Rip Snorter's Blog

Writing the entry about the flu stuff got me thinking how often we humans tend to worry about the wrong things.  Reminded me of a guy I used to fly with a bit during the late 1970s named John Rynertson.

John was a man who flew a blue Cessna 120.  It was a lot like the 140 Helldragger I flew pictured a couple of entries ago.   But he was also a man prone to introduce himself to people around the Killeen, Texas airport as 'one of the best pilots around'.

Naturally there were those who didn't favor his self introductions involving pilot skills.  John wasn't a man who could claim a lot of friends.  But he did have a wife almost as desireable as that 120 he flew.  So pretty, she was, that whenever he wasn't flying, John was worrying about her.  He fretted over what she might be doing when he was off flying, or when he was almost anywhere he couldn't keep an eye on her.  Which was a good bit of the time.

Old John just worried himself silly about that women.

Then one day he was flying with some Warrant Officer from Fort Hood and managed to get more airspeed than that old airframe was willing to put up with.  The 120 wasn't rated for snap rolls.  But being one of the best pilots around, John just naturally figured they weren't referring to him when they rated the airplane.

Wings came spang off that mama at about 3000 feet above the ground.

Turned out John didn't need to be worrying about what his wife was doing.  If he was going to worry, he needed to be focusing on learning to stay alive and fly at the same time. 

Whatever his wife might or mightn't have been doing while he was alive, she certainly did after he was grease scattered over an acre of ground.

Similarly, I recall all those kids who used to spend all their time worrying about getting drafted for Vietnam, then took too much of the wrong thing and ended up corpses right here in the good old US of A with never having been fired at in anger.

A person needs to use a lot of care, consult an internal map, look at the compass and GPS, picking things to be worried about.  Otherwise he'll spend all his time worrying about things that don't happen while the things that do sneak up behind him and tap him above the ear with a ball-peen hammer.

Jack

 

A while back I posted this.  But since there's a flu scare going on I think it might be worth re-posting.

Here's a link to some other info you might find helpful if you plan to make your own:

http://www.borderlands.com/journal/lunar.htm

I think I've about reached the end of my rope on it, not sure where to go next.  One mind just gets muddled, eventually, trying to pursue all the twists and turns.

What I need is some open minded cohort who's prepared to believe the numbers behave according to a fixed set of behaviors, assuming I can give a persuasive body of evidence they do.  Someone who is willing to commit to not sharing that evidence for a while, or ever, once he has it.

Probably, if there's anyone out there who's willing, they'll need to be a Premium Member of LP to be able to do what is needed for me to convince a skeptical mind of what I'm going to offer. 

PM me if you are interested.  If you appear to me to be the sort of person I can work with and trust we'll go to email to finalize things.

Jack

 

 

Morning blogsters:

Having some difficulties getting the juices flowing this morning.  When I don't get up at 5 am, when I allow myself to lie there and savor how good it is inside that cacoon of blankets, screws up my entire day.

I was down in Rio Rancho at the food store the other day, saw a long line of people waiting to get flu shots.  Seems there's a new strain out there to be scared silly about gonna kill us all if we don't get shots.

Maybe.  I suppose it might happen someday, probably will. 

1918 made a big impression on the world how fast and unexpected a virus can move to bunch up the time-span of folks for folks dying all close together, instead of spreading it out and letting them die scattered across the calendar.

People remember 1918... the graveyards remind them.  That line of graves out there with so many 1918, 19, dates surrounded by other times just sort of shotgunned in.

But what people  don't remember is the Swine Flu scare of 1976. 

Good year, that one.  It was the year we all didn't die of swine flu whether we had innoculations, or didn't.  It was a year a lot like this one, but my first year in public health.  Lines a mile long for shots, no amount of money and human energy too great to expend saving us all from dying of the Y2K of the viral set.

The fact they're talking aloud of such things at the Center for Disease Control says a lot about who's left over there at CDC.  The ones who remember the black eye public health took from the Swine Flu scare would never have allowed it.  I have to conclude they've all retired and there a lot of young lions now watching for micro-organisms to be afraid of and make announcements about for possible budget increases. 

Looking for a hole in the pandemic of panic-hunger they can slip an announcement into and see it grow and blossom.

Which is fine if someone who didn't get shots dies. 

And it's Y2K, if it doesn't. 

When the real, bullgoose bug comes storming out of Africa or Asia nobody's going to listen.  But 1918, reaches out here into 2005 and testifies on oath that it can happen and probably will.

I'm guessing this ain't it.  The bug has killed maybe 60-70 people and has been around long enough already to get people scared. 

Mr. Bad News ain't gonna come down the pike thataway.  He's going to come balling down the freeway leaving a trail of hair, teeth and eyeballs behind him in his wake and nothing but clear open highway ahead, except people scurrying around ducking and dodging trying to get out of the way.

Likely he'll be transmitted airborne, long enough incubation time so's a person throws him off a long while before the victims even know they're sick.  So you get everyone infected well before the first ones begin to get the blind staggers.

Second cup of coffe here and I still don't have my mind out of the cage... still can't feel any enthusiasm for dragging up those spreadsheets and trying to figure out where those numbers came from last night, for trying to reconstruct their route and itenerary.

Ah well.

Jack

 

 

Gonna make a truly dumb prediction for PB tonight.  Assuming 17, 21, 23, 29 and 38 don't hit, every number except one will be higher than 39.  One number will be in the teens, though it might be the red ball.

I'm basing this on the outcome of a method I don't trust, a method arrived at in haste because of the debacle with the numbers I had picked for this draw until the MM draw last night absconded with them.  These numbers are purely out of hunger.  Five numbers out of six higher than 39?  Bah humbug.

Jack

 

 

Lost Victories

 

She loved bridge

He loved mostly poker;

Never understood

How his sevens-high full house

Betted to the limit

Looking at her pair

Of Aces

Turned out to be

Disaster

Crushed beneath

An Ace high full

Every time he let her

Cut the deck

 

 

From Poems of the New Old West

Copyright© 2002, Jack Purcell

 

Morning blogsters:

Around 1969, I was in a freshman Geology course at the University of Texas, first week of classes. The instructor was a grad student teaching assistant who began the course with an overlay of how geologists determine the age of a particular layer of deposition.

Along about the third day a kid who’d been sitting next to me raised his hand. I’d noticed him squirming from the first day, and now he just had to get whatever was bothering him off his chest.

“I’ve been trying to understand what you’re saying, but it’s confusing. How can all this be true, all those depositions being so old when the world’s only (some specified low-range number of thousands) years old. It’s all been calculated when God created the earth.”

After the chaotic eruption of laughter from forty sophisticated freshmen who knew better subsided the instructor directed his response to the now-cringing questioner.

“You can’t have it both ways. This is a Geology course. Everything you hear in this room is based on the premise that the earth is ancient beyond imagination. That the world we see around us is the product of eons of tectonic activity. Of faulting, lifting, erosion, weathering followed by more of the same.

“I’m not going to try to convince you that what you’ve said is wrong. But I’ll tell you that if you can’t accept, for the sake of discussion, the possibility that the book in front of you describes reality, you’ll never get through this course.”

The kid joined me at a table in the Union coffee shop later. He was still upset and confused by the incident, the laughter. Turned out the kid truly couldn’t wrap his mind around the concepts being discussed. He KNEW it to be otherwise at such a fundamental level that he’d have had to relax all manner of other things he KNEW and held sacred to even consider it.

So he dropped the course and never let his mind out of the cage he’d built around it.

The experience that kid had in a geology classroom isn’t too different from what all of us encounter in life. It’s all a matter of where we place the boundaries of the cage.

Within a decade of the incident the geology world was turned upside down with emergence of tectonic plate theory, and much of what he’d have learned if he’d finished the course would have been out of date.

But Tectonic Plate Theory found similar boundaries among geologists’ minds during the difficult battle for acceptance. Old department heads wrestled against it in a war as bloody as a fundamentalist preacher would have fought against the concept of an earth more than a couple of thousand years old. They’d just placed the boundaries a bit further out than the kid and whatever school teacher told him the world was young. Those old geology profs KNEW there was no such animal as continental drift. No point in discussing evidence supporting it.

Similarly, we all KNOW the numbers are random.

Jack

 

Morning blogsters:

I'll be the first to acknowledge it.  Looking at number behavior as a fixed phenomenon that follows some sort of physical laws, or seems to, has a definite down side.

Last night the numbers I had picked for Powerball tonight hit on Mega Millions.

Something I'm trying to figure out how to be grateful for this morning.

Hmmm.

I'm grateful my Powerball numbers didn't hit on Powerball instead of Mega Millions because the Powerball jackpot's so low I'd have only gotten enough lump sum to try all this again.

Yeah.  That's it.

Jack

Evening blogsters:

Shalini mentioned in a comment about the habenero post that it has medicinal qualities.

Shalini is correct.

Not just habenero, either.  Whatever the stuff is that makes it hot is evidently in all peppers in varying degrees.  Habenero's the hottest, most concentrated, but cayenne runs a cheaper, but respectable second.  Habenero's rated around 200,000 for heat.  Cayenne's 75,000, compared to jalapeno at around 5000.

Anyway, if you have a pallete that's unaccustomed to that sort of abuse you can buy cayenne molido and pack it into gel caps... I use one gram...(there's a device available from most health product outlets to make packing gel caps a breeze).

And once you have the caps, the molido and the method of packing the gel caps you can take enough of that stuff to keep your heart pumping long after your brains off in Andromeda or whereever it goes  when it dies.

Great stuff, this stuff for the human heart, for arthritis, for topical anti inflamatory.

Also, mosquitoes won't bother you.

Something to keep in mind once you get so your body remembers all the lousy things you did to it when you were younger.

Jack

Evening blogsters:

Someone gave me a bag of these.  Finest peppers in all Christandom.  They are, to the pepper world what Powerball and Megamillions are to the lottery world.

Habenero.

The name sort of rings musical, as does the pod.  High grade Acupulco Gold of fire and brimstone cuisine.

Fact is, they're great for other things, as well.  You can grind them up, boil them, and spray the soup onto areas you don't want the neighbor dogs to pee on.  You can take that soup and melt cold cream around it to rub on aching muscles and joints.

Or you can forget you have the pot boiling with them, let all the water boil off and you can fumigate your house impromptu.  You and the cats will go heaving and upchucking into the front yard first, followed by every spider, centipede and unborn generations of rodents who anticipated visiting the adobe one of these days ten years from now.

All lined up outside coughing and trying to breath, wiping the eyes, and generally having a big old time.

Jack

 

 

 

 

Morning blogsters:

Lots of minor distractions here at the moment.

I got a call last night and happily was informed old Marsh made it back down out of the mountains and hellichopters without mishap.  Didn't find those cannon, but didn't get himself killed trying to hover a rotating wing at 9200 feet MSL with ground level at 9000.  Which is a win.

Took about a thousand high resolution photographs of the area to give him something to go blind studying this winter.  That was the upfront most likely scenario and it worked out.

Got a determined squirrel decided to make a winter retreat into my old '87 Trooper engine compartment. 

I came back from town the other day and found the neighbor dogs had torn all the plastic shielding between the engine compartment and the outdoors out and scattered pieces around the yard trying to get to the squirrel, which I didn't know existed at that moment.  Thought they might have been after a cat.

Gave me a bit of a start when I lifted the hood and an aggressive squirrel feigned a jump at me, then scurried back over the trannie case somewhere.  I tried unsuccessfully to get it to move out, but I'm thinking I'm going to have to start driving the Trooper more just to convince that squirrel I don't plan on putting up with all the damage it would do if I allowed it to stay.

The various cats either can't, or won't bring it down for meat, so I'm going to have to deal with it.

I used to have a similar problem with nature's creatures ignoring the agendae and priorities of humanity when I was keeping old N90172 tied down at an airstrip.

Seemed every time I went to pre-flight the bird I'd find a mess of bird nests, eggs or, sometimes, baby birds under the engine canopy.  Nothing for it but to pull them out and mess up the day for one homeless bird or another, but I never liked doing it.

On the other hand, when there were baby birds  in there it was clear I'd have to kill them or just toss them on the ground and let them die.  It seemed a shame to waste them, so I started taking them home to the cats.

Now, friends, neighbors and blogsters, I'm going to assure you that everyone from my ex-wife, the mocking birds, whomever, got fairly riled when I did that.   For some reason all my friends of the time preferred the thought of those young birds just getting stomped and left at the airstrip than carried back to the house and fed to the cats.

I dunno.  Strange creatures, us.

Jack

 

There's an addendum to the anecdote of the last entry that ought to be added here.

Marsh is awfully proud of that son of his.  Not because he's bringing in a million bucks a month, but because of the way he's using it.

"He's not loading himself down with more houses, boats, big cars, like some rock star," he glowed.  "He sponsored a church group.  They're in Afghanistan building thousands of cheap houses for those people over there!  Just trying to get them into some shelter to keep the weather off them."

Jack

Good morning blogsters:

I had lunch yesterday with a guy who was on his way down to the mountains to fly a helicoper around. 

He's looking for two prize cannons Texans either abandoned, or were killed by Apaches and just left up there somewhere during the Sibley retreat I've referred to in earlier entries. 

The pieces have been seen over the centuries since occasionally by hunters and cowboys, but the location's so vague and difficult nobody's been able to relocate them.

A couple of cowboys found a civil war rifle with a bayonet stuck into a tree diagonally somewhere in the same general vicinity during the 1950s, but they never saw the cannon.

My bud's been looking for those cannon on and off for 20 years as part of a larger search for some other things that have led him into countless tales and adventures.

He can afford to do these things because he's a self-made multi-millionaire. 

A quarter-century ago he lost his job up north because of down-sizing and moved to New Mexico, where he took a grunt-job at minimum wage just to keep alive.  The place he was working was a fabrication plant, and he studied what was going on around him.  He saw a lot of industry standard things going on that looked stupid to him.

So, Marsh got to thinking how it could be done better.  He went to the bosses and told them about it, hoping for a raise, but they laughed at him.  So he started making the changes in his garage and trying them out.  Sold one tool and the people wanted more, so that was the beginning. 

Now he owns several large ranches and a company that makes more money than he can reasonably spend, so he set his son up in a smaller business doing other things, and his son's company's making a lot more than Marsh's... a million dollars a month.

But the reason I'm telling you this involves a side conversation we had. 

"You've got to do it in the dark.  That's where things happen." He observed, concerning any dream, idea, project. 

"Anything that's different or innovative, you have do do in the darkness of negativity from others.  You have to keep the faith in yourself and your ability to do it, and keep on despite the multitudes around you who'll tell you at every turn that you can't do it."

Seems to me that's worthy of mention to you younger blogsters.

Marsh was talking about looking for those cannon.  He was talking about setting up a company and making millions of bucks.  He was talking about anything worth doing in life.

His son was lucky enough to have a father who knew, who taught the same thing to him.  Taught him that he could do anything if he believed in himself.

Marsh credits his grandfather for drumming the mindset into his head that he could do anything.  He gave me a quote I can't recall, because it rhymed so well with something my own granddad drummed into mine. 

"You can't stop a man who knows he's right and keeps coming."

 

Jack

 

 

 

Good morning blogsters.

It’s a crisp morning here. The Rio Grande valley’s got a hazy look to it at daybreak from all the wood fires cranking up on the San Felipe, Santa Ana and Santo Domingo Reservations. Our own village is contributing with wood-smoke from the chimneys, though it probably hasn’t drifted into the Rio Grande valley as yet.

The aroma of pine wood burning these early fall mornings always gives me a cozy, satisfied feel of peacefulness in the crisp dawn

I’ve said the aroma ‘gives’ me that feeling, but it really isn’t so. Nothing really ‘gives’ us anything we don’t choose to be given.

My blog entry of a couple of days ago talked a bit about that. The fact that we are responsible for how we respond to all manner of sensory input. We just rarely examine why those feelings are there and acknowledge that we’re making a choice about what they’ll be.

One of the frustrating pieces of human interactions for me during a lot of life was the general concept that’s crept into our belief systems consigning the responsibility for our feelings to others. To their behavior, attitudes and remarks.

“You make me feel thus-and-so when you do thus-and-so!” is merely a means of attempting to control how others behave, but it involves a personal abdication of our own power over ourselves.

Human beings love power. Especially the power to influence others. When we abdicate power involving our happiness, our state of mind, a fair assortment of humans will gladly take the reins and apply the spurs. They’ll have a burst of joy in believing they managed to help someone have a bad moment or day.

But the bottom line is, nobody owns our feelings. Not our spousees, not our bosses, not our pet cats.

Every moment of every day we make our choices about how we’re going to respond to any event in our lives. Those events don’t control how we feel about them.

We do.

Jack

 

 

Morning blogsters:

Groggy headed  this morning.  Can't recall whether to fall back or forward.  Ran short of coffee so I'm trying to take up the nerve-ending slack with doses of tea, which isn't all it's cracked up to be in that regard.

But otherwise things are pretty fine.

I've mentioned Guy Clark as one of my favorite songwriter/singers.  He's another of those who never gained much fame except by having others sing his songs.

Here's one I don't rank among my favorites but it seems somehow appropriate this fine fall morning:

How'd You Get This Number?

 

Sorry 'bout your mama
sorry 'bout your paw
sorry 'bout the business
with your brother-in-law
Hard cheese about the money man
hard cheese about the stock
hard cheese about you bein'
up to your ears in hock

Tough luck about your luggage
tough luck about your socks
tough luck about the way
that the other shoe drops

Too bad about your girlfriend
too bad about your wife
too bad about the thing
you call the rest of your life

How'd you get this number man
who do you think you're talkin' to
who do you think your kiddin'
what do you want me to do
how'd you get this number man
please don't make me laugh
you know you oughta be on TV
with a line like that

I heard about the car wreck
I heard about the fight
I heard about the time
you's in jail all night

I know you don't like trouble
I know you don't like to fight
I know that you can argue
with a fence post all night

I heard about the lamp shade
I heard you had it on your head
I heard you told a joke and
knocked the whole room dead

No kiddin' 'bout the cough syrup
no kiddin' 'bout the junk
no kiddin' 'bout you been
in a deep blue funk

How'd you get this number man
who do you think you're talkin' to
who do you think your kiddin'
what do you want me to do
how'd you get this number man
please don't make me laugh
you know you oughta be on TV
with a line like that

Written and recorded by Guy Clark

You gamblers have a lucky day.

Jack