WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Lazarushian-leathers Let Loose in the Labyrinth
byVanderleunonSeptember 15, 2017
So I’ll meet ’im later on
At the place where ’e is gone—
Where it’s always double drill and no canteen.
’E’ll be squattin’ on the coals
Givin’ drink to poor damned souls,
An’ I’ll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!
Yes, Din! Din! Din!
You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din!
Though I’ve belted you and flayed you,
By the livin’ Gawd that made you,
You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!
– –Gunga Din by Rudyard Kipling
How (Not) to Run a Modern Society on Solar and Wind Power Alone First, we could count on a backup infrastructure of dispatchable fossil fuel power plants to supply electricity when there’s not enough renewable energy available. Second, we could oversize the renewable generation capacity, adjusting it to the worst case scenario. Third, we could connect geographically dispersed renewable energy sources to smooth out variations in power production. Fourth, we could store surplus electricity for use in times when solar and/or wind resources are low or absent. As we shall see, all of these strategies are self-defeating on a large enough scale, even when they’re combined. If the energy used for building and maintaining the extra infrastructure is accounted for in a life cycle analysis of a renewable power grid, it would be just as CO2-intensive as the present-day power grid.
An ode to Vise-grips If one needs a single tool, Vise-grips are it. On a motorcycle I have used one as clutch or shift lever or attached to a broken throttle cable.
19 Girls Have Worn The Same Dress On Their First Day Of Kindergarten In The Last 67 Years For Colorado-based mom Jenny Hirt, a dress sewn by her great-grandmother in 1950 is the core of a heartwarming tradition. The dress was first worn by Hirt’s aunt, Martha Esch, on her first day of kindergarten, and is still being worn by each girl in the family for the same occasion 67 years later.After having previously sent her own daughters, 4-year-old Caroline and 6-year-old Ally, to school in the symbolic yellow smock, Hirt’s niece recently became the nineteenth person to wear it – Hirt herself was the fifth! The garment has traveled between 7 States throughout the years, yet has only had to be minimally repaired by recipients. Considering most families can barely make a sweater from the 70’s last a couple generations without falling apart, this is an astounding feat.
An ode to Vise-grips. I’ve torn up and twisted off more stuck nuts and bolt heads with vise-grips over the years than I care to admit. These days I only use them on stuff that’s already round, and then always with a cushion. If using a cushion makes it too loose, the stuck thing just has to stay stuck.
TenSeptember 15, 2017, 9:50 AM
Having given away an entire nation with feckless codependency and spineless lifestyle signalling only, now the ostensible right turns its victorious attention to banging on about the great perils of solar and wind energy when not bleating against vegans or something. Sure, that’s a winning formula.
Just let that one go already. Fossil fuels are presently effective but they’re also a supremely dumbassed technical hill to die on. To then conflate them with rightism only diminishes the latter as misled and ineffective. Which it is.
If, in the great crucible of “free markets” rightists are always on about, electricity were universally viable there’d be no downside to it. That day will come, thankfully. So relax.
jwmSeptember 15, 2017, 12:23 PM
Ah- vice grips. Some genius has combined the vice grip with the crescent wrench. Dial it in, snap it shut. cool.
JWM
pbirdSeptember 15, 2017, 12:54 PM
I have used vise grips for bathtub tap handles when the part that the handle goes on was too old and stripped to ever work again. Eventually, we got the bathroom remodeled.
RoscoeSeptember 15, 2017, 1:37 PM
Kipling was some kind of genius. What’s always amazed me about Gunga Din is that RK seems to have constructed it so that even with the Cockney pronunciation and vernacular, and even with the non-English words & phrases, one can read the poem aloud – at the ideal pace – and it still rolls fluently off the tongue! As I recite that poem aloud, the words just flow out, and in my head I’m thinking “there’s no way that I should have just got that phrase/verse/line out without getting tongue-twisted”, but it works, at least for me. Just me? Or any else?
Ten- I have no idea what you are trying to say. It’s probably me.
“Better man than me, Gunga Din” Whenever I hear that I think back to the Charles Stuart murder case in Boston in the 90’s. In an interview the husband of the murdered woman stated that he ‘forgave’ the men responsible for his wife’s death, because he thought they didn’t ‘mean to’.
And I thought (at the time) he’s a better man than I because I could never forgive anyone for my wifes death. A few days later the husband jumped off the Tobin Bridge between Charlestown and Boston to his death and I feel grief for his obvious pain that caused him to take his own life.
A day later it came out that the husband was about to be arrested by Boston Police as the murderer.
Then I thought, “you’re a smarter man than me, Gunga Din”.
About 35 years ago we had a 19″ “portable” color TV that was sitting on one of them tubular roll around carts and our son was about 3 or 4 at the time and when he tried to change the channel (no remote) he snapped the plastic rotary knob off. Back then we were used to getting up to go change the channel but now the knob had to be manipulated just so in order to work, otherwise it would just spin on the shaft with a flat side on it.
One saturday afternoon a friend came by and we sat around for a spell smokin and drinkin with the toob on, but turned all the way down, and the stereo playin. At one point he got tired of finaggling with that broken knob and went out to his ride and grabbed a pair of 6″ needle nosed vise grips and clamped em on the shaft. Ta-Daaaa……
So we kept sitting there doing what we were doing and when he left he forgot to take his vise grips with him. Several weeks later he got transferred to another state and I never saw him again. Eventually that TV died and the vise grips ended up in my tool box.
Zoom ahead about 3 and a half decades and the previous owner of my Blazer managed to round off the shaft of the control that changes the angle of the back of the drivers seat and apparently the previous owner had some girth because that angle was not acceptable to me. The plastic handle meant to control that angle just spins on the splined shaft.
Since that moment last year when I got that Blazer, and still, that 6″ needle nosed vise grip lives on that splined shaft on the side of my drivers seat.
FWIW, when my FIL law, a machinist, died 8 years ago his wife gave me a fair amount of his tools of which there were about 11 vise grips of every shape and size for welding and everything else – added to the 6 pairs I already had and my Waterloo roll around tool box got instantly smaller.
Howard NelsonSeptember 15, 2017, 9:57 PM
It must be that Great Grandmothers who live to see their great grandchildren think they’re Great and that all the troubles she went through were all worth it.
Don’t get me started on wind! Wind power makes no sense at all on a public utilities scale, no way, no how.
If you saw the map in the article of power sources, by type, in the US, you can’t help but see how pregnant the PNW is with hydro electric power. When they put in the freak show of wind in Central Washington, along the Columbia River basin, I wanted to know how much power we’d be getting for our subsidized virtue signaling windmills. It took me 2 years to finally get the answer. When they eventuate the whole works, in Washington and Oregon, the power would not equal one hydro-electric generator’s output. Factor in the enormous spread out of the windmills, and realize that there is friction working against your potential power load, and you begin to realize the huge waste of money on wind, just so we can feel renewable, or something.
Insert bad swear word here. The dam closest to me, in eastern WA, has 33 of those generators online. That’s just one of a string of big dams (the very same ones the enviros wish to destroy) in the PNW. Hydro is a renewable behemoth. Wind is a fart in your face. I’d love to see the calculation on how much energy comes out of wind, per dollar, compared to Nat Gas or hydro. Actually, counting in the subsidies, it is a negative number.
Sooooo, when I read lines such as, “we know that wind and solar can replace fossil,” I want to reach for the noose and a pitchfork. Explain to me how one runs out of electricity on the interstate, evacuating from Irma, and then what does one do? Grab a fuel can and look for an electricity station?
Rob De WittSeptember 15, 2017, 11:47 PM
I have it on good authority (Rick Shubb is a friend of mine) that the over-center locking action of the brilliant Shubb capo had its origin in Rick’s fascination with the action of a vice-grip.
Unless another way is invented to capture wind power I don’t see big spinning fans as having much of a future except in some specific private installations, primarily in wide open isolated areas.
When examining alternative power methods quickly you find the stunning drawback on transporting the power over distance. Contrast the amount of power used now through the standard municipal sources to what can be sourced through alternatives and you’ll see where the problem lies. If this problem is ever to be solved it will require time and huge leaps in the advancement of the related technology.
What I can see, for now, is solar applications being applied on an individual residence type where each home owner owns and maintains the equipment for his own use. If you try to ramp that up to say a community level it all falls apart quickly because of the distances – solar power drops off drastically over distance. People are used to the idea of paying for utilities and many people are used to the idea of maintaining their own well and septic equipment – methods in which I have always preferred, so the idea of maintaining solar equipment is not a huge leap. Much like companies that sprung up to take care of pools, companies that take care of solar will spring up as well.
Though the prices for solar equipment have dropped in recent years, the cost of the equipment to provide juice on the scale that most people use today is still unbelieveably expensive and in many cases there is simply not enough space on the property to contain the amount of equipment to support the lifestyle. In the solar community it is a given that before any solar application can occur a clear understanding must be made to the residents that unless costs and space are not an issue a balance must be achieved between use and expense in order to achieve any semblance of success.
In all things there is a time for observing and a time for doing and next summer I will be doing solar here in my office with the long range goal of taking the entire domain off the grid. I have spent the last 10 years constantly lowering the amount of juice I use to where right now I believe it is about as low as it can go, without just sitting here in the dark and sweating or freezing. Even with all that, it is estimated to cost close to $1000 in solar and related equipment to remove my (stand alone detached) office from the grid permanently. There is a lot more thinking in this stuff than most people know.
Good comment, Ghostie. I know for certain that I live in God’s very country as far as resources are concerned. Timber, hydro, and in a more perfect world, Nukes, are the manna we enjoy in the PNW.
If I were suddenly promoted to governor, I’d take down all of the wind generators and maybe surplus them for private sales. It would be a net gain, monetarily.
Larry GeigerSeptember 16, 2017, 11:30 AM
Solar and wind energy have always been excellent for pumping water uphill to some storage container/cattle watering trough and heating water. We know that we could reduce electrical usage in the southern areas of the US by heating more water with solar but all anyone wants to talk about is electricity. Foolishness.
“…all anyone wants to talk about is…”
==========================
If you’re talking about the gov’t/media that is probably true, but out here in realityland we’re actually trying to get stuff done. I’m playing around with the idea of eeking 4x the amount of juice out of any specific solar panel with “add-ons” that create “spin-offs”.
The panel I am developing is a standard 100 watt unit and it will be surrounded by concave mirrors focused through fresnel lenses effectively supplying more fuel (sunlight) for the transfer. This of course will raise the temperature of the solar cells which is not good (heat causes inefficiency), so I am threading tiny copper tubing around each individual solar cell which will initially carry water for cooling purposes on both front and back sides, like a car radiator, and that heated water can then be used for other purposes. If the water is traded for alcohol, which has better cooling properties, it can then be ran through a heat transfer unit for heating a space, maybe a house.
It’s the little guys out here in the garages late at night playing with things that interest them that are getting things done while the Elon Musks make claims and mostly fail and shyster the citizenry.
My goal? It is a goal that is 40 years old.
A container sitting in the corner of the laundry room, basement, or garage, about the size of a 50 gallon water heater that, connected to a very reduced solar array, that can provide 100% power to the residence in 30 day cycles even in complete darkness.
Ever heard of solatubes? They’ve been around for decades. Utilizing these enhanced solatubes solar panels can be installed INSIDE of buildings and out of the elements, extending their life expectancy. Imagine a small, maybe 12′ x 12′, *maintenance room* in your house that would contain hundreds of solar cells arranged in such a way that, being fed by solatubes through fresnel lenses and convex mirrors, they create all of your homes electrical needs and hot water and heat and even air conditioning, and store the additional juice in the 50 gallon device (sort of like a capacitor but with slow release) I mentioned above in case of emergency’s.
At one point in the late 80s or early 90s, my dad bought a ’58 Ford pickup, because he ‘wanted a toy,’ and that was something he felt was simple enough for him to work on. I don’t think he ever replaced the vice-grip that was used to roll the driver’s window up and down.
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
Green Pants Interior by Klahn
Who Am I? by Carl Sandburg
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I reach my hands and play with pebbles of destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading “Keep Off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.
Duty, Beauty, Liberty, Country, Honor, Family, Faith — Plus a few simple easy to follow rules for guys
Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea
They thought great thoughts about liberty
Poets wrote down words that did fit
Writers wrote books
Thinkers thought about it
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
Many’s the road I have walked upon
Many’s the hour between dusk and dawn
Many’s the time
Many’s the mile
I see it all now
Through the eyes of a child
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
And close your eyes
Leave it all for a while
Leave the world
And your worries behind
You will build on whatever is real
And wake up each day
To a new waking dream
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Change, change come over
Change come over
Talkin’ about a change
Change, change
Change come over, now
Change, change, change come over
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
Gerard Van der Leun
Comments on this entry are closed.
An ode to Vise-grips. I’ve torn up and twisted off more stuck nuts and bolt heads with vise-grips over the years than I care to admit. These days I only use them on stuff that’s already round, and then always with a cushion. If using a cushion makes it too loose, the stuck thing just has to stay stuck.
Having given away an entire nation with feckless codependency and spineless lifestyle signalling only, now the ostensible right turns its victorious attention to banging on about the great perils of solar and wind energy when not bleating against vegans or something. Sure, that’s a winning formula.
Just let that one go already. Fossil fuels are presently effective but they’re also a supremely dumbassed technical hill to die on. To then conflate them with rightism only diminishes the latter as misled and ineffective. Which it is.
If, in the great crucible of “free markets” rightists are always on about, electricity were universally viable there’d be no downside to it. That day will come, thankfully. So relax.
Ah- vice grips. Some genius has combined the vice grip with the crescent wrench. Dial it in, snap it shut. cool.
JWM
I have used vise grips for bathtub tap handles when the part that the handle goes on was too old and stripped to ever work again. Eventually, we got the bathroom remodeled.
Kipling was some kind of genius. What’s always amazed me about Gunga Din is that RK seems to have constructed it so that even with the Cockney pronunciation and vernacular, and even with the non-English words & phrases, one can read the poem aloud – at the ideal pace – and it still rolls fluently off the tongue! As I recite that poem aloud, the words just flow out, and in my head I’m thinking “there’s no way that I should have just got that phrase/verse/line out without getting tongue-twisted”, but it works, at least for me. Just me? Or any else?
Ten- I have no idea what you are trying to say. It’s probably me.
“Better man than me, Gunga Din” Whenever I hear that I think back to the Charles Stuart murder case in Boston in the 90’s. In an interview the husband of the murdered woman stated that he ‘forgave’ the men responsible for his wife’s death, because he thought they didn’t ‘mean to’.
And I thought (at the time) he’s a better man than I because I could never forgive anyone for my wifes death. A few days later the husband jumped off the Tobin Bridge between Charlestown and Boston to his death and I feel grief for his obvious pain that caused him to take his own life.
A day later it came out that the husband was about to be arrested by Boston Police as the murderer.
Then I thought, “you’re a smarter man than me, Gunga Din”.
About 35 years ago we had a 19″ “portable” color TV that was sitting on one of them tubular roll around carts and our son was about 3 or 4 at the time and when he tried to change the channel (no remote) he snapped the plastic rotary knob off. Back then we were used to getting up to go change the channel but now the knob had to be manipulated just so in order to work, otherwise it would just spin on the shaft with a flat side on it.
One saturday afternoon a friend came by and we sat around for a spell smokin and drinkin with the toob on, but turned all the way down, and the stereo playin. At one point he got tired of finaggling with that broken knob and went out to his ride and grabbed a pair of 6″ needle nosed vise grips and clamped em on the shaft. Ta-Daaaa……
So we kept sitting there doing what we were doing and when he left he forgot to take his vise grips with him. Several weeks later he got transferred to another state and I never saw him again. Eventually that TV died and the vise grips ended up in my tool box.
Zoom ahead about 3 and a half decades and the previous owner of my Blazer managed to round off the shaft of the control that changes the angle of the back of the drivers seat and apparently the previous owner had some girth because that angle was not acceptable to me. The plastic handle meant to control that angle just spins on the splined shaft.
Since that moment last year when I got that Blazer, and still, that 6″ needle nosed vise grip lives on that splined shaft on the side of my drivers seat.
FWIW, when my FIL law, a machinist, died 8 years ago his wife gave me a fair amount of his tools of which there were about 11 vise grips of every shape and size for welding and everything else – added to the 6 pairs I already had and my Waterloo roll around tool box got instantly smaller.
It must be that Great Grandmothers who live to see their great grandchildren think they’re Great and that all the troubles she went through were all worth it.
Don’t get me started on wind! Wind power makes no sense at all on a public utilities scale, no way, no how.
If you saw the map in the article of power sources, by type, in the US, you can’t help but see how pregnant the PNW is with hydro electric power. When they put in the freak show of wind in Central Washington, along the Columbia River basin, I wanted to know how much power we’d be getting for our subsidized virtue signaling windmills. It took me 2 years to finally get the answer. When they eventuate the whole works, in Washington and Oregon, the power would not equal one hydro-electric generator’s output. Factor in the enormous spread out of the windmills, and realize that there is friction working against your potential power load, and you begin to realize the huge waste of money on wind, just so we can feel renewable, or something.
Insert bad swear word here. The dam closest to me, in eastern WA, has 33 of those generators online. That’s just one of a string of big dams (the very same ones the enviros wish to destroy) in the PNW. Hydro is a renewable behemoth. Wind is a fart in your face. I’d love to see the calculation on how much energy comes out of wind, per dollar, compared to Nat Gas or hydro. Actually, counting in the subsidies, it is a negative number.
Sooooo, when I read lines such as, “we know that wind and solar can replace fossil,” I want to reach for the noose and a pitchfork. Explain to me how one runs out of electricity on the interstate, evacuating from Irma, and then what does one do? Grab a fuel can and look for an electricity station?
I have it on good authority (Rick Shubb is a friend of mine) that the over-center locking action of the brilliant Shubb capo had its origin in Rick’s fascination with the action of a vice-grip.
Unless another way is invented to capture wind power I don’t see big spinning fans as having much of a future except in some specific private installations, primarily in wide open isolated areas.
When examining alternative power methods quickly you find the stunning drawback on transporting the power over distance. Contrast the amount of power used now through the standard municipal sources to what can be sourced through alternatives and you’ll see where the problem lies. If this problem is ever to be solved it will require time and huge leaps in the advancement of the related technology.
What I can see, for now, is solar applications being applied on an individual residence type where each home owner owns and maintains the equipment for his own use. If you try to ramp that up to say a community level it all falls apart quickly because of the distances – solar power drops off drastically over distance. People are used to the idea of paying for utilities and many people are used to the idea of maintaining their own well and septic equipment – methods in which I have always preferred, so the idea of maintaining solar equipment is not a huge leap. Much like companies that sprung up to take care of pools, companies that take care of solar will spring up as well.
Though the prices for solar equipment have dropped in recent years, the cost of the equipment to provide juice on the scale that most people use today is still unbelieveably expensive and in many cases there is simply not enough space on the property to contain the amount of equipment to support the lifestyle. In the solar community it is a given that before any solar application can occur a clear understanding must be made to the residents that unless costs and space are not an issue a balance must be achieved between use and expense in order to achieve any semblance of success.
In all things there is a time for observing and a time for doing and next summer I will be doing solar here in my office with the long range goal of taking the entire domain off the grid. I have spent the last 10 years constantly lowering the amount of juice I use to where right now I believe it is about as low as it can go, without just sitting here in the dark and sweating or freezing. Even with all that, it is estimated to cost close to $1000 in solar and related equipment to remove my (stand alone detached) office from the grid permanently. There is a lot more thinking in this stuff than most people know.
Good comment, Ghostie. I know for certain that I live in God’s very country as far as resources are concerned. Timber, hydro, and in a more perfect world, Nukes, are the manna we enjoy in the PNW.
If I were suddenly promoted to governor, I’d take down all of the wind generators and maybe surplus them for private sales. It would be a net gain, monetarily.
Solar and wind energy have always been excellent for pumping water uphill to some storage container/cattle watering trough and heating water. We know that we could reduce electrical usage in the southern areas of the US by heating more water with solar but all anyone wants to talk about is electricity. Foolishness.
“…all anyone wants to talk about is…”
==========================
If you’re talking about the gov’t/media that is probably true, but out here in realityland we’re actually trying to get stuff done. I’m playing around with the idea of eeking 4x the amount of juice out of any specific solar panel with “add-ons” that create “spin-offs”.
The panel I am developing is a standard 100 watt unit and it will be surrounded by concave mirrors focused through fresnel lenses effectively supplying more fuel (sunlight) for the transfer. This of course will raise the temperature of the solar cells which is not good (heat causes inefficiency), so I am threading tiny copper tubing around each individual solar cell which will initially carry water for cooling purposes on both front and back sides, like a car radiator, and that heated water can then be used for other purposes. If the water is traded for alcohol, which has better cooling properties, it can then be ran through a heat transfer unit for heating a space, maybe a house.
It’s the little guys out here in the garages late at night playing with things that interest them that are getting things done while the Elon Musks make claims and mostly fail and shyster the citizenry.
My goal? It is a goal that is 40 years old.
A container sitting in the corner of the laundry room, basement, or garage, about the size of a 50 gallon water heater that, connected to a very reduced solar array, that can provide 100% power to the residence in 30 day cycles even in complete darkness.
Ever heard of solatubes? They’ve been around for decades. Utilizing these enhanced solatubes solar panels can be installed INSIDE of buildings and out of the elements, extending their life expectancy. Imagine a small, maybe 12′ x 12′, *maintenance room* in your house that would contain hundreds of solar cells arranged in such a way that, being fed by solatubes through fresnel lenses and convex mirrors, they create all of your homes electrical needs and hot water and heat and even air conditioning, and store the additional juice in the 50 gallon device (sort of like a capacitor but with slow release) I mentioned above in case of emergency’s.
At one point in the late 80s or early 90s, my dad bought a ’58 Ford pickup, because he ‘wanted a toy,’ and that was something he felt was simple enough for him to work on. I don’t think he ever replaced the vice-grip that was used to roll the driver’s window up and down.