Down by the River

Chris Farley living in a Van Gogh down by the river

You might remember Chris's skit on Saturday Night Live about a zillion years ago.

Lottery

Oregon Lottery

Just completed a phone survey about gambling. It was kind of obnoxious. The lady claimed she needed to read all of the questions in order to maintain the validity of the survey, or something. There were a few questions about me, but the bulk of the questions were about gambling, and most of those questions were about the Oregon Lottery, which apparently has about a zillion different ways to suck money out of your wallet. The lady asks about each game individually and after we've gone through umpteen games I was getting a little annoyed at having to keep answering 'no'. I was also a little bemused that there were so many games. I'm a little curious as to who was conducting the survey, but right now I think it was part of an advertising campaign for the Oregon Lottery. I mean, gee wilikers, look at all these games they have! You should play one.

R. I. A. R.

The machine [from the movie Contact]
gvg908

I was talking earlier about how stuff accumulates and how it is a constant battle to keep from getting buried by all your stuff.

Now we come to my Dad's papers. We lived in Seattle up until I was in the 6th grade. Dad was an aerospace engineer working Boeing. He worked on inertial guidance systems, which made use of gyroscopes. Gyroscopes bothered my Dad, it really bugged him the way a gyro could apparently defy gravity by only being supported on one end. It bugged him so much that he convinced himself you ought to be able to make a machine that could completely defy gravity, if you just did the right things with some rotating weights. 

He called the machine RIAR for Radial Impulse something something. The basic idea was that you could swing a weight on a long radius in an overhead arc and that would generate an impulse in the upward direction, and then at the end of the arc, the radius would become very much shorter so it would return upward much quicker than the first arc, so the downward impulse would be much shorter. Since the upward arc was longer than the downward arc, the upward force would be larger and if would lift itself into the air, i.e. you would fly. 

Problem is that while shorter radius means quicker turnaround is also means more centrifugal force. So depending on how you looked at the problem, and how you finessed the trajectory of the weight, you could convince yourself that it should work. Or you could be stuck in the Newtonian physics box and conclude that it wouldn't work. My Dad built one model, and while it did move, it didn't fly and wasn't convincing. I bought some materials like 40 years ago with the intention of building my own model, but I never got a round toit. It wouldn't be too tough, all it would take is a bottle git-it-done.

Anyway, my Dad left behind a couple of boxes of papers covered with diagrams, drawings, equations and notes. I've sort of been meaning to sit down and look through them, but it would take getting my head in the right space to deal with it. I feel like I should at least look through the papers, see if there is anything that looks like it is worth preserving. I suspect most of it is just chicken scratches, notes made while he was thinking. And it has the potential to suck me in and I'll end up spending days going through them. Gaah! Meanwhile the two boxes are riding around in the trunk of my car. We are full up inside.

Save It

StorQuest Self Storage

Save it! It's valuable! has been my sarcastic response any time there is a question about whether we should save some bit of paper that the has potential to be valuable, like receipts, instruction manuals or warranty cards. Problem with that approach is you end up with a heap of papers, most of which are absolutely worthless. Taking the time to evaluate whether a piece of paper really has any value requires thinking, and thinking about stuff that doesn't interest you is work. So the piece of paper gets added to the heap.

I suspect that saving stuff is a common affliction. Just look at the proliferation of storage lockers. These things are turning into giant compounds. I have enough stuff that renting a storage locker and moving some of that stuff into it would give me a little more room in my house. But you know what would happen: I would just accumulate more stuff and pretty soon I would be back to thinking I could use a little more storage space. However, I have a severe dislike for paying rent. It's bad enough paying property taxes, but at least I get something for them. 

The problem I have is that I am an American and stuff accumulates. In order to avoid becoming a hoarder, you have to diligently and repeatedly purge your house of excess stuff. What a pain. The alternative is dying a tabloid worthy death when a pile of papers (valuable! Save it!) topples over on top of you and you suffocate. 

My wife and I both work pretty diligently at getting rid of stuff we don't use. I have half a dozen items that I think might we worth enough to make posting them on Ebay worthwhile, but they've been sitting there for at least a month and I haven't made a single move in that direction. I might make enough to pay for lunch for a week, so I should do it. Of course, the longer I wait, the higher the price will go (because of inflation), but any dollars I do get will also be worth less (because of inflation), so that's basically a wash. More likely the stuff will be worth less because it is getting older by the day.

Then I got a notice from Google that my Google Drive was 3/4 full, and would I like to rent some more space? No thank you, but Google gives you 15 gigabytes. What all have I stored in there that's taking up ten gigabytes of space? So I started taking a look. I've been dumping files in there for 15 years, and there are a bunch. There are hundreds of rinky dink little spreadsheets, but these are only a few kilobytes each. There are some documents, maybe hundreds, but still, only a few kilobytes each. I suspect I started storing photos there. I probably ought to hook up my big hard drive and work on getting all my photos loaded onto it.

If I turn my head I can see my bookcase. It's mostly been taken over with medicine and stuff. There is only a handful of books and maybe one shelf's worth of 3 ring notebooks. My first desk when we moved to Oregon was a big old Steelcase unit I bought used. It had three file drawers, and I filled them with valuable papers. But I eventually found (like after 20 years) that I was only using a small subsection of one drawer. The rest were just sitting there, turning to dust. Something happened that caused a major reorganization and the Steelcase desk was replaced by a spare, wood veneer table from somewhere, Dania maybe? So a bunch of paper went to the recycler and a bunch went in the shredder. That was a pain. I remember that - sitting there patiently feeding a thousand sheets of paper into the shredder two or three at a time. The shredder earned it's pay that day.

Anyway, I probably ought to look in those notebooks. Most haven't been opened for years.

Go Play in Traffic Kid

Space Age Quik Mart

Drove to the airport to pick up dangerous daughter this afternoon. Google Maps tells me traffic is going to be bad, so I opt to take Germantown Road over to St. Johns and thence Colombia Boulevard east to the airport. Things were going along swimmingly until I got about halfway down the far side of Forest Park and then traffic came to a halt. It was creepy crawly until the bottom of the hill. 

Often, at the bottom of the hill there are a dozen or so cars backed up waiting to turn onto the ramp for the St. Johns Bridge, but this time it was about a mile, so it took a little while to get through that. Get to the bottom of the hill and there is no sign of any problem. However, go up the ramp and onto the bridge and we find that a car had broken down there. A tow truck had just shown up when I drove by. At least the plug hadn't been on the road coming down the hill. I'd probably still be there in that case. The rest of the way to the airport was smooth sailing.

Coming back I wanted to turn left on MLK, but there was a honking big gas truck trying to pull into the Space Mart station there. He was blocking two lanes of traffic, so the opposing traffic ended up having to use my left turn lane to get around him. Yeah, with all this traffic I'm not making a left turn here, which means taking Vancouver which is a drag because it's loaded with speed bumps. 

These days, I often find myself driving down streets I've never been on before. Call me Chuck, the intrepid street explorer.

P. S. I have written a dozen or posts that mention Germantown Road. 

Mercy For None - Netflix Series

Mercy For None | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Korean John Wick wades through an army of thugs using his fists, knives, broken glass, actually anything that comes to hand. You know the shits about to go down when he puts on his gloves. Sometimes he'll pick up a knife in the middle of one of his killing sprees and we get even more blood splashed on the screen. For the main event, he has a special bat made. It's a metal bat and looks like there is a five pound weight wrapped around the big end. It makes a great sound when he drags it across the concrete floor.

Unlike John Wick, it's not about his dog, it's about his brother. The useless son of an allied chief gangster ordered the hit. Half way through the show, our guy gets his revenge. Think this might trigger an even bigger bloodbath? Well, we've still got three episodes to go. Somehow I don't think they're going to sitting around drinking tea and crumpets and discussing their philosophy of revenge.

The Watching the Detectives label is there to let you know this show is about criminals. However, we've only seen one cop so far, and he wasn't doing much detecting. He was being interrogated by a mob boss.

Russophobia

Attack Of The Savage Division On The Austrian Infantry - Viktor Viketyevich Masurovsky

Terry Cowan is talking about Russophobia in a post on New Notes from a Commonplace Book. He seems to be as confused as I am by the hatred for Russia evidenced by most of the leaders of Western Europe. An excerpt:

So that brings us today, and the real subject of this post. As bad as we are, we are not in the same league with the British. Lindsey Graham cannot hold a candle to Keir Starmer or David Lammy when it comes to Russophobia. We have been their eager students, but they remain the Masters. A recent piece has highlighted the historical roots of this psychosis. A former Canadian diplomat in Russia in Anti-Russia Through the Years writes of the long history of Russophobia, finding it in full blossom 170 years ago. He’s an old Russian hand, and I highly recommend his site.

I suspect Russophobia is a religious belief, passed down from one generation the next, and nurtured for their entire life, and as such is impossible to discuss in a rational manner.

I am beginning to suspect that people have an innate need for a certain amount of violence in their lives. Whenever things are too quiet and peaceful for too long, some people will start to boil and violence will erupt.