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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.
No, We're Not Entering a Recession! (A History Lesson)
When I joined the Air Force in 1971 we were in a bad recession. It was really difficult to find work. One of the guys I went in with joined because he was married with a new baby, and no jobs were to be found anywhere. I'd been working at a drive in theater since 1968 when jobs were plentiful.
There was no inflation, because you ordinarily don't have inflation during a recession; only a fool raises his prices when everybody is out of work. But in 1973 when I was stationed in Thailand, OPEC hit and doubled the price of oil.
Nixon was being impeached for Watergate as oil and gasoline prices soared. The soaring oil prices caused the cost of all transportation to skyrocket, and the transportation cost is passed on to the consumer.
Before resigning in disgrace, Nixon instituted wage and price controls, which made inflation worse for working people and ran some businesses into bankruptcy, further depressing the economy but having no or little effect on inflation.
The only president who never won a single federal election became President. America was lucky that he stayed in office such a short time. Unfortunately, the next president wasn’t any better, making the recession worse with his talk of “malaise”.
Reagan was elected and made life much worse for most working people when he signed the Republican congress’ bill that slashed the Capital Gains Tax, saying “a rising tide lifts all boats” despite the fact that lowering taxes on the rich isn’t a rising tide, it’s welfare for the wealthy. The tax cuts unleashed an orgy of hostile corporate takeovers that cost some people like me a good part of their wages and cost others their jobs.
The inflation and recession didn’t subside until Clinton was elected, when oil prices stabilized and we had an economic boom. After his second term, Bush Jr, a failed oil man, was elected, along with his oil man Vice President.
Gasoline had quadrupled in price in the two decades between 1970 and 1990, rising from a quarter to a dollar per gallon. The oil men more than quadrupled the price again in less than half the time. But this time, it didn’t cause much inflation, but crashed the economy towards the end of his second term. People had been making a choice between buying gasoline to get to work or paying the mortgage and lost their homes.
Meanwhile, banks; actually, all big business, had gotten greedy enough to shed all semblance of morality and ethics and came up with a foolproof scheme: make mortgages available to people who looked like they could barely afford them, collect mortgage payments as high as rent would be while leaving taxes, repairs, and costs all up to the borrower, then foreclosing at the slightest mistake. That gave them the property they had loaned money for, worth more than they had loaned. It was a racket.
Bush and Cheney had inherited a balanced budget and a booming economy with low unemployment, and left a historically huge deficit and a crashed economy. Luckily, the next president, unlike the previous, was a patriot who actually wanted the nation to do well, and avoided another Great Depression.
Eight years later the Democrats nominated the absolutely worst presidential candidate there was, who lost the election to a man historians say was the fourth worst president, who did almost nothing about the world wide pandemic that had raged. States’ governors did his job for him and closed the country down, as leaders world-wide had done.
Nobody drove much of anywhere, all around the world, and gasoline prices plummeted. Oil companies shut down drilling and refining. Unemployment was sky high because almost all the factories and all the bars and restaurants and most stores closed.
Vaccines and anti-virals were developed and the pandemic waned. But we had a shortage of everything because nothing had been made for over a year. Shortages cause rising prices. The pandemic bust ended and we’re now in a historic boom, better than anything I’ve seen in my seventy years. For the first time in my life, there’s a labor shortage.
It’s almost impossible to have a recession during times of no unemployment, but inflation is guaranteed.
Something very similar happened a century ago, with the “Spanish Flu”, which was far less deadly than Covid. When that pandemic started, World War One was raging.
Here’s the interesting bit: when the 1920 pandemic ended the “Roaring Twenties” started. Stop talking about recession and start talking about the second Roaring Twenties.
But in another decade, we’ll probably be in deep economic straits like 1930.
Review: The 1619 project
I bought the hardcover edition of The 1619 Project. It is very well-written for a scholarly work, and after the first chapter I had already learned quite a bit.
However, its editing was abysmal, such a horrible job I wondered if it was edited at all. Its editor was embarrassingly incompetent. By the end of the first chapter I had already found three errors. The first was a homophonic spelling error; of course, spell checkers can’t catch them. “Basis” was spelled “bases”. Oddly, I found no errors after the first chapter except the continuation of one of them.
The second error was grammatical and appears to be repeated throughout the book. A race’s name, like Caucasian, Hispanic, etc. should be capitalized. The Black race is capitalized in the book, but not the White race. This simple grammar error will lead many readers to believe that the author is a racist! Abysmal.
These types of errors hinder comprehension. On page 116 it reads “...a fresh wave of white terrorism…” which when dissected suggests that there is actually a good form of terrorism. It should have read “...a fresh wave of White terrorism…” leaving no doubt that this was evil terrorism by White people, not some kind of good terrorism.
The third error, on page 38 is two run-on words; “shall be” was printed “shallbe”. It quoted an old text, and if that is how the original text was written, it should have been followed by “[sic]” or simply corrected.
My education was in the visual arts (handy for cover design), and the closest thing to a college level English or writing class I took was one on verbal logic. Any writing skills I possess were learned by example; I’ve probably read tens of thousands of books, some very well written and some had terrible writing. An example is True Grit, one of only two poorly written books I’ve read that the movie was much better than; in this case, both movies. It was a good story, poorly written.
When I say 1619 was well-written, I mean for a scholarly work. I worked with government scientists for decades and read a lot of scientific and government reports. They were all horribly written. One in particular stands out in my memory decades later: a paper with various forms of the word “enumerate” a dozen times in the first paragraph, without once using the word “count”.
I saw the excellent movie We Were Soldiers, and since the book a movie's script is from is almost always better, I bought the book. Its writing was almost as bad as a government report; the writing followed all of the rules and was still abysmal. It’s hard to imagine a war story that can be boring, but that one was. I shelved it after forty pages.
1619 is slightly better written than the average college textbook, but every bit as informative as any textbook I’ve ever read. It’s obvious its writer is an avid reader, but as nonfiction texts go, she’s no Isaac Asimov. He himself, my favorite writer, was no Stephen King.
Halfway through the book I realized where the noise about “critical race theory”, something that is only taught in law school, came from. What the racist right calls “CRT” is really this book. As former US Vice President Al Gore might say, it is full of inconvenient truths that are either missing or glossed over in public school history classes.
When I was in public school, the treatment of the indigenous peoples of the Americas wasn’t really mentioned; maybe two sentences about the Trail of Tears. 1619 has a long chapter about how horrible our treatment of them was, especially under President Jackson, a truly evil man.
It appears that in this century they’re at least starting to teach about slavery in grade school. When my youngest daughter was eight or ten, her best friend was a black girl who lived in the neighborhood, whom she had gone to school with since first grade. When they learned about slavery, Patty asked her friend how could she not hate White people? Navisha answered that it was White people who freed her ancestors from slavery.
But it’s easy to see how 1619, better known as “CRT”, would make it look as if every White person in history was evil, because of what 1619 leaves out. When Patty told me that, I informed her that on my mom’s side of my family, there were abolitionists who started the underground railroad. The book mentions Harriot Tubman, and from the book you might think that the railroad was an all Black thing. Of course, it couldn’t be, the safe houses were all owned by Whites, the only way it could work. Jones would have you think that every White person in history was an evil racist, including Abraham Lincoln. The truth is that we all have evil in us.
Ms. Jones barely touched on classism, which is what racism is based on. India has had institutional classism for its entire history. Its “untouchables” were America’s Blacks. She mentioned our racial hierarchies without mentioning class at all, and both racism and classism is because of money.
Both racism and classism go all the way back to our prehistoric roots, as does slavery and all other evils. The Jewish Torah, the Muslim Quran, and the Christian Bible all document the Egyptians’ enslavement of the Jewish people, who have been hated by racists for millennia and probably since Moses himselve's children.
All in all, it's an excellent book. I especially think every White racist in America should be forced to read it, at gunpoint if necessary.
Weird TV
This one is really old, but never published. The TuneIn app was discontinued years ago.
Weird—Yesterday I was listening to KSHE and the TuneIn app stopped, which isn’t weird at all. Especially on the TV, although that app gives me trouble on the tablet once in a while, too.
So I opened it on the big tablet and it worked there. But when I went to use the “cast” function on the tablet to put the picture and sound on the TV, the tablet reported “no nearby devices found”.
That had happened once before when internet was being screwy. So I turned on the big laptop, which is plugged in to the TV, opened a browser and KSHE was on again. I had a minor mystery. I got out the little laptop to work on a story.
Later I decided to watch Star Trek so I hit the TV’s Netflix button. It said I wasn’t on the network, that I needed to plug in a cable or set up WI-fi, only the cable was, in fact, plugged in.
When the TV acts up, rebooting usually fixes the problem like any other computer, so I unplugged it; the only way to reboot it (I’ve since found an obscure menu item that is sometimes unreachable).
But this time a reboot didn’t solve it, again it said it wasn’t on the network. So I rebooted the router, unplugged the TV again, unplugged the network cable, restarted the TV, and hit the Netflix button. Of course it said it wasn’t on the network, because this time it really wasn’t. So I plugged the network cable in again, expecting to be on the internet, but absolutely nothing happened.
I scratched my head all day trying to figure it out and never could. I suspected it was Comcast (I’m on AT&T fiber now) shenanigans, now that there’s no Net Neutrality (thanks, assholes).
This morning I hit the Netflix button by mistake, and Netflix came up! Checked TuneIn, and that now works, too. The only answer I can come up with is it must be related in some way to the thunderstorm and power outage Friday night.
The Brits have it wrong
English isn’t English. There’s British English, and American English (and probably Australian English as well). It doesn’t bother me that the only difference between humor and humour depends on whether you’re looking it up in the OED or Webster’s.
It’s illogical for them to call a car’s trunk a “boot”. Where did that insanity come from? It’s a trunk! A boot is footwear, a trunk is a box that stores stuff.
It’s illogical to use a three syllable word that has a one syllable synonym, as in the British lift, that we call an “elevator”. Lifting and elevating are the same thing! Calling a lift an “elevator” is stupid. You may say “but an American named Otis invented them.” No, he didn’t. Elevators date back to ancient Rome and are older than the English language.
But none of that bothers me.
What does bother me is an ignorant Britishism that we Americans have started to copy, speaking and writing as if a company or a team is plural, as in “Microsoft are”. That drives me crazy! Microsoft is ONE company. The British (and now we) say “the team are playing…” NO! It’s ONE team! How many individual football teams (we’re wrong calling American football “football”) are there in Great Britain? The team is and the teams are.
Yes, a team has several players, and a company may have hundreds of employees, but a car has thousands of parts. Why do you say “the car is” rather than “the car are?”
Because that would be stupidly illogical, that’s why. As stupid and illogical as saying “Microsoft are”.
A.G.E.
Note: I wrote this song in 1985 when I was a young 33, before my hair was gray or my eyesight dimmed. I was younger than my children are now. The chords are, of course, A, G, and E. It has not been seen by anyone.
My car’s leaking oil,
The radiator’s starting to boil.
It’s a 1972.
Let me tell you, it ain’t new.
Chorus:
It’s got A G E.
It has a history.
Time won’t let you be,
It gives you A G E.
Once it was shiny and clean,
A factory fresh machine.
It was really keen,
But it has lost its sheen.
(Chorus)
My computer’s on the blink,
It got too old to think.
The weirdest thing you’ve ever seen,
Whoever heard of a senile machine?
(Chorus)
My guitar’s busted a string;
I guess it’s too old to sing.
My amp has blown a fuse,
I guess it has nothing to lose.
(Chorus)
The world is reputed
To be very polluted.
The land’s all been sold.
I guess it got old.
(Chorus)
It must be a disease that catches—
My records are covered with scratches.
I’m feeling a bit of a funk
Surrounded by all of this junk.
(Chorus)
I used to be young and bold
When this story hadn’t been told.
This song is covered with mold,
I guess it’s getting old.
I used to be full of fire,
A real live wire.
I would be a liar
If I said my hand don’t tire.
These wrinkles are getting to me.
My hair is as gray as can be.
My eyes are too dim to see
I got A G E!
I got A G E.
I have a history.
Time won’t let me be,
It gave me A G E.
Twenty One: 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:
There’s No Such Thing as a self-made Man
How To Record Music From the Internet
What Went Wrong in Afghanistan?
Why I Don’t Write Dystopian SF
Why the National Anthem Should Be Changed
The Horrible Reason Most Professional Sports Players Are Black
Song
Last years’ stupid predictions (and more):
I predicted that I would publish a book, and I released The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. This year I'm predicting that I will have another volume of Random Scribblings; all it lacks as it stands is a table of contents and cover art.
I predicted that the monster would be banished on January 20 but the son of a bitch just won’t fucking go away! I just don’t get it, he lost both the House and the Senate, never won the popular vote once, “served” a single term (if you can call it serving), but his party is still at his beck and call. I figured it out-the Republicans realized that America hates its policies and can’t win an election without Trump’s racist base. I’d like to predict that the Trumpian candidates all lose next year, but they probably won’t so I won’t predict at all.
But I’ll also hang on to most of last year’s predictions.
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 plaguing us.
Happy New Year! Ready for another trip around the sun?
