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Don't let the door hit you in the ass, Bitch. And take some of these other senile sons of bitches with you!

She finally got one thing right, if inadvertantly.

a citizen of the greatest Republic in the history of the world.

The Republic should revoke her citizenship.

https://babylonbee.com/news/war-solved-united-states-puts-up-gun-free-zone-sign-in-ukraine

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.

Do you still ignore the required dependencies and autoremove packages while installing the new application on Linux?

Initially, you take note of application dependencies and packages going to be wiped out from your system, but with time, we procrastinate due to the ugly interface of the apt command, which shows package names in the monotone format, and for this reason, you need to stare at the screen to know what step is being performed now.

For example, if I install git from the default apt package manager, and the same command is installed from nala package manager, then you can clearly see the difference from the side-by-side comparison.

And if I ask you, which output looks much more concise and unambiguous? You would simply answer, “The nala version of the command is much more concise and unambiguous.”

So, let’s learn how to install nala package manager on Ubuntu and other derivatives of Debian-based Linux distributions, which means you can follow the same steps if you have Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, Debian 11 (Buster), etc.

https://trendoceans.com/nala-package-manager/

Yes, it really is faster than other APT frontends. No need to install apt-fast anymore, especially since apt-fast is mostly deprecated. It's prettier. Not just prettier, but easier to read. It's far more informative.

The article suggests 3 methods to install nala, I just did apt install nala. Try your own distro's repositories before you follow the other methods.

Best of all, it looks like there is no real learning curve - if you're familiar with apt, apt-get, or apt-fast, you'll use mostly the same commands and arguments with nala.

Did I say fast? Even with my new 100 meg internet connection, I would expect 900 mb of downloads to take a few minutes with apt. Nala fetch found the fastest repositories for me, saved those repositories to it's configuration, then when I did nala upgrade, it downloaded files in parallel. It was as fast, if not faster than, apt-fast.

I think it's pretty awesome. If anyone thinks otherwise, I'll be watching for comments below!

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?

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.

Tulsi Gabbard Continues to Cause Problems Within the Democrat Party After Leaving It
By Brandon Morse | 3:45 PM on October 13, 2022

Former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard haunts the Democrat Party and it would appear that her exit is causing issues to arise within the voter base. Not only does her shadow follow Kamala Harris, but it’s also now starting to threaten AOC who recently was shouted down at her own town hall for not following Gabbard’s example with the Ukraine war.

It would appear that Gabbard’s effect on the party is only growing despite the DNC’s best efforts to unperson her. Let’s talk about it more in my latest video.

Be sure to like the video and subscribe!

https://redstate.com/brandon_morse/2022/10/13/tulsi-gabbard-continues-to-cause-problems-within-the-democrat-party-after-leaving-it-n642730

Direct link to video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCQbpU52nvM

Wake, not woke.

EDIT: I should have linked to the story about Tulsi leaving the party. https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2022-10-11/tulsi-gabbard-leaves-democratic-party-elitist-cabal

(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!

Well, we've had bittorrent in our home for - a long, long time. Search for a movie or something, start it downloading, and come back tomorrow to watch the movie. Nothing exciting, just file sharing.

With the upgrade to fiber, we expected to see amazing download and upload speeds. Mehhh - instead speeds were mostly still measured in k per second, sometimes reaching 1 or 2 M/s. Somewhat awesome to most members of the household, but, FFS, we now have fast internet! Where's my 100 meg?

I diddled around with it for awhile yesterday. Yes, of course we run BT on a VPN. Yes, of course I've gone through BT settings, and optimized according to guides available on the internet. Multiple times, actually.

Finally stumbled over the fact that I must REQUEST port forwarding from the VPN. Oh. Well. How do I do that? Check VPN settings, and right there all the time, is a setting, "Request Port Forwarding". Now, why didn't I give any thought to that setting? Click the box, and find that I'm limited to just a few servers. My "favorite" VPN server doesn't offer port forwarding. That's alright though, I don't really have a favorite, I always choose the fastest.

So, reconnect to a server with port forwarding, I'm assigned a port for port forwarding, and I go back into Bittorrent settings. I assign the listening port to match what VPN has assigned me, and BOOM!

Download speed jumped to 15M , and upload speed to 12M.

Speeds fluctuate, of course, depending on a whole lot of things, mostly the health of the torrent, and however the algorithms decide to connect seeds and peers. I've seen speeds dip to zero while I was watching, and I've seen the above mentioned speeds. It's entirely possible that Bittorrent actualy consumes all of my bandwidth from time to time. I suppose I should go back into settings, and cap speeds at 20 or 30 meg - but I'll just leave it at infinite for awhile, and see what happens.

THIS is what I was expecting when I subscribed to fiber internet. It only took me a couple weeks to figure out how to make it work.

EDIT

OK, bittorrent can be made almost unusable, with the use of fake downloaders. I've always seen them. At the bottom of the list of connected clients page, you'll see a bunch of bitstorm clients. They don't actually download or upload anything, they just keep your client busy with pointless connections. That, and bitlord. Both clients are ancient, no one with a lick of sense uses them to actually torrent.

Several searches, and I finally found a link pointing at https://github.com/c0re100/qBittorrent-Enhanced-Edition

Features:
Auto Ban Xunlei, QQ, Baidu, Xfplay, DLBT and Offline downloader

Auto Ban Unknown Peer from China Option (Default: OFF)

Auto Update Public Trackers List (Default: OFF)

Auto Ban BitTorrent Media Player Peer Option (Default: OFF)

Peer whitelist/blacklist

It works as advertised. All those bitstorm clients are gone, and I'm left with lists of clients actually performing the tasks that bittorrent was meant to do.

I highly recommend this client, if you torrent.

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.