Consenting Adults
04/06/23 07:09
It's Monday, Memorial Day, and we're off and running on another exciting week here on the seacoast. Who knows what bees I'll have in my bonnet between now and the time I wrap up this week's blog a week from today? That's a thing, right? Bees in the bonnet? If I never had any bees in my bonnet, what the hell would I write about? I've got to exorcise these demons in my head somehow. Thems the bees I'm referring to. They come and go as bees will on any given day, but I think I finally have them flying in formation. Kinda like the butterflies that people get in their tummies before making a speech. If you can get them flying in formation, the world is your oyster. It seems I'm going to club these baby seals of mine to death with cliches. That's a thing, too, right? Cliches?
A family acquaintance of ours took her Rolex watch to get cleaned the other day. I know, I know. Who the hell wears a Rolex watch these days? Speaking of clubbing baby seals, wearing a Rolex watch in public is asking for trouble. I suppose it depends on where you go with that Rolex of yours on your wrist, but you definitely want to avoid certain areas, if you get my drift. Anyway, she takes this watch of hers to a jeweler in town and asks about having it cleaned. They quoted her a price of $1,500 US dollars to have it done, and that didn't include the cost of any parts that might need replacing. I'm thinking to myself, holy jumping Jesus. Why is it so expensive? Maybe it's true what they say about if you can't afford the maintenance, then maybe you shouldn't buy it in the first place. If I had to guess, I'd guess that this was probably a gift back in the day. Price aside, there's something to be said for sentimental value. Let's find a Rolex service center and get this done right. Forget the cost.
I'm not a big watch guy, so one should take any advice I have to give on watch procurement or repair with a grain of salt. I'm more inclined than not to purchase my watches at Walmart. I go to a lot of places and do a lot of things where I don't want to have to worry about having my watch stolen or somehow compromised. I'm talking about the gym, biking, and that sort of thing. I've never fancied having an Apple watch since having to charge my wristwatch every so often seems ridiculous to me. Why would I choose to buy a watch that I need to recharge when I can buy a watch that I don't have to recharge? It's a little like buying an electric car. Who the hell wants to buy a car that you have to plug in every night when you can buy a car that you never need to plug in? The technology is changing so rapidly that I'm afraid that by the time I decided to buy the car, or the watch for that matter, my purchase would be outdated, technologically speaking. Does that make me a troglodyte? A Luddite?
I know it makes sense for Zelensky and his toadies to send drones into downtown Moscow but to what end? Is it the beginning of a larger counter-offensive that Ukraine has been talking about now for a while? Have they forgotten about Crimea and their plans to recapture Crimea from the Ruskies? I'm guessing Zelensky and his generals want to inflict a little pain and discomfort on the Russians to let them feel the kind of fear and dread that the Ukrainians have been experiencing for the last year or so. Maybe they think it will turn the Russian people against Putin, and that alone will bring the military action to a grinding halt when nothing else could. When you think of the kinds of things that qualify as an escalation in this brush-up between Russia and Ukraine, sending drones into Moscow definitely fits the bill. Now, the Russian people are fighting for their homeland. Nothing girds the soul of a nation more than seeing your homeland under attack. How do you say "all hands on deck' in Russian?
The dressing down of Bumbles Biden and his clown car of an entourage continues on the world stage. The latest humiliation comes in the form of a bitch slap to Biden's Defense Secretary, Loyd Austin, by his counterparts in the Chinese military. China has rebuffed Austin's efforts once again to set up meetings to improve communications between the two superpowers. I'm no foreign affairs expert, but I'm thinking that this can't bode well for any number of things, including the long-term well-being of Taiwan. All I see in the news these days is news about the Chinese president, Xi, making economic and military pacts with this or that nation across the Globe while Bumbling Joe Biden calls a lid every day at 9 am and puts in a four-day workweek before flying back home to Rehobeth, Deleware for a three-day vacation. It would seem that America's power on the world stage under Biden is receding while China is ascendant. Does any of this have anything to do with the millions of dollars transferred into Biden's coffers by the Communist Chinese Party? You tell me.
You've got to hand it to Bumbles. He has the audacity to step up to the podium and excoriate the president of Uganda for signing off on laws having to do with homosexuality while he turns our nation into a laughingstock on the world stage by staffing his administration with perverts and misfits. He fights for the rights of his leftist constituencies to continue the slaughter of American babies in abortion centers while putting prayerful protestors in jail. He looks the other way while Leftists District Attorneys funded by George Soros release hardened criminals by the thousands back into the streets to continue their assaults on the American public while jailing peaceful protestors from January 6th whose only crime was to be in Washington on that fateful day back in 2020. He says nothing while the woke culture freaks impose their unnatural predilections on society enabled by corporate entities like Target and Anheuser Busch. He looks the other way while human traffickers on both sides of the border rape and prey on every man, woman, and child heading north to our country's porous borders. This kind of rabid hypocrisy runs deep in the DNA of the Bidens, Bumbles notwithstanding.
Yesterday was quite a day. Everything was going according to Hoyle until around 8 in the morning. The missus appears in the doorway complaining about a sliver of sorts under her fingernail. Knowing that this was probably something more than just a trifle, off we went to the local urgent care center. Oddly enough, she wasn't in excruciating pain, so that was good. Anyway, that all took a couple of hours to get squared away. The sliver came out, and she now has a tender fingertip for the time being. We stopped and had a nice breakfast at the Golden Egg restaurant in Portsmouth. That was a treat. I can't remember the last time we had breakfast out. I managed to prepare a nice late-afternoon meal for the family, which we enjoyed on our back deck. I made nice chicken/spring vegetable skewers for the missus and the Ev man and I had hotdogs with steamed buns and macaroni salad. The weather was a comfortable 65 degrees with almost zero humidity. I even managed to mow our lawn and get in a bike ride to boot in the early evening. Don't you just love the early days of summer?
Y'all know who Tara Reade is. Right? She's the woman who accused Bumbles Biden of rape. She never got a hearing of any kind in the media here in the States, to nobody's surprise. I guess the Me-too Movement only goes so far. If you're accusing a sitting Democratic President like Bumbles Biden of rape, nobody's interested in your story. Not the media, not the Justice Department, nobody. If you're Donald J Trump, at least in New York State, they will create new laws to allow your accusers to come forward many decades after the alleged offense despite your inability to remember any of the details of the decades-old whatever. Just when you thought you'd heard the last of Tara Reade, she turns up in Russia. Wut? I thought it was a joke when I first heard it. Apparently, she fears for her life here in the United States. You've heard of the Clintons. Right? You've heard of Vince Foster. Right? It makes you wonder if Tara still has that "blue dress." You know, the one with the DNA on it. It's all very reminiscent of the Monica Lewinsky thing, with one notable exception. Can you say consent?
My brother from another mother gave me a framed picture a while back of him sitting in his boat just offshore on Lake George, New York. We've had it hanging here in the house for a good couple of years now. We were over at the Ev man's place to give him a hand tidying up the other day, and we talked about the fact that he had no wall hangings of any kind. The Ev man has a long history with Lake George, relatively speaking, and he's pretty tight with my brother from another mother. Well, as tight as one can be living as far apart as we do. You can see where I'm going with this. I was not want one way or another to part with the picture, but it seemed to me to be a proper bequeathment under the circumstances. Now that he has the picture, I'll want to follow up with him to make sure that he does a proper job of putting it up on the wall in his apartment. We gave him a little thingy that he can use so he doesn't have to put a nail in the wall, so here's hoping that works. He's pretty excited to have the picture, and I think he thinks he knows just where he wants to hang it.
I'm liking this backlash thing that we see happening with Anheuser Busch. They underestimated the tolerance of their customer base for the likes of Dylan Mulvaney and everything that he/she/they/it represents. They're stock has taken a shellacking from the day that that twat's face first appeared on Anheuers Busch's beer cans. Target did not do themselves any favors by hiring a gay Satanist to oversee their fashion line, and now they're being properly Bud-Lighted by parents who are having none of it. I think I'm liking Bud-Lighted as a verb. It just works. Target's stock has lost billions in value since parents have awakened to their woke nonsense. I think Kohl's is next on the chopping block. If you're guessing that they too have some nose-studded and tattooed LGBTQ type running their fashion lines, I think you'd probably be correct. Gay people involved in the fashion business is nothing new, but there's this new radicalism in the LGBTQ community these days that, for better or worse, rubs most people the wrong way. Retailers seem to have forgotten that customers vote with their dollars.
It looks like Chris Christie is going to get into the presidential race. He's not in it to win it like the other announced candidates. He's in it to bring Trump down. Christie was on the sidelines, just waiting to see what DeSantis's entrance to the race would mean for Trump's seemingly unstoppable ascendency to the nomination. Well, now he has his answer. Trump's numbers have actually improved despite both DeSantis's entrance into the race, not to mention Trump's mounting legal woes coming from District Attorneys in blue states and Special Prosecutors assigned to Trump's case by Biden's Justice Department. Trump isn't wrong when he accuses the Biden Justice Department and others of election interference. What Christie doesn't realize is that any ad hominem attacks against Trump, especially coming from Christie, will likely be seen for what they are: Cheap shots at a one-time president whose base still holds him in considerable esteem. Then, where is he? What does he have left? Christie, I mean. If he has any aspirations for higher office in the future, he'll be wise to hold his tongue, sharp as it is.
I'm running out of reasons not to square away our garage. It's that age-old procrastination thing that only gets worse the older you get. I should probably change the oil in my snowblowers and get them ready for the upcoming winter season. I always tell myself that these are things that I need to do, yet I inevitably drag my feet when it comes to getting them done. I can't forget to follow up with the oil guys who walked away with the filter from my furnace with the promise to find and install a replacement. It's been a good week since he was here servicing our furnace, so I think it's time to follow up. One of these days, I'm going to get around to washing the windows here and there throughout our house. I also need to get my act together and put a coat or two of paint on the walls in the Ev man's bedroom. That's been on my mind to do for a good five years or so. One day at a time is what I tell myself. You can only do so much. If I do nothing else today, I need to replace the canister of gas on my grill. She's getting low, as best I can tell. Oh, and I need to shop around for a new air conditioner.
I think I need a new router. I blew out a couple of the ports on the back of my router when a storm blew through the area last summer, so that may have been the beginning of the end. I found a pretty good workaround so that I didn't have to buy a new router, so that was good. Did I mention that that surge also took out a couple of my Apple TV's? Now, whenever I hear thunder or the crack of lightning in the distance, I immediately disconnect my Apple devices from the ethernet cords that tether them to my router. Anyway, my router has developed this weird little problem of going offline for 2-3 minutes at a time, maybe a handful of times every day. It's idiosyncratic at best if that's the right word. I can live with it, but it gets a bit old after a while. The missus is less accepting of these kinds of things since she relies on the computer to do what she needs to do every day. I've done the restarting routine and all the rest, so I finally relented and ordered a new router yesterday. Let's hope this does the trick.
I ended up driving to a couple of stores to see what they had in stock for routers. That is just an exercise in futility. The stores seem to have a limited supply of routers which struck me as a bit odd. Is everyone buying router/modem combos these days? I can tell you unequivocally that if I had one of those combo jobs, I'd still be trying to troubleshoot the issue that I'm having. I'm thinking that the stores are carrying fewer routers because most people are buying their routers online. That's me thinking out loud. The biggest problem with buying one from an online place like Amazon is that they have too many to choose from. They also have a pretty good selection of lower-priced units, which were conspicuously absent from the shelves in the two stores that I visited. The sweet spot for me in terms of pricing is somewhere between $100 and $200. I'm also a little reluctant to buy a brand that I have little to no experience using, although that's probably just a bias on my part. Most of them are plug-and-play these days. What the hell am I going to do if this doesn't fix my problem? Anyway, my point here is to say that I would have saved myself considerable time and expense had I just gone to Amazon from day one. Screw the brick and mortars.
I saw a story yesterday about Russia taking out Ukraine's one and only naval vessel. How long will it be now before Zelensky prostrates himself once again before the Western powers in a bid to have them supply Ukraine with naval vessels to replace the one taken out by the Ruskies? Now that the Ruskies have Crimea, doesn't that render the country of Ukraine landlocked? I know shit about the geography of Ukraine other than the fact that Russia is to the east of Ukraine and every other country in Europe, with the exception of Sweden and Finland, which lie to the north, lie East of Ukraine. That shouldn't stop Zelensky from making the request. He can always trade any naval vessels or aircraft carriers he gets for something else he needs. Do you think there's a chance that some Western power would give him a nuclear device? God forbid. What about those weapons that we've given to Ukraine that are now ending up in the hands of the Cartels in Mexico? That is messed up. Bumbles Biden keeps ramping up the rhetoric, and his nitwits in the Military Industrial Complex are a "no" when it comes to accepting terms tendered by Putin to bring Russia's aggression to a grinding halt. God only knows where this ends up. No place good is what I'm thinking. Will NATO troops get involved just to keep Zelensky in power?
Bumbles took another fall yesterday. Forget for a minute that his speech to the Air Force graduating class was nasty and mean in terms of his tone and content. He was going on and on about his trying to get into the Naval Academy in his youth. What that had to do with the group he was addressing is anybody's guess. Who knows how much of what he was saying was even true? I don't think he knows from one minute to the next, given his considerable cognitive impairment. Oh, and he said something about this year's class at the Academy being the most diverse in history. He just can't fucking help himself. Somebody is going to have to explain to me like I'm a fifth grader how diversity makes us stronger. So, Bumbles goes to walk off the stage, and he falls flat on his face like the dumb incoherent fuck that he is. This wasn't his first fall, nor will it be his last. This is what passes for our Commander-in-Chief these days. So humiliating. It took three of four people to get him back on his feet, as he was physically incapable of getting up on his own. Paging Dr. Jill. Paging Dr. Jill.
Just so you know, Doctor Jill is off by her lonesome on some junket to visit several Middle Eastern nations. She's the new Biden Crime Family bagman since Hunter's role has fallen under increased scrutiny these past few months. I guess that makes her a bag woman, right? She'll allegedly be collecting checks from leaders around the Middle East who want more access or more favorable treatment from her husband during his remaining time in office. Who knows how many more LLCs the Bidens will have to set up to accommodate the beneficence of the donors she plans on shaking down. Then again, Congressman Comer is all over the LLC scams utilized by the Bidens, so she may insist on payments in cash. Who's going to check her luggage when it goes through Customs? Nobody, because Air Force One and its personnel don't go through Customs. See how that works? I mean, nobody would even suspect the First Lady of the United States of this sort of thing. Right? It's the perfect crime until it isn't.
I don't think any conservative worth his salt thinks that Speaker McCarthy did what he had to do when it came to dealing with this debt ceiling issue. All you need to know is that they couldn't have passed it out of the House had it not been for the Democrats who voted for it. That's never a good sign. He pushed the bill through with zero caps on how much the Democrats can spend between now and January 2025. Who does that? This had nothing to do with advancing the interests of the Republican Party or, for that matter, the American people. It was the Uni-Party doing what the Uni-Party always does. They closed ranks, and they did what they always do - they fucked the American people, and they fucked them (us) good. The Democrats will now likely add trillions more to the debt that we already have sitting out there to the tune of $32 trillion dollars. God help our children and our grandchildren, is what I say. Worst of all, McCarthy bent over and gave away the store to that radical leftist, Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader, in order to get his commitment that the Democrat votes would be there for him when he needed them. He's (McCarthy) gotta go.
I don't know why I did that. I recorded a song on my iPhone that I've been practicing on my guitar just to get a sense of what it sounds like. Maybe I'm being too critical. It sounded like shite. It was so bad that I didn't even pick up my guitar yesterday, and I never let a day go by when I don't at least pick the damn thing up and do something with it. It's all about keeping my callouses intact, if that makes any sense. You work too long and too hard to develop callouses as a guitar player, and you don't want to lose all of that hard work and time spent by going a day or two or more without playing. Now, I'm stuck. Do I give up on that particular song, or do I look to get over this little hump of mine by practicing and perfecting the song even more? It is true that I think I get better every time I play that particular song. Maybe I'm just saying that because I'm getting better at playing notes without looking at the strings. I'm such a noob. The song I've been working on is Paul McCartney's "Blackbird" in case you're curious. I'm not even singing along, so don't even go there. That's a whole other ball of wax. I know, I know. Don't give up your day job.
I set up my new router this morning. I was hoping for a bit more of a bump in download speeds, but that doesn't seem to be the case. That's not why I bought the new router, but one can dream. Right? I needed to fix my problem of getting intermittent connection blackouts. I think I'm good to go now, so we'll see. The other thing I need to work on is the static coming out of my speakers that seems to come and go depending on where I place certain electrical devices on my desk. Sometimes it's just a matter of snugging up connections here and there or rearranging equipment that might be interfering with each other. There is such a tangle of wires in and around the desk that I'm not terribly inclined to try and sort them out. I know that day's coming, and I know that I'll feel better having put that issue in the rearview mirror. I tell myself that I can't make matters any worse. When it's all sorted, what I end up wondering is why it took me so long to do it. It's the way of the world, I tell myself. I wouldn't have it any other way.
I used to appreciate the likes of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green because she was a fighter. She is a gal from Georgia with more testosterone in her pinkie than a lot of the people and politicians she surrounds herself with in the sewer we know as Washington, DC. The more I see of her these days, the more I wonder just how far she has her head up Speaker McCarthy's ass. She supported him in his bid for the Speakership, and she couldn't stop smiling when he took the gavel from the stooge, Nancy Pelosi. I think she thought she had the world by the balls with the Speaker in her back pocket, indebted as he was to her after winning the Speakership position. In a perverse turn of events, what she doesn't or didn't realize was that she was quickly becoming, for better or worse, McCarthy's little bitch. She voted with him on the disgusting giveaway to the radical Dems, and she and her turncoat Republican peeps quickly caved to the radical Minority Speaker of the House, Jeffries, on the debt ceiling bill. She came out the other day saying something about the imminent release of the J6 tapes, and not twenty-four hours later, she's telling her conservative base that releasing the tapes could risk Capitol security. The words coming out of her mouth sound more McCarthy than Green, and with good reason. That little bitch thing is not a good look.
The missus asked if I might find a way to effectively paste text of her choosing into a document without doing the typical copy/paste routine. Oh, and I can't be downloading any fancy schmancy software onto her work PC that might get her in hot water with the mucky-mucks in the IT department where she works. I thought I had found something the other day (AutoHotKey) in some open-source software on the web that I thought might work, but she was on to me, and she had me delete it all before I even got started. I told her that I thought it might help her prospects for the future if she showed a little chutzpah now and then. I get the whole thing about malware and all the rest, but you can't hide under your bed for fear of the boogeyman for the rest of your professional life. Can you? Anyway, it just so happens that the good folks at Logitech just released an update to their software for their mice and keyboards that does precisely what the missus wants. The user simply assigns the trigger (button on the mouse) and then assigns the action associated with the trigger (prints text of your choosing.) Voila! It's mouse related, so it's probably not on anyone's radar in the IT Department. Can you say, "happy as a clam"?
Have you ever seen the television show "Top Chef"? We've been watching it seemingly forever. I think it's on something like season 20. Padma and Tom are the two mainstay judges who have been on board since day one. We're in the final week of this year's challenge, and we're down to three contestants. I think the more skilled and infinitely more creative chef of the three is a guy named Buddha. The other two, Sara and Gabri, are two that I wouldn't have bet on still being around this late in the game. Maybe someone can explain to me how Sara won the latest challenge with a fucking mushroom soup? They were serving their prepared dishes to the best chefs in the world, and she puts a bowl of fucking soup in front of them? I thought the contestants were supposed to be upping their game now that they're down to one last challenge before the season's winner is announced. This Gabri guy is always burning something or mismanaging his time so that he leaves one or more of his creations off the table when the time comes to serve the judges. Oh, and I'm getting more than a little tired of hearing about Gabri's woes as a lad growing up in Mexico. Is it me, or is he playing the underprivileged illegal alien card in order to gain the sympathies of the judges in order to walk away with the $250k prize money?
A family acquaintance of ours took her Rolex watch to get cleaned the other day. I know, I know. Who the hell wears a Rolex watch these days? Speaking of clubbing baby seals, wearing a Rolex watch in public is asking for trouble. I suppose it depends on where you go with that Rolex of yours on your wrist, but you definitely want to avoid certain areas, if you get my drift. Anyway, she takes this watch of hers to a jeweler in town and asks about having it cleaned. They quoted her a price of $1,500 US dollars to have it done, and that didn't include the cost of any parts that might need replacing. I'm thinking to myself, holy jumping Jesus. Why is it so expensive? Maybe it's true what they say about if you can't afford the maintenance, then maybe you shouldn't buy it in the first place. If I had to guess, I'd guess that this was probably a gift back in the day. Price aside, there's something to be said for sentimental value. Let's find a Rolex service center and get this done right. Forget the cost.
I'm not a big watch guy, so one should take any advice I have to give on watch procurement or repair with a grain of salt. I'm more inclined than not to purchase my watches at Walmart. I go to a lot of places and do a lot of things where I don't want to have to worry about having my watch stolen or somehow compromised. I'm talking about the gym, biking, and that sort of thing. I've never fancied having an Apple watch since having to charge my wristwatch every so often seems ridiculous to me. Why would I choose to buy a watch that I need to recharge when I can buy a watch that I don't have to recharge? It's a little like buying an electric car. Who the hell wants to buy a car that you have to plug in every night when you can buy a car that you never need to plug in? The technology is changing so rapidly that I'm afraid that by the time I decided to buy the car, or the watch for that matter, my purchase would be outdated, technologically speaking. Does that make me a troglodyte? A Luddite?
I know it makes sense for Zelensky and his toadies to send drones into downtown Moscow but to what end? Is it the beginning of a larger counter-offensive that Ukraine has been talking about now for a while? Have they forgotten about Crimea and their plans to recapture Crimea from the Ruskies? I'm guessing Zelensky and his generals want to inflict a little pain and discomfort on the Russians to let them feel the kind of fear and dread that the Ukrainians have been experiencing for the last year or so. Maybe they think it will turn the Russian people against Putin, and that alone will bring the military action to a grinding halt when nothing else could. When you think of the kinds of things that qualify as an escalation in this brush-up between Russia and Ukraine, sending drones into Moscow definitely fits the bill. Now, the Russian people are fighting for their homeland. Nothing girds the soul of a nation more than seeing your homeland under attack. How do you say "all hands on deck' in Russian?
The dressing down of Bumbles Biden and his clown car of an entourage continues on the world stage. The latest humiliation comes in the form of a bitch slap to Biden's Defense Secretary, Loyd Austin, by his counterparts in the Chinese military. China has rebuffed Austin's efforts once again to set up meetings to improve communications between the two superpowers. I'm no foreign affairs expert, but I'm thinking that this can't bode well for any number of things, including the long-term well-being of Taiwan. All I see in the news these days is news about the Chinese president, Xi, making economic and military pacts with this or that nation across the Globe while Bumbling Joe Biden calls a lid every day at 9 am and puts in a four-day workweek before flying back home to Rehobeth, Deleware for a three-day vacation. It would seem that America's power on the world stage under Biden is receding while China is ascendant. Does any of this have anything to do with the millions of dollars transferred into Biden's coffers by the Communist Chinese Party? You tell me.
You've got to hand it to Bumbles. He has the audacity to step up to the podium and excoriate the president of Uganda for signing off on laws having to do with homosexuality while he turns our nation into a laughingstock on the world stage by staffing his administration with perverts and misfits. He fights for the rights of his leftist constituencies to continue the slaughter of American babies in abortion centers while putting prayerful protestors in jail. He looks the other way while Leftists District Attorneys funded by George Soros release hardened criminals by the thousands back into the streets to continue their assaults on the American public while jailing peaceful protestors from January 6th whose only crime was to be in Washington on that fateful day back in 2020. He says nothing while the woke culture freaks impose their unnatural predilections on society enabled by corporate entities like Target and Anheuser Busch. He looks the other way while human traffickers on both sides of the border rape and prey on every man, woman, and child heading north to our country's porous borders. This kind of rabid hypocrisy runs deep in the DNA of the Bidens, Bumbles notwithstanding.
Yesterday was quite a day. Everything was going according to Hoyle until around 8 in the morning. The missus appears in the doorway complaining about a sliver of sorts under her fingernail. Knowing that this was probably something more than just a trifle, off we went to the local urgent care center. Oddly enough, she wasn't in excruciating pain, so that was good. Anyway, that all took a couple of hours to get squared away. The sliver came out, and she now has a tender fingertip for the time being. We stopped and had a nice breakfast at the Golden Egg restaurant in Portsmouth. That was a treat. I can't remember the last time we had breakfast out. I managed to prepare a nice late-afternoon meal for the family, which we enjoyed on our back deck. I made nice chicken/spring vegetable skewers for the missus and the Ev man and I had hotdogs with steamed buns and macaroni salad. The weather was a comfortable 65 degrees with almost zero humidity. I even managed to mow our lawn and get in a bike ride to boot in the early evening. Don't you just love the early days of summer?
Y'all know who Tara Reade is. Right? She's the woman who accused Bumbles Biden of rape. She never got a hearing of any kind in the media here in the States, to nobody's surprise. I guess the Me-too Movement only goes so far. If you're accusing a sitting Democratic President like Bumbles Biden of rape, nobody's interested in your story. Not the media, not the Justice Department, nobody. If you're Donald J Trump, at least in New York State, they will create new laws to allow your accusers to come forward many decades after the alleged offense despite your inability to remember any of the details of the decades-old whatever. Just when you thought you'd heard the last of Tara Reade, she turns up in Russia. Wut? I thought it was a joke when I first heard it. Apparently, she fears for her life here in the United States. You've heard of the Clintons. Right? You've heard of Vince Foster. Right? It makes you wonder if Tara still has that "blue dress." You know, the one with the DNA on it. It's all very reminiscent of the Monica Lewinsky thing, with one notable exception. Can you say consent?
My brother from another mother gave me a framed picture a while back of him sitting in his boat just offshore on Lake George, New York. We've had it hanging here in the house for a good couple of years now. We were over at the Ev man's place to give him a hand tidying up the other day, and we talked about the fact that he had no wall hangings of any kind. The Ev man has a long history with Lake George, relatively speaking, and he's pretty tight with my brother from another mother. Well, as tight as one can be living as far apart as we do. You can see where I'm going with this. I was not want one way or another to part with the picture, but it seemed to me to be a proper bequeathment under the circumstances. Now that he has the picture, I'll want to follow up with him to make sure that he does a proper job of putting it up on the wall in his apartment. We gave him a little thingy that he can use so he doesn't have to put a nail in the wall, so here's hoping that works. He's pretty excited to have the picture, and I think he thinks he knows just where he wants to hang it.
I'm liking this backlash thing that we see happening with Anheuser Busch. They underestimated the tolerance of their customer base for the likes of Dylan Mulvaney and everything that he/she/they/it represents. They're stock has taken a shellacking from the day that that twat's face first appeared on Anheuers Busch's beer cans. Target did not do themselves any favors by hiring a gay Satanist to oversee their fashion line, and now they're being properly Bud-Lighted by parents who are having none of it. I think I'm liking Bud-Lighted as a verb. It just works. Target's stock has lost billions in value since parents have awakened to their woke nonsense. I think Kohl's is next on the chopping block. If you're guessing that they too have some nose-studded and tattooed LGBTQ type running their fashion lines, I think you'd probably be correct. Gay people involved in the fashion business is nothing new, but there's this new radicalism in the LGBTQ community these days that, for better or worse, rubs most people the wrong way. Retailers seem to have forgotten that customers vote with their dollars.
It looks like Chris Christie is going to get into the presidential race. He's not in it to win it like the other announced candidates. He's in it to bring Trump down. Christie was on the sidelines, just waiting to see what DeSantis's entrance to the race would mean for Trump's seemingly unstoppable ascendency to the nomination. Well, now he has his answer. Trump's numbers have actually improved despite both DeSantis's entrance into the race, not to mention Trump's mounting legal woes coming from District Attorneys in blue states and Special Prosecutors assigned to Trump's case by Biden's Justice Department. Trump isn't wrong when he accuses the Biden Justice Department and others of election interference. What Christie doesn't realize is that any ad hominem attacks against Trump, especially coming from Christie, will likely be seen for what they are: Cheap shots at a one-time president whose base still holds him in considerable esteem. Then, where is he? What does he have left? Christie, I mean. If he has any aspirations for higher office in the future, he'll be wise to hold his tongue, sharp as it is.
I'm running out of reasons not to square away our garage. It's that age-old procrastination thing that only gets worse the older you get. I should probably change the oil in my snowblowers and get them ready for the upcoming winter season. I always tell myself that these are things that I need to do, yet I inevitably drag my feet when it comes to getting them done. I can't forget to follow up with the oil guys who walked away with the filter from my furnace with the promise to find and install a replacement. It's been a good week since he was here servicing our furnace, so I think it's time to follow up. One of these days, I'm going to get around to washing the windows here and there throughout our house. I also need to get my act together and put a coat or two of paint on the walls in the Ev man's bedroom. That's been on my mind to do for a good five years or so. One day at a time is what I tell myself. You can only do so much. If I do nothing else today, I need to replace the canister of gas on my grill. She's getting low, as best I can tell. Oh, and I need to shop around for a new air conditioner.
I think I need a new router. I blew out a couple of the ports on the back of my router when a storm blew through the area last summer, so that may have been the beginning of the end. I found a pretty good workaround so that I didn't have to buy a new router, so that was good. Did I mention that that surge also took out a couple of my Apple TV's? Now, whenever I hear thunder or the crack of lightning in the distance, I immediately disconnect my Apple devices from the ethernet cords that tether them to my router. Anyway, my router has developed this weird little problem of going offline for 2-3 minutes at a time, maybe a handful of times every day. It's idiosyncratic at best if that's the right word. I can live with it, but it gets a bit old after a while. The missus is less accepting of these kinds of things since she relies on the computer to do what she needs to do every day. I've done the restarting routine and all the rest, so I finally relented and ordered a new router yesterday. Let's hope this does the trick.
I ended up driving to a couple of stores to see what they had in stock for routers. That is just an exercise in futility. The stores seem to have a limited supply of routers which struck me as a bit odd. Is everyone buying router/modem combos these days? I can tell you unequivocally that if I had one of those combo jobs, I'd still be trying to troubleshoot the issue that I'm having. I'm thinking that the stores are carrying fewer routers because most people are buying their routers online. That's me thinking out loud. The biggest problem with buying one from an online place like Amazon is that they have too many to choose from. They also have a pretty good selection of lower-priced units, which were conspicuously absent from the shelves in the two stores that I visited. The sweet spot for me in terms of pricing is somewhere between $100 and $200. I'm also a little reluctant to buy a brand that I have little to no experience using, although that's probably just a bias on my part. Most of them are plug-and-play these days. What the hell am I going to do if this doesn't fix my problem? Anyway, my point here is to say that I would have saved myself considerable time and expense had I just gone to Amazon from day one. Screw the brick and mortars.
I saw a story yesterday about Russia taking out Ukraine's one and only naval vessel. How long will it be now before Zelensky prostrates himself once again before the Western powers in a bid to have them supply Ukraine with naval vessels to replace the one taken out by the Ruskies? Now that the Ruskies have Crimea, doesn't that render the country of Ukraine landlocked? I know shit about the geography of Ukraine other than the fact that Russia is to the east of Ukraine and every other country in Europe, with the exception of Sweden and Finland, which lie to the north, lie East of Ukraine. That shouldn't stop Zelensky from making the request. He can always trade any naval vessels or aircraft carriers he gets for something else he needs. Do you think there's a chance that some Western power would give him a nuclear device? God forbid. What about those weapons that we've given to Ukraine that are now ending up in the hands of the Cartels in Mexico? That is messed up. Bumbles Biden keeps ramping up the rhetoric, and his nitwits in the Military Industrial Complex are a "no" when it comes to accepting terms tendered by Putin to bring Russia's aggression to a grinding halt. God only knows where this ends up. No place good is what I'm thinking. Will NATO troops get involved just to keep Zelensky in power?
Bumbles took another fall yesterday. Forget for a minute that his speech to the Air Force graduating class was nasty and mean in terms of his tone and content. He was going on and on about his trying to get into the Naval Academy in his youth. What that had to do with the group he was addressing is anybody's guess. Who knows how much of what he was saying was even true? I don't think he knows from one minute to the next, given his considerable cognitive impairment. Oh, and he said something about this year's class at the Academy being the most diverse in history. He just can't fucking help himself. Somebody is going to have to explain to me like I'm a fifth grader how diversity makes us stronger. So, Bumbles goes to walk off the stage, and he falls flat on his face like the dumb incoherent fuck that he is. This wasn't his first fall, nor will it be his last. This is what passes for our Commander-in-Chief these days. So humiliating. It took three of four people to get him back on his feet, as he was physically incapable of getting up on his own. Paging Dr. Jill. Paging Dr. Jill.
Just so you know, Doctor Jill is off by her lonesome on some junket to visit several Middle Eastern nations. She's the new Biden Crime Family bagman since Hunter's role has fallen under increased scrutiny these past few months. I guess that makes her a bag woman, right? She'll allegedly be collecting checks from leaders around the Middle East who want more access or more favorable treatment from her husband during his remaining time in office. Who knows how many more LLCs the Bidens will have to set up to accommodate the beneficence of the donors she plans on shaking down. Then again, Congressman Comer is all over the LLC scams utilized by the Bidens, so she may insist on payments in cash. Who's going to check her luggage when it goes through Customs? Nobody, because Air Force One and its personnel don't go through Customs. See how that works? I mean, nobody would even suspect the First Lady of the United States of this sort of thing. Right? It's the perfect crime until it isn't.
I don't think any conservative worth his salt thinks that Speaker McCarthy did what he had to do when it came to dealing with this debt ceiling issue. All you need to know is that they couldn't have passed it out of the House had it not been for the Democrats who voted for it. That's never a good sign. He pushed the bill through with zero caps on how much the Democrats can spend between now and January 2025. Who does that? This had nothing to do with advancing the interests of the Republican Party or, for that matter, the American people. It was the Uni-Party doing what the Uni-Party always does. They closed ranks, and they did what they always do - they fucked the American people, and they fucked them (us) good. The Democrats will now likely add trillions more to the debt that we already have sitting out there to the tune of $32 trillion dollars. God help our children and our grandchildren, is what I say. Worst of all, McCarthy bent over and gave away the store to that radical leftist, Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leader, in order to get his commitment that the Democrat votes would be there for him when he needed them. He's (McCarthy) gotta go.
I don't know why I did that. I recorded a song on my iPhone that I've been practicing on my guitar just to get a sense of what it sounds like. Maybe I'm being too critical. It sounded like shite. It was so bad that I didn't even pick up my guitar yesterday, and I never let a day go by when I don't at least pick the damn thing up and do something with it. It's all about keeping my callouses intact, if that makes any sense. You work too long and too hard to develop callouses as a guitar player, and you don't want to lose all of that hard work and time spent by going a day or two or more without playing. Now, I'm stuck. Do I give up on that particular song, or do I look to get over this little hump of mine by practicing and perfecting the song even more? It is true that I think I get better every time I play that particular song. Maybe I'm just saying that because I'm getting better at playing notes without looking at the strings. I'm such a noob. The song I've been working on is Paul McCartney's "Blackbird" in case you're curious. I'm not even singing along, so don't even go there. That's a whole other ball of wax. I know, I know. Don't give up your day job.
I set up my new router this morning. I was hoping for a bit more of a bump in download speeds, but that doesn't seem to be the case. That's not why I bought the new router, but one can dream. Right? I needed to fix my problem of getting intermittent connection blackouts. I think I'm good to go now, so we'll see. The other thing I need to work on is the static coming out of my speakers that seems to come and go depending on where I place certain electrical devices on my desk. Sometimes it's just a matter of snugging up connections here and there or rearranging equipment that might be interfering with each other. There is such a tangle of wires in and around the desk that I'm not terribly inclined to try and sort them out. I know that day's coming, and I know that I'll feel better having put that issue in the rearview mirror. I tell myself that I can't make matters any worse. When it's all sorted, what I end up wondering is why it took me so long to do it. It's the way of the world, I tell myself. I wouldn't have it any other way.
I used to appreciate the likes of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green because she was a fighter. She is a gal from Georgia with more testosterone in her pinkie than a lot of the people and politicians she surrounds herself with in the sewer we know as Washington, DC. The more I see of her these days, the more I wonder just how far she has her head up Speaker McCarthy's ass. She supported him in his bid for the Speakership, and she couldn't stop smiling when he took the gavel from the stooge, Nancy Pelosi. I think she thought she had the world by the balls with the Speaker in her back pocket, indebted as he was to her after winning the Speakership position. In a perverse turn of events, what she doesn't or didn't realize was that she was quickly becoming, for better or worse, McCarthy's little bitch. She voted with him on the disgusting giveaway to the radical Dems, and she and her turncoat Republican peeps quickly caved to the radical Minority Speaker of the House, Jeffries, on the debt ceiling bill. She came out the other day saying something about the imminent release of the J6 tapes, and not twenty-four hours later, she's telling her conservative base that releasing the tapes could risk Capitol security. The words coming out of her mouth sound more McCarthy than Green, and with good reason. That little bitch thing is not a good look.
The missus asked if I might find a way to effectively paste text of her choosing into a document without doing the typical copy/paste routine. Oh, and I can't be downloading any fancy schmancy software onto her work PC that might get her in hot water with the mucky-mucks in the IT department where she works. I thought I had found something the other day (AutoHotKey) in some open-source software on the web that I thought might work, but she was on to me, and she had me delete it all before I even got started. I told her that I thought it might help her prospects for the future if she showed a little chutzpah now and then. I get the whole thing about malware and all the rest, but you can't hide under your bed for fear of the boogeyman for the rest of your professional life. Can you? Anyway, it just so happens that the good folks at Logitech just released an update to their software for their mice and keyboards that does precisely what the missus wants. The user simply assigns the trigger (button on the mouse) and then assigns the action associated with the trigger (prints text of your choosing.) Voila! It's mouse related, so it's probably not on anyone's radar in the IT Department. Can you say, "happy as a clam"?
Have you ever seen the television show "Top Chef"? We've been watching it seemingly forever. I think it's on something like season 20. Padma and Tom are the two mainstay judges who have been on board since day one. We're in the final week of this year's challenge, and we're down to three contestants. I think the more skilled and infinitely more creative chef of the three is a guy named Buddha. The other two, Sara and Gabri, are two that I wouldn't have bet on still being around this late in the game. Maybe someone can explain to me how Sara won the latest challenge with a fucking mushroom soup? They were serving their prepared dishes to the best chefs in the world, and she puts a bowl of fucking soup in front of them? I thought the contestants were supposed to be upping their game now that they're down to one last challenge before the season's winner is announced. This Gabri guy is always burning something or mismanaging his time so that he leaves one or more of his creations off the table when the time comes to serve the judges. Oh, and I'm getting more than a little tired of hearing about Gabri's woes as a lad growing up in Mexico. Is it me, or is he playing the underprivileged illegal alien card in order to gain the sympathies of the judges in order to walk away with the $250k prize money?