Sunday Squibs

 Shall it be health and wellness, or wealth and hellness? Or a little of each.

When people forward funny videos, I wish they could send along their sense of humor. 

You get an A for understanding the material and jumping through all the hoops. B is for understanding, but some of the hoops were skipped. C: no understanding , but hit all the hoops. D, no understanding, no hoops, but showed up. 

F, do I have to spell it out?

People apologize for butt dialing me, but not for bumping into me in the grocery store. 

Well-adjusted people are ok with the fact that some of their dearest friends are not going to respond to their texts, emails or TikTok videos in a timely manner, if ever. 

We pawns dash about shouting “What about this!” and “What about that!” while the rooks, the knights, the bishops, kings and queens stand in the back row, waiting for the real war to begin. 

I’ve learned not to re-watch movies I once loved. With age I notice their faults. My own as well. 

Hard must be beauty’s cold shiny veneer

To endure and resist the world’s groping and leer

The equinox will make good in three months on the solstice’s promise today. 

We’re all born with a ration of vitriol. Some of us never get it under control. Others put it in a squirt gun. The saints seal it tightly in a flask. 

The huge baby boom when it came of age waited on itself. Trying to enjoy its retirement now, all it hears is “Get in line Boomer.”

I drink coffee in the morning until I start to detect subtle notes of cigar butt. 

Some guests you wish would come early 

Others you wish would stay home 

The first incite mini-adventures 

The rest won’t quit talking of gnomes 

Mozart makes you intelligent. 

Shakespeare makes you wise. 

The neurotic knows what he doesn’t want and he wants it right now. 

If education is as they say concentrated experience, then most students have evolved a zone-out strategy to avoid traumatic brain injury.

Gone but not Forgotten

    One way to be remembered is to disappear without a trace. We still wonder about Jimmy Hoffa and Amelia Earhart, and a little further back, Ambrose Bierce, who took off for Mexico in 1913 to report on the Mexican Civil War. Bierce was a journalist and attached himself to Pablo Villa's army as an observer. He never made it home.

   There are rumors that he was executed by a firing squad or that he snuck back to the U.S. and committed suicide at the Grand Canyon, but it’s all speculation. He had fought as a Union soldier in the American Civil War and his record reads like a history of the western theater of the war: Shiloh (the worst), Chickamauga, Lookout Mountain, Missionary Ridge, Kennesaw Mountain. He suffered a traumatic brain injury at Kennesaw Mountain and missed the last few months of the war.

   He stayed in the army after the war ending up in San Francisco where he settled as a journalist specializing in crime reporting. He wrote short stories about his war experiences. An Occurrence at Owl Creek is his best known story. In his journalism he exposed chicanery in high places and he was a social critic and satirist. The great curmudgeon H.L. Mencken was a fan.

   His most famous work, still widely quoted today, is The Devil's Dictionary, a collection of satirical definitions. Sweater: a garment worn by a child when it's mother is feeling chilly. Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. Selfish: Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others. Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math. Education: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.  

Happy Birthday Ambrose Bierce (1842) 

"Squibs: Murder by a million witticisms.”

Sunday Squibs

 I give thanks for my daily round of worries. They distract me from my looming death and its attendant worries. Is death the end, or is there more?  If more, will it be Heaven, Hell, or back to earth? If back, will it be as Homo sapiens or as Musca domestica?

College is denigrated for teaching all of the branches of knowledge, but none of the roots. That’s because we learn the roots on the job. 

Is it better to go slowly to hell or to arrive abruptly? Slowly please. I need some time to look my best. 

The philosopher says we must accept the world as it is. His cleaning lady wisely does his house when he’s at the office. 

If a bee or a spider gets in the house, I’ll catch it and set it free outside. I’d do the same for flies and mosquitos if they would only come one or two per week. 

Because it’s a valid excuse to take the day off, the lazybones enjoys being sick. 

Don’t feel bad if you’re baffled by your phone. Even two tin cans and a string can be done wrong and you figured that out. 

The world is illogical and not entertaining, except for the fictions it contains, which must be  illogical if they are to be entertaining. 

Places you’ve never been, things you’ve yet to try: figments of your imagination, motes within the eye. 

With the advancing years I imagine the books of my library flying off to other people’s shelves. 

Maintaining perfection is hard. It’s much easier to let my genes take the blame for my peccadilloes. 

It used to annoy me when someone told me an interesting story but didn’t know important details. Now I realize that’s just how the world is. 

Bunker Hill

    The Battle of Bunker Hill took place on this day in 1775. I was born just a mile away from the battlefield and so take a proprietary interest in this first real battle of the Revolutionary War. 

   Tension had been building in Colonies for the ten years previous to the battle. After the French and Indian War, Britain imposed taxes on the American colonies to help pay off war debts. The Americans saw no point in paying for defense now that the French were out of the picture.

   Britain sent troops to the Colonies to enforce her will, which led to the Boston Massacre in 1770 and the Tea Party in '73. Britain really tightened the screws after the Tea Party, and in response the Americans began forming well regulated militias and stockpiling weapons. It was a British expedition in April,1775 to confiscate some of those weapons that ignited the powder keg of war.

   By June the British has several warships and thousands of soldiers in Boston. Back then, Boston was a knob of land at the end of a peninsula. The American militias occupied the land around the city and threatened the British in Boston with cannons. This forced the British to attack the American position in Charlestown directly north of Boston. 

   The Americans initially planned to build their fort or redoubt on Bunker Hill, but decided they would be better off on a nearby unnamed hill which was later named Breed's Hill. Once Bunker Hill was associated with the battle, it was impossible to switch the name to the more accurate Breed's Hill  

After being repulsed twice by the Americans, the British were able to take the redoubt when the Americans ran out of ammunition. The British suffered more casualties in this battle than in any single engagement for the rest of the war. The Americans went on to lose most of the battles in the coming years, but won those that mattered, with some timely help from the French.

    It took 17 years (1825-43) to complete Bunker Hill Monument which when completed was the first monument of its kind in the U.S. When I was a kid it cost ten cents to walk up the 294 stairs. Now admission I'd free and there's still no elevator. The view from the top is magnificent. 

   The monument was a big deal at the time. Pioneers on the Oregon or Mormon Trails passing Chimney Rock in western Nebraska called the landmark Monument Rock because it reminded them of pictures they had seen of the new Bunker Hill Monument.

  The original builders of the monument hoped to preserve the battlefield for posterity, but had to sell off most of the land to finance the building of the granite obelisk. Lafayette came over from France to lay the cornerstone. Bunker Hill Monument is now managed by the National Park Service and was renovated at at great expense in 2007. The monument was closed for Covid so don't go there till you see the Open sign.

Count 'em

Sunday Squibs

 The US lived in a Potemkin Village of national unity until the Soviet wolf sickened and died. 

The lowest form of humor the world has known; 

The pun’s where laughter turns into groans.  

The stronger the boundaries you draw, the more they resemble the hermit’s cave. 

An artist doesn’t need a large audience to feel like a rock star. Just enough to fill the mosh pit will do. 

Much poetry is a making of mud pies. The grown up stuff makes love to the reader. 

The great-grandfathers at first liked the lengthening days, but by June it was getting ridiculous. It took much chanting, dancing, and self-mutilation to get the sun to turn back. 

Is the chef’s quest for perfection ever set on its ear,

When the fish he serves up gives his guest a cold sneer?

If the cost of a thing is calculated in the hours it takes to buy it, then for the retiree, everything is free. 

The person who follows the path of least resistance is considered weak. That’s what electricity does. Is electricity strong enough for you?

Mi agenda es su agenda

We vow to love, to honor, and to tolerate occasional displays of stupidity. 

Truth is a mirror, or better, a window, or best, just the nose on one’s face. 

The cop brings the louse in. The detective gets the confession, the prosecutor, the conviction, and the judge orders him fried. But what’s the use when God’s going to pardon him in the end. 

I envy the psalmist who praised God with singing and dancing and playing on the lyre. But the psalmist didn’t have to ride the subway to work. 

If democracy in America collapses, one of the inconveniences will be having to rename all the Washington Streets in the country with the name of the most prominent usurper. 

As each man has his Jesus, so each has his Judas. 

To get drunk is the alcoholic’s plan A. His plan B is AA .

The fans of Jane Austen want more of her stuff. 

Some will choke down the worst pablum and duff. 

God sent Jesus, his ace to make sense of the random game of life. We get to choose if aces are high or low. 

The more jobs he has to shirk, the deeper into his comfort zone the procrastinator sinks.

Solar Plexus

    It's possible to get all your electricity for free from the sun. The one drawback is the initial cost of the equipment to capture the solar energy and send it into your house. Right now the government is offering a big tax credit to install that equipment so we decided to go solar and quit relying on the coal fired power plant out in North Dakota.

   For the past two months we've been meeting on Zoom with Simon Eddy, the technical sales rep for RealSolar in Backus, MN. It's been a long process of figuring out exactly how much this is all going to cost. A series of ups and downs has led to bottom line we can live with.

   During this process Simon reviewed our bills from the Roseau Electric Cooperative. In the past Roseau County has had some of the best electric rates in the country thanks to the abundant coal deposits out West. But things have been changing over the past few years. The government has mandated the power plant pay for expensive retrofits to scrub the discharge from its stacks. It's had to put up wind turbines. And its had to share some of its cheap output with the rest of the country. These things have causedour monthly bill to rise.

   We'll have to continue relying on the coal plant when the sun doesn't shine. We could buy batteries to store our excess power, but batteries are expensive. Instead we'll sell our excess production on long sunny days back to Roseau Electric who will bank it to provide us with power on long winter nights. We should break even in the course of the year.

   But there's another kind of breaking even. How many years of free electricity will it take to pay for the solar panels? According to Simon's calculations it will take 21.5 years to break even. I'll be 95 1/2  old years old by then. Perhaps one of our grandchildren will want to move here. We'll give them a family discount on the place.

  Last Friday Simon came for a site visit. He marked out a 40' by 12' rectangle on the lawn south of the garage where the panel array will sit. He took a soil sample. He set his solar pathfinder on a tripod and declared our panels would be shaded at no point during the year except late in the afternoon around the time of the winter solstice by some trees several hundred feet away. 

   There was one little glitch. The array should be oriented to the south to get maximum solar exposure, but our garage is a bit off from true south. The array would be aesthetically less pleasing if it did not line up with the garage. How much would it cost us to make it look nice. Simon ran the numbers: we'd lose $8.00 worth of electricity per year. What the heck. Let's go for pretty.

   Simon took pictures of our meter and our electric panels, then we reviewed the contract. The RealSolar crew is going to be real busy this summer. Simon estimated they would get to our array in October or November. As I handed over our deposit check I said, "Don't be too late, Simon. Electric rates aren't going down anytime soon."

Mosquitoes throw a lot of shade. I'll definitely be keeping them off. 

Sunday Squibs

 Gathering knowledge is like harvesting the fruits of the sea. Where to start? And with how fine a net.

The sinner consoles himself with the belief that even the saints were also sinners, excepting of course the Mother of God and his own mother. 

My wife puts her knitting in a Subway bag to organize her yarn bunch. Every time I see her now I think it’s time for lunch. 

The feeling that time speeds up as we age yields the collateral feeling there’s not enough time to get anything done. 

The one thing more addicting than checking a phone screen is scratching a lottery ticket. 

It’s not the building, it’s the people. Churches can be desecrated, torn down, turned into condos…even so venerable a shrine as Notre Dame is subject to acid, worm, and fire. 

Only a handful of lucky sods strike it rich in any gold rush. The best way to make a bundle is to sell supplies to the gold diggers. 

The fat man wears his backpack under his skin. When we get to the lifeboats I’ll be sorry I’m thin. 

The algorithm is yes/no all night and all day. 

Code writers lust after zero shades of grey.