Month: October 2023

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Well that 6 billion sure helped the Iranians

Israel hamas war rockets AP

The Iranians suddenly had 6 Billion extra in their budget and what did they do with it??

Pretty obvious, wouldn’t you say?

They funded the Palestinian assholes known as Hamas. Who then started attacking Israel.

Go Team Biden! Fantastic job! 

So that’s two armed conflicts that Team Biden failed to anticipate or understand. But Team Biden managed to light the fucking fuses on both, through demonstrated weakness and incompetence. Yea Team!!!

Ukrainian and Israeli blood is on the hands of the Democrats in Washington and Biden in particular. 

I’m glad to hear that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared War, and I sincerely hope that his forces kill every fucking one of the Palestinians. No Mercy! No negotiations, No peace until Palestine is a graveyard.

Yeah, that’s the kind of person I am about this bullshit. The Palestinians have demonstrated time and again what kind of vile shitheads they are. As far as I am concerned, the Palestinians lost all right to my consideration of their position when they hid weapons in schoolyards, and fired missiles from schools then cried to the UN accusing Israel of firing on children.

The one thing I can pretty much guarantee about Jews, is they wouldn’t knowingly hurt children, even the children of their enemies. But they would fire on the point of origin of missiles pretty much instantly. The IDF will do their level best to prevent loss of innocent lives as they always do. So while Palestinians may richly deserve retribution for harboring and keeping Hamas in power. Not all Palestinians are Hamas.

The Israelis usually know the difference and I have faith that they’ll be merciful with non combatants.

The people that should be worried are the folks who funded this War. The Israelis will not be merciful with them.

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Wait What??? I’m so confused again!

Biden is building the border wall?

Biden

Didn’t he promise America there there’d not be one more foot of wall built after he took office?

Didn’t the Democratic Party tell us that “walls don’t work,” didn’t they call anyone supporting border walls racists and white supremacists?

So how is it that the Biden administration has reversed itself? 

Could it be that all of us who were supporting a border wall are not in fact racists or white supremacists but simply understood that we couldn’t support uncontrolled illegal immigration.

Could it be that Walls do actually work? Could it be that Biden lied in his campaign promises? 

Could all of these “Settled Facts” the Democrats have been preaching to us might actually be wrong?

Say it isn’t so!

Uh Huh…

We See you Democrats!… We see that your words are nothing more than pandering to get votes. We see your lies and deceptions.

Ayanna Pressley

I happened to catch an interview with Ayanna Pressley (who I think is an evil, evil, woman,) where she was trying to slime her way out of questions about The Biden Administration building a chunk of wall.

First she said is was some holdover from Trump Era budgeting. When she was asked why then, the construction had languished for 2 and a half years, and why it hadn’t fallen under the same cancellation order Biden signed on day one of his Presidency, Her story changed. 

The best part of the interview was that the reporter, (surprisingly from MSNBC, CNN, NBC, ABC, or CBS, I wasn’t paying attention,) asked Representative Pressley if walls work. This was after years of “The Squad” saying that they don’t.

Grudgingly Ayanna Pressley actually admitted that walls do work. But if she could have killed the reporter killed with a look, she would have.

Then we have Hillary saying out loud and on the record in a CNN interview that she believes the MAGA republicans should be “Deprogrammed”.

Hillary ClintonThat is another way of saying being “Reprogrammed”. As in those subjected to this procedure, will come out the other side thinking just the way someone wants them to.

The Chinese, North Vietnamese, Russians, and innumerable other dictators and despots can, and probably have written books about reprogramming human subjects.

Stalin and Mao, called it a re-education camp.

In China and Russia, “Reprogramming” or “Deprogramming” had a 100% success rate. Those that didn’t take to the new programming didn’t survive.

All I can say is we dodged a bullet when Hillary lost the 2016 election.

BTW it’s interesting to note that she still claims the election was stolen from her. Yet she’s not being dismissed as a lunatic, nor is she being chastised or denigrated for her assertion that she won the Presidential election.

Stacy Abrams also is an election denier. Yet she’s on the boob tube all the damn time spouting that she won both her failed gubernatorial election bids.

Emperor PalpatineHas anybody but me noticed how truly haggard Hillary Clinton looks these days? I guess fomenting all that hate, vitriol, and evil takes a toll on you.

If she’d ended up in the Oval Office, by now she’d look like Emperor Palpatine

This is why I don’t trust the government. It’s why I especially don’t trust the Democrats.

See I look at it like this, if my other half, a guy who was forgiving beyond belief. A guy who always saw the best in everyone, and who gave even the most evil people, the benefit of the doubt…

If a person like that found enough wrong with the Democrat Party that he left them after a lifetime of association, volunteering to raise campaign funds, and his whole family being Democrats, Then there has to be something seriously wrong.

Needless to say his departure from the Democrat party got my attention! In part, because he wasn’t all that political. For their shenanigans to have caught his attention, and offended him that much says a lot.

No, he didn’t go Republican he went independent. 

Finally, we lost McCarthy as Speaker of the house.

I’ve got very mixed feelings about it. On the one hand I applaud holding him to his promises and agreements. You know, those promises and agreements he made to get into the speakership in the first place.

Honestly I’d like to see every member of Congress and our entire government for that matter fitted with shock collars. If the collar determined the person was lying it would hit them with 50,000 volts.

Lie to the American people 25 times and the collar kills ya!

I bet that would put a stop to a lot of the Washington D.C. Bullshit!

I digress. 

On the other hand, I don’t think the timing was particularly good to have to cycle through however many votes it’s going to take to elect a new speaker.

But I did very much enjoy Nancy Pelosi being tossed out of the secondary office that she’d occupied as Speaker of the House. I’d have loved to be a fly on the wall when she heard about that. I’ll bet she swore like a drunken sailor. Yeah, I don’t like her. I admit it!

I’m concerned that the Republicans will or already have screwed us all… again! 

I say that as someone how left the Republican Party for much the same reason as my other half left the Democrat Party. Shenanigans, and the fact that they no longer represented us or our interests and they weren’t, (in our opinions,) serving the people who had elected them.

This particular foolishness and divisiveness among the republicans may have made folks who were considering not voting Democrat this election cycle reconsider which party they’re voting for.

The Republicans have a very thin majority, they really should be using it wisely.

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I Swear… Often!

There are so many reasons to hate medical facilities.

One reason is shitty driving and parking. Why the fuck are there never enough parking spots? Why is it that you’re trying to get to an appointment where you’re going to be charged if you’re late but you can’t park? So your blood pressure is elevated when you get into the place and immediately you’re put on BP meds and Statins…

OH! I get it! They do this so they can make more money selling shit you don’t really need! Duhh!

Then there’s this stupid shit.

Yeah this is a vehicle in a handicapped spot but at least you’d think they could park head in and between the lines instead of at a jaunty angle that makes every one else have to jockey around.

But NO! Why shouldn’t they park like they do in the third world shit hole they come from?

It’s little things like this that we ignore because we want to be culturally sensitive. Unfortunately, over time, they accumulate into fundamental break downs in what those of us raised in the USA call common rules. This shit is a low level annoyance that adds stress to the situation.

How about everyone adhere to the same set of rules?

It’s annoying too because we’d expect even newcomers to our country to at least follow the example set my the majority of the other people who have already parked.

The folks in the car pictured, appear to have come from India or wherever. They have a handicap sticker apparently they’re brain dead too.

Then at this particular medical facility there aren’t enough bathrooms. Well, there were enough bathrooms beforethey made two bathrooms on the ground floors gender neutral.

So now the one bathroom closest to the parking lot entrance that was a men’s room is gender neutral. The Other bathroom in the other building is still a Women’s. The two bathrooms at the opposite ends of the building halls are one Gender Neutral and another Woman’s.

The bathrooms on the second floor adhere to the same pattern. Guess what?

The gender neutral bathrooms always have lines of women outside them.

As a man, what am I supposed to do? Hang it in the bushes because all I have to do is piss.

This is why there are almost never lines in front of Men’s rooms. We don’t mind pissing in front of each other or against a wall for that matter. Why at a medical facility of all places would you create a situation where 1/2 of the population is treated like trash?

Oh right… Men are shit so let’s fuck ‘em all the damn time.

At least this is what’s happened in fucking Commifornia.

At this point I think it should be ALL or NOTHING!

Either make every bathroom gender neutral or none of them. Particularly in the medical facilities. This one in Loma Linda is just one example. When the other half was in the hospital I encountered the same stupid shit! The gender neutral bathrooms had lines waiting, the women’s rooms were vacant, and the men were left pissing on the walls in the parking structure or using the bathroom in patients rooms.

Hell even the car wash that I used to go to all the time, got so tired of dealing with people bitching that they had a men’s and a women’s room that they removed all the restrooms!

Now the guys piss on the wall. So what? It’s mostly guys who are hand washing their cars and their wives cars in the first place.

You just know, there had to be some nasty ass blue haired bitch screaming about gender neutral bathrooms, so everyone lost.

Gee thanks you blue haired jackass.

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Maybe I dodged a bullet with the new iPhone

I haven’t been able to order a new iPhone.

It’s a simple thing, I want a completely unlocked phone right from the start. I don’t want to have to monkey around with unlocking a phone from a carrier or any of the other bullshit contractual obligations that are included in the fine print of a purchase.

T-Mobile, you really need to train your reps in Costco better… Based on my interaction with a blue hair guy? girl? Amorphous fat ass? I’m seriously reconsidering our working relationship.

No, your representative wasn’t rude or whatever. He/she/it/they/them, was simply not listening. I’ve been noticing that more and more with your representatives across the board, since T-Mobile and Sprint merged.

It’s always questionable which corporate culture will survive when two companies merge. This is especially true if one corporation is diseased and shitty as Sprint was, and the other corporation is relatively healthy. 

I think from here on out, I’ll be betting on the shitty corporation infecting the healthy corporation and taking all the services to the lowest, laziest, common denominator. 

The only benefit I received at the T-Mobile Kiosk was that I got to see the new iPhone in person. It’s nice.

I wasn’t going to go through the machinations necessary to order one on the T-Mobile account, then trade in my current phone, then pay off the T-Mobile Payment plan purchase early, then go to T-Mobile to unlock the phone. That’s just a load of annoyance that I don’t want to deal with.

I was tempted…

I’m glad I waited. There have been some interesting articles about the new iPhone Pros getting nice and toasty while in use. 107°F by one article’s account. There have been reports of the phones being blemished or outright damaged right out of the box. 

How disappointing would that be? Your brand new hotness, right out of the box, with a nasty gouge in it as you peel the protective plastic off.

I’ve also seen at least one photo of an iPhone Pro Max that looked like not only did the back glass of the phone shatter easily but the new titanium frame looked like it had cracked too.

Titanium is strong, light and useful for a lot of things, but I seem to recall that it’s kind of crystalline when you see the raw metal. I also seem to recall that if you don’t make it just right, it’s prone to cracking. I’m wondering if that’s not part of what we’re seeing in some of the reports about the phones glass, (front or back) shattering.

In the announcement event, there was some mention of alloying the titanium frame with aluminum structural components within the phone, presumably as a heat sink. Titanium can be alloyed with a number of other metals, but again, that has to be done carefully. 

I wonder if this is another situation where China’s sloppy quality control has created a disaster. Or maybe manufacturing at the scale Apple is attempting is just not yet reliable. Maybe it’s a little from column A, and a little from column B.

Perhaps, I’ll just wait until the iPhone 16 and hope they make it in a color I like.

There’s also been some chatter about Apple’s replacement for leather. Folks are finding that a week or so of use presents them with staining indicative of fabrics, instead of the durability of leather. I’m thinking that my future phone cases will either be silicone from Apple, or I’ll be buying leather from another vendor. Most likely silicone…

Before you get your panties in a twist over my consideration of leather, let me present the following use cases.

I’m using a Franklin leather binder that I’ve had since 2008. It’s in very good shape and I have no intention of replacing it anytime in the near future. I have two TUMI leather briefcases. The smaller one is the one I use most often. That case is 4 -5 years old, the larger one is 15 years old. TUMI will repair a briefcase at a reasonable cost and send it back to you.

So if you talk about sustainability. How is using leather unsustainable? Sure, if you replace leather items every year, then that’s a problem. But if you buy leather, take care of it, and don’t find a need to buy the item over and over I’d bet the sustainability equation tips in favor of leather.

How much energy does it take to make these new fiber cases? How often will consumers replace them and why? Are these new fiber products biodegradable, and how long does that take? 

Honestly, if Apple would stop changing the phone shapes every year so that last years case doesn’t fit this years phone, perhaps sustainability would go up and pollution would go down in amounts equal to their switch from using leather goods.

I haven’t purchased one of Apple’s leather cases since the iPhone 5. I found that their leather case wasn’t grippy enough and I dropped the phone twice, then went third party silicone with nice grippy knurls on either side. No more dropping my phone.

Since I replace my phone every 3-4 years, after the iPhone 5 debacle it’s never seemed reasonable to invest in leather unless, like the MagSafe wallet, it could be used on other iPhones.

Sustainability and being climate responsible isn’t just about companies. It’s also about asking questions of yourself. 

Questions such as:

Do I need a new phone?
Do I need a new leather jacket, phone case, or brief case? The leather jacket bit is funny, because with vintage all the rage people buy “Vintage” looking stuff but don’t have the patience to make it “vintage” by wearing it year after year.
I guess the question really boils down to “Do I Need xyz” or “Do I Want xyz”.

It’s okay to want, but feeling like you need to buy the newest, latest, flashiest every year might be part of the problem.

I’d like a new iPhone because there has been enough change that a new phone is a pretty substantial upgrade to what I have. But… do I need it this year? Not really. My old phone works just fine, (the battery is showing signs of its age,) but I can go another year and avoid what may be an Apple screw up in the iPhone 15 Pro.

Maybe that’s exactly what I’ll do. I’ll keep reading the articles to see what’s happening.

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Wow! The other half had a lot of musical scores in digital format.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have much of a filing system for either Paper or Digital scores.

Screenshot 2023 09 30 at 7 29 50 AM

I’ve been trying to collect up all the music (Digital and Paper), and sort it with the intention of making sure that it got to the people that could use it and who would appreciate the effort.

I’m using a 32GB thumb drive now and unlike previous attempts will hopefully not run out of space.

I’ve also been finding a lot of duplications. I suspect that is in part due to the lack of a filing system and in part it might be further evidence that he’d been “off” for a while and was doing a damn fine job of hiding that fact from me.

No, I’m not angry about it. I’m just a little sad. He did his life, his way, as do I. We called “Shotgun” on each other’s journey through life and rode together for a long time. It’s cool, even if I am a little sad about the way things went from time to time.

As an aside, I have no clue how music is supposed to be catalogued, or indexed, or anything else.

I’m just doing what seems “Right” with the music much the same way I’ve done with every other curveball that’s come my way over the past 10 months.

In addition to the actual musical scores, some of which are only identifiable by opening them. (I’m fixing that slowly but surely.) I’ve also run into actual recordings where he was playing and recording into GarageBand either via a MIDI connection or he was using a microphone. Hearing him play has been somewhat jarring because I recognize his style and technique. It’s okay, but I’m still prone to crying over stuff like that, because the memories of him practicing a particular piece come flooding back. 

I’ll be a little sad over not being annoyed and hiding out in the office as he played the same measure over and over again trying to get it just right. In a way it was like RAP with Classical music!

I hate RAP!

As I typed that, I was smiling through misty eyes.

I’m sorting the music as best I can. If something has Hebrew characters in it, then it’s obviously going into the Jewish music folder. If it’s written in Russian It’s probably a fair bet that too is going to be Jewish Music. That is also true of German and Spanish.

I’m so out of my depth!

I’ve been looking for keywords in the scores. If I find anything that is recognizably Hebrew or Yiddish I know where to file it.

Christian music is a little easier because there I only have to scan for “Jesus” or Holy Ghost or Father, Son and Holy Spirt. You don’t find those kinds of references in Jewish Music.

Things start to get dicy when there are no lyrics, only the musical notation. If the title isn’t obvious, then I’m in a bit of trouble. 

If I can sound it out and recognize the roots or the rhythm of the piece  then I’ve got a shot at getting it in the right place. Some music is instantly recognizable as Jewish when you hear it.

I recognize the names of many classical pieces, or at least the composer so those scores go into the Classical Folder.

But wait! There’s more…

The harp music, the organ music, the piano, harpsichord, and even accordion music is all in one big assed digital pile.

For him, this presented no problem. He’d open an arrangement and know exactly what instrument it was for just by looking. Hell, I think sometimes he didn’t care what the score said the instrument was supposed to be. I think he’d just figure it out on the fly. That’s what a classically trained musician can do. It’s a skill built up over a lifetime and it’s amazing to watch in action.

I’ve been trying to sort the Harp and keyboard music into separate folders. Some of the folks that will be looking at this are classically trained musicians, but others aren’t.  Some of the amateur choir members can carry a tune and read music, but I know the other half curated very carefully what he gave to the choir.

It wasn’t about him disrespecting them, it was about not wanting to frustrate them with super busy scores. Sometimes he’d sit down and manually do choir only notation as a new file that he’d print here. Then we’d assemble the choir books if he wanted or needed my help.

I was probably next to useless because I didn’t read music. But I could follow instructions, run the printer, punch holes in pages, and we’d be spending the time together.

I know I could just hand all of the over to “Real” musicians instead of a hack like me. One reason that I don’t is because also mixed in this big pile of musical scores are receipts, and medical evaluations, and all the usual documents that one accumulates. So I have to be the one that filters all of this stuff out. 

Some of the pieces of music where he’s actually playing are in Apple only formats. Not a problem for me… But the Synagogue and Church are Windows based. So I’m letting my super fast computer handle processing the music into something universally playable. That takes time. Not much in the way of computer time, but time listening to the various edits and editions to determine which one is most likely to be the “Final” version that he’d want distributed.

Perhaps I’m doing all of this as much for me, and the other half, as I am for the Synagogue and Church.

It’s tedious, and time consuming. But I’m hoping to construct something that he’d be proud of.