Rip Snorter's Blog

Hi blogsters.

Been a fun day of not much going on.  Couldn't bring myself to look another batch of numbers seriously in the eye so I just did a minimal workup and did the usual handstand, look-out-of-the-corner-of-my-eye while juggling and saying mantras backward routine.  Never fails in a pinch.

Nice long thread on the 'do you go to jail if you steel tickets' thread..... poll's an exciting one running almost neck and neck between 'they fire you from the pace', and another alternative with a deeper, more foreboding drift.

Old pac attack is philosophizing and inviting a plague of boils upon himself from various questions he wants to ask of the good lard.  Buzzsawwoman's cacklating and plotting to figure out how to figure out pick something or others, TA's loosening up and unwinding about all the old baldies and young Packistanis who lust after her traffic stopping body and change her lightbulbs. 

All the cats have been tricked or cajoled inside out of harms way.  Naiaid, the long-haired black Reiki Master puss cat was the one had to be both, cajoled and tricked, indoors.  Hydrox came in easy and somewhat serene as should a cat who's been attuned, both as a Reiki Master, and in a lot of other things cats most generally don't get attuned for.

Tabby, second-level Reiki, nearly as I can figure, old Tabby really never spent much time outdoors today, so she wasn't a problem in that regard.  Had to figure out other methodology problem wise.

Shiva, not really attuned to anything, but a cagy survivor, stayed in back closeted for the day.

I have before me my numbers, but I'm thinking I won't even look until tomorrow morning, the New Year shining bright.  Or maybe pre-dawn.  But definitely not until double ought six come blaring down the pike horns fiery slobber slinging from its noostrils and mouth looking for a likely suspect to do a bit of spitting at noostril/mouthwise and hornwise both.

I'm not a drinking man, but did some serious contemplating earlier that I just might put together a Margaurita and get a little buzz on, but I decided against it.  Decided is probably the wrong word.  Making it would have required me to make it, which I didn't.  Default.  Ergo, no Marguirita for the dying breath of 2005.

I suppose if I had something else I could snort it, or smoke it, or inject it, or shove it up suppository style, but I don't do that, either, so I didn't.

But weirdly enough, I feel somewhat as though I did.  Feeling pretty nigh on happy here.... downright ecstatic.  Not the spiritual state of grace ecstatic .... can't do that one on demand..... but pretty damned fine.

Nice way to finish out a year.

Jack

Hi blogsters:

Last night I was re-reading some of A. Grove Day's, Coronado's Quest.  It's a middling good history of the Spanish conquest of the American Southwest and the earliest encounters between Spaniards and Amerindians in the unexplored reaches north of Mexico.

In 1537, Pope Paul III issued a Papal Bull declaring that the Indians were human and that they couldn't be enslaved or driven off their lands without the folks doing it having to fear excommunication from the Church.  This represented a considerable inconvenience for the Spaniards, who had a lot of work that needed doing and didn't want to have to do it themselves.

Mexico already had a population of black slaves almost as large as the population of Spaniards, but getting more was an expensive problem involving capture and transportation, whereas the local Indians were easier to get at, so they had to find ways to circumvent the newly discovered human status.

Reading all that got me thinking.  Nowadays we've mostly all been declared human.  It's lost the moxie it once had.  Almost no protection to be found anymore in just being human.

Seems to me what's needed now is something akin to an endangered species status to get things going more along the lines his Holiness intended for the American Indians (but didn't quite achieve).

Okay.  A person kills a bald eagle or a whooping crane, he's going to do some serious time.  But if that same person kills a mere human being, it's two-to-five.  That's provided the person he kills isn't a police officer.  Police already enjoy something akin to an endangered species status when it comes to getting himself killed.  That's in spite of the fact that the cop shops in this country are growing almost as fast as the prisons.  (Not to mention their exclusive retirement systems and special health care systems comparable to those gravy trains the US Congress gives itself).

No.  What I'm talking about is something the man on the street can benefit from, along with his family.  Something to keep the wife and kids from getting shot on a street corner.  That sort of thing.

Something along the lines of a Papal Bull declaring particular sorts of people both non-human and of a species that's dying out fast.

People born before 1950 might be a good place to start.

An attractive tag worn in the ear, maybe a tattoo in some obvious place to notify the casual killers on both sides of the law that need to take a miss on this one.

Wonder how a person would go about getting something like that organized.

Jack

Hi blogsters:

I rarely talk to young people, though I'll confess to craftily observing them when I can, watching their interactions reflected in a plate-glass window, sneakily watching them at another table in a restaurant, trying to hear and understand what they're saying.

The problem is, mostly I can't understand what they're saying.  As the years have progressed I've noticed that, even in convenience stores and fast-food joints I often can't understand the simplest thing that's being spoken.  I tilt my head, ask them to repeat, explain I'm a bit hard of hearing and ask them to repeat again, and finally usually give up and just smile and nod 'yes' if that seems it might be appropriate.

I don't believe it's entirely my hearing doing this.  I think there's something new and different going on with language, but more importantly, inside the heads of people who sound as though words should be spoken through a mouth full of something, and really fast.

Mostly I don't have a clue.  Frequently my curiosity taunts me.  I don't know who these people are.  I don't know what, nor how they think.  To me it would be easy to merely mutter to myself, these kids are incredibly stupid, illiterate, and so whacked-out on television and public school brainwashing it's a wonder they can function at all.

But I'm trying to insist to myself that the human race hasn't truly devolved all that much in only a couple of generations.  These aren't subhumans, though it would be easy to conclude they are, based on a lot of their mannerisms and behaviors in public.  I think these creatures probably think and feel, but that they don't express those thoughts and feelings in ways that allow me to fathom them.

Which is all by way of explaining my enthusiasm for this new member, sombody-or-other-baby-gurl.

Here's a chance to actually decypher something one of those people thinks, feels and expresses, in a way that bypasses the mouth full of marbles and the speed the words come to the fore.

Frankly, it's an exciting prospect.  I really hope there'll be more posts of that sort.

Jack

Morning blogsters:

I wasn't going to enter a blog this morning, but I got a treble hook into my cheek on one of the threads.  Can't seem to go offline and stay that way, going back and reading that thread:

steeling tickets after you print them up

So, I figured since I couldn't just get yesterday results and saunter off into my predawn numbers activities I might just as well post a blog entry.  A celebration of one of the things I love about LP.

The unexpected and delightful.

That thread is one example of a class of posts occasionally encountered on LP, a class of posts I place an inordinately high value on.    Likely as not I'll go back and read through it again before I go offline.

I voted.  So should you.

Meanwhile, I'm pleased to announce that the method for figuring 'out of balance' number behavior is either flawed, or the entire concept is hmmmmm not operable (a phrase invented by Tricky Dixon meaning, though I said it, it isn't true because the facts caught up with me and slapped me around a bit).

I figure I'll continue to play around with the concept a bit longer because it fits into some other things I'm messing around with.  Things I'll be messing with this last day of 2005, provided I can break free and not have to be constantly coming back for another read of that thread.

Nice morning blogsters.  Roosters crowing somewhere, coyotes singing.

And the subdued background sound of some dumb old guy in an adobe somewhere chuckling as he reads words on a screen.

Jack

Hi blogsters:

These numbers appear to be out of balance today in favor of hitting on the Pick 5 and Pick 6 draws all over the board:

3 11 22 23 31 33 34 35 36 37 42 44 46 48 49 52 55

These appear to be 'out of balance' and shouldn't be hitting anywhere at all.

 13 17 18 19 24 25 26 28 29 32 38 39 43

Crazy?  Probably.  Don't bet on them one way or the other.  But if you are interested, keep an eye on them.

I've posted some pick 5 wheels based on the premise.  If you feel inclined you can watch the wheels more easily than you can look for the numbers in the results.

But if you find it entirely too outter space, just don't look at all.

Jack

Morning blogsters:

Windy pre-dawn here.  Feels blustery and colder than it actually is. 

Got semi-dry clothes hung up from every protruberance indoors from a batch of laundry I did yesterday without flooding the place

The prediction method I tried out on Pick 5s yesterday seems to offer some promise....

3 of 5 on Connecticutt and California

4 of  5 on Texas

I'll tweak it some more today if I get a chance and see if it firms up any, or whether yesterday was just an anomaly.  The system assumes a hungering for 'balance' among the numbers in ways that don't involve how long it's been since they hit.

Strange concept, but yesterday it showed a bit of promise, so I'll work on it some more and see it it holds.

Left the comp on playing itself trying out blackjack strategies all night.... some interesting preliminary results on that, which I've posted over on the GAMING thread.  I'll be continuing with running that Bearwear animated blackjack program and tweaking BJ strategies for a million hands or so when the comp isn't doing anything else.

I'm running it on a six-deck shoe game with two, or three players using different strategies.  When one loses enough to convince me there's need I'll tweak his strategy and see if things improve.

Sort of fun.

Hope all you blogsters a great day out there.  Hold on to your hats or that wind will haul them off to the middle of next week.

Jack

Evening blogsters:

Interesting threads running among the techie minded folks ..... Lantern's instructions on filters, instructions on Excel, hyper's explaining his Sonic Boom stuff, Pac's got some interesting stuff going on the thread Positive Cash Flow System.  WIN D has a thread on his 'P3' number discovery, which isn't precisely a discovery. 

No guessing what's moving around in the pick 3s and 4s, but I suspect it's busy, though I haven't been there to look..

All in all, there's a lot going on in the LP forums. 

##################################

Messed around with a lot of different things today, trying new twists, or things I've tried before from a slightly different direction.  Tried to keep the scope fairly narrow so's to be able to track the success/failure on the predictions page.

When I go too expansive with trying things and something works I have some difficulties remembering what I was doing when I came up with those particular sets.

Anyway, the predictions I posted today are mostly for Fantasy 5 games, and they're derived from 3 variations on the same theme.  Waiting to see what happens with them.

###########################################

Anyway, started a few polls on the GAMING forum in an attempt to get some blackjack discussions going, but I don't look for a lot of success that way. 

Most of us blackjack players tend to be fairly fixed in our methods of play, and we generally figure anyone who doesn't play in that exact way is too stupid to justify talking to.  It's a rare blackjack player who doesn't already know everything there is to know about the game.  Most could (or have already but don't anymore) make a living at it if they wanted to, but just don't want to at the moment.

Hmmmm

On the other hand, we're fairly amiable, truthful people when we aren't playing blackjack or talking about it.

####################################

Anyway, I'm thinking I'll just rack out and read some more of Kitto's, The Greeks, in hopes of discovering the solution to all the problems of the modern world there, probably a Utopia of some sort.

Jack

Expending on the premisss of th lask intry:

I thnk Tdd is missing a gud bet here.

With all those loddery $ going 4 edducation and the chance to score some of thm maybe he shuld open an online schoolhouse for HS kids to lern how to win the Lodedery.

Score some $ Mading them Junion Premum Members.

What do U think?

Jack

Hi blogsters:

I was sitting here messing with the numbers trying to get back into things after several days of not doing it, but one side of my mind was kicking around the issue of lottery funding of education.  It's an ongoing set of discussions on the threads, all facets of the matter.

A couple of decades ago I had the experience for several years of hiring newly graduated BS and BA rosy cheeks into a professional staff.  During that time I made a lot of false assumptions.  One of those false assumptions was that the people I had working for me could read and write in English sufficiently to author business letters.

One day I was subpoenoed to testify in a matter involving issues my staff had been peripherally involved in for several years and had written a lot of letters concerning the matter in dispute.

I spent a couple of days on the witness stand with attorneys holding up poster sized copies of letters written by my staff for me and the jury to try and decypher some meaning from.

The result was that when I returned to my duties a number of my staff members were given a choice of not writing letters or taking a night-course in remedial English.

Okay.  That experience is the launch-pad.

Those education dollars aren't resulting in students learning the basic skills in much of anything we'd qualify as an education.  But nowadays gambling money is being used to sponsor more of the same.

So how about this:

Let the schools offer courses in 'practical education' to help provide more dollars for education funding.

Offer courses in Lottery Odds.  V-trac.  Wheels.

Give them the means to hold their own against a casino.  Teach them whether to split a pair of 8s when they're looking at a dealer 10 on a blackjack table.  Whether to hit a 12 looking at a dealer 12.  Whether to hit a 14 looking at a dealer 12.  Whether to hit a soft 17.

Teach them stud poker.  Teach them the odds when they find themselves in the worst hand possible on a poker table..... a low full house in the first five cards looking across the table at trip Aces.  Teach them they got to bet them high and risk sleeping in the gutter.

Teach them to deal cards so they can get jobs in gambling joints when they get out of high school.

Those kids need to be taught something while they're in school.  Might as well make it something that will help them make more money for education.

Jack

Evening blogsters:

I'm in a mood to muse a bit.  The urge comes at a convenient time.

The fact I'm a middling good writer and I use my writing on this blog as an instrument for reflection shouldn't be taken by any of you as evidence I'm someone you'd want to know in real life. 

It just ain't true.

I enjoy doing this blog.  I try to be a straight shooter and never misrepresent what I am, what I believe, what I feel.  I do my best not to intrude into the lives of others, get into their business, tell them what to do.  Sometimes I don't succeed in that regard and I overstep my self-established boundaries.

But tonight I'm a bit troubled, a bit rattled, even a bit doubtful whether all this blogging is a good idea. 

I've said what I am many times on this blog, many of the facets of my character.  I've tried to offer the unvarnished truth as I see it.  There shouldn't be any reason for anyone who's read it to think for a moment you want to get to know me better.

I'm just me, blogsters.  I like myself a lot and I get a lot of joy out of my own company.   I'm happy if some of what I've shared here gave you some laughs and amusement, but you'd be entirely wrong if you allowed yourself to believe there's anything here for you but my thoughts, my words and my best wishes.

Jack   

A few years ago I was having breakfast in a restaurant in Grants, NM.  Guy at the next table and I got to talking.

He's a man who makes his living traveling around cleaning up after particularly nasty suicides.  Good paying job, evidently, and something of a specialty not everyone wants to mess with.  He was there for the Santa Fe Railroad taking care of a Navajo who'd offed himself by lying down with his head on a railroad track.

This was the offspring of that conversation:

Industry

Brain soup on steel rails,
Creosote and gravel
Tasteless and inconsiderate.

What a waste, you say.
It keeps people employed
I say.

Lawsuits, insurance forms
Police reports
Accident investigation
For a non-accident.
Clerks, cops, lawyers
Funeral directors
Morticians, newsmen

And the little guy.

Someone has to clean
The brain and bloodstains
From the walls and carpets;
Pick the bone fragments
Out of the doorframe
With a pair of needle nosed
pliers;

Plug the holes, re-paint.
Mop up those
Sidewalk body fluids
Untangle the lariat
Or phone cord
From the light fixture
Scrub bathtub
Crimson rings.

Someone has to
manufacture
Sleeping pills
Bullets
Razorblades
Ropes.

And hospital beds
For the faint-of-hearts
And near misses.

Some of that's still
Made in America
(Damned good quality, too,
I'm proud to say)
It's hard times.

A man has to go where the
work is.

Brain soup on steel rails,
Creosote and gravel
Tasteless and inconsiderate.
What a waste, I say.

No real mess to clean up.
It keeps people employed
It's commerce.

From Poems of the New Old West

Copyright©2003 Jack Purcell

Morning blogsters:

Coyote serenade on the mesa sounds fairly mournful.  Maybe old Santy didn't bring them everything they wanted.

I read somewhere once that the day after Christmas is plagued with suicides and depression.  Post Christmas Let-down, the thing I was reading called it.  An actual human condition, identifiable by the fact it has a name.

Post Christmas Let-down.

Serious business.  A name that has a proud walk.  Post Christmas Let-down.

Old Santy doesn't bring you whichever doodads you wanted best and you think about it all day, sleep on it, and go out into the garage and hang yourself.

You earthlings are truly fascinating, weird creatures.

Post Christmas Let-down.

Jack

It cleaned up real nice.  Best Christmas gift I've had in years.  Probably still would be if it weren't the only Christmas gift I've had in years.

Makes me wish I knew a Quaker I could show it off to so's he could shoot me a compliment by telling me, "It looks real plain."

Only thing wrong with that picture is that I betrayed the difficulty I was having keeping from grinning.  Holding a camera out at arm length and trying to take a picture of your new hat can be like that.

Smiling good thoughts at you blogsterisimos.  But not grinning.  That's what self-discipline's all about.  Remember where you heard it.

Jack

Morning blogsters:

Hope all of you are getting the cobwebs out of your punkin heads sufficiently to maximize whatever joy a person gets out of sitting around a Christmas tree unwrapping packages.

I overslept here, didn't wake until dawn.  Maybe some of this Christmas spirit thing rubbed off on me and disrupted my routines.  Nice morning.  Quiet outside, cool, but not a shock to hit you when you climb out from under the covers or hit you in the face when you venture outside.

A red dawn.  Sailorman would be concerned about that, I expect.

Last night the cats refused to keep me entertained, so I began reading H. D. F. Kitto's, The Greeks.  It's a book I've read before, but I occasionally read it again as a refresher course.  Kitto's work is a fairly expansive treatise on life in Greece during the Classical Period, but he constantly jumps backward so's to demonstrate how they got where they were and why.

Those Classical Greeks are worth the effort of remembering about.  They're as much how we got where we are as Homer, the Dorians, the Minoans are how they came to be what they were.  We owe our ability to think in particularly organized ways to them, mathmatics, philosophy, their practical use of democracy, even our concept of drama to some extent.

But we in the West also owe the curse of the Utopian Ideal to their pointy little heads.

That Utopian Ideal has haunted us every since, even though the Greeks, themselves never actually believed in it.  They knew perfectly well that human beings are fundamentally flawed in ways that assure they'll poison their own watering holes, then run them dry.  They knew that wherever human weakness fails to do the trick, fate, or the Gods will step in to lend a hand.

Those Greeks studied Homer much the way really devout Christians study the Old Testament.  And Homer, whatever else it might be, is a refined catalog of human strengths and weaknesses.  Of the drumbeat repitition of human experience.

In their own way, the Greeks were experts on a few thousand years of history in ways we aren't.  They learned from it, not as we believe we've learned from it, but haven't, but rather as an assurance that human beings make the same mistakes over and over.  That they'll go on making them as long as there's a human being left to do the job.

The Greeks derived a wisdom from their knowledge of history, but the wisdom was an oblique one that provided a separate wisdom..... one that included the certainty there'll never be any Utopia.  Never be any meek inheriting much of anything and holding onto it.

But that's my premise, not Kitto's.

I've had a couple of days break from the numbers, which I badly needed.  I'm thinkng today I'll get back into the harness.

Best to all of you. 

 I hope you'll spend a bit of time remembering what Christmas was supposed to be the anniversary of the beginning of.  Not baby-Jesuses or Santa Clauses, blogsters, but a beginning of a spiritual commitment to peace, love, understanding. 

An ideal for breaking the endless cycle of power struggles, killing, worship of gluttony and greed.  A beginning for human beings to take responsibility for their own behavior, attitudes and lives.

Christmas.  Jesus.  A beginning of not being so frightened of everything.  So angry.  So aggressive and downright rattlesnake ugly mean you want to kill strangers a long way from here who are no threat to you if you'll leave them alone, and take joy from doing it.

A beginning of having the faith that death is part of human experience, and that isn't something you have to be so damned cowardly scared of it keeps you furious and wanting to look away at anything at all to take your thoughts away from having to do it.

I hope you'll remember that for a few moments, blogsters, but I know you won't.

I ain't a Utopian.

Jack

Hi again blogsters:

Went back down there for some more blackjack and didn't get in more than a few hands before a pit boss announced they were shutting down the tables, the casino, and sending everyone home to spend time with their families.

Surprised me, but a worthy cause I wouldn't have expected of them.

Fact is, all those gamblers who aren't aware that blackjack's a spiritual experience needed to be off somewhere else, anyway.  Which is to say, pretty much all of them except me.

So, I smiled to meself with a warm red glow that a casino would let the employees go home to be with their kinfolks instead of staying there making a lot of money for the mafia.  Swung over by Taco Bell on the way back out of Bernallilo and picked up three bean burritoes and three crispy tacos to celebrate a victory for those employees over casino management.

Brung those tacos and burritos back up to the village and capped the hill looking down into Placitas.... looked as though something awful had happened here..... flashing emergency lights copcar style all down on the main road.  Sheriff with a flashlight was waving me to take a back road.  I rolled down my window, "Accident?"

"No.  Most of the roads are shut down.  People in groups in the middle of the roads singing Carols.  You'll have to take this road.  Be careful."

Happened 'this road' was the very selfsame road I needed to take to trip my young arse home as fast as safety allowed to lock the front gates and turn off the outside lights before any carol singers could catch me unawares and make me listen to Christmas carols.

I don't so much mind people singing carols.  I think it's kind of cool, actually, especially if they were to go a step further and listen to the words they're singing.

On the other hand, I honestly don't want to listen to the words, the music, nuthun do do with Christmas carols.

I figure if I can go through an entire presidential term without knowing who's president, and go through Thanksgiving to New Year without hearing a single Christmas carol (most especially ones involving Santy and reindeers), it will be okay to die.  I'll know I've lived right, at least one period of my life.

Anyway blogsters, if you're reading this blog you need to get your young arse off the computer and go spend some time with the family.

But if you don't have somewhere else to be, don't have someone else, why heck, amigos, rejoice.  Luxuriate in the beauty of being alone with yourself and any cats you might have.

If you don't have any cats, nor any particular self you can bring yourself to rejoice about, heck.  As Sonny and Cher used to say back when everything was supposed to be pretty well straightened out by now,

You got me, babe.

Jack