Author: thewriterinblack

A friend of mine’s tearing rage over masks continues. And he has more than a little justice to his rage.  Wearing masks causes him significant health problems and others in his family have also experienced significant (trust me on this although I’m not going to go into detail here–not my story to tell) hardship because of the “wear a mask” mandates.  So far, I’m with it.  Really.  However, he then declares that anyone who cooperates with these mask orders either believes that they actually help and is thus “an idiot” or knows better but bows to authority anyway, which he declares makes them “a pussy.”  Now, readers of my blog should know by now what I think of the routine wearing of masks, nevertheless I wear one to avoid the aggravation of dealing with some store security guard or being kicked out of one of the only venues I go to for getting out of the house for some decent exercise (see my various “Ice Follies” posts for that.)

My protest is a little more low-key.  I wear a mask, but it’s a costume piece (picture at the top of this (and if you like it, you can buy it here) that makes no pretension of any medical value.  Nobody has questioned it.  Ever.  Thus demonstrating that the whole thing is theater.

So, to him, I guess, I’m a “pussy” because I can’t deal with the aggravation of fighting the mask edicts with anything other than words and the low key “type of mask” at the moment. Too many things on my plate and not enough spoons (to stretch a metaphor). This has, however, given me food for thought.

My friend is also something of a firebrand on the liberty front…makes me look like a moderate (and, again, readers of this blog should be able to calibrate that).  One of the things he has talked about is the idea of an armed revolt to overthrow a government that has strayed, and continues to stray farther from the ideals of liberty set forth in the Constitution and restore actual liberty to the US.

The thing is, if there ever is a “pro freedom” armed revolt in this country I do not think the person who sets it off will be one of the firebrands like my friend. Those kind of folk have their place as do (so I believe) folk like me who engage in more reasoned (or so I tell myself) argument. Firing the opening shots that sets off a revolution is generally not that role. It’s too easy for the “establishment” to paint someone like my friend (or me) as a nutjob who of course went violent.

No, if such an armed revolt starts it will be because some quiet, ordinary individual gets pushed too far. And a lot of other quiet, ordinary guys will find themselves in sympathy with him, triggering a preference cascade and suddenly a whole bunch of people are up in arms.

Only when the ordinary folk who just want to live their lives in peace find themselves pushed beyond patience and driven to say “enough”, would folk like my friend, or me, possibly find ourselves as commanders or leaders in the events quickly following the cascade. (Well, almost certainly not me because much too “small fish” and not any kind of “expert” in the necessary areas–I recognize my own lack of qualifications.)

Before then, the role of the outspoken–again folk like my friend and me–is to try to set ideas in folks minds, laying the groundwork for that eventual preference cascade. As Samuel Adams once said, “It does not take a majority to prevail, only a tireless minority eager to set brushfires of freedom in men’s minds.” He missed, I think, that by doing so you create a majority…but that comes later. It’s that “setting brushfires of freedom” where the public outcry is most valuable at the moment.

For setting those brushfires, I try to present reasoned arguments.  My friend’s approach is bombast. He’s usually got considerable in the way of facts and reason on his side, but his method of presenting those is bombast.

As much as I find the “bombast” approach grating, I have to admit that it has its place. Some people whose eyes glass over when you try reason will respond to bombast. It’s a tool, not an end in itself.

A quote I’ve used is that “in order for you to insult me, I would first have to value your opinion.” Unfortunately, it seems that a friend, and someone who’s opinion I generally do value (and, thus, someone actually able to insult me), considers me a “pussy” because I don’t follow his particular approach for dealing with the mask nonsense.

I guess I’ll just have to live with it.

This week seemed to be a bit…difficult in the skating department.  I’m sure part of the problem was that I couldn’t sleep Friday night.  I mean, not at all.  Ended up pulling an all-nighter as sleep just would not come.  Don’t know why.  Also, Saturday, when I went to the afternoon public skate session, something felt “off” in my right ankle.  No pain, just a sense of weakness.

I decided to take it easy but to continue skating.

The rink was a little busier than it had been, which is a good thing since that means they’re making money and are more likely to stay open.  I set up the phone at one end of the rink to record my “basic skating”.  Forward stroking into one foot glides and forward crossovers at the ends of the rink.  I also included a bit of using the circle in the middle of the rink to practice forward crossovers in the other direction.  Was a bit shakier than usual on this.

One thing I notice here is that I am a bit more bent over at the waist than I should be.  Going to have to work on that.

Later, I did a bit of work on the circle.  Backward pumps in both directions, then backward edges, outside and inside, again in both directions, and finishing with forward crossovers in the clockwise direction.  These last ones are weaker than in the counterclockwise direction simply before the general “flow of traffic” in the rink is counterclockwise and so I get a lot more practice with it.  I also tried, as usual to do my two foot turn with each change of direction.  Backward to forward, I am told, is noticeably harder than forward to backward.

That was actually painful to watch.  On the one hand I was getting a bit better with my backward pumps, getting my foot out farther and getting more momentum which helps with holding the edges.  On the other, my balance was just off.  Part of that, I think, was whatever was off in my ankle and part of it was just “having a bad day”.

I called off the session after about 35 minutes, not wanting to strain too hard and didn’t attend the later session.

On Sunday, I went in for public skate.  Ankle felt better, so that was good.  And I had been able to sleep Saturday night which was better.  Nevertheless, the results were much like the above.  Again, I called it at about 35 minutes and sat on the benches to rest and wait for class to start.

Classes at this rink are divided into two groups.  The first group, containing the young kids and the Basic 1-3 classes is at 3:15 to 3:45.  The second group is the higher classes and all the adults.  One end of the rink is marked off with cones and when one group is on the ice the other can use that maked off area for some extra practice.  I spent the time in there working on a couple of fundamentals:  stopping, both snowplows and t-stops, and backward one foot glides.  More work in the latter was recommended to me in an online forum on the grounds that it would help me with the backward edges.

This work made it very clear that I was less stable on my right foot than on my left.  So while the ankle felt better, there was still something off.

My instructors are great.  I explained that I was having some issues this week and would like to take it a bit easy and so we did.  In class, one of the things my instructor had me do, toward the end of class, was to try was when I cross, instead of immediately bringing the back leg around, just hold that crossed two foot glide for a bit.  This would ensure that I had both skates lined up the same way and would help me be more stable and fluid when skating.  So, I tried it and it seemed to help.  Will do more in the future.

Another thing we did was those two foot turns.  Part of my problem is that I don’t have the “torsional flexibility” in my upper body to make it work well. On a standing two foot turn I can do it if I give my upper body a bit of dynamic twist and turn just as I hit the limit of body twist.  I do much the same thing on the circle but that I’m going around the circle tends to disguise the motion a bit.  In class with the standing turns, my instructor said to not worry about getting the skates all the way around.  Just get the motion down so the hips legs and feet are turning while the arms stay still.  After the standing two foot turns, we tried it on the circle.  The other two students (at a somewhat lower level) were on one.  I was on another and since I had it to myself I would just go round and round trying front to back then back to front over and over again, then, after a while, reverse and go the other direction, front to back and back to front.

I seem to have made some progress on the two foot turns and, coming in what was a generally bad weekend, I’ll take that as a win.

And that was my weekend at the ice follies.

So, a few months ago I was in a minor accident with my Ford Explorer.  Nobody was hurt but insurance totaled out the Explorer.  Well it was 15 years old and it doesn’t take much for insurance to say “not worth it.” So that left me without a daily driver.  I had my Miata in the garage but it had been parked for a very long time.  The tires were shot.  The battery was D. E. A. D.

So, first step was to replace the battery and the tires.  While I had a rental (courtesy of insurance) I took the wheels to the tire shop and got a new set of tires mounted.  Ran to Batteries Plus and got a new battery.  Got them home, installed them on the Miata and…great, it runs.

Apparently, however, a seal or something had deteriorated during its long period parked because a couple weeks later, while driving to work, the engine dies and I’m just coasting down the Interstate.  I shift to neutral to avoid slowing down to fast (like right in the middle of the road) and pull over to the side.  While I’m doing that  I manage a glance at the instruments and…oh, engine temperature is pegged high.

This does not look good.  Long story short, it wasn’t.  Engine was toast.  I had great insurance, including roadside assistance to get the car to a shop (Yay) and they check and no compression on three of the cylinders and just a hair on one of them.  Yep.  Engine is toast.

Too expensive to fix with the resources I had available at the time, at least not quickly, so I end up replacing the car (2009 Kia Spectra with 5 speed manual which I think is going to be another project, but that’s for another day).  Later I have the Miata towed home (the shop recommended a tow company, Ward’s Towing, and they give me the “shop rate” so it’s only $80 to get the car back home even though it’s all the way across town).

Now, thanks to the time I spent with “Uncle Denny” (see the “My Life” posts, particularly part 8 and the forthcoming Part 10) I have considerable confidence that I can do the work to repair the engine.  It just will take time.

And, so I’ve started.  First step was to start tearing into the car to find out just how extensive the damage is.  If it’s just a blown cylinder head gasket, that’s one thing.  If it’s scored cylinder walls, that’s a whole other, and more extensive, matter.  I’ll be working on this bit by bit over time and plan to chronicle the endeavor here.

I got the car up on jackstands.  I figure I’ll have to be under it as well as working from the top so might as well get ready for that now.  Then I opened up the hood and started the process of tearing into the engine.  This first batch involves removing things that I can readily access and know need to come out so as to uncover other parts as I get to them.  I also disconnected the battery.  Remember that in a Miata, the battery is in the trunk.

This series will be a fairly complete record of what I do, mistakes and false trails and all.  Also note that I don’t always have the correct name for things ready to hand as I am doing this so I’ll make up a description.  If anything is unclear, let me know and I’ll try to clarify.

Here’s what I start with under the hood.  The first thing I see to remove is the air tube that runs across the front of the engine from the air filter to the intake manifold.

 

There’s a hose that connects the air tube to something deeper in the engine compartment.  It’s held in place by a clamp.  There’s a special tool for removing these clamps but I didn’t have one.   Vice grips worked well enough for this:

 

Once the clamp is loosened, prying from above and pulling and wiggling from below gets it removed.

 

This hose cuts across the front of the valve cover and is just force fit onto a barb connection.

 

Once again, prying and pulling gets it removed.

 

With the extra hoses removed, we can now start working on the main air tube.  This claim is kept tight by a screw, use a philips screwdriver to loosen it.

 

Once the clamp is loosened, you can pull the tube free at this end.

 

Same kind of clamp at the other end.

 

Once you free the other end and pull it loose, the whole thing just lifts out.  Here it is set in front of the radiator.

 

Next piece that looks to be in the way is the upper radiator hose.

 

Same type of clamps as those previous hoses.  A bit bigger so I had to use a larger pair of vice grips to loosen them.

 

And once again some prying, some pulling, managed to get it free.

 

The other end is a bit more difficult because the grip points on the clamp were on the underside and thus, harder to reach.  Still, I got the vice grip on there.

 

And it came free.  This end was a bit more difficult.  I won’t say that there was some swearing involved in getting it off, but there was some swearing involved in getting it off.

 

Next is the thermostat housing.  It’s not really in the way at this point, but since I think it’s going to have to come off eventually for the work I need to do, now is as good a time as any to remove it.  It’s held in place by a bolt on top and a nut underneath.  Both require a 12 mm driver.

 

Housing comes off nicely, along with the thermostat itself.  I screwed the bolt and nut loosely back into place just to keep from losing track of them.  Notice that I’ve also stuck the upper radiator hose onto the radiator, twisted upward and out of the way.  This, likewise, was to keep from losing track of it.  Note those two hoses coming from the bottom of the thermostat receptical.  I decided to disconnect them because, again, they were going to have to be disconnected eventually and now is as good a time as any.

 

Same kind of clamp arrangement as before.

 

They come loose without any trouble.

 

Next step is the valuve cover.  I found eight bolts that need to be removed.  There are two at the front that hold clips that secure a hose that we disconnected from the air tube up above.  They look like they might need to be removed, but they do not.  They are very short and don’t extend through the valve cover into the cylinder head.  With the hose disconnected, you can ignore them.

 

Disconnect the PCV valve.  I found that it comes loose with a gentle pull.

 

Next pull the spark plug wires and set them aside.  Normally, at this point I’d remove the spark plugs too but I decided to leave them, both to save me the trouble of digging up the proper spark plug socket and to also keep the spark plug holes plugged to avoid anything falling into the cylinder while I’m working on this stuff.

 

Next, remove the bolts that hold down the valve cover.  These require a 10 mm socket.  Yes, the infamous always disappearing 10 mm socket.  I had a problem when I first started in that I thought the head had been stripped.  Turned out the problem was that the socket was cheap junk and had split so it couldn’t properly grip the bolt.  Fortunately, I had another.

 

Decided to remove the spark plug wires entirely and set them aside, just get them completely out of the way.

 

And the valve cover still would not come off.  Something was hanging up at the back.  I thought maybe it was the wiring tethering it into place so I disconnected these two plugs.

 

That wasn’t it.  I stopped at that point to look online (or if I can find my fershlunger manual; it’s around here someplace) to see what I missed.

That’s where I pick up next time on Project Miata.

Either towards the end of Third Grade or early during the summer, my parents, my sister, and I moved to the house next to Uncle Denny’s.  That house, too, still seems to be there:

The house, as you can see, is long and skinny.  While I have no idea what internal remodeling might have been done in the years since we lived there, the lower level was divided into a living room up front and a kitchen/dining area in the back.  The upper floor was divided into two bedrooms, the master bedroom in the back and a second up front.

My mother and Bruce had the room in the back.  My sister and I shared the one up front.  I don’t have a lot of memories of this house and living here.  I had a friend up the street.  His family had dogs, a German Shepherd and a Bulldog.  Both kept chained up outside (in and of itself something I abhor).  I had a few other friends around the neighborhood.

One day, my mother came home and told my sister and I to get packed up.  We were leaving.  Looking back at how narrow the time frame after her trip to the hospital could have happened to how early this must have happened I suspect she had found out about Bruce’s “fling” and decided to leave him.

I was ecstatic at the idea of leaving Bruce.  At the time I had little knowledge of just what a monster had proven to be and would continue to prove to be–and I certainly didn’t know his role in my mother collapsing and going to the hospital–but I do know that I utterly loathed (even without having that word for it back then) that man.  In the course of packing up I gave a bunch of my toys, that I would not be able to take with me, to some of my neighborhood friends.

We loaded up the car and headed out.

We drove through to my Aunt Pauline and Uncle George’s house in Chesapeake, VA.  They were actually a Great Aunt and Uncle.  Pauline was, I think, the sister of my maternal Grandmother.  They were fairly well off, living in a nice house in a nice suburban neighborhood.

And, so, once again I had to make new friends.  There weren’t many kids my age in that neighborhood.  A girl about a year older than me (I think; I’m guessing here) a couple of houses down and across the street.  I think she may have been my first crush but, well, I don’t have many clear memories of that time.

While we were staying with Pauline and George I started fourth grade.  The school in which Pauline and George’s house resided was a nice one for the time.  And a strange thing.  For the first time since 1st grade I wasn’t being bullied in school.  I remember a couple of things from this period.  One was that in 4th Grade Virginia schools of that time introduced Virginia History.  And partway into that one of the things we had to do was memorize Patrick Henry’s famous “give me liberty or give me death” speech.

One of my classmates would intone the famous final line and I asked him “which will you have, then, liberty or death?” He said “I’ll take death.” So I “made a gun” with my finger and thumb and “bang.” He said “I’m Superman and can’t die.” Then he collapsed forward onto his desk, playing dead.

Well, to a ten year old this was hilarious.

Not long after I started school my mother found a job and a place of our own in Portsmouth.  While we were welcome enough at Pauline and George’s (as Robert Frost put it, “Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in, something you somehow haven’t to deserve”) still, it was better to not be a burden on them if we could avoid it.

The place we lived was a small second-floor walk-up.  Two bedrooms.  Living room and kitchen/dining area in the middle.  One bedroom in the “front (street-facing) and the other in the rear (small yard and alley).  There was a big pecan tree in that small yard.

For a while my mother would take me and my sister each morning to the bus stop where we caught the school bus.  However, some time later we were unable to continue at that school.  I think, again looking back, that the school learned that we no longer lived in the district and insisted we transfer to the correct school for where we were living.

The new school was a lot less “nice” than the one at Pauline and George’s.  The building was much ratier and more run down.  Less shiny new equipment.  Still, it covered the same material and the kids were much the same.

We were…really poor during this time.  My mother was somehow able to pick up a few comic books for me from time to time.  It was during this period that I decided I wanted to be a superhero.  I really wanted to be a superhero.  So I had the clever idea that, hey, vitamins help build strong bodies right?  So if I take lots and lots of vitamins I can get super strong to be a superhero.  So I convinced my mother to buy vitamins for us (Flintstone’s Chewables, to be exact) and I chomped down a dozen or so.

No super powers, of course.

Oh, well.  That idea of “how to be a super hero” was a perennial idea in my head through much of my childhood and even into young adulthood.  Even today I’ll still find myself occasionally wistfully thinking “I wonder if there’s some way…” Oh, well.  Life, as they say, goes on.

That pecan tree came into fruit and was the source of endless snacking.  I learned how to crack open the shells without a nutcracker (or hammer or anything like that).  Take two pecans in your hand and squeeze them together.  One of them will crack open and you can peel it and eat the nut meat inside.  Repeat.

It started approaching Christmas time.  We couldn’t afford much in the way of decorations.  We didn’t have a tree.  I had seen the shiny aluminum trees and tried, using straightened out coat hangers and cut up pieces of aluminum foil to make one.  It…did not go well.  Christmas eve, my sister and I went to bed, wondering what Santa would bring us.  I ended up waking in the wee hours and came out to find a big pile of toys on and around the coffee table.  One of the items was one of those “football playing” games–where you place men on a metal table set up like a football field and a motor causes the tabletop to vibrate moving the men around the field.  That was a pretty nice toy back in the day.

Santa had made it.

I don’t know how she did it, but I will say this for my mother:  she always managed to give us a good Christmas.  We had our Christmas feast.  It may have been chicken rather than turkey–I don’t really remember–but it was good and the most important ingredient was there:  love.  We may not have had much in the way of money and goods but we loved each other.

Not long after that mother was apparently convinced to return to Bruce in Ohio.  I don’t know what went on behind the scenes there but one day we were packed up again and headed back to Ohio.  Thus ended probably the last truly happy period of my childhood.

More next time.

There is an old scam that is useful to look at because it’s illustrative of a way in which people can easily be fooled.

The scam works like this.  You get a message telling you that a particular stock is going to go up over the next week (or, perhaps, that a particular sports team will win), or the message might say that the stock will go down (or the other team will win). You don’t think much of it, but at the end of the week you notice that the stock has gone up (or down) exactly as the message said.

The next week you get another message of the same nature, predicting a particular stock to go up/down (or sports team…well, you get the idea).  And again, sure enough… The following week the same.  And then the week after.

Finally, after a number of weeks with every single prediction correct, you get a message saying that now that they’ve established that they can reliably predict these things for just the low, low, low price of (some value) they’ll tell you how to do it.  You’re very excited about the idea of being able to safely invest (or “gamble” in the case of the sports teams) and make lots of money with very little effort.  So you send in the money and…never hear from them again.

Many of you, cued in by the image at the top there, have likely already figured out how this scam works.  The scammer starts by sending out a large number of messages.  In half of them they say the stock will go up (or team A will win).  In the other half, they say that the stock will go down (team B win).  Then, whatever happens, they’ve got a large number of people, half of those they sent to, where what they predicted is what happened.  To those people, and only those people, they send the next message.  Again, half of them get the “stock will go up” and half “stock will go down.”  And the week after, they send messages to the ones where they were right twice in a row.

Each time, only half the people get messages, but since they started with a large number they still have plenty.  After a number of repeats where people, not seeing all the “wrong” predictions, have gotten a perfect record of correct predictions, come to believe that the person making the predictions has some secret knowledge and are willing to pay to get it.  Only there is no secret knowledge.  There’s just a limited number of possible outcomes, and filtering out from large numbers of “samples” only those that fit the outcome they want.

This is a rather simplistic illustration of a general principle by which people are prone to fooling others, or even themselves.  When a politician lists a bunch of good things that happens under his authority, or a bunch of bad things that happened under an opponent, it’s easy to portray those things as happening because of the politician’s policies.

The world, however, is a complicated place.  There are always “good things” happening and there are always “bad things” happening.  You can make even the most disastrous policies look good by simply listing the “good things” and ignoring the “bad things.” Conversely, you can make the best policies look bad by doing the reverse.

You have to look deeper than “these things happened, therefore…”.  This often requires a level of understanding that most people do not have.  This is no criticism of those people.  As I said, the world is a complicated place, no one has sufficient understanding of enough varied fields along with access to sufficiently comprehensive data to fully understand it.  Indeed, that’s one of my main criticisms of any attempt at centrally planned economies.  But one needs to be aware of the problem and skeptical of arguments that simply list good/bad things that happened and then simply declare it was because of this or that policy.

You should always ask yourself, and check, whether the “facts” being claimed are true, but you need to go beyond that.  You need to look for whether the facts actually have a causal connection to the claims being made, and still further to whether there are additional facts that might counter the claims.

The real world is complicated and simple answers are rarely correct and almost never complete.

There was this pic on the Book of Faces.  I originally thought to write just a short bit of snark on it but instead it turned into a rant.

The snark:  Then they won’t be providing cover for the bad ones.

The problem is that police departments are bureaucratic organizations. And like all bureaucratic organizations the “Iron Law” applies. In this case, it’s fully developed. Those “dedicated to the organization itself” (as opposed to those “dedicated to the goals of the organization”) are fully in charge.

I’m not even saying it’s a majority of law enforcement officers, just “the ones driving the bus.”

A serious housecleaning is necessary. I would prefer it happen from within. It’s better for them, better for us, and likely to have a whole lot less collateral damage. But years of promises and no actual cleaning makes me skeptical of “this time for sure.” So at this point I have grave doubts that it can come from within. And, indeed, the Iron Law would seem to imply that the change cannot come from within.

That leaves political fixes “from above”. But political requires that it become an issue for the politicians. And for it to become an issue for the politicians, it has to be something that’s politically profitable for them. And for that to happen there has to be a climate of opinion making this issue important enough that it will affect who people vote for.

And that means people need to be both aware of and outraged over police abuses, real police abuses not the drummed up stuff we sometimes see.

You see, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend with the big protests, fomented by BLM and like groups: they only seem to raise a ruckus when the supposed “abuse” (shooting of Michael Brown as one example) is entirely justified (assault a police officer, attempt to steal his weapon, and charge at him once he has weapon drawn and you’re only a victim of your own stupidity), or where the system was working (the officer who killed George Floyd was immediately fired and, after a brief period for investigation arrested).

When the cases are actual abuse? Crickets. At best they’ll be mentioned as an aside in the midst of people protesting legitimate exercise of law enforcement authority.

This portrayal of legitimate law enforcement authority does nothing to help curb abuses of police power. If anything it undercuts attempts by making all objections seem every bit as misapplied.

And this happens again and again and again. There’s a saying “once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” Well we’re well into “enemy action” on this. And one has to wonder why, what’s the gain.

I could speculate, get well into “conspiracy theory” territory. The same folk who are behind these protests are also among those who, as just one example, want to ban private firearm ownership. And enforcing a general ban on firearms, particularly in the wake of the massive non-compliance for things like magazine size restrictions and bump stock bans, would require severe police abuse. Undermine the credibility of accusations of abuse and it becomes much easier to carry it out.

Mind you, I don’t believe it’s anything as straightforward as that. Indeed, I’m not sure that the folk organizing this have anything as specific as a plan. It could also simply be a matter of undermining police authority in general, or hamstringing the police, so as to give certain groups a much freer hand in ignoring/violating the law as they pursue their various ends.

In any case, buckle up. It’s going to get bumpy.

A friend of mine, posting this, was decidedly “red pill” on the grounds that it would truly suck to be a 10 year old with all that knowledge that you couldn’t do anything about.  Now, with the red, do I go back to the time that I was 45, or just drop my age to 45 now? Because there’s a bunch of stuff I could do if it’s the former.  Fifteen years of foreknowledge can provide a lot of leverage.

If I were to go back to when I was 10, yeah, it would suck. There’s be a lot of hair pulling “No, no, no!” as I watch things unfolding knowing how they were going to play out.  Then again, first time through sucked pretty badly too.  There are a lot of things that would suck a lot less than it did the first time around. (The folk bullying me back then might be in for a big surprise to encounter Judo-brown-belt me.) I would essentially nail my classes. There wouldn’t be a lot I could do regarding my mother’s abuse at her then-husband’s hands (or maybe there would…I’d have to see the situation with fresh eyes. Accidents, after all, do happen.  And given some of the stuff I was later to learn…)

Oh, and ten year old me with adult me’s brain?  I am quite certain that adult me (who sold several stories to Stan Schmidt when he was editor of Analog Science Fiction) could sell to John W. Campbell of that selfsame Analog Magazine.  That would get me some actual pocket money, substantial pocket money for a ten year old at that time and place, of my own.  And that would let me do…

Middle school.  I did a science fair in middle school.  It was a disaster.  I had the smarts but I didn’t have the discipline or the presentation skills.  But, with five years of preparation (including money from fiction writing) and knowing what I know now?  I work in Atomic Force Microscopy.  It would be child’s (okay, teen’s) play to create a Scanning Tunneling Microscope five years before it was invented in “our” time.  Oh, it would be crude.  I don’t think the hobbyist computers were up to displaying an actual image, but an oscilloscope could show each “scan line” in sequence.  It would show the concept.

And if that did not grab the attention of the physics community, I don’t know what would.

High school would be much better, even without winning fame and fortune (and Nobel Prizes) by inventing the STM.  I, frankly, wouldn’t be much interested in the girls there. I mean, I visited the school something like 30 years ago and even then the students seemed such children. (Well, they were.) But then again, that’s no downside from first time through. It’s not like I had much (i.e. any) success with the girls first time through. I would, however, make some different choices when it comes to classes and, I think, I would have come out way ahead. There’s no reason I wouldn’t be valedictorian this time around. I could have been back then but lacked the discipline to do things like homework when it was boring (and most of my classes were). Six years in the military took care of that–doing boring tasks just because they need to be done at someone else’s direction? BTDT. So with top grades and top SAT and ACT scores (I got good scores on both of those first time around; no reason I couldn’t do it again) I should be better positioned for college and know better than to only apply to one school where my local clergyman had veto power over it. (That was a bad, bad mistake that time around.)

Come the 80’s I’d know better than to listen to that guy who took me aside and “explained”: “if you want to be attractive to women, you’ve got to wear bright clothes.” First time around, well, being unreservedly heterosexual with a very healthy set of hormones thank you very much, this was a very telling argument. Problem was it didn’t work and I ended up spending literally decades vaguely uncomfortable in my own skin and not knowing why. I could instead, accept my then nascent “inner goth” and concentrated instead on finding my “tribe” and people who could accept who I was rather than turning me into something I wasn’t.

Probably would have done college right out of high school instead of a good decade later. And, you know, I would have been well placed to jump in right at the beginning of the development of Atomic Force Microscopy. Come to think of it, it’s not impossible that I could actually invent it while still in high school. Get a jump of a year or two on that technology. (What a science fair project that would make.)

Coming out of college, I would be well positioned to jump on a number of things that I knew would become big. Stay low key, just make some “smart investments.” In the end, by the time I hit 45, I’m pretty sure I’d have a lot more than $50 million in investments. A lot_ more. For that matter, that Elon guy would probably be trying to play catch up with his piddling little SpaceX company.

There’s only one problem. In that alternate reality I would almost certainly never have met she who I would marry. And while that relationship turned out badly my daughter, Athena, my wonderful, wonderful daughter, would never exist.

I’ll take the roll back to 45 and $50 million, please.

After all the shutdown stuff, I was in desperate need to get out and do something when the rink finally opened and I was able to get back not just into public skate but into classes.

I’d lost some ability with the enforced layoff.  My backward edges were weaker than they had been and, frankly, I wasn’t about to try backward crossovers again.  I just wasn’t stable enough for that to be anything other than a good way to get hurt.  And at my age you lose condition fast when you stop exercising.  Where before I had been going a good hour during public skate now…not so much.

Still, it felt good to get out on the ice and I started recovering the condition (up to 50-55 minutes a session now).

The backward edges were the particular challenge.  For a month I was working them and not seeming to make any progress.  Finally, one thing clicked and I realized an error I was making.  Going forward, you see, I can simply push directly onto one foot, whether it’s stroking into a straight line one foot glide, or into a forward edge.  Indeed, forward crossovers are just that.  You push onto a forward outside edge, cross, then push onto a forward inside edge on the other (crossing) foot, bring the crossed foot around and repeat.  I was trying to do backward what I had gotten to the point of being able to do forward and it wasn’t working.  Being able to “push” directly onto one foot requires a good feel for the body mechanics so that your weight is entirely over the gliding foot as you finish the stroke.  I just didn’t have that, yet, going backward.

What I needed to do was, pump to get going backward, something like this:

Then, while still on two feet with feet together I needed to shift my weight to the foot I’m going to be doing the edge on (foot to the inside of the circle if doing an “outside edge”, to the outside of the circle if doing an “inside edge”–each blade has two edges, one on the inside of the foot side of the blade, the “inside edge” and one on the outside of the foot side of the blade, the “outside edge”, with a hollow between them).  When my weight is fully transferred, then pick up the foot.  The result should look something like these:

That’s what I was trying at Saturday’s session.  The result was much improved.  Still a ways to go, but much improved.  Saturday afternoon the rink was pretty dead so I had the opportunity to get some video of my working the backward edges:

Watching that video I did notice a couple of things I was still having issues with.  One was that I had these little, half-hearted pumps to get moving.  This meant that I was creeping along around the circle.  Bigger, more committed pumps to get more momentum would definitely help (and did on the Saturday evening and Sunday sessions).  Another was that while I could have sworn I had my body upright while doing that (I usually have pretty good feel for what my body is doing, something that stood me in good stead in Judo) I see that I have a pronounced forward lean here.  And as I got into it, my head would tend to tilt down.  I need to work on that.

Still, it was a major improvement over where I had been.  When I get to where I can consistently hold a backward edge for 3-4 seconds I figure I’ll be ready to try backward crossovers again.

Over on the Book of Faces there was this:

Okay, let’s say that Bruce Wayne is as rich as Bill Gates. So, net worth of $113 billion. That sounds like a lot, but let’s look at Gotham City. It was based on New York in the comics so let’s use New York’s population. 8.4 million. Divide one into the other and that’s $13,452 per person. Since that’s per person rather than per family, that amounts to an annual income enough to keep everyone out of poverty. Yay, problem solved, right?

Well, not so fast. Doing that for one year and Bruce Wayne is low flat broke. There’s nothing left to do it again for a second year. And on top of it, by liquidating all his assets he’s destroyed, or at least seriously damaged, the businesses that employed a bunchaton of people. That means a lot of people, a whole bunch of people now out of work. And since they’re out of work, they’re not producing goods and services for the rest of us. But there are a bunch of people out there with money to spend on those goods and services that do still remain. More money available to spend, less goods and services to spend it on. There’s a term for that. Inflation. Prices of the remaining goods and services goes up.

And when that year is up what then? Wayne is tapped out. So, what next? Grab Gates’ money this time? Okay, you keep up the “basic income” for another year by completely impoverishing Gates. This puts still more people out of work, producing less in goods and services. Again, more money chasing fewer goods and services. Prices go up more.

And the next year, you’ll probably have to grab at least two billionaires to impoverish to keep this up.

Even if we assume that the billionaires just sit around and wait until it’s their turn to be stripped of their wealth and don’t flee the country, taking their wealth with them, this is a recipe for disaster. More and more jobless, fewer goods and services being produced, higher prices for those that remain, and basically making everyone, rich and poor alike, poorer.

And that’s just for Gotham City (or New York City in the “real world”). The country as a whole has about 35 times as many people as does Gotham/New York. The disaster sweeps in that much faster as you shovel more dollars into a bigger maw.

One might say say that one wouldn’t really completely impoverish each billionaire in turn but instead take a little bit from each of them all together. “They won’t notice it.” Except, while they might personally suffer no hardship from being a few billion less rich than before, the secondary effects are the same in terms of reduced jobs and production if it’s $100 billion from one or $1 billion from each of 100. The effect on the economy is the same. You have the same more dollars chasing fewer goods and services. You can just hide it better and pretend the economic disaster is unrelated.

Politicians are very good at that, in fact.

 

Everywhere you go people are wearing masks.  Governors and mayors are writing “executive orders” requiring people to wear masks in public–requirements that are not passed by legislatures and, really, by all rights should have no legal weight but that businesses, either buying into the hype or just fearful of pressure from regulatory agencies enforce on their properties.  And, of course, if the business says “wear a mask or leave” and you don’t leave, that’s trespass and that does have legal weight.

And we’re told that if you don’t wear a mask it’s because you want Grandma to die.

There are a number of problems with this  One is quite simply that for many people wearing a mask is an active hardship to the point of disability.  They (and I, as I’ll get to in a moment) simply cannot wear masks either for an extended period or at all.

I have reactive airway disease. I can’t wear a mask for extended periods of time without ending up gasping for breath. I need to save my “mask wearing” for situations where I really don’t have a choice–activities I’m committed to but where I’ll be shut out if I don’t. Mask wearing is, for me a “scarce resource that has alternative uses.” (Followers of this blog have seen me use that expression before.) How that “resource” is allocated is something I have to manage and manage carefully.

My daughter has it worse than I do so that applies doubly for her.

Other folk have it even worse. I have friends that, because of severe abuse in their past leading to severe PTSD reaction to anything over their face. They can’t wear masks. Period.

When this was pointed out I received the response:  “I had no idea that you and your daughter have a health issue surrounding wearing of masks”

Frankly, that’s none of anybody’s business. There’s a reason the ADA forbids requiring people to disclose the nature of any disability they have. There’s a reason that HIPAA forbids doctors from disclosing information without consent–I even have to explicitly give one doctor permission to access information from another doctor, both of whom are treating me for different issues. There are a handful of reasons why they may be justified in giving that information without my express consent but to satisfy some Karen’s busybody nature is not one of them.

And that, frankly, was a good response to my objections to wearing a mask.  “Too bad.  Don’t care,” is more common.  And I’ve also known people who have received “Oh, you’re just lying because you don’t want the minor inconvenience of wearing a mask.  You’re an evil person who doesn’t care if Grandma dies.”

Well, somebody doesn’t care about others.  But it’s not the people suffering from PTSD, Asthma, Reactive Airway Disease, or a host of other issues which makes wearing a mask a significant hardship.

This is particularly the case when one considers that this routine wearing of masks doesn’t make Grandma any safer.  The person who made the “I had no idea…” comment also said. “It is true that wearing masks would reduce the spread of most airborne infectious diseases and can help people who are sensitive to air pollution.”

Except it isn’t and doesn’t. The masks as people wear them are utterly worthless when it comes to stopping disease. To be useful, the masks have to be sterile themselves. They have to be of sufficiently small pore size to actually stop the infectious material. They have to be properly fitted. The person wearing them has to not. touch. them. once they’re put on. Once they’re contaminated (after exposure to infectious material or just from wearing for more than a couple hours) they need to be replaced with another that fits all of the above criteria.

None of that applies to the everyday mask wear people are doing. None of it.

At best the masks are a fetish, a talisman, the functional equivalent of a lucky rabbit’s foot, or a tribal shaman’s rattle (to scare away the demons). Utterly worthless.

“But…but…why do surgeons wear mask?  Are you going to tell them that they can throw them away?”

In the case of surgeons and their masks there are a number of factors:

1. The purpose of the mask is to keep spit and snot, and the bacteria they carry, from falling into open wounds on a compromised patient.
2. The masks are properly fitted to avoid “leakage” around the edges.
3. The masks are either brand new (and sterile) or freshly sterilized before being put on.
   1. Masks are either not reused or are thoroughly disinfected before reuse.
4. One put on the surgeon does. not. touch. it.
5. The masks are changed regularly as they get contaminated.
6. The masks are used in a clean, sterlized operating theater.
7. The masks are part of an extensive set of antiseptic procedures which involves sterilizing everything brought into that theater.  Even the patient is covered so that only those body parts that absolutely have to be accessed by the surgical team are exposed (generally incision site, face for anesthesia, and minimal exposure for instrumentation).

None of that applies to the masks that people wear out and about, that they reuse regularly, that they stuff in their pocket between uses, or sit on a shelf, that they’re constantly touching and adjusting with their bare hands (or gloved hands that are contaminated from having touched other contaminated surfaces).

Routine wear of masks does the next thing to nothing when it comes to stopping the spread of disease.

And air pollution?  Really?  When it comes to chemical contaminates (SO2, CO, various nitrous oxides, and the like of air pollution) not even a mask that fits those criteria does anything. You need a mask with an airtight seal and a filter that absorbs/adsorbs those chemicals, an actual “gas mask”. Particle filtration does exactly nothing for those.

But wait, there’s more. What masks do is collect your exhalation, including water vapor. They get damp. Your breath keeps them warm. You create a warm, moist fibrous surface right next to your face. Basically, you create a practically ideal culture medium in which for bacteria to grow. And not just the bacteria of your own exhalations. No, walk into or past a bathroom that had been flushed recently and you’ll pick up fecal matter and a whole host of bacteria that live in it. Now, you pick up a bit of that anyway (ZDogg, who does videos as Doc Vader has spoken on this subject in the case of such matter being picked up by cell phones. People use there cell phones in the toilet, wash their hands, then continue using their cell phones, recontaminating their hands.) Normally, what you pick up is a very modest amount that you immune system is more than capable of dealing with. Gross when you think about it but so far as a healthy immune system is concerned it’s no biggie. Only now you have a culture medium, ideal for what you pick up to “be fruitful and multiply” and you have it right next to your nose and mouth, just waiting to transfer to you.

Even leaving out stuff the mask picks up from around you, the stuff it picks up from you is an issue.  You see, your immune system is in a constant, never-ending battle with various microorganisms.  Normally, your immune system is more than capable of preventing the microorganisms in and on your body from multiplying enough to make you ill.  But when you take some of those, give them a place away from your immune system to grow, and then re-ingest the larger amount?  The dose, as they say, makes the poison and so it is with disease.  That your body could handle what you already had does not mean it can handle the larger quantity that you bred in the culture medium across your face.

This constant improper (from an antiseptic protocol perspective) wear of masks not only does not help but actually increases the chance of illness.

But it’s the fetish that people, with their magical thinking, have settled on and intend to impose on the rest of us.

Ooga booga, folks.