Tag: NoJoMo

No prompt today, just a recap of what I’ve done, and what I hope to see for the rest of the year.

Since I’ve been up today, I ordered my new computer. It’s not exactly what I wanted, but it looks like it’ll do for the next few years.

This thing isn’t whining yet this morning, which is nice. I think the new one will be quiet, too.

So. On writing. I don’t know. Obviously a lot of what I’ve ended up writing about is the 600-pound gorilla in the room, COVID-19.

I’m worried about Lockeian fundamental human rights. I’m convinced there’s a large portion of the population in the US who don’t believe in those rights anymore.

I don’t know what to do about that, and I’m much more limited in my options to combat it.

The other day, Friday, maybe? I ended up watching a bit of MTV Classic. Bust A Move was on. “Everything you have is yours, and not stolen.”

But if you get a government agent to steal it, it’s okay, right? No.

For “Cyber Monday,” I did order my new desktop. I hope it will be better than this wheezing thing. While it’s not exactly what I thought I wanted, but can it be worse than what I’m dealing with now?

And, not long after I finished writing that, I ended up buying something else. So much for fiscal responsibility.

But, yeah, I’m finished. Eleventh year in the books.

I hope everyone has a nice Christmas.

I will try not to be so sporadic, but I do need to get rid of the daily writing spells.

Maybe I won’t write this summer. We’ll see.

I think there’s something useful, perhaps, in my underreported news items. Walt Hickey sort of does a version of this over at numlock.news, but I think I could do something different.

Could I do a very short podcast on a single story….? Hmmm…..

Sputtering towards the end of the month, both me and my writing.

I think I’ve slept more in the past two days than I have in the past decade.

It’s different.

Listening to Robbie and Gene Epstein as a Sunday Morning wake-up.

I watched some of Rob’s stand-up Friday night, and enjoyed it. I might have been a little more gentle, but this is his set, not mine.

Would I pay money to consume it? Probably. It’s largely enjoyable to me, and I want to see him succeed.

My only real point of emphasis? High-droxy-chlor-o-quin

My body seems to be responding positively, and I should email one of my doctors about that.’

This is another somewhat-truncated week. I get my infusion on Friday, finally, thankfully. With the extra rest, however, I’m not nearly as fatigued as I’d normally be.

Hair growth is happening. The beard isn’t going badly. The hair up top is a bit of a pain to deal with, but I’m going to deal with it.

It’ll be a bit strange to have an ID that has me with long hair on my face, and head.

Oh well.

My initial hedging on it, is passed.

I do wish I could get a haircut at Georgetown while I was in the is-he-going-to-die-after-his-infusion period.

Prompt…

Have you ever unintentionally poisoned someone against another person because you hated them? 

No. Doing that is exactly the opposite to how I live. I play Sir Robin.

Still, there’s a difference. One of the reasons I’m getting counseling, is that I know bad things could happen, and I really don’t care.

All I ask is that if you’re going to harm me, please leave a record of it.

If you’re going to harm me, own it.

That, too, reflects back on how I live my life. Have I ever done anything I regret? Certainly. Have I done anything that causes terrible embarrassment? No. Nothing. Now that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do some things differently, wouldn’t place confidence in some individuals, but I think nearly everything I’ve done was justifiable.

Okay. News.

Front page of Bing was this, which is a video clip.

The woke crowd will say he’s a set-up. Whatever. I do believe in life, liberty, and property. If that makes me a bad person, so be it. Kill me for it, just do it when the cameras are rolling. You can’t hide everything forever.

But on a somewhat-related note, and in line with what I’ve been barking about the last few days, all of this is killing mom-and-pop shops.

The fruits of someone else’s labor are not yours to give, but they’re also not yours to take.

Even if you know better than me.

Saturday morning. Not as much sleeping as the past two days, but I think I’m getting more on schedule.

Going to address the prompt early today because the news section really is what I want to deal with today.

So. Prompt.

Is there someone you were close to at one point in time, that you can no longer stand to be around? 

Absolutely. Her. Him. Her. No ill-will towards him. Well, I still talk to her sometimes. Him, too. *shrug*

I don’t have a lot of friends. I never have. Few people get close to me, understand how I work. Some of that is me, but things fall away.

Some of that is a function of my nomadic upbringing. Some of it is a function of how I behave.

The amount of ill-will i bear towards those with whom I really don’t have contact varies.

By and large, I’m civil.

Significantly limiting time spent in the cesspool that is Facebook goes a long way to ensuring that.

I use the mute function liberally. That’s kind of eliminated my original concept of just unfriending them there.

This is related to the news section today.

I’m becoming increasingly convinced of two things:

1. The solutions proffered for combating the virus don’t work, and;
2. There’s really not a lot anybody can do about it.

I admit that I’m listening to this right now.

What I’ve been looking for is solid evidence that the sorts of measures recommended by lockdown proponents that the lockdowns actually work.

New Zealand!

Okay. It’s an island with relatively few residents. Let’s look at Australia.

The numbers there are increasing, too, despite it being late spring.

Science doesn’t know how to control this. Government, especially ones “following the science” don’t have answers, either.

So you’re left with a choice of doing something that probably won’t work, or doing nothing.

Politicians are accepting whichever option justifies more authoritarianism.

Listening to this in the background. This morning really did require an effort to write, not to just mess around.

Thanksgiving was decent. Seeing both teams serve up fortyburgers was, um, satisfying.

The nighttime AFC game was delayed because of a COVID-19 outbreak on the Ravens.

Dangerous prediction! Probably all of those infected will be okay next week.

I know, I know, that’s not Chuck Todd dangerous, but I clearly don’t believe in the constantly-shifting War On Science^TM.

Casting any aspersions on the blessed is risky.

Oh well.

Christmas gifts, plans

Happy to see that there’s a way you can put together one of the Big Tech merchant’s wish lists, then buy things somewhere else.

So I’ve largely done that.

I don’t know for whom else I should buy gifts.

At this point, I can count on one hand the number of people outside my family who’ve kept up with me since the rolling that started in 2013.

I don’t even have the energy to get upset about it. Maybe I should.

News
Oh, a CIA officer got killed in one of the bright spots of the Obama/Biden foreign wars. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Two more days, and another year finished.

I shouldn’t say I’m excited to relax, should I?

But I am.

Thanksgiving.

Even with the Steelers’ game cancelled, there’s still games in Detroit and Dallas.

I actually saw an interesting story on this.

The AFC game for tonight was cancelled, so it’s very old-school today. One intra-conference game in Dallas, one cross-conference game in Detroit.

I do like the old-timey NFL franchises still seeking Super Bowl success — Lions, Cardinals, Browns.

So. Thanksgiving. What am I thankful for?

1. Being married to the right partner. She and I do work well together, even if we sometimes disagree; even on big issues. She’s not going to be at all happy about the SCOTUS ruling that came down while we were in bed.
2. Financial well-being. I don’t know how much of a bonus I’ll get from my job this year, and I don’t care. I’m not working to scrape by enough to get us through the month, keep us insured, etc.. I cannot describe how relieving that feeling is, even more knowing that we did it together.
3. Being somewhere where I can get decent medical care. When I moved up here, that, alone, would have been a selling point. One of the few after the government’s response to the pandemic with a 99.something percent survival rate killed off most of them. Not that I partook often, but at least I was in close proximity. Would I liked to have taken my wife out to dinner for our tenth anniversary last month? Absolutely. Even if it meant a cab ride through the shoddily-coordinated Black Lives Matter Plaza? Yep. Whatever. Is that even really possible, now? No. Will the place I was intending to go be there? I’ve got my doubts. Kennedy had a monologue on Monday about removing what she termed “qualified immunity” from politicians whose lockdowns have unintended consequences. She was a big off on the term, there, it should be “sovereign immunity,” but I do like her argument’s general thrust. If politicians were accountable at somewhere other than the ballot box, they might make a lot fewer laws that negatively affect, sometimes kill, people. There’s long been a push to expand personal liability for corporate executives who do bad things; why not add politicians?

News

I mentioned this above. Whether you believe in a higher power or not, it’s pretty clear that this is a basic thing that humans do. Yes, there may be a few who can do it in solitude, but most people want feedback and interaction.

Cutting that off, something that is explicitly protected in the Constitution, isn’t going to work.

There will be violence. As it should be.

But today is going to be football, food, and calling family for Jitsi meets, etc.

Back tomorrow.

I am off work. I have nothing to do until Monday.

This feels weird.

There’s not a lot to do, really. I could be doing training, but I wonder what’s even the point.

So, catching on the podcast queue. Maybe I’ll get around to watching some TV; I have two nights’-worth of Kennedy, and I’m still trying to get through The Wire.

(Totally random aside — I think after the COVID craziness is over, I could deal with living in Baltimore….)

You can change one significant event in history, and only things directly related to it will change in the future. Do you change it, and if so, what event do you choose?

The more that I think of things, the more I think that it’s time to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution.

The presidents elected straight from the Senate have been largely terrible.

What am I listening to right now? This.

I get information from many different sources. Not just one source. And that’s dangerous.

The discussion is fascinating to me, honestly, as I’ve lived so much of my life in isolation.

I work by myself. That’s largely been the case since I started working. I can’t imagine how it is for other people.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow, even if the folks on the Reason editors’ roundtable were picking on the Lions on Monday.

They started this stuff.

News.

I’ve been trying to follow this, and I’m not sure why. My wife and I would order Pizza Hut while we were out in the middle of suburban sprawl.

Was that because the food was great? No. Did I find something small, local, that was better? Yep. But it hit the spot from time to time…and for not a lot of money.

Would I prefer to do something from a local shop? Yes. Is that really difficult when you can’t walk/take public transit/drive? Absolutely.

My property management company just sent an email reminding me to follow them on Instagram. I guess I could do that, but I don’t want any Facebook spyware on my phone.

I think I’m going to stop for the day, however. Thanksgiving tomorrow. Should I write about what I’m thankful for this year?

Hmm.

Stepping away to ponder….

Feel like I’m Tom Brady throwing a pass to one of his running backs last night. Something I should be doing with ease, but I manage to screw it up.

The prompt I had queued up for today’s entry is suspiciously close to something I’d written about a few days ago. It involved which book has had a lasting effect on you.

I wrote about How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World. In discussions yesterday, it occurred to me that despite years that had passed since I last read the book, I was actually sort of doing some of the things he recommended in the path to freedom. I was getting rid of debts, getting rid of complicating commitments arrangements, etc.. I moved, and continued down that path.

You can leave.

(Though it wasn’t running through my head when I wrote that, it sorta jibes with Charles Grodin’s book title — It Would Be So Nice If You Weren’t Here). Looking at the linked entry, however, I did sort of do that again. There’s little other than toxicity, and misinformation on Facebook.

I’ve been posting links to my ramblings up there somewhat sporadically, but wonder if it’s even worth doing, anymore.

On to a newfound prompt for this today….

Is there somewhere specific you like to go when you want to come up with ideas? 

There really isn’t a place. I really can’t leave my apartment. I do occasionally just sort of zone out, and try to get thoughts to come to me.

A lot of what I’ve been listening to with Pete’s podcasts about what he’s done/is doing with meditation. When I started at CNU, I was in the Honors program. The stuck-in-1974 professor had us reading Ram Dass.

I was very opposed to doing anything I considered um, mystical, back then.

Around age twenty, I considered myself a committed atheist.

The more that I considered the, as I call them, evangelical agnostics, really bothered me. Unsurprisingly, South Park had an episode about those sorts of people.

My psychologist also recommended someone who was pushing meditation.

I don’t know that I’m ready to go whole-hogom, and try to do that.

But back to the topic, I don’t go anywhere. I just relax and think.

News.

I’d started in on something about a border conflict among China, India, and Bhutan. But this is more on with what I’ve been tracking lately.

Flashback to my radio days; there were lots of Saturday Morning infomercials extolling the virtues of microdoses of various substances. Take a whiff of garlic, and you won’t have problem X.

But with something like a lower-dose vaccine, maybe it does work?

The puzzling part about Astra’s results was that bigger doses were less efficacious. The vaccine was only 62% effective in a group that got two full doses spaced about a month apart. But among about 2,700 people who got a half-dose followed by a full, the number rose to 90%.

Why are you puzzled by this?

You do tests with different doses, and choose the one that proves most-effective.

This isn’t tough, really.

Okay.

Here’s the point in the month when I’m ready to be finished writing.

I figure I’ll get a bit more pep about it when the vacation time starts, and I have some time to think more clearly.

Today I don’t really feel like doing anything other than eating what my wife made for me, that will be in the fridge until after my morning meeting today, and listening to podcasts or watching TV.

Or being on holiday vacation.

Take your pick.

So. Prompt. How do you handle hypocritical people? 

I make a mental note of it, then do my best not to interact with them. This is kind of what people like me do — we mind our own business, and don’t let whatever antics the nervous Nellies of the world have in mind for us.

It used to be that you could do that.

COVID’s given people an excuse to be all up in your shit; they care more about you than you do, don’t you know?

One of the words floating through my scarred brain the past few days has been “prescriptive.”

Yeah, sounds pretty accurate, Karen.

The Astra/Oxford vaccine for COVID was announced.

Not the new technology used by Phizer and Moderna, but still pretty effective for a “traditional” vaccine.

Multiple Independent discovery. Imagine that.

More tomorrow. But things are moving along.

So Sunday Morning.

I’m not even sure what to say this morning.

There’s football today. Let me take a look. On TV here, we get Baltimore and Washington games on TV. Then an afternoon game, and the nighttime game.

Hm. Yeah. underwhelmed. What’s possibly the Saints’ new era starts today with Taysom Hill getting the start at QB, and Breeesus out for the rest of the year.

Taysom Hill is incredibly fast. His passing has left me somewhat uninspired. Okay on the short stuff, decent long stuff, but not very much from 10-30, which is where you want to see most of the action happening.

Maybe another lost year. In many different ways. When it comes to football, could be worse, could be the Peckers.

Favre kinda got where I am with that during the Saints’ trip to Tampa earlier this year.

#FreeBuccoBruce

Do you think that you are hopelessly flawed? 

I can answer that with a firm “no,” today. There’s a lot of things I can’t do well anymore. Some of those are on account of my condition, but even more, there’s nothing now that I’m embarrassed about.

My wife and I have had some good conversations over the last few days. It’s almost like we work well together or something.

We were discussing Christmas presents. I want a new PC. This one I’m working on right now was kind of a novelty when I bought it, but it’s time to replace it.

I also need to pay Microsoft’s tax. Thankfully, their software cost has actually come down to kind of match the hardware price drop.

I found something I kind of like, showed it to my wife, and because it’s out of stuck, she wanted to build something with the same specifications.

When I was younger, I totally would have done that. Nowadays, sounds like just an exercise in unnecessary frustration.

So news.

I saw this, and had to look around to find out where it was from.

India, not Indiana. I was wondering whether the kid was trying to get daddy’s security guard gig at a camp in Afghanistan.

Yes, we’ve been over there that long.

Osama bin Laden is dead. Bring them home. All of them. Now.

But, yeah, India. My company has a pretty substantial presence there. My curiosity grows as I see things.

That leads me to think about last year’s party, where some of the finger food was some incredible Indian food. I am disappointed that there isn’t going to be a end-of-the-year party this year

Supposedly, they might have one after Governor Hoodor Blackface mandates that everybody get vaccinated.

I guess we’ll see.