that time of year again. The time of year when everyone and their dog waxes nostalgic about all the shit nobody cares about from the year past, and stupidly predicts the next year in the grim knowledge that when the next New Year comes along, nobody will remember that the dumbass predicted a bunch of foolish shit that turned out to be complete and utter balderdash.
I might as well go ahead and do it anyway. Just like I did last year (yes, a lot of this was pasted from last year’s final chapter).
Some of these links go to /. (these would be old stuff), S/N, mcgrewbooks.com, or mcgrew.info. As usual, first: the yearly index:
Journals:
Articles:
No, We're Not Entering a Recession!
A little advice for a Terrorist War Criminal
Only Yesterday (The Invisible Hyphen)
Review:
Song
Fixin' to Die Rag (Russian Version)
Last years’ stupid predictions (and more):
I completed my seventh decade of life, turning 70 last April.
I pedicted that I would have another volume of Random Scribblings, because all it lacked was a table of contents and cover art. I still haven't made the art; when I go to Track Shack on 3rd and Laurel, there are never any trains until I leave. Oh, the HTML for that book is less than half done.
I did get Only Yesterday done, but I didn't write that, although it was as much work.
But I’ll also hang on to most of last year’s predictions.
But here's a new one: I predict that there will thankfully be no elections in 2023, at least here.
Someone will die. Maybe you, maybe me. Not necessarily anybody I know... we can only hope.
SETI will find no sign of intelligent life. Not even on Earth.
The Pirate Party won’t make inroads in the US. I hope I’m wrong about that one.
US politicians will continue to be wholly owned by the corporations.
I’ll still be a nerd.
Technophobic fashionista jocks will troll slashdot (but not S/N). I have no idea if that one or the following held up, anybody been there lately?
Microsoft will continue sucking.
The pandemic will continue plagueing us.
Happy New Year! Ready for another trip around the sun?
Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks
Forty years ago last summer I learned how to program computers. I was thirty then, and bought a cheap computer, a TS-1000. It was monochrome, text only with a dozen blocks that do very primitive graphics, 1 mHz clock speed, with 2 kilobytes of memory. A very small, primitive computer.
I bought it because I hated my job pumping gas at Disney World, despite its numerous perks, and had read that a teenager had become a millionaire writing computer programs. A teenager? I could do that! Hell, I was hacking electronics as a teenager, making a guitar fuzzbox, like was sold for $300 in music stores, out of a broken $10 transistor radio!
The computer came with a tutorial on how to program it in Sinclair BASIC. It took a few weeks of spare time to learn well enough that I could write an analog clock display, albeit not a very accurate clock, and simple 2-D video games, building up in complexity.
The most ambitious game I wrote at that time was a two player battle tanks game, similar to what Windows would have decades later. The only trouble was, the slow clock speed of the machine, with the added overhead of its BASIC interpreter made it unplayably slow.
So I learned Z-80 assembly, re-wrote it based on the BASIC version I had written; BASIC is incredibly similar to assembly, and I had to assemble it by hand because that computer had no assembler I knew of. Then I had to add timing loops to slow it down.
A couple of years later, I discovered that the teenager was Bill Gates, his parents were rich lawyers who worked for IBM, and he became a millionaire making an operating system he had bought to work on an IBM-PC, then licensed that OS to IBM. And I bought another computer with my meager Disney wages, a Radio Shack TRS-80 MC-10. This was color, but text-only as well.
I bought its repair manual because I’ve always wanted to know as much as I could about stuff I owned, and discovered that although it was text-only, its video chip was capable of graphics. It was fun finding its address and what value to POKE there to make it do things; trial and error, short routines, etc. I had hacked its hardware with software.
I wrote a graphics program for it called HRG, bought a classified ad in Byte Magazine, and sold enough copies for $20 each to pay for the ad, but not for the blank cassettes or postage.
Learning was always easy as a young man, as long as I worked my ass off on it.
But half a decade later during a bad recession I got a job with the state of Illinois on the basis of my knowing about computers; they were still new in offices, and most people had never seen one. Of course, the state had mainframes for decades, but “microcomputers” were still new.
I started out entering data, and wound up writing the databases in dBase, later taking a college course in NOMAD. I still have the textbook in my basement, I think. The two languages are similar enough that I suspect that dBase was originally written as NOMAD on a PC.
Four decades after haunting the library and devouring dozens of books learning assembly, and almost a decade after retiring, I find the books I’ve written are listed on Goodreads and sign up for an author account.
It requires RSS for a linked blog. I’ve never used RSS on either end, and as of when I created the Goodreads account yesterday knew nothing of it whatever, except that a thing called “RSS” existed. I searched for information all afternoon yesterday and wound up where I should have started, W3C Schools.
I’m seventy now, but I’ll bet I have that RSS feed up and running faster than I had that machine code tanks program running when I was young!
Update: Two hours. Who says you can’t teach am old dog new tricks? Of course, XML ain’t hand assembled machine code...
A Thank You to the S/N Community
Was there another S/N crash, or did I screw up? Probably the latter; I posted this a week ago and it disappeared. [Edit]: The former, all the comments I made yesterday are also gone, and few stories have any comments at all! Now to what was lost:
I have the Linux computer pretty useful, thanks to your comments, although I’m still sharing files with Sneakernet.
But I think my biggest Linux problem, as a few of you mentioned, is kubuntu. So now I’m looking for a better distro, I think I’ll try Mint. What I’d probably like best is one with the biggest repository.
Kate works okay as a text editor, but it’s too busy, has too many functions I have no use for, and worse, it’s completely nonstandard, with the stupid Chrome nonsense. Doubly stupid in an interface as busy as Kate has. Any suggestions for a Linux text editor that’s as minimalist as Windows Notepad?
I’m still going through your answers. Thanks again!
Making lumber w/ a chainsaw mill
Last night I typed a long response to (I think) Phoenix666 about his inquiry into the "gotchas" of milling your own lumber using a chainsaw mill. Unfortunately, when the SN DB shit the bed my post was lost, so I figured putting what I typed into a journal entry would be a good idea. I think I can recall most of what I typed even though I was pretty tired last night.
I have three Stihl saws, an MS310, MS441C and an MS462. The 310 has a 20" bar and is my go-to saw for cutting everything it can handle. I've had it about 15 years and it's been rock solid. The 441 has a 32" bar and is strictly used for cutting down and bucking up big trees the 310 can't handle. The 462 is what I use in my mill.
One big "gotcha" is the price of saws. Before Covid the saw I wanted ran about $900. After Covid the price shot up to $1300 and I had to wait 5 month to get one. The price of Granberg mills went up too but not as much.
I bought Granberg's medium-sized mill. It's supposed to be used w/ a 30" bar max but I use it w/ a 32" bar in my 462 and it works fine. I've tried milling saw chains from several different manufacturers and the ones Granberg sells work the best for me. Since milling more planes the wood (instead of cutting it) you need to use specialized chains. I have both a 28" bar and a 32" bar and several chains for both that are used only for milling.
Another thing you'll want to invest in is a grinder for sharpening your chains. I think mine was made by Oregon and it was around $300 when I bought it years ago. Depending on what kind of tree I'm milling I can usually get 3-5 passes before a chain needs sharpened. If you rely on someplace local to sharpen your saw chains you'll be spending a lot of money plus there's the downtime waiting to get them back. I sharpen my regular chains at 31 degrees and the milling chains at 10 degrees. After sharpening, always check your cleanouts b/c if they're too high the chain will never cut correctly.
I use a 20' ladder to make the first pass then run the mill on the flat surface for the rest of the cuts. I made the brackets to hold the ladder out of a 2x8. Granberg's medium-sized mill has a clamp that holds the bar on the end and this helps avoid the problem where the bar wants to dip and make an uneven cut.
There's a bit of a learning curve to using a chainsaw mill so be sure to practice on a rotten log or something you don't care about. Screwing up a nice walnut log while learning how to use a mill is definitely not desirable.
I made two stout horses out of ash to hold the log I'm milling up off the ground so I can stand while running the mill. It can be done while kneeling but to me this is not desirable. If you use horses you'll need something to lift the logs. I use the front loader on my tractor, but there's ways to do this w/ a "log lifter" device too.
Of course, it's recommended you dry your lumber before using it. I have several stacks in my barn and a few in my basement. You'll need a lot of stickers to stack the lumber and I make mine on my band saw out of the cutoffs from using my circular saw to dimension the lumber. I use ratchet straps around the ends of a stack to keep the lumber from bowing up while drying.
Two good YT channels I recommend are Guilty of Treeson for learning the different notches to use on the hinge cut (I assume you'll be felling your own trees), and I like watching Surviving Ringworm b/c that guy is a master when it comes to making stuff using just a chainsaw. He also has a video about the log lifting device he came up w/ for moving heavy logs up onto the horses. Have fun!
Backup Restoration
Here is the deleted journal, which can also be found in my real web page.
The Man With No Belly Button
A True War Story
You may think that the movie “Forest Gump” was unbelievable because you can’t believe anyone that dim could ever be accepted by the military, but I wasn’t in the Air Force long before I found that if you have a mental disability, you’re fine. Maybe intelligence is a detriment, although there are some stupid stunts that they won’t stand for.
One was possessing marijuana, a felony in 1972, outlawed on the basis of lies.
It was my day for clean-up duty in the barracks, as well as the duty sergeant’s. I can’t remember the fellow’s name, but Private Gump was a lot smarter than him. As we were cleaning the day room, where there were couches and a TV, the sergeant found a doobie. A big fat one, a real hog’s leg. He asked me if I knew what it was.
I took it and looked at it. “It’s a hand-rolled cigarette.”
“Could that be... marijuana?”
“One way to find out,” I said, and broke it in half. “I never saw green tobacco before,” I said, handing it back to him.
“What should I do with it?”
I shrugged. “Throw it in the dumpster.”
“You don’t think I should turn it in to the SPs?” The SPs were the Security Police, what other branches call the MPs.
“Hell, no! If you do, you’re going to be there all damned day filling out paperwork.”
He did. I saw him in the hall the day after next.
“You were right, I should have thrown it in the dumpster. I spent all damned day yesterday at the SP’s filling out paperwork!”
Two friends I was stationed with there were Stan Rogers and Chuck Woods. Chuck hated the tongue twister “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood?”
Late one afternoon as I was reading, Stan dropped by my room to show off a gun he had gotten, from God only knows where. It was a snub nosed .38 pistol.
My dad was a hunter, so I was brought up around dogs and guns. I was taught dog safety and gun safety at an early age. It was obvious that Stan had never seen a gun of any kind except on TV and movies, and the two days during basic training.
I ran him off, despite his protestations that it wasn’t loaded. I was sure someone was going to get killed and I didn’t want to be around when it happened, especially if it happened to me.
Later in the evening a fellow whose name I don’t remember, the company clerk, a practical joker and doobie toker who hung with and smoked with the guys I hung around with, knocked on my door. I put down my book again and answered it.
“Stan shot Chuck!” He seemed really excited. Nice acting, I thought.
I frowned. “Peddle your sick joke somewhere else.”
“No! Really!”
I slammed the door and picked my book back up, a truly evil book I had checked out from the base library. It was Aleister Crowley’s “autohagiography”, the book that Ozzy Osbourne obviously named his album “Diary of a Madman” for, and sang about in the song “Mister Crowley”. It’s a book of black magic with instructions on how to perform it, drug abuse, murder (he claimed the King of England was Jack the Ripper), rape, sodomy, bestiality, suicide, ocean voyages, and mountain climbing. Four thousand evil pages. I read the whole damned thing, Delaware was the most boring place I’ve ever been in my life.
But real life was just as ghastly that night. The fellow wasn’t joking, Stan really did shoot Chuck! But it wasn’t on purpose.
I don’t know why I didn’t hear the gunshot or hear the sirens. I never thought about that until now that I’m writing it down. Maybe I had dozed off? A C-5 took off at the same time? Those things are really loud, although an SR-71 is a hell of a lot louder. Or maybe I was so absorbed in the batshit crazy book that I was just oblivious.
At any rate, Stan had visited Chuck after I had run him off. They took turns playing with the gun that Stan had insisted was unloaded.
I learned gun safety at a young age, as I said, and rule one is to never treat a gun as if it’s unloaded, even if you just unloaded it yourself. My dad always said that more people are killed by unloaded guns than loaded ones; I don’t know how accurate that was. But Stan and Chuck sadly didn’t know the rules.
Chuck later told me what happened.
He was leaning against a wall. Stan, a tall thin fellow, was twirling it like the “cowboys” (the word “cowboy” was an insult in the 1800s, referring to a drover, who held America’s worst job) do on TV and in the movies.
His unloaded gun went off. The slug hit Chuck square in the belly button and exited from his left buttock. He told me as he recounted the tale, “When I die, I want it to be from getting shot. The only way I knew I was shot was my leg started twitching.”
He slumped down the wall.
“Oh, shit!” Roger exclaimed. “Shit! Shit! Oh, fuck! Are you okay?”
“No, God damn it! You fucking SHOT me!”
I imagine a lot of blood was pooling, but he didn’t mention the blood, but said he wasn’t freaking out. I imagine it was like the car wreck I had in 1976; I was calm, but the ambulance guys were freaking out.
Stan was frantic. “Oh shit! Oh Shit! What should I do? What should I...”
“Get the God damned duty sergeant you fucking moron!” Chuck yelled. Stan ran down for help, and came back with the sergeant, of whom, as I said, Terry Pratchett might have said wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, and might even be a spoon.
“Holy fuck! What do I do?”
“Get an ambulance! Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with you?!”
Yes, unlike TV and the movies, in real life military men freak out and panic sometimes, just like civilians. The ambulance came and took him to the hospital and the doctors started surgery.
The hospital lost power halfway through the operation, and they had to get a generator from the flight line.
Before they started sewing him up, the generator went out. In my 3½ years on the flight line towing AGE (Aerospace Ground Equipment), that was the only time I ever heard of those things failing; the military keeps a sharp eye on their equipment. Most of the vehicles I drove were older than I was.
Someone on the internet said that my science fiction story “But Sir, I’m Just a Robot” was unbelievable because of the string of bad luck that befell the robot’s owner, but Chuck’s story is actually true; all of this happened to the best of my memory. Mark Twain said ”truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be believable” (Terry Pratchett disagreed).
I never saw poor Stan again. He was immediately incarcerated, and stayed in jail until he was court-martialled on the charge of bringing a prohibited weapon on base; the only firearms are supposed to be owned by the government, and Chuck’s injury illustrates why.
Stanley was found guilty, and spent the next six months in Leavenworth, before receiving a dishonorable discharge. Nixon was in office, and the nation would be in a recession until Clinton’s administration, so life must have been really rough for Stan after the Air Force.
Chuck was in the hospital for a long time, but bore no ill will towards Stan. It was an accident, and it could have been just as easily Chuck shooting Stan. But he was pissed off at the hospital; they had incinerated his shirt and jeans because of the blood. He wanted them for souvenirs, I guess the big scar wasn’t enough.
He did recover from his injuries, but lost his belly button.
If you’re thinking about buying a firearm, please take a safety course. More gunshot wounds are accidental than murderous.
Ask S/N: Linux
I’m a n00b all over again.
I first started using Linux with Mandrake, after trying unsuccessfully to get Red Hat to behave on my hardware, later learning that that distro was better suited for a web server than a desktop. I used Suse for a while on one machine, and lately kubuntu. All were dual-boot, and the Linux side was honestly not used much except for a laptop that was stolen; Windows was annoying but worked okay.
At least, until I got a virus. I assume it was a virus, but who knows, it could have been targeted. I don’t know why I would have been, but it would be possible. At any rate, all my efforts to vanquish it led to the computer becoming unusable, so I just replaced the computer. I would have replaced the hard drive when I was young and poor. Replacing the computer’s pretty easy to do when the data are all on a network drive.
The replacement was the same make and model computer, and both were running Windows 10. I never got around to installing Linux on the new one, and the useless one sat under a table sulking.
Several times in the past, Microsoft had instituted measures to cripple Audacity with its Windows “updates”. Rolling back the updates fixed it. But the last time, they also disabled THE COMPUTER’S OWNER who bought and paid for it from rolling back updates. Virus? Microsoft is its own malware.
So I bought a new hard drive for the unused infected computer. They’ve really gotten cheap and huge lately! I tired of building computers years ago; hell, I’m old. But I opened the infected box up and replaced its infected drive with the new, giant clean drive that was physically smaller. It’s not properly installed, but fuck it, it works. Well, after the Linux Install CD formatted it and installed Linux, anyway.
But I never had to do two things: find a new repository and install it, and install the network drive that Windows and Android have no trouble with. I want GIMP and XMMS and Audacity, since Audacity was the reason I bought the drive.
I was able to download a working copy of Audacity from their web site, but it won’t install, it just runs. At least it’s usable, although I can’t run it by clicking one of its files. I also can’t record the internet with it, but I can record the Windows computer through a patch cord.
The network drive is what drives me crazy, because I had it working on the old infected drive. And I’d like to be able to install shit.
This brings up something else, something my daughter Patty and I were disagreeing about the last time she visited home from Cincinnati. She’s going back to college at age 35, and grew up with shareware, freeware, and open source along with some commercial software, but the college, probably bankrolled by Microsoft, has brainwashed its students into believing that normal people can’t use open source software, only freaks like you, me, and her.
I tried to convince her it’s just what you’re used to. But then, I bought my first computer as a birthday present to myself on my 30th birthday, forty years ago and I’m having trouble with Linux.
Yes, an OS isn’t an app, but try explaining that to a college professor who has been likewise brainwashed. But at any rate, I’m looking for good information on how to connect the network drive; what I’ve found on the internet is missing a lot of needed info.
Then there’s new software, Kubuntu’s repository is tiny, missing much of what I need, like Audacity, XMMS, and GIMP. Where can I find these apps and how do I install them?
Only Yesterday (The Invisible Hyphen)
Way back in 1977 when I was in college, my history class was assigned a book by F.L. Allen titled Only Yesterday. It surprised me; I was expecting a dry, scholastic work devoid of flavor or writing skill.
But I was wrong. This “textbook”, in paperback for ninety five cents plus tax (how much did you pay for your textbooks? My most expensive one was ten bucks) was written as if it were a high quality magazine article. I was impressed.
It sat on my bookshelf for almost half a century until the Covid pandemic struck, and reminders were everywhere of the last pandemic a century earlier.
I had referenced this book since I got on the internet when some ignoramus spewed some nonsense about the “roaring twenties”, which my grandmother, an eighteen year old new mother in 1921 said only roared for the rich. The book agrees with Grandma, although weakly.
But I began to see similarities to our twenties, the 2020s, and figured that this book would be of interest to everyone in this decade.
There’s a mention somewhere in the book about time repeating itself, but never exactly. Some things were very similar to now, some were the exact opposite. In the last ’20s the Republican president took the Democrat’s job, in our ’20s the Democrat took the Republican’s job.
Rather than a right wing mob storming the capitol, in the 20th century Bolsheviks bombed the stock market on Wall Street in New York. Alcohol prohibition began in the 1920s, cannabis prohibition ended in Illinois in 2020. In 1920, Women gained the right to vote. In 2022 they lost the right to have an abortion.
Like our decade, theirs started at the end of wartime. Like their decade, ours followed a quarter century of technical innovation. Like our decade, the nation was very divided a hundred years ago.
So I decided to put it on my book web site.
I found an HTML copy on the University of Virginia’s website quite a while ago and decided to get the text from there. Its book is a file per chapter, so I copied the text into a text editor, and then went to format it.
I had a real good start, to chapter four, I think, and something just didn’t look right and I couldn’t figure out what, so I looked for other copies. One was at the Australian Gutenberg, and apparently my memory was at once better and worse than I remembered it was; the two didn’t exactly match. I put the project away for a while; I like to get things as close to perfect as I possibly can.
Then looking for something completely different, there sat Mr. Cleese himself in the person of a PDF file scanned from a Houghton-Mifflin 1957 copy by the Kansas City Library. That book was a hell of a lot fancier than my paperback copy, and than the Gutenberg and VU copies.
I had a lot more work ahead of me, loading the PDF into GIMP as an image per page. Saving about four hundred images would take a while, so I thought I’d try something I was sure wouldn’t work, trying to OCR the PDF directly.
My OCR program was included with a scanner a quarter of a century ago, and I wasn’t sure if they even had PDFs then but was certain that the ancient OCR wouldn’t read a new PDF file. Apparently they did have PDFs back then, because it actually worked, seemingly against all logic. And it worked better and with more accuracy than I’ve ever seen it do before.
And I discovered the invisible hyphen. I’d never seen, or even heard of one before. It’s a hyphen that is invisible in an HTML page unless it falls at the right side of the page, when it becomes visible. But you can’t copy and paste it in Notepad, as when pasted it becomes a normal hyphen.
This was a problem formatting the book, because in Notepad there was a hyphen, but “school-board” became “schoolboard” in HTML.
But this thing could be very useful! Someone should write a program that had a word database and would put one between syllables. It would be great for HTML full justification! I left in many of the useful ones, at least after I started understanding what was happening; I’d deleted a lot and wasn’t going to start over from scratch again!
I wish I had more information about it. What is its real name? Its ASCII value? Does anyone have any links to information about it?
Anyway, I decided to make my HTML copy as fancy as the PDF from the hardcover book, including foreign characters and drop caps. In two ways it’s fancier. You can’t click a link on paper. Another way was making the “th” in dates superscript as is common today.
For drop caps, I used the same kludge I used in the HTML version of Random Scribblings, an image of the character. I’ve been doing hacks and kludges since I was a teenager in the ‘60s, when I was unable to afford a multi-hundred dollar guitar fuzzbox from a music store, so I made one out of a broken transistor radio. This doesn’t count the meaningless gizmos I made in 6th grade, like the Dufus Detector that would light up when it was pointed at a dufus.
I decided that when a movie or book title showed up in the text, I would link movies to movies in the Internet Archive, and books from Gutenberg, but there was a roadblock with the movies. I copied the URL from the browser’s bar, but on testing it led to some stupid page about their stupid policies. Stupid. And they want me to donate! I donate to Wikipedia because I use it almost daily and Jimmy Wales isn’t an idiot like the morons who run the Internet Archive.
Gutenberg was far more intelligent, and I noticed that they’ve improved their search capabilities, although they’re still really weak. I should be able to enter a title and get that one book, if found, instead of every book with any book in the book you’re looking for’s title.
I later found some mentioned movies on YouTube, who encourages you to share.
The links are all black, because you just don’t see colored texts in any book except a magazine or a child’s book. The table of contents is the exception.
I see no point to linking the magazines that still exist. None are much like they were a century ago. At any rate, I’m not done with editing. When I’m satisfied with it, it will be at mcgrewbooks.com/Allen/.
If anyone has any information about the weird hyphen, or links to any unlinked books, or direct links to any mentioned movie (most are in the public domain, all made before 1927 are public domain), please let me know.
Waitin' to Die Rag: Russian version
(Apologies to Country Joe)
Well, come on on all you comrade men,
Uncle Vlad needs your help again!
He's got himself in some terrible pain
Way out west in old Ukraine.
So put down your books and pick up a gun,
We're gonna have a whole lot of fun!
And it's 1, 2, 3, what're we fighting for?
Don't ask me, it ain’t too plain.
Next stop is Old Ukraine.
And it's 5, 6, 7, open up the pearly gates.
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whooopee! we're all gonna die!
Well c'mon generals, let's move fast,
Your big chance has come at last.
Gotta go out and kill them dead,
The only good Ukie is one who's dead.
And you know that peace can only be won
When we've blown ‘em all to kingdom come!
And it's 1, 2, 3, what're we fighting for?
Don't ask me, it ain’t too plain.
Next stop is Old Ukraine.
And it's 5, 6, 7, open up the pearly gates.
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whooopee! we're all gonna die!
Well c'mon on, Oligarchs,
Don't be slow,
Why, this is war a-go-go!
There's plenty good money to be made
By supplin' the Army with the tools of the trade.
Just hope and pray that if we drop the bomb,
Civilization won’t be gone!
And it's 1, 2, 3, what're we fighting for?
Don't ask me, it ain’t too plain.
Next stop is Old Ukraine.
And it's 5, 6, 7, open up the pearly gates.
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whooopee! we're all gonna die!
Well c'mon mothers throughout the plain,
Pack your boys off to old Ukraine.
C’mon pops, don't hesitate,
Send ‘em off before it's too late.
Be the first one on your block
To have your boy come home in a box!
And it's 1, 2, 3, what're we fighting for?
Don't ask me, it ain’t too plain.
Next stop is Old Ukraine.
And it's 5, 6, 7, open up the pearly gates.
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whooopee! we're all gonna die!
The Bicycle
I’ve never bought anything from anyone who would go to such lengths to make a customer happy.
I’d been thinking of getting a bicycle for quite a while. I almost did in 2020, but heard that everybody was buying bicycles and there was a shortage.
Last year I got a physical checkup, and the doctor told me my blood pressure was high, so I bought an automatic blood pressure checker and looked up high blood pressure on the internet. You couldn’t do that when I was young.
The only cause that fit me was lack of exercise. So right after my birthday this year, I bought a bicycle from Ace Bike shop. Since I had just turned seventy, I decided on an electric bike in case I got too tired to pedal home. I went to the closest shop to my house, Ace, on MacArthur.
It turned out my blood pressure is only high when my arthritis is excruciating.
I bought a Del Sol electric, and that may be the Cadillac of bicycles. It was really expensive, $2300. I took a test ride and bought it, but as you can’t ride a bike and drive a car at the same time it was a few days before I could pick it up, but I took the battery charger and manual home.
Almost everything about it was alien to me, except the bicycle part. I wound up pedaling all the way home despite having read the poor excuse for a manual. I knew that holding a lever on the handlebar down would make it go without pedaling, but not that the higher the displayed number, the faster you could go; there’s an adjustment in the handlebar. It would take a few rides to learn it well.
It would take a couple of weeks to know I’d bought a lemon.
The next day I rode it to Felber’s. A couple of guys were sitting outside. “Lose your license?”
“Huh? No, why?”
“Where’s your car?”
“In my driveway.”
“Why aren’t you driving it?”
“Five dollars a gallon!”
“Oh.”
I locked it up and went inside for a beer. When it was done, I went outside to ride the bike home.
It wouldn’t turn on. So I had to pedal it home. Now, this wasn’t like the ten speeds I rode decades ago, this was a heavy bike with fat tires. It really wore me out riding it home!
The next day it still was dead, so I pedaled it all the way to Ace. I got the sales fellow, and it lit right up for him. Of course, there was no way for him to diagnose it, since it was working fine. I thought of an old story about a TV repairman from back when such men existed, who was called for a dead TV. When he got there, it worked fine. He got another call about the same TV a week later, and again, it worked fine.
The third time he brought a picture of himself and left it inside the set, which never malfunctioned again until years later when the picture tube wore out. True? I don’t have any idea, but here it seemed the same thing was happening. I rode it home, not yet having discovered that you need to have it set to five to get it to go faster than ten miles per hour without pedaling, or that it simply wasn’t working like it was designed to.
I thought its cutting out while using the motor for movement was normal. It actually got up to twenty once. When I got home I put it on the charger, went inside, and turned on the air conditioner.
The next afternoon I got it out, and it wouldn’t come on. Damn, it worked yesterday, at least after I pedaled to the bike shop. Vibration going over the railroad track and bumps? I jiggled its cables, pressed the button―and it came on. I rode it to Felber’s for a beer. Nobody was there, so I drank one beer and went out and unlocked the bike. It wouldn’t wake up, even after jiggling the cables.
It decided to work the next day. I started riding it to to Track Shack, because I need photos of freight trains vandalized with graffiti for the cover of my second volume of Random Scribblings. Halfway there the motor quit, and the display gave an error number. I took it home and looked it up in the “troubleshooting” part of its manual, which said to take it to the dealer without riding it, so I called Ace.
They said they would try to come out and pick it up. A few days later they did, and the day after called and told me it was working. They said they had to google it, and reset everything. By then I’d told them an exchange would be warranted, and I was getting quite annoyed, but rode it home anyway.
Three days later it quit again, with the same error code.
They took it to the shop, and had trouble contacting Del Sol. They finally called me and said they sent it back to the factory and that I could come in and pick up any bike.
I picked one up that was $300 less. An Aventon, and it was a hell of a lot better bike than the Del Sol, even if the Del Sol hadn’t been a lemon. This one had a headlight, tail light, brake lights, and shock absorbers on the front fork!
I had Ace install a mirror and front and rear baskets, which all look like they were factory-installed.
There was another problem; the manual said it should do 28 mph and if it didn’t, to take it to the shop. There, they told me that I had to install its app, so I did.
Getting the app installed wasn’t easy, and I’ve been dealing with computers since 1982. That, however, wasn’t Ace’s fault, that’s on Aventon. But I finally got it installed, and you can set its top speed in the app, so I did.
It still wouldn’t go faster than 20 using the motor, so I called them. By now, they were surely sick of this pesky old man who kept bugging them, but they didn’t show it, and stayed polite. However, they said that it would only do 28 with full electricity plus pedaling.
I thanked them and hung up, but I didn’t believe them. So I googled, and discovered that there’s a federal regulation that mandated a governor on electric bicycles, and are not allowed to go over 20 on electricity alone! Now I need to bitch out my elected representatives, as well as the Secretary of Transportation. It’s a brain-dead stupid rule; there is no such rule about gasoline mopeds, its rule is that the engine can’t be bigger than 50 CC and faster than 31 mph.
Why is a gasoline moped allowed to do 30, but an electric one only 20? Oil industry bribes to legislators, or is Secretary Buttigieg on the take? Are oil companies bribing him? He and my elected representatives will be getting some emails... Or more likely, Trump’s transportation secretary Elaine Chao, since the Republican Party is the Party of Big Oil, the party of climate change skeptics, the party of billionaires, no longer the party of Lincoln but now the party of Trump, the president who engineered a failed attempt to hold onto power despite the vote.
But, the fellow at Ace was correct. The maximum speed without pedaling is 20. I recommend that shop, they have good people.
As to the bike itself, here’s a short review:
The Del Sol lemon was a couple hundred bucks more expensive than the Aventon, even though it’s a better bike, and not because I had a lemon. The Aventon has a headlight, tail lights, brake lights, and front shocks, while the more expensive Del Sol didn’t.
Each was around two grand, and I can’t help compare it to the brand new Honda 175 I bought in 1969 for $900. People all seem to have remarks about it, especially the fat knobby tires. A few guys have told me they know e-bike owners who paid $3,000 and $4,000 for theirs.
The Del Sol shared a couple of pretty bad design flaws with the Aventon. Both were too tall, and too short. Too tall that unless it’s a step through like mine, you would have to be taller than six feet to get your leg over the seat. That’s why I chose the step through, what they used to call a “girl’s bike”.
By “too short” I mean in length. This would be worse the taller you were. Riding it wearing sandals I broke the nail on my right big toe pedaling around a left turn; my toe hit the tire. It was bloody and painful. Since then I never pedal around corners.
The Aventon has shocks on the front fork. It amazed me that its too small and too hard seat wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable as I thought it would be, but I think everybody wants to make bikes like they belong in the Tour de France. Which is ironically stupid in an e-bike. It, too, is too far forward.
The lines to the front brake and computer display come unplugged if you turn the handlebars too far to the right, like backing it out of my garage while turning it around. It isn’t a big hassle, they’re color coded and stand out when unplugged. I don’t know if it’s a design problem or a manufacturing defect.
I like it a lot better than the Del Sol, even if that one had worked right.
