Latest Posts

The Ears Of Texas Are

Entertainment, Music

…relieved, after Judas Priest unexpectedly canceled their Houston gig a couple days back.

I saw Priest in 1986(?) in Austin, and that concert got me to wear earplugs to concerts ever thereafter.

Let me tell you:  I played in a loud rock band for ten years before that, and Judas Priest were LOUD.  My ears rang for about four days after the show.

I am frankly amazed that these old farts can still play the shows they do, ditto the Rolling Stones etc. (but not the Eagles, who are pretty much just a mime gig nowadays, apparently).

More power to them, say I, although perhaps the last thing the Priest need is more power.

All that said, I myself have often said that I would (still) love to play in a band — just not a rock band;  been there, done that, got the tinnitus.  But put me in a quiet little dinner-dance restaurant, playing old 1940s and -50s standards and ballads, preferably in a trio (piano, bass, and Drummer Knob on drums) with a torch singer like Julie London or Diana Krall… I’d be the happiest septuagenarian in history.

I still miss playing in a band.

“Dear Dr. Kim”

Advice, Men & Women

“Dear Dr. Kim:

“I have been happily married to my husband for two years now. We met when I was in my late 20s and we tied the knot when I was 31. I’d never had a serious relationship before, and I used to travel around for work – so I’ll admit that I’d slept with a fair few people before we met.

“Not that it’s something we ever discussed.

“Last week, however, my husband told me his best friend had discovered his girlfriend’s ‘body count’ and was horrified by the total. His girlfriend had admitted to sleeping with 20 people, a number judged by my husband and his friend to be ‘extremely high’.

“Then, out of curiosity, he asked what my ‘body count’ was. And, having heard his outrage at 20, I decided to lie. A little panicked, I claimed I’d slept with no more than 15 guys.

“It turned out that my husband was disturbed even by that lower estimate – and admitted that he found ‘so many’ sexual partners to be a little off-putting.

“Yet the truth is that I’ve slept with well over 50 men, so many that I’ve lost count. Now I don’t know what to do. Should I stick to my lie and just hope the subject never comes up again?”  — Heels-Up Harriet

Dear Harlot  errrr Harriet:

It’s always so healthy to base your relationship on a total lie, isn’t it?  Okay, here’s the deal.

The topic is going to pop up again, because your hubby is clearly one of those “vulnerable” men who feels that your previous shags will form the basis of a comparison to his performance — and it might, might it not?

However, having lied and given the number as fifteen, you may as well stick with it;  but here’s how to rationalize it.  Assuming that you started at age 19 or 20 (I’m going with averages here, as most women “claim” hem hem to have lost their mimsy-wall during their first- or second year at university), that number of fifteen translates into fewer than two men a year in the decade before you met him — which, to be honest, is not that horrendous in this day and age — and if he does bring it up again, show him the math, so to speak.  (Maybe even that number will be too high for Hubby, in which case you are in deep shit — okay, deeper than you are already.)

Just pray that one of your female BFFs doesn’t let your actual number slip during a Drunken Party Episode, or as a way of getting a revenge shag out of Hubby, just for spite.

Welcome to the Sexual Minefield, honey.

—

Bad Back Then, Still Awful

Technology

I see that Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet program has just turned 40, which is proof that you can fool a bunch of the people all the time (provided that you bundle your foul, inadequate software into a compendium suite which just “happens” to work okay with the core operating system which, lest we forget, you also created).

I don’t know a lot about a lot of stuff, and even less about software, except that I’ve been a spreadsheet user — at times, a very heavy spreadsheet user — all the way from early 1980s VisiCalc, to SuperCalc, Lotus 1-2-3 through Quattro Pro, while having all that time avoided Excel because its first iteration was dreadful.

Then I joined a company which only used MS Excel, and insisted that I do too (as well as the stupid Word and even-worse Access.  Of course, it required re-learning all my old commands in a new language — not too difficult — but what was difficult was discovering that Excel had not really improved much over the years.

So I quit using the thing, did all my development and report design work in Quattro Pro — which was still the best spreadsheet program extant — and then translated everything into Excel, which was time-consuming and also counter-productive because a great many commands I’d used in Quattro as a matter of course had no equivalent in Excel.  (Bear in mind that this was back in the 1990s and early 2000s, and things may have changed since then.)

Also, Quattro’s companion database product Paradox was streets better than pretty much all other such programs back then, which hamstrung me even more.

It always struck me that MS products, like Apple’s, are great if you’ve never used anything like that before.  If you have, however, and are familiar with the competitive products, MS always comes up short.

Nowadays, my needs are a great deal more modest than back then, so I use Apache’s Open Office suite (Writer and Calc) because a) they work just fine for me and b) they’re free.

Now, if I have to send someone something I wrote or crafted on a spreadsheet, I just tell the recipient to download Open Office to be able to read the stuff.  (I should point out that the Son&Heir used OO Writer exclusively to write his papers all the way through college, and never had a problem — to this day it’s the only thing he writes with — but at his job at Global MegaBank Inc. he has to use Excel, which he hates more than I do.)

So Happy Birthday, Inferior Spreadsheet Product, for what that’s worth.  (Nothing, by comparison to Open Office’s Calc.)

Newcomer

Politics

So young Tulsi has decided to come over to the not-so-Dark Side:

“And it is because of my love for our country, and specifically because of the leadership that President Trump has brought to transform the Republican party and bring it back to the party of the people and the party of peace, that I’m proud to stand here with you today, President Trump, and announce that I’m joining the Republican Party,” she said at Trump’s rally in North Carolina. “I’m joining the party of the people, the party of equality, the party that was founded to fight against and end slavery in this country. It is the party of commonsense, and the party that is led by a president who has the courage and strength to fight for peace.”

  My guess is that about 30 seconds after Trump is sworn in, she’ll be dropped from the TSA surveillance list.

to:

Welcome aboard, sweetie.  Just don’t fall back into your old bad habits.

Oh Stop It

Elections, Politics, Resistance

I just can’t:

Donald Trump said he would enlist Elon Musk to run a “government efficiency commission” if he wins a second term as US president.  Speaking to the Economic Club of New York on Thursday, Trump said the X owner had agreed to head a task force to conduct a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” and make “recommendations for drastic reforms.”

Could it be?

Or, if we’re going to be more traditional about it:

Special Day

The Gun Thing

For no reason at all, I declared yesterday to be “Ruger Revolver Day”, and duly equipped, I headed off to the range…

From the top:  Blackhawk .30 Carbine (7½”), Single Six .22 LR (5½”), Single Six .22 LR/.22 Mag (6½”), and Redhawk .45 LC/ACP (4″).

And a good time was had by all except the poor wee lass in the booth next to mine, who was startled by the sound of the .30 Carbine round and its 18″ muzzle flash.

Have I mentioned before how much I love shooting single-action revolvers?  I have?  Many times?  Well, there’s a reason.

36 rounds of .30 Carbine, 48 rounds of .45 ACP (I’m a little short of .45 Colt, soon to be remedied), and I kinda lost count of the .22s (it happens), but it was a lot.

Just for the record, my post-shooting Zen (that lovely adrenaline dump) lasted for about two hours afterwards… wonderful.

Next time:  some semi-auto rifle activity of the 7.62x39mm persuasion, or maybe it’ll be the turn of the S&W revolvers, I’m not sure.  Sufficient unto the day is the pleasure thereof.