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Strange Daze

Truth, Justice, And The American Way –  Superman has a smile on his face. He knows what he’s headed toward, and he knows he will succeed. A hero is eternally optimistic about his mission because nihilism is a spiral of irrationality in which creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom and failure. A Superman would never succumb to such downward spirals.

Notice how the background then drapes the American flag around him. The American dream of pursuit of property for us and our posterity is then amplified as the flag takes us down to what appears to be an all-American family standing at the forefront behind Superman, ready to give him backup and cheer him on into victory.

The father stands at the front, the rational man proudly wearing the letter “A”, a reference to the Law of Identity. He’s also holding a book in his hand, learning and using reason to better himself. A man and father must stand before his family in rationality to lead them and guide them toward what is right. The family will then stand with him.

Behind the family, stands more of society — including a large skyscraper. Civilization hangs in the balance behind the Superman who pushes forward and overcomes darkness, behind the family who maintains rationality and reason.

This is beautiful. It’s inspiring. This is what comics should be. We need heroes, not anti-heroes. We need truth, justice, and the American way.

Bentley Blower Car Zero, 2020. Bentley Mulliner have completed the first prototype for the Blower Continuation Series. Car Zero, the first “new” Blower Bentley in 90 years. A further 12 customer cars will be built, all have already been sold (but at what price?).

So Elon Musk announces his move to Texas and now Oracle has announced they are moving their HQ from California to Austin. California is quickly going to run out of other people’s money… A Large Regular: Flotsam and Jetsam

Ink-Stained Wretches: The Battle for the Soul of Digital Freedom Taking Place Inside Your Printer   Since the turn of this century, the company’s changed its name to HP and its focus to sleazy ways to part unhappy printer owners from their money. Printer companies have long excelled at this dishonorable practice, but HP is truly an innovator, the industry-leading Darth Vader of sleaze, always ready to strong-arm you into a “deal” and then alter it later to tilt things even further to its advantage.

The company’s just beat its own record, converting its “Free ink for life” plan into a “Pay us $0.99 every month for the rest of your life or your printer stops working” plan.

I’m sorry but this –THIS — is just silly. .950 JDJ – Largest Center-Fire Rifle Ever Made. This gun is larger than a .50 cal and larger than the famed T-Rex The round is .95 inches in diameter, and weighs a staggering 3600 grains (8 ounces, half a pound). The bullet has a muzzle velocity of 2,200 feet per second, and generates 38,685 lbs/ft of energy. It also generates a recoil impulse of 200 lbs/ft, or about 13 times the recoil energy of a .308 Winchester. This recoil is FAR beyond the capability of most humans to tolerate, and can in fact cause severe or even fatal injuries. To compensate for this, the rifles are typically fired from a lead sled type shooting rest. The rifle costs about $17,000 by itself, and each round costs nearly $80.

Secrets Costco doesn’t want you to know   When you think of how many people are jammed into the food court at any given time, you would assume that Costco is selling a whole lot of hot dogs. But would you guess that they sell over 100 million in a year? Well, they do, and according to The Motley Fool, the warehouse store actually sold 128 million in 2015, which happens to be about four times as many hot dogs as all the major league ballparks combined sold in the same year.

Why Do We Even Listen to New Music? |   Most people have all the songs they could ever need by the time they turn 30.

The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months    The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen, and guard duty. Sometimes they quarreled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell, and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits.

Pandemic Villains: Robinhood –    It’s the perfect mousetrap, among other things because of its name. “That’s the other thing,” says Brewster. “They call it Robin Hood.” Instead of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, the American version takes in the young and sells them to computer-powered hedge funds; this Robin Hood is the house that always wins. If there’s a more brilliant metaphor for capitalism in the Covid age, it’s hard to imagine.

Who’s watching whom? The featured image of the Moon through a gap in a wall of rock may appear like a giant eye looking back at you. Although in late October it took only a single exposure to capture this visual double, it also took a lot of planning. The photographic goal was achieved by precise timing — needed for a nearly full moon to appear through the eye-shaped arch, by precise locating — needed for the angular size of the Moon to fit iconically inside the rock arch, and by good luck — needed for a clear sky and for the entire scheme to work. The seemingly coincidental juxtaposition was actually engineered with the help of three smartphone apps. The pictured sandstone arch, carved by erosion, is millions of years old and just one of the thousands of natural rock arches that have been found in Arches National Park near Moab, Utah, USA. Contrastingly, the pictured Moon can be found up in the sky from just about anywhere on Earth, about half the time.

For me, self-identification was a con    I can’t just upload a new face or different secondary sex characteristics when the old set no longer feels quite ‘me’. Just as our inner sense of selfhood is both consolidated but also constrained by the willingness of loved ones to recognize it, so our ability to apply the digital style of selfhood in ‘meatspace’ is limited by the stubborn refusal of our bodies to behave like a slate we can wipe clean and over-write at will with new selves.

I may have dreamed, as Sebastian, of being able to reincarnate as a new, unblemished me when the old one didn’t suit. But as has become apparent with age, I will always be pursued by the fraying, beleaguered traces of old selves: childhood scars, stretch marks, a C-section scar, the piercings I no longer wear.

More wine and cheese may help reduce cognitive decline, fight Alzheimer’s disease – Study Finds  Getting healthier every day, am I.

Today’s Reminder of:

In the summer of 1913, Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, Tito, Freud, Franz Ferdinand and Lenin were all regulars in Vienna’s Café Central  (Remember, you only have ONE bullet. Choose wisely, grasshopper.)         

WindowSwap    In which endless windows on the world of the world can be seen. You can even enter your own window on the world, but don’t ask me to look through it.

bookofjoe: The tallest palm trees in the world – that’s a horse at the foot of the palm.

Word Around the Net: GOODBYE MY FRIENDS  [A brilliant but little known blogger hangs it up.] Principles of the constitution, reason, truth, logic, and so on were not just unknown but people simply did not want to know them, because they clashed with a preferred version of reality.  And to make matters more difficult, the people who were of this mindset controlled media, government, education, entertainment, culture, law, and the rest of society.

Iowa church buys and forgives $5M in medical debt ahead of holidays |  “We asked them how much money it would take to forgive all the medical debt in Polk County,” Bothwell said. “They responded, ‘With what you have, you could forgive debt in all of Iowa.'” According to Bothwell, the nonprofit told her roughly $8,000 could buy $5 million worth of medical debt in Iowa.

The YouTube Ban Is Un-American, Wrong, and Will Backfire  by Matt Taibbi Start with the headline: Supporting the 2020 U.S. Election. YouTube in its company blog can’t even say, “Banning Election Conspiracy Theories.” They have to employ the Orwellian language of politicians — Healthy Forests, Clear Skies, “Supported” Elections — because Google and YouTube are now political actors, who can’t speak plainly any more than a drunk can walk in a straight line.

daily timewaster brings you Ghost Elk

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Dan December 14, 2020, 9:39 AM

    Patrick Macnee driving his green Bentley on The Avengers.

    https://stephenpotter15.tumblr.com/image/140858840355

  • Phil in Englewood December 14, 2020, 9:45 AM

    ” the warehouse store actually sold 128 million in 2015, which happens to be about four times as many hot dogs as all the major league ballparks combined sold in the same year”

    Well, the warehouse is delivering a better product than the MLB.

  • Sam L. December 14, 2020, 9:53 AM

    The Costco story: Yeah, I go there. I like the dogs and the FroYo.
    Haven’t had the pizza.

  • leelu December 14, 2020, 9:53 AM

    That’s depressing.
    However, its based on the old-fashioned need for paper. A goodly part of my work in aerospace was weaning engineering and manufacturing off paper. We did it by ‘printing’ documents (drawings and supporting docs) as pdf files. Anyone can get an Adobe reader, so that was the easy part. We succeedded quite well, cutting the turnaround time for a document request from a wek, to ‘log in, click the link, and download’.
    Very soon after that, suppliers started complaining about download times that weren’t fast enought. (Earyy 2000s).
    Users.
    Scan, print to pdf and email or upload, just like I did for some loan docs recently.

    Printers are sooo 20th century.

  • Donald Sensing December 14, 2020, 10:18 AM

    “Pay us $0.99 every month for the rest of your life or your printer stops working” plan.

    Don’t I wish! They are charging me $2.99 per refill.

  • Mike Anderson December 14, 2020, 10:32 AM

    Those dang Iowa Lutherans just won’t stop. Fresh from cleaning up the medical debt in Iowa, they’ve started in on Missouri. Already raised 110% of their $15,000 goal. Making Christmas Great Again.

  • azlibertarian December 14, 2020, 1:59 PM

    It doesn’t surprise me in the least that Costco sells four times more hotdogs than the MLB combined. I can enjoy a day at the ballpark (or at least I used to until Colin Kaepernick and the BLM idiots ruined every pro sport out there) as much as the next guy. But throwing down $8-10 for a 70¢ hotdog is just too much. Those Costco dogs may be loss leaders, but even if they doubled the price, they’re a far better deal than something you’d buy at the ballpark.

  • Anne December 14, 2020, 4:14 PM

    The San Francisco school teacher in front of the blackboard. She is also standing in front of one of the “bath” house! 😉

  • gwbnyc December 14, 2020, 5:18 PM

    San Francesspit

  • Keith December 14, 2020, 7:20 PM

    Arches National Park. Fun fact, this double arch, when viewed from 200 yards away looks like the eyes of a crocodile. Southern Utah is filled with rock formations your mind anthropomorphizes, much the same as we do with clouds. I’ve seen Bugs Bunny, C3PO, Aunt Jemima, ET and more!

  • Just Waiting December 14, 2020, 7:32 PM

    Only 1 bullet? So many worthy names, but shoulda had Bill Gates on the list.

  • George_Banner December 15, 2020, 12:06 AM

    “Truth, Justice, And The American Way”
    “This is beautiful. It’s inspiring. This is what comics should be. We need heroes, not anti-heroes. We need truth, justice, and the American way.”
    Can’t agree with you more.
    You are so right!
    Ditko was an Objectivist.
    So am I.

    “Ink-Stained Wretches: The Battle for the Soul of Digital Freedom Taking Place Inside Your Printer”
    It has been like this since the beginning.
    Bad thing for the user.
    Bad attitude from the company.
    Capitalism should be decent not exploitative in this way.
    Make a durable and simple printer. (They don’t.)
    Charge the ink cheap. (They sure don’t.)

    “Why Do We Even Listen to New Music?”
    I don’t.
    Most of my music is classical.
    Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Paganini, Rameau, Rimski-Korsakov, Schubert, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Telemann, Vivaldi, Brahms , Elgar, Handel,
    Haydn, in no particular order and the list is far from complete.
    When I was 15 I could sing by heart along Handel’s “Messiah”, beginning to end. Still do.
    Lousy singer. But enjoy myself immensely.

    “Getting healthier every day, am I.” On the same boat, here. Yellow, hard, salty, whole grains of pepper in it. That’s my kind.

  • ghostsniper December 15, 2020, 4:40 AM

    As leelu mentioned, I too cut the printer out of the loop 10+ years ago. Just yesterday I had AutoCAD convert 2 residential site plan dwg files to pdf and emailed them to the builder in FL. 10 years ago I sold my large format HP plotter because I used it so seldom that the 4 $40 each ink cartridges would dry up. Now, on the rare occasion that I need a print of something (maybe once every 2 years) I take the pdf files to the UPS store and have them print them at a cost of about $6 each.

    Awhile back I saw Walmart selling a HP color printer for $30. They lose money on the printers but make up for it in the cartridges.

  • nunnya bidnez, jr December 15, 2020, 6:34 AM

    Anne commented that the photo of the school teacher was taken in front of a San Francisco bath-house. I’m looking at the cartoon character on the right side, it sort of looks like a mouse, but look carefully, ignore the black paint splatter. In your mind, turn it upside down (ignore the little white “eyes”), and you’ll see that it’s a picture of male genitals .. two testes and a black tipped penis.
    Very subliminal, but not unexpected considering the location.
    Decades ago, the logo for Crazy Eddies electronics retailer was very similar, looked like a crazy guy with a long nose and some hair on top of his head, until you turned it upside down.

  • Uncle Mikey December 15, 2020, 10:04 AM

    Even worse, if you’re an HP printer owner and it broadcasts its own wifi signal, that signal is on the same channel as your router and is destroying your network. I changed my router channel and the f*cking printer followed me. Had to figure out how to disable the Wireless Direct function, which HP apparently thinks people want. Class action sh*t

  • John The River December 16, 2020, 7:49 AM

    Steve Ditko, the original Spiderman artist. He was my favorite. Lost a box of his comics when the house went up in flames, I always planned on rereading them when I got older.

    I gave up on inkjets. I bought a laserjet. Two years still working on the first toner cartridge. And I print my photos at Walmart.