grouchyfarmer

Catching Up: Spring, solar, lasers, Oh My

Well it’s spring, or so they tell me. And judging from the lack of posts here it seems I’ve been hibernating most of the winter, doesn’t it?

After a ridiculously warm winter we’ve had a ridiculously cold spring. It isn’t until now, early May, that we’ve gotten reasonably warm temperatures during the day, although it’s still plunging down to near freezing at night. Anyway, the daffodils are in full bloom, even some of the irises are popping open which is always delightful to see.

MrsGF has had her seedling operation going in the basement for some time already. We have tomatoes, brussel sprouts, peppers and I don’t know what all else popping up in the little greenhouse down there. We have onion sets ready to go out as soon as the weather improves. The garlic she planted seems to be thriving. She only put in about a dozen garlic cloves and somehow all of them seem to have survived the winter and are now about 8 inches tall out behind the garage near the solar panels.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while you know I love bicycling, and by this time of year I should have been going out almost every day. But thanks to the cold weather that hasn’t been happening. I’ve managed to get out exactly twice since mid-April. It is very frustrating.

Solar Stuff

I think I mentioned that I picked up a bunch of solar panels with the intention of getting them up on the roof of the garage to supplement my rather pathetic 2KW of panels leaning up against the back of the house. Alas, that hasn’t happened either because of the poor weather. Hopefully soon. MrsGF has a fit when she sees me up on a ladder or on a roof, so getting those mounted is going to have to depend on when my sons can get over here to work on it. And I suppose I better actually order the mounting hardware, shouldn’t I?

I just got done completely rewiring the entire AC side of the solar power system to bring it up to snuff so it will pass an inspection. It’s configured a bit differently this time. The inverters struggled to keep the central air conditioning running, to the point where we couldn’t run on solar if we had to use the AC. That meant that whenever the weather got hot, we were entirely on the grid, which was not a good thing. The system has been rewired now so that both the AC and the electric clothes dryer are always connected to the grid while the rest of the house can be switched over to the solar system. So we’ll be able to keep cool and do laundry while running the rest of the house off solar.

Also this brings the system into compliance with electrical codes and it’s passed inspection.

Laser Stuff

This is one of the reasons why I’ve been so busy that blog posts have been neglected. If you’ve been following grouchyfarmer for a while, you know that I’m sort of an artist/electronics geek/computer geek/maker/… Well, you get the idea I suppose. Years ago I got a deal on a cheap, flat bed laser engraver. While it was fun to play with, it was also woefully slow, cranky, fiddly, annoying, had zero safety equipment, zero smoke control, inaccurate, but fun.

And it sparked some ideas as well. Commercial ideas that eventually developed into actual products. I eventually got a much better, much faster, much more accurate and much more useful laser, and I started cranking out things like company logos, art projects, things like that. I didn’t do a lot of it because despite what you may see on YouTube, there really isn’t any actual money in doing this kind of thing unless you’re willing to invest the time, money, and especially the equipment, into going into it almost at an industrial scale. What mattered to me was that I was enjoying it, it gave me an outlet for this need I had for artistic expression and all that high minded guff, and it gave me an excuse to play with a lot of high tech equipment.

I thought that part of my life was pretty much done with, though. I was getting a bit tired of it. Technology was moving on, if I was going to continue doing it I was going to have to get serious about learning Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator at a level that was deeper than I really wanted to get involved with. And to top it off my laser engravers were starting to show their age.

And then stuff started happening. People I’d made things for before started asking about doing more, the brewing company told me that all of the joke coasters I’d done for them had been stolen and they wanted more and oh, could I look into doing a few promotional items for them like maybe branded keyfobs or bottle openers. And then I was getting the urge to make “art” again…

Okay, to make a long story short, i got a new laser engraver/cutter and I’m back in the business again. And yes I’m going to bore you with all of the details, but not in this post. I’ll reserve that for a different time because to cover everything I want to talk about is going to take some space.

That’s about it for now. It’s actually nice out today, so I’m heading out to put a few miles on the bike.

Random Thoughts & Stuff

Ah, the joys of insomnia! Well I’m not sure if I should call it insomnia or not. I have no trouble falling asleep at all. The problem is I wake up after about 4 hours. And I mean wake up. About 3 AM rolls around and I wake up, fully, totally awake, not tired at all, fully alert, with sleep the last thing I want to do. I feel as if I’ve had a full, complete night’s rest. By about 10 or 11 AM I’m starting to feel a bit tired, take an hour nap or so, and I’m good for the rest of the day. I’m not sure what the heck is going on, but that’s the way things have been going here for the last month or so. Occasionally I’ll sleep to 5 or 6 AM, but that’s rare.

So what does one do at 4 AM when the rest of the world is asleep? Well, stuff like this….

I draw stuff, sometimes. When I’m in the mood. I fire up Photoshop on the big computer and drawing tablet and start fiddling around with a combination of sketching and filling and mix in some AI stuff and I end up with things like that up there. I start sketching things out, fill in bits and pieces with the AI thingie, fiddle around with smoothing and blending, adding more detail and eventually I end up with something that I, at least, like.

Book Pricing

So they got me working on pricing books again, this time children’s books. It’s fascinating. The price ranges on some of this stuff is fascinating. I was looking up that book over there on the left just a short time ago. The Berenstain books are considered “classics”, I suppose, like Seuss’s books. But they printed these things in the millions. It isn’t like they’re collector’s items or something.

But damn, some people try. If you look that one up over there on places like eBay you’ll find people asking mind bogglingly huge amounts of money for it. The highest price I found someone asking for this book was $240.

Seriously. Someone was asking $240 for that book up there. Another was a more “reasonable” $190.

If you dig around further you’ll find that the real selling price for that book, in reasonably good condition, is about $3.

The sellers of these high priced versions must think that there is someone, somewhere out there, who is stupid enough to pay $200 or more for a $3 book?j

Once in a while I run into a gem. I found one rather obscure Little Golden Book, a first edition with a very rare cover color, that was legitimately selling for big $$$. In pristine condition it was going for well over $100 for some reason. Alas, the one we had was not in pristine condition. In that kind of condition it was going for $40 or so. So by our standard policy we charge about 1/3 of what the retail price is, so I should probably put about $10 – $12 on it. But who’s going to pay that kind of money for a kid’s book around here? Oh, well. Not my problem. I slapped a not on it explaining it to the manager and I’ll let her decide what to do with it.

Solar Repairs and Theft???

The weather is fantastic out there right now, in the mid-50s, almost 30 degrees warmer than it was this time yesterday, so I took advantage of that to make some repairs to the solar panels. A couple of weeks ago I got up and looked out the window in the dim light of dawn and saw what looked like one of my solar panels laying face down in the middle of the yard?? WTF?

I bundled up and went out. Sure enough, one of the panels was laying out there, with the MP4 connectors ripped right off of the cables. At first MrsGF and I figured a gust of wind had caught it. They’re just leaning up against the side of the garage after all. But if that was the case why only one? Those panels are all wired together. If the wind caught one, the wires and connectors would be more than strong enough to pull several of the others along with it.

So I checked the historical data from the weather station in the backyard and we had almost no wind at all that night. The biggest gust we had was only 5 MPH for the previous 24 hours. So obviously it hadn’t been the wind.

So I went out and looked around again and… There wasn’t much snow out there, only in parts of the yard, and there were what looked suspiciously like the footprints of someone cutting through the backyards of my place and the neighbors’ yards. I figure some nimrod was stumbling home half drunk or something, went “Ooo, free solar panels!” and it wasn’t until after he’d ripped one free he realized that trying to lug around a 5 foot tall, 3 foot wide, 40 lb solar panel at two in the morning wasn’t a good idea and just dropped it.

Anyway, I hate trying to do wiring in cold weather. My fingers are clumsy enough as it is. Besides, the weather was so cloudy we hadn’t gotten enough sun to bother switching over to solar anyway. But today being bright and sunny and even warm, I spent a half hour trying to find where I’d put my MP4 connectors, crimping tools, etc. and then went out and got everything hooked up again.

Then held my breath, kept the fire extinguisher handy just in case I screwed up, switched everything on and… and it worked? Yeah, it worked.

So we got the solar going again, just in time for the spring sun. Even with some high haze I’m pulling in enough sun power to run the whole house off the panels. We’re pulling in 1.8KW at the moment.

Then, of course, I have the new panels sitting in the garage waiting. Getting those up is outside of my control. MrsGF won’t let me go on the roof any more for some reason. Not that I pay any attention to that when she’s not around, of course. She caught up up the spruce tree in the backyard one day stringing up antenna wires. Ooo, was she mad…

Anyway, we’re back on solar again, finally!

Catching Up. Bored… So bored… Records. And Solar Update

Wow, has it been that long since I posted anything? Sheesh… Well the fact of the matter is that there really hasn’t been much to talk about until now. Here at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters we’ve been… bored… so bored…

That started to change though beginning with this nonsense just below.

Yeah, snow. I know, I know, this is Wisconsin and snow is something we just live with. Or, rather we did. Snow has been a scarce commodity around here until just this past week. Winter resorts are literally going bankrupt because we pretty much haven’t had a real winter until this past week.

But then in the middle of February, now first we get hit. We got close to a foot and a half of snow in just about a week, and then the cold hit, with wind chill temperatures down around -35F and still air temperatures of around -10.

The local St. Vincent dePaul society where MrsGF and I both volunteer has been keeping me busy, though. Our primary fund raising method is a thrift store that the organization operates. We get donations of gently used clothing, furniture, appliances, cookware, etc. which we, in turn, sort, clean, and turn around and sell to the general public in the store. So they put me to work sorting, grading, cleaning and pricing a variety of stuff, including books, video games and vinyl records.

We don’t get a huge amount of vinyl records in. I suspect that most of them come from someone cleaning out Grandmother’s house after she moved into an assisted living center or has passed away, and they don’t know what to do with the stuff. We don’t mind.

You’d think it would be dull work but it’s actually quite interesting, especially the records. I’m not a collector or music fanatic or anything like that, but I do appreciate good music and I have a small collection of vinyl records and an excellent turntable. So I do like my music. My tastes wander all over the place from stuff ragtime, jazz and dance music from the 1920s and 30s, up to more modern stuff. I’m a creature of my generation, though, so my preferences run towards pop/rock music from the 60s and 70s.

My job is to sort through all of this stuff, check the condition of each record to make sure it’s playable. A lot of them aren’t. I’d say about 20% of them or more are so badly scratched or otherwise damaged that they go straight into the bin.

If they do look playable, they get run through that yellow thing over there on the right. If you dabble in used vinyl records at all you need one of these, or at least something like it. That’s a record washer. It’s filled with filtered water to which a record cleaning solution has been added. The record slides down into the tank just keeping the label out of the solution. It’s then clamped between two microfiber pads soaked with the solution and rotated around a few times. Dry it with a microfiber cloth or let it stand on a rack to air dry. It removes not just the dust and all that, it removes finger prints, dirt embedded in the grooves, etc. I’ve taken records that were unplayable and after running them through that thing they’ve come out sounding almost as if they were brand new.

Then I play them. Well, not all of them. I mean some of those records are the stuff of nightmares, depending on your musical tastes. But enough to determine if the record is in good enough condition to sell.

Then there’s pricing. We’re a thrift store, not an antique shop. We have a limited amount of storage and retail space, so we need to move product through the store as fast as possible. Plus we aren’t out to try to make a killing on some “rare” collectable. The rule of thumb we follow is that we take the average price an item sells for on the used market, and we charge 1/3 of that price. So if a record’s average selling price is, oh, $10 on eBay or one of the other pricing sources we use, we mark it at $3.

Not that I really need to worry about anything like that. The most expensive vinyl record I ran into so far was a rare special edition jazz recording from the early 1960s put out by, of all things, a high end paper manufacturer. The B side was pleasant, generic, 1960s style smooth jazz. The A side was something entirely different. Each track started out with a recording of a different printing press in operation, and then the musicians would come in, matching the tempo and tone of the printing press’s mechanical noises, blending into a smooth melody and eventually the mechanical noises would fade into the background leaving only the music. It was unique and actually worked surprisingly well. The album jacket was designed for a 2 disc set, but the second pocket wasn’t for another disc, it was for paper samples from the paper company. Alas, those were not in with the recording itself. I had a devil of a time finding any information at all about it. For a moment there I thought we might have something that might justify going to the trouble of putting it up for auction, but eventually I tracked it down and found that the last recorded sale of it was for only about $35.

The other day the manager of the store presented me with a whole stack of video game manuals. No games, just the manuals. I didn’t think they were worth anything. I was wrong, she told me. There apparently is a thriving market for just the game manuals. Oddly enough, sometimes the manuals alone sell for more than the actual game disc sells for.

And books… So many books… Modern mass market paperbacks and even hard covers just get shoved on the shelf for a set price. But we get a lot of very old, antique books as well. You’d think that a 120 year old book would be worth something, but most likely it isn’t. So many authors and titles that I’d never heard of before, and for good reason. Either our ancestors were very easily pleased, or publishers were putting out just as much pure crap as they are today.

Occasionally I’ll run across a gem, like a first edition of a popular author like Agatha Christie or something like that. But even those aren’t worth that much no matter what you might see on Antiques Road Show.

Solar stuff… You’re going to be hearing more about this later once the weather gets better. A big ass truck showed up at my front door yesterday and dropped this off:

Solar panels. Lots and lots of solar panels. Damn, those suckers were heavy. That pallet there weighs around 700 lbs. Fortunately the driver very graciously helped me wrestle it up the driveway and into the garage. Even better, all of the were intact with no shipping damage!

This spring or early summer the entire solar system is going to be completely rebuilt from the ground up. Those are 430W bifacial panels that I got for a ridiculously cheap price, $109 each from Signature Solar. I don’t really care about the bifacial part, it was that price that got my attention. Even MrsGF told me I was nuts if I didn’t grab a bunch of them for that.

The south facing roof of the garage is going to get covered with those, the existing 2.2 KW of existing panels are going to continue living on the backside of the garage, and when all is said and done I should have about 6 or more KW of solar panels out there, which ought to really piss off the utility company because I should have enough power coming in now to be able to shut off the main breaker and run the house entirely on solar.

Since all of the existing PV wiring is going to have to be pulled out anyway, we’re going to scrap all of the existing wiring and re-do all of it. it’s going to be a pain in the neck but if we’re to meet building codes it has to be done. We’re going to need larger PV wiring, larger circuit breakers and fuses, run new conduit, etc. anyway so we might as well re-work everything, re-route the conduit into more convenient locations, etc.

Random Stuff: Rockets, Pi5, Fake Milk, AirPods and More Wierd Weather

Artemis Delayed Again:

Once again NASA has delayed the next launch of Artemis, the space agency’s program that is supposed to take astronauts back to the moon using what is one of the most complicated and, frankly, bizarre schemes that even NASA has ever come up with. Artemis, and the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket are billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.

The Orion space craft that is supposed to carry astronauts is riddled with problems that include gas leaks and heat shield failures. (Nice job there, Boeing) It’s attempt to use it to send astronauts to the ISS ended in failure and when seirious leaks and other problems were discovered after it docked at the ISS and the astronauts were stranded had to wait for a flight from SpaceX to get back home. And the rest of the moon program is even worse. NASA still doesn’t have a lunar spacesuit, doesn’t have a lunar lander, doesn’t have the “mini” space station that will orbit the moon that it says it needs, doesn’t have… Well, it doesn’t have anything it needs to make this work, really. According to NASA’s original time table, the agency should already have astronauts on the moon or be nearly ready to land them there. In reality, we’re looking at mid-2026 before the Artemis is even ready to fly again thanks to numerous problems that have including gas leaks and issues with the heat shield, and it’s going to be years beyond that before anyone actually gets to the moon

And as for the SLS itself, it is so much over budget and will cost so much to launch, that no one knows how the program can even continue. I’ve seen estimates of as much as $2.5 billion per launch. Rumor has it that there’s about a 50/50 chance the whole program will be scrapped. Considering the progress SpaceX has made with its Starship program, it’s going to have similar heavy launch capabilities for a fraction of the cost, so why is NASA even dumping all that money into that black hole in the first place?

Apple AirPods Pro

I love music of all kinds and probably have spent way too much on speakers, turntables, albums, etc. in my life. I’ve had Apple’s basic AirPod headphones, one of the first versions, for a long time but didn’t use them all that often because I found them awkward to use, they fell out of my ears frequently, and while the sound quality was surprisingly good, it wasn’t anywhere near as good as what came out of my stereo system speakers. But along came Black Friday and there was a huge discount on the AirPod Pro. So I got a set for a Christmas present for one of my sons and at that price I couldn’t resist getting some for myself as well.

I’m no expert on headphones. As I said my only experience with these things were the original AirPods. So when I plugged these things into my ears it was quite a shock.

First I thought I’d gone deaf because suddenly I couldn’t hear anything. Not the kitchen exhaust fan, not the furnace fan, not the air filter, not the cat’s water fountain, nothing. There was almost utter, total silence. I hadn’t bothered to read the blurbs for the things because if I had I’d have realized that the Pro model comes with noise canceling technology. And it works so well it’s almost scary. Noise canceling can be turned off, or it can be set to let in some ambient sound and things like that. But at first I couldn’t believe how quiet it suddenly got.

Then I fired up Amazon Prime Music and started going through my playlists. Holy sh*t… I’d never heard anything quite like it before. How the hell do they get something that small to sound that good?

Then there the other goodies, like being able to take phone calls with the things (paired with my phone), interact with Apple’s Siri, and other goodies I haven’t had a chance to explore yet. There are built in microphones for phone calls. There are accelerometers that can sense when I nod yes or shake my head no to respond to Siri, pressure sensitive switch in one of the stems to switch modes or to pause music or switch to the next track.

Like I said, I’m no expert on headphones. Far from it. But damn, these things are good. I might write about them later after I’ve had a chance to use them more.

Pi5 SSD

If you’ve been reading grouchyfarmer for a while you probably know I love the Raspberry Pi computers. Basically the Pi 4 and 5 models are full blown computers costing less than $100, running a version of Linux. Just plug in a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and you have yourself a pretty darn nice little Linux computer that can do just about anything you need to do with a computer, except for things like hard core gaming, video editing, etc. that requires a huge amount of processing power and/or memory. Plus it’s easy to connect to the outside world to work as a controller for robotics and other goodies.

One of the biggest pains in the butt when it comes to the Pi computers has been its reliance on micro SD cards for booting/data storage. Micro SD cards are a serious bottleneck. They have a limited lifespan and for modern computing needs they’re woefully slow. But the new Pi5 can handle modern SSD drives with the addition of a simple plug in board, making it much, much more reliable and much faster. You can roll your own, or you can get one complete with a 250 gig SSD and the add on card, with Rasberian (the Pi’s version of Linux) already installed and ready to go from Canakit for about $200. And I got my hot little hands on one.

I only just started playing with it, so this is something I’ll probably bring up in the future once I have a chance to put it through its paces. But my early impression is that wow, this thing is neat. I wouldn’t have though it would be that much fast than the Pi5s I have that run off the SD card, but yeah, it is. Much, much faster. Using a real SSD instead of that micro SD card makes a huge difference.

Fake Milk

I’m not a big fan of things like almond “milk” and all that stuff. Most of it is, frankly, crap. Horrible taste, non-milk like textures, and the only reason they can claim it’s “healthy” is because the manufacturers shovel in vitamins and minerals from external sources because the tiny, tiny amount of actual real nuts in that “milk” have very little nutritional value.

But over the years I’ve become increasingly sensitive to dairy for some reason. I can’t eat ice cream any more, for example, without experiencing a great deal of gastrointestinal distress. Nor can I eat cold cereal with milk. A bit of cream in my coffee doesn’t bother me. Much. Cheese isn’t a problem. But drinking milk? No way in hell. My eldest son is even worse than I am.

I don’t normally make product recommendations like this, but I have to bring this one up.

So I’ve kind of been keeping an eye out for some kind of fake milk that is reasonably close to the same texture as real dairy milk, and I think I’ve found one. That’s it over there on the left. I picked it up as an impulse buy when I was at Walmart the other day.

The texture, mouthfeel and all of that is pretty similar to a rather rich whole milk. And while it doesn’t taste anything at all like dairy milk, the flavor is pleasant. And even more impressive, it’s a reasonably good substitute for the half and half I normally put in my coffee. And it’s good enough that I might even be able to start eating cold cereal once more. I told my son about it and he picked some up and he loves the stuff.

If you absolutely need to have some kind of milk-like substance for your cereal or coffee or cerealor whatever and can’t handle dairy milk, you might want to give this a try.

Weird Weather

grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters

It’s no secret that the weather has been weird for some time now. After the warmest winter we ever had last year, one of the warmest summers we’ve had, and one of the warmest autumns we ever had, temperatures abruptly dropped to well below zero for a few days with some light snow, then abruptly jumped up to 40° with rain… Then we had dense fog for a couple of days.

The brief period of cold resulted in a lot of lakes in the area developing a very thin layer of ice, and people being people, the DNR and the sheriff’s department has had to issue warnings to people to stay the hell off the ice. I’ve heard news stories almost every day of idiots venturing out onto ice that’s still way, way too thin, falling through and having to be rescued.

Random Thoughts: Jaguar. (The car, not the cat)

Some motor vehicles become iconic. Almost everyone, at least in the US, will instantly come up with an image of the Ford Mustang in one of its many forms. A classic shape that Ford has more or less stuck to since it was first introduced in the 1960s.

Another automotive icon is the Jaguar E-type.

That up there is the image most people think of when someone brings up the car brand.

Jag has always produced cars that are stylish, sporty, elegant and, of course, bloody expensive. And often not very well made, I’m afraid. My experience with Jag is that it is a company that has always valued style over substance. That beautiful E-type up there? I never owned one but I have driven two different examples of that car back in the 1970s when they were still relatively new, and I can tell you from first hand experience, that while looking at one is fantastic, driving one is something else again. Both of the ones I drove were utterly awful in every single way. Over the last 20 years or so that’s changed, the cars certainly handle and perform better. But, alas, they have earned a reputation for unreliability that has hurt sales badly.

Jaguar’s biggest problem though has always been that it can’t seem to be able to actually sell cars. At least not enough to remain profitable. The company has changed hands more than once over the last few decades, and since 2007 has been owned by an Indian conglomerate called Tata. And it is doing worse than ever, I’m afraid.

Jag’s solution to the problem is to stop building cars entirely. Seriously. It is completely shutting down all production of all current models and in the future it is going to completely retool and produce only newly designed EVs. So what is it going to do to tide itself over while waiting to bring out the new models?

This is what Jaguar dropped on an unsuspecting world a few days ago:

I’ve watched that ad about six times now and I still don’t know what the hell it’s supposed to be. No one else seems to know WTF it is either.

The ad sparked a firestorm of controversy on social media, as I’m sure you can imagine. The comments on FB, X, Youtube, etc. have been scathing, and often they have descended into downright abusive language and even hate speech directed at “woke” ideology and LGBTQ persons. It’s all really rather sad.

Basically all Jag has going for it right now is its brand, Jaguar, a maker of over priced, over powered, stylish and not very good cars that seemed to be aimed squarely at the kind of fellow in upper management who takes his Jag to a secluded resort in the Catskills to cheat on his wife with his trophy girlfriend, and the golf clubs in the back so he can go golfing with his boss on Sunday while trying to explain why he doesn’t have all the receipts for his expense account claims.

What this ad tells me is that Jag is desperately trying to change that image. And I mean seriously desperate. It also tells me that they don’t have a fucking clue as to what the hell they’re actually doing. They have no sense if direction, no market that they’re aiming at, no technology they are trying to push, and worst of all, no cars. They got nothing. So all they can do is put out whatever the hell this is to try to keep the brand name alive until they have something, anything, they can try to sell.

But this? This is supposed to give consumers confidence in the brand? This is supposed to somehow make people curious enough that they’ll wait until Jag can retool and start producing cars again? No. Sorry.

Stop it. Just stop it. It’s time for Jaguar to just hang it up and retire gracefully instead of trying to hang on far, far too long like an aging quarterback who refuses to admit he no longer has the ability to compete.

I’m Bored. Time for Another Cat Sketch

Radom Thoughts: Movies

So I’ve been watching movies of late. Netflix has dropped a whole bunch of (shudder) Hallmark style holiday romcoms and I (god I don’t believe I’m admitting this. I’m never going to live this down, am I?) have watched pretty much all of them. I could probably come up with a lengthy essay about that all on its own, but that’s not where I’m going with this.

I want to talk about the multiverse. You know, that theory that claims that there are many, many universes out there. All of them just like this universe, only a bit different here and there. Somewhere out there is another universe where you’re filthy rich and Musk is your personal toenail trimmer. Or where you are a small, intelligent duck named Roger who lives in his mother’s basement. Or where you’re a ferret herder in Canada. You get the idea.

Specifically I want to talk about the movie industry and the multiverse.

So let’s get back on track, shall we? One of the reasons why I was watching those romcoms was because I needed to do something to recover from watching the Deadpool/Wolverine movie that I’d watched earlier. After watching two hours of bad jokes, dozens of disembowelings, beheadings, and an eventual body count that that surpassed that of a small war, I needed to do something to get all that gore out of my head.

For those of you who have been living in a cave for the last year or so, the biggest event in the movie industry (arguably) was Marvel/Disney dropping the new Deadpool movie on an unsuspecting public. And if you aren’t a fan of the franchise, you probably don’t know why this was such a big deal.

After the wildly successful Avengers movies, Marvel put out a few flicks that were, to be blunt, stinkers. The Eternals did badly. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was disappointing. Instead of following up the mildly successful Captain Marvel movie with a decent sequel, we got something called “The Marvels”. I’m still not quite sure what Marvel was trying to do with that movie. And as for poor Thor… The last time we saw Thor he’d been partnered up with a 9 year old girl. Seriously. They’re apparently trying to turn Thor into a kids show? The last Dr. Strange movie was – was just odd.

So basically Marvel needed to do something. They needed to do something big. And even more importantly, they needed to do something to make gobs and gobs of money because they got bought by Disney and Disney needs the money. Keeping Walt on ice in the secret vault under the Magic Kingdom ain’t cheap, after all. The only two superheroes whose careers Marvel hadn’t ruined yet and which were pretty much guaranteed box office gold were Deadpool and Wolverine. So, someone said, let’s team the two of them up! Our two most popular characters, the only ones who’s reputations and careers we haven’t driven into the muck yet, together in one massive blockbuster movie? Heck, they could have put DeadPool and Wolverine in tutus dancing in Swan Lake for two hours and a lot of fanboys would pay money to see it.

There was only one problem. Wolverine/Logan was very, very dead. A fact that was abundantly made clear when in the opening minutes of the movie we see Deadpool using Logan’s rotting corpse to dispatch several dozen bad guys in a variety of very entertaining ways.

No problem, though. This is Marvel, after all. Need to replace a hero who was killed off in the previous movie to make people all weepy and sad? Just trot off to an alternative universe and find a new one.

Yes, more “multiverse” crap. Sigh… Kill off your hero? No problem, just pop into a different universe and find the alternative version of said hero. There are apparently an infinite number of them. Just whip out your Walmart alternative universe twiddler and pop off and bobs your uncle. Take your pick…

Sigh… Look, okay, it was kind of neat the first time they pulled this stunt but it got old fast. Both Marvel and DC have been pulling this crap for years now and we’re getting tired of it. It’s hard to get movie goers to invest emotionally in the tragic death of a character when we know damn well that chances are good that in the next film they’re going to whip out another one brought in from an alternative universe.

So stop it. Just stop it. Okay?

To Help You Relax A Bit, Here’s A Cat In A Hat

Is Abnormal The New Normal?

So, it’s October 29. Deep into fall. Frost on the pumpkin and all that.

About that frost thing…

It’s sunny, blustery, and about 78° and on its way to 82° the weather guy said and I’m tempted to turn the air conditioning back on. Wisconsin is known for it’s odd weather but this?

I have cilantro and tiny onions sprouting from seed out in the raised beds.

I have dill sprouting

And my parsley looks like this:

Oh, and the rose bush out front was starting to go dormant but has now decided it’s going to start flowering again.

This is just ain’t right.

Random Thoughts: Stuff We Know That’s A Lie

The List of Health Fallacies Continues to Grow

Being mumble mumble years old, I’ve lived through dozens, perhaps even hundreds of claims about what is or is not good for your health, only to see many of those claims turn out to be blatantly, even ridiculously wrong. The latest is the standing desk. That’s what got this train of thought started.

A few years ago someone had one of those “Aha!” moments. People who have a sedentary lifestyle generally have shorter life spans and poorer health than those who are physically active, they thought. So that must mean that sitting at a desk in an office all the time must be bad for your health, they thought. So we need to throw all of our traditional desks and chairs out and get desks that make us stand up all the time. You’ll burn more calories, get more exercise and generally it will improve your health. And almost immediately many people jumped on the bandwagon, especially the desk manufacturers who saw the opportunity to ~~scam~~ sell standing desks to company managers who dearly love to torment and torture their employees and otherwise make their lives a living hell.

(Sidenote: Even worse is the abomination known as the walking desk. This is a desk where you not only have to stand up, but it also has a treadmill built into it so you have to walk while you’re trying to work. There is a special circle in Hell just for people who come up with this kind of crap. At least I hope there is. Right alongside of the same bunch who came up with the “poverty simulator” the school district I worked at forced all employees to attend where underpaid school employees who were, in fact, already poor, were forced to pretend they were even more poor for an entire afternoon.)

But those of us who have ever worked in the grocery store or retail store environment would have immediately laughed you out of the room if anyone had bothered to ask us. One of the leading causes of workman’s compensation claims by employees at grocery stores and other retail businesses is physical injury caused by… Guess what? Yeah, standing for prolonged periods of time. Lower back injuries, knee injuries, ankle and foot injuries, deep vein thrombosis, other circulation problems… The list goes on and on. New studies indicate that working at a standing desk does nothing to improve cardiovascular health and can even cause significant health problems.

So standing/walking desks join a long list of other nonsense that have made their way into the “it’s good for you” world of nonsense. Here are a few others.

Coffee has long been claimed to cause all sorts of health problems ranging form sleeplessness to cancer. While it will indeed keep you from sleeping, the rest is complete nonsense. We now know that moderate coffee consumption has many significant health benefits. It seems to help to prevent some types of cancers. It seems to prevent or at least delay or make less serious some kinds of dementia.

Stretching before exercising? Doesn’t seem to do any good at all. It might feel good, might seem to make sense in a way, but in actual clinical studies it did not reduce the number of injuries when done before strenuous exercise. In fact, in some cases stretching before doing proper warmups sometimes actually caused injuries.

Milk? All that stuff about how good it is for you? Yeah, well… Sorry, no. Milk does provide a lot of nutrition, but all of that nutrition can be obtained from other sources easily. You don’t need milk. You certainly don’t need it for bone health. In fact, studies have shown that people who consume large amounts of milk actually have more fractures and bone health issues than those who drink little or no milk.

How about cholesterol? Eating foods high in cholesterol has little or no effect on your blood cholesterol levels so avoiding those foods does little or nothing to reduce your blood cholesterol levels. The reason why is that your body needs cholesterol. Needs it so much that it makes its own. There are some exceptions for some people with a particular genetic heritage, but generally speaking dietary cholesterol has little or no effect on blood cholesterol. A diet high in saturated fats can increase your blood cholesterol, but except for a minority of people who have that specific genetic situation, eating foods high in cholesterol has little or no effect on blood cholesterol.

We all know that a glass of wine occasionally is a good thing, right? Wrong. So many people bought into that nonsense that even my doctor was advising me to have one or two drinks a week even though I can’t stand the stuff. He, and they, were wrong. A more careful examination of the data used to indicate that there was some kind of health advantage to drinking certain types of alcohol like red wine has proven that those benefits were illusory. All that guff about the antioxidants in wine being good for you? Yeah, the problem with that is that for you to get enough of those antioxidants to do any good you’d have to drink gallons of the stuff every day. What it boils down to is that there is no health benefit from even moderate consumption of any type of alcoholic beverage, and alcohol consumption at any level causes an increased risk of cancer.

But enough. I’m getting bored and I’m sure you are too.

Coming Up!

Yes, I’m still alive. Yes, I’m still fiddling around with stuff, but I’ve been so busy with gardening and other summer stuff I haven’t had time to do much writing. Plus my laziness index seems to have gone up significantly lately, so there’s that.

I’ve got several projects in the works. I’m building an 8 legged robot because why not.

I’ve also decided I hate my bedroom clock so I’ve decided to build my own clock radio using a clock module I got from Ukraine that uses some kind of Cold War era electro luminescent numeric display salvaged from some kind of old Russian hardware and an AM/FM radio kit that comes as a bare circuit board that I have to put together myself because, well, also why not?

I still need to get my off center fed dipole up before the snow flies. I like the mag loop antenna a lot but I need the OCFD not just for amateur radio but also for short wave broadcast band listening. And to get that up I have to dig a hole to put in a 16 foot post, pour cement and… I did mention I’m lazy, right?