WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Open thread 10/7/2024
byVanderleunonOctober 7, 2024
I want to highlight this comment that appeared over the weekend:
None of you know me but I want to update everyone on Olive. She lives with my son (I am Jeff’s significant other) because I have a severe cat allergy. Our area of the Appalachian mountains has been devastated by Hurricane Helene and Olive has once more shown her resilience. She snuck out of the house and reappeared today. First a fire, then a hurricane. She truly is a special lady.
And I’ll add this photo that I took a couple of years ago:
Hopefully Olive is still in kind hands.
Sure wish I had known Gerard in person.
I’m glad I knew him on the web.
DTOctober 7, 2024, 4:33 PM
Ditto. I feel a loss even if I never met him.
azlibertarianOctober 7, 2024, 4:59 PM
“…Sure wish I had known Gerard in person.
I’m glad I knew him on the web.”
Gerard’s gift was that his skill as a writer left so many of us believing that we knew him without having ever met the man.
I can only add that I consider so many of the commenters here as friends too, and that one day soon, this place will close. I’m glad that I’ve known you all too.
ghostsniperOctober 7, 2024, 12:35 PM
Hummingbirds
===========
Been 2 days since I seen em last.
I think they’re gone…for good.
But I won’t let go….forever autumn.
Here in northern Michigan, we saw our last hummingbird on September 16th. Autumn is coming on strong and the browns and brookies are checking out the gravel runs for places to spawn.
John A. FlemingOctober 7, 2024, 3:49 PM
It’s a rare cat that will tolerate any more than a few minutes of that kind of attention. Most of them will turn on you, bite you and scratch you, maybe even give you a nasty meow, and then jump off for parts unknown. Sometime you can tell from their tail whipping about that they are getting annoyed, but not always.
ghostsniperOctober 8, 2024, 1:38 PM
With us having multiple cats over the past 40+ years, I have been bitten a few times.
First, it hurts like hell, and I don’t know why.
Because of a compound in the saliva?
The micro-serrations around their teeth?
The bulk of the bites have come while holding one similar to how Gerard is in the pik.
The cat is all passive and seemingly luvving then, it’s like something slowly comes over it until….!
It will slowly, almost imperceptively, raise it’s head and turn, and then cobra like, it snaps forward and clamps down on my forearm. Like greased lightning out of nowhere. YEOWTCH!
First thought process is to throw the foul demon at the wall.
But the cat is already on it’s game and has jumped down and fled the AO.
Meanwhile I sit there and curse a blue streak while tightly clasping my quaking arm.
DAM that shit burns!!!!
My wife comes clomping down the stairs at high speed and the cat criminal passes her on the way up. She rips around the corner and sees me clenching my arm and blood running between the fingers. “What happened?” Of course, her first suspicion is that I tortured her precious cat and it struck back defensively. I explained what happened, and she shook her head knowingly. She’s been bitten more than me.
Next thing you know she has her (imaginary) light gray Florence Nightingale outfit on, my big ol’ red first aid toolbox on the counter and she’s scrubbing the daylights out of my damaged wing. She squeezes the wounded area with both hands and the might of Hercules, forcing all the poison out. Then a thorough drying, and then come the ointments. Oh, the ointments. First up is the betadine solution to disinfect the entire region. She fans it with her hand to make it dry. Then the globs of Neosporin. SPLOP-SPLOP-SPLOP, then the gauze. Miles of 3″ wide gauze. And then the tape. My arm looks like Popeye. And she insists I take an Advil for the pain. No. Don’t need a permanent solution for a temporary problem, thenk kew veddy much.
We’re down to just 2 cats now. Our oldest is Tawny Autumn, she’s about 12 years old and she’s a short haired Tortie. Her “twin” sister Caramel died about 2 years ago. The youngest, Sparkle, is about 10 years old and she’s a long haired muted calico. Sparkle is an absolute gorgeous animal, with her coloration the way it is. Definitely cat product advertisement material. Her mother, Bella – also extremely gorgeous, died 2 years ago too, about 2 weeks after Caramel. It was a tragic month with 2 of our “kids” leaving so closely like that.
Those 2 gurlz, and our female mutt Shannon (10) will probably be the last animals we own. We’re both 69 and will probably be dead by the time we’re 80 and with each passing year it seems stuff get harder to due, and there seems to be less workable time each passing day. We don’t like that someone else would HAVE to take over our animals when we die, or that they get stuffed into a shelter and then euthanized. Like I said, they are our kids and we think of them that way.
Casey KlahnOctober 8, 2024, 5:57 AM
Olive reminds me of my alpha cat, The General. He was twice the size of any farm cat we ever had, and would go on walkabouts in the fields and forests (dangerous!) for days or weeks before reappearing. He bonded with me, and now is-cat-years-in his late 80s or his 90s, thin and hips poking out. He loves long cuddle sessions, and still goes outside just within view of the house. So, I can appreciate Olive’s sense of the catastrophic, after Paradise and now in the Appalachians. Here’s my best wishes for Olive and for his human extended family in the disaster zone.
On a political note, I’ve been wondering about the Southern States hit by Helene. Post offices are destroyed and roads washed out for miles in places with only one road serving a town. The voting is certainly disrupted, and you know DamnGAW that voting irregularities will ensue. Where are the governors in all this? DeSantis we know is fighting the good fight, but I looked into NC and see that the Lt. Gov. is a vocal Republican who provides oppo to the Democrat Gov. That Gov., Roy Cooper, won in ’16 in an upset of the sitting GOP Gov, and by a narrow margin. Fishy like Biden.
Keep an eye on the governors. NC looks like the perfect political storm.
Is everything said about FEMA true, or is it misinfo? Firstly, if you use misinfo/disinfo a lot in your dialogue, you might be a commie. It’s all disinfo! That’s why we have the 1st Amendment. That language is weasel for we’ll-control-the-narrative/trust-us. So, FEMA has screwed the pooch. They have no more referent trust among the people, and it doesn’t matter if Jesus Himself were to sit on the board of directors the hillbillies would find fault in FEMA. The big picture result is we the people are fed up entirely with Biden’s federal government and it’s a schism. It’s Hatfield and McCoys. It’s Granny Clampet get your shotgun.
ghostsniperOctober 8, 2024, 1:49 PM
“To be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”
–Michael Oakeshott
John A. FlemingOctober 8, 2024, 3:07 PM
Disagree. It’s a strawman, an appeal to emotion, that the not-conservative is superior. If a person is not trying something new, going in a new direction, they are wasting their time. If they don’t “go for howling adventures amongst the Indians, over in the territory, for a couple of weeks or two”, if they don’t strive for go big or go home, if they don’t strive for perfection, and if they prefer utopia, they are doing it all wrong.
I prefer a different dichotomy: someone who by their actions creates the future (Type A), versus someone who wants to control the future being created (Type B), to limit and control the creators. One of the methods of the Type B’s is to destroy the past and present. If to create the future you have to destroy the past and the present, you’re doing it wrong and you are evil. To create the future you have start somewhere and make it better, or make something new. That’s why all the filthy commie scum are always destroying the past: the past evidence of their unending failures. Type B’s know that if Type A’s are unbound, Type B will be the losers.
John A. FlemingOctober 8, 2024, 8:48 PM
Maybe I’ll modify this by looking at it a different way. There are five types: explorers, trappers, skinners, guardians, and parasites. The guardians are conservative. The skinners depend on the trappers. The trappers depend on the explorers. When the guardians get in the way of the explorers, the society fails. When the guardians let the parasites be in charge, the society fails.
An interesting way to look at it. I’m gonna have to think on this some more.
It looks like the predicted track is drifting S. It’s over Sarasota now, Tampa Bay might be getting spared a little. Watch out denizens of Gasparilla Sound, you are about to get on-shore winds. Well Mr. Ghost, can your creations down that way handle 150 mph and 10+ ft surge?
ghostsniperOctober 8, 2024, 5:25 PM
I guess we’ll find out John. Thanks for your consideration. Our son and his family are in Cape Coral, about maybe 5 miles from the edge of Pine Island Sound and he installed the hurricane shutters yesterday and stocked everything, charged everything, filled the vehicles. My wife is a nervous wreck and is burning the texting wires back n forth with the son and a few other folk down there. Meanwhile I went to Hoosier Buddy and got 4 more bottles of Fireball. sip-sip
John A. FlemingOctober 8, 2024, 9:10 PM
The trend is not your son’s friend. The latest 10pm CDT predicted track is now south of Sarasota. It’s been drifting southwards for the last two days, back then the track was above Tampa Bay. The latest storm surge map shows Punta Gorda and Port Charlotte getting the worst of it. Tomorrow morning predictions will tell the tale.
John A. FlemingOctober 8, 2024, 7:10 PM
Cape Coral should be far enough away that the winds will be normal (!) hurricane. If they are on the flats near the coastline a 10-ft surge can go a long way inland. I’ve got family at Sarasota inland a few miles, they are not in the mandatory evacuation zone, and their house is supposedly hurricane-strong. They dodged a few biggies these last several years, but it looks like this time they will get the full experience. We pray they will be safe.
ghostsniperOctober 8, 2024, 7:41 PM
If their house was built in the last 20 years they should be good. The key is having the finished floor at or above 10′ above mean sea level. Another issue is older homes close by that can cause collateral damage from tidal surge scrubbing and breakup.
Helen KitchenOctober 9, 2024, 7:41 AM
Just another update. Olive is in kind and loving hands. She is residing in our garage with her bed, a human bed (Jeff sleeps with her part of the night) and a sunny perch looking out the window. She has been feasting on tuna and salmon and drinking lots of bottled water. She has had to resort to a regular litter box since power has not been restored to her fancy one. I can see her through a window and I am hoping she is not plotting a blizzard for the winter just to prove how strong she is.
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.
Hopefully Olive is still in kind hands.
Sure wish I had known Gerard in person.
I’m glad I knew him on the web.
Ditto. I feel a loss even if I never met him.
“…Sure wish I had known Gerard in person.
I’m glad I knew him on the web.”
Gerard’s gift was that his skill as a writer left so many of us believing that we knew him without having ever met the man.
I can only add that I consider so many of the commenters here as friends too, and that one day soon, this place will close. I’m glad that I’ve known you all too.
Hummingbirds
===========
Been 2 days since I seen em last.
I think they’re gone…for good.
But I won’t let go….forever autumn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX9X4ka29B8
Here in northern Michigan, we saw our last hummingbird on September 16th. Autumn is coming on strong and the browns and brookies are checking out the gravel runs for places to spawn.
It’s a rare cat that will tolerate any more than a few minutes of that kind of attention. Most of them will turn on you, bite you and scratch you, maybe even give you a nasty meow, and then jump off for parts unknown. Sometime you can tell from their tail whipping about that they are getting annoyed, but not always.
With us having multiple cats over the past 40+ years, I have been bitten a few times.
First, it hurts like hell, and I don’t know why.
Because of a compound in the saliva?
The micro-serrations around their teeth?
The bulk of the bites have come while holding one similar to how Gerard is in the pik.
The cat is all passive and seemingly luvving then, it’s like something slowly comes over it until….!
It will slowly, almost imperceptively, raise it’s head and turn, and then cobra like, it snaps forward and clamps down on my forearm. Like greased lightning out of nowhere. YEOWTCH!
First thought process is to throw the foul demon at the wall.
But the cat is already on it’s game and has jumped down and fled the AO.
Meanwhile I sit there and curse a blue streak while tightly clasping my quaking arm.
DAM that shit burns!!!!
My wife comes clomping down the stairs at high speed and the cat criminal passes her on the way up. She rips around the corner and sees me clenching my arm and blood running between the fingers. “What happened?” Of course, her first suspicion is that I tortured her precious cat and it struck back defensively. I explained what happened, and she shook her head knowingly. She’s been bitten more than me.
Next thing you know she has her (imaginary) light gray Florence Nightingale outfit on, my big ol’ red first aid toolbox on the counter and she’s scrubbing the daylights out of my damaged wing. She squeezes the wounded area with both hands and the might of Hercules, forcing all the poison out. Then a thorough drying, and then come the ointments. Oh, the ointments. First up is the betadine solution to disinfect the entire region. She fans it with her hand to make it dry. Then the globs of Neosporin. SPLOP-SPLOP-SPLOP, then the gauze. Miles of 3″ wide gauze. And then the tape. My arm looks like Popeye. And she insists I take an Advil for the pain. No. Don’t need a permanent solution for a temporary problem, thenk kew veddy much.
We’re down to just 2 cats now. Our oldest is Tawny Autumn, she’s about 12 years old and she’s a short haired Tortie. Her “twin” sister Caramel died about 2 years ago. The youngest, Sparkle, is about 10 years old and she’s a long haired muted calico. Sparkle is an absolute gorgeous animal, with her coloration the way it is. Definitely cat product advertisement material. Her mother, Bella – also extremely gorgeous, died 2 years ago too, about 2 weeks after Caramel. It was a tragic month with 2 of our “kids” leaving so closely like that.
Those 2 gurlz, and our female mutt Shannon (10) will probably be the last animals we own. We’re both 69 and will probably be dead by the time we’re 80 and with each passing year it seems stuff get harder to due, and there seems to be less workable time each passing day. We don’t like that someone else would HAVE to take over our animals when we die, or that they get stuffed into a shelter and then euthanized. Like I said, they are our kids and we think of them that way.
Olive reminds me of my alpha cat, The General. He was twice the size of any farm cat we ever had, and would go on walkabouts in the fields and forests (dangerous!) for days or weeks before reappearing. He bonded with me, and now is-cat-years-in his late 80s or his 90s, thin and hips poking out. He loves long cuddle sessions, and still goes outside just within view of the house. So, I can appreciate Olive’s sense of the catastrophic, after Paradise and now in the Appalachians. Here’s my best wishes for Olive and for his human extended family in the disaster zone.
On a political note, I’ve been wondering about the Southern States hit by Helene. Post offices are destroyed and roads washed out for miles in places with only one road serving a town. The voting is certainly disrupted, and you know DamnGAW that voting irregularities will ensue. Where are the governors in all this? DeSantis we know is fighting the good fight, but I looked into NC and see that the Lt. Gov. is a vocal Republican who provides oppo to the Democrat Gov. That Gov., Roy Cooper, won in ’16 in an upset of the sitting GOP Gov, and by a narrow margin. Fishy like Biden.
Keep an eye on the governors. NC looks like the perfect political storm.
Is everything said about FEMA true, or is it misinfo? Firstly, if you use misinfo/disinfo a lot in your dialogue, you might be a commie. It’s all disinfo! That’s why we have the 1st Amendment. That language is weasel for we’ll-control-the-narrative/trust-us. So, FEMA has screwed the pooch. They have no more referent trust among the people, and it doesn’t matter if Jesus Himself were to sit on the board of directors the hillbillies would find fault in FEMA. The big picture result is we the people are fed up entirely with Biden’s federal government and it’s a schism. It’s Hatfield and McCoys. It’s Granny Clampet get your shotgun.
“To be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”
–Michael Oakeshott
Disagree. It’s a strawman, an appeal to emotion, that the not-conservative is superior. If a person is not trying something new, going in a new direction, they are wasting their time. If they don’t “go for howling adventures amongst the Indians, over in the territory, for a couple of weeks or two”, if they don’t strive for go big or go home, if they don’t strive for perfection, and if they prefer utopia, they are doing it all wrong.
I prefer a different dichotomy: someone who by their actions creates the future (Type A), versus someone who wants to control the future being created (Type B), to limit and control the creators. One of the methods of the Type B’s is to destroy the past and present. If to create the future you have to destroy the past and the present, you’re doing it wrong and you are evil. To create the future you have start somewhere and make it better, or make something new. That’s why all the filthy commie scum are always destroying the past: the past evidence of their unending failures. Type B’s know that if Type A’s are unbound, Type B will be the losers.
Maybe I’ll modify this by looking at it a different way. There are five types: explorers, trappers, skinners, guardians, and parasites. The guardians are conservative. The skinners depend on the trappers. The trappers depend on the explorers. When the guardians get in the way of the explorers, the society fails. When the guardians let the parasites be in charge, the society fails.
An interesting way to look at it. I’m gonna have to think on this some more.
Stand by me. America has forgotten our roots.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=10_xjsb10Lg
It looks like the predicted track is drifting S. It’s over Sarasota now, Tampa Bay might be getting spared a little. Watch out denizens of Gasparilla Sound, you are about to get on-shore winds. Well Mr. Ghost, can your creations down that way handle 150 mph and 10+ ft surge?
I guess we’ll find out John. Thanks for your consideration. Our son and his family are in Cape Coral, about maybe 5 miles from the edge of Pine Island Sound and he installed the hurricane shutters yesterday and stocked everything, charged everything, filled the vehicles. My wife is a nervous wreck and is burning the texting wires back n forth with the son and a few other folk down there. Meanwhile I went to Hoosier Buddy and got 4 more bottles of Fireball. sip-sip
The trend is not your son’s friend. The latest 10pm CDT predicted track is now south of Sarasota. It’s been drifting southwards for the last two days, back then the track was above Tampa Bay. The latest storm surge map shows Punta Gorda and Port Charlotte getting the worst of it. Tomorrow morning predictions will tell the tale.
Cape Coral should be far enough away that the winds will be normal (!) hurricane. If they are on the flats near the coastline a 10-ft surge can go a long way inland. I’ve got family at Sarasota inland a few miles, they are not in the mandatory evacuation zone, and their house is supposedly hurricane-strong. They dodged a few biggies these last several years, but it looks like this time they will get the full experience. We pray they will be safe.
If their house was built in the last 20 years they should be good. The key is having the finished floor at or above 10′ above mean sea level. Another issue is older homes close by that can cause collateral damage from tidal surge scrubbing and breakup.
Just another update. Olive is in kind and loving hands. She is residing in our garage with her bed, a human bed (Jeff sleeps with her part of the night) and a sunny perch looking out the window. She has been feasting on tuna and salmon and drinking lots of bottled water. She has had to resort to a regular litter box since power has not been restored to her fancy one. I can see her through a window and I am hoping she is not plotting a blizzard for the winter just to prove how strong she is.