Category: General

It appears that it is my job to educate the world about how thermostats function. If you are hot, turning down the thermostat will not make you cool. If the air conditioner is already running at 100 percent, turning down the thermostat is not going to make the room any cooler. So stop futzing with the damn thermostat!

Completion of Art Stunt 2 is delayed slightly, due to some house guests that are a bit of a disruption. The project will resume in a few days. That’s what I like best about this project, compared to Art Stunt 1. The earlier experiment kept my equipment tied up with video encoding and streaming 24/7 until the project was done. But with the new methods, I can paint whenever I get around to it.

My nephew just got his first junky old car, and he’s notorious lately for bumming gas money in really small amounts, like one dollar. That reminded me of my old ’65 Plymouth Barracuda. My Cuda is a car of legend, I could write a book about it.

One of the quirks of my Cuda was the gas tank would only hold 5 gallons. It was towed once and the tow truck dented the gas tank and poked a pinhole. I looked and looked but I couldn’t find the hole, just a greasy smear of wet gas. The pinhole was up high on the tank, if I put more than 5 gal in the tank, it would just leak out overnight.

Of course this was a huge inconvenience in a driving town like Los Angeles. I had to drive by the odometer. I planned my route to work so it went past several gas stations, in case I ran out. I was always keeping track of my gas milage and how much I’d put in the tank, calculating how many miles I had left on the tank. Any trip might be interrupted by a short hike, carrying a gas can to and from the nearest gas station. I was frequently late for work, and my boss was constantly infuriated. I told him if he paid me a decent wage I could afford to fix my car properly. That usually shut him up.

Sometimes I ran out of gas in really dangerous places, like the Santa Monica Freeway, and then I had no choice but to phone for a tow. I even got kicked out of AAA for excessive calls for a tow truck to bring gas. I don’t think 3 calls in one month was excessive, since I still paid for each tow. With all these additional expenses, it took me a while to scrape up enough money for a proper repair.

I took the Cuda to a AAA-approved Unocal 76 service station, I paid them $200 to patch and repair the tank. Unfortunately, they destroyed the gas gauge sensor while pulling the tank. Now I could fill er up, but my gas gauge always read E, which was almost worse than my previous problem with the leak. At least I ran out of gas less frequently, if I always kept the tank filled. Eventually, I had to have the entire tank and sensor replaced, at a cost of $300.

I just observed an uncommon weather phenomenon that is described in an old wives’ tale. I’ve never known it to be wrong, and I’ve observed for years and never seen it fail. The saying goes something like “if it rains on your shadow, it will rain again tomorrow.” And it’s absolutely true. Sorry it’s not poetic or anything, it’s just a random piece of folk wisdom, even if it isn’t a catchy couplet.

There may be a reasonable explanation for the prediction. The only time rain can fall on your shadow is when it is raining when the sun is shining. I’ve only seen this happen in the hottest days of the summer when the weather is extremely unstable, and small, scattered thunderstorms break out in a mostly sunny sky. Usually this weather pattern lasts for a couple of days, so there is more rain on the way. I’m not sure if this pattern works anywhere but here in the plains of the US, but I suspect it is universal.

Bob Hope is dead, and the world is a better place. Hope is gone, but his legacy as a scumsucking Hollywood greedhead will continue. Longterm Disinfotainment readers may recall my old essay, Bob Hope: Robber Baron wherein I described how Bob Hope destroyed the urban architecture of Los Angeles by creating thousands of Mini-malls. But today, while doing further research, I learned something new. I was completely unaware that Bob Hope’s company, La Mancha Development, built the very first mini-mall. La Mancha Development is almost singlehandedly responsible for spreading urban blight throughout California. It conducts its activities as secretly as possible, there is almost no information available on the web about La Mancha.

Bob Hope was an early participant in the early LA land rush. Hope took the profits from his early movies and bought huge tracts of undeveloped land in LA and Ventura counties, and sat on it until it was ripe for development. This wasn’t unusual for the time, for example, Edgar Rice Burroughs bought up a huge chunk of land that became the LA suburb Tarzana. But Hope’s commercial activities were particularly rapacious. Hope owned huge tracts of land in the Ventura Mountains, the last undeveloped natural forests in the LA area, some of the most valuable properties in the state. He spent decades fighting to develop this pristine, unspoiled land into luxury housing. The LA Nature Conservancy fought Hope in the courts for years, finally winning a partial victory, La Mancha sold LANC some of the land for use as nature preserves, and LANC dropped their suits and La Mancha got the go-ahead to cut down the forests, carve roads into the wilderness, and develop expensive luxury housing. What a deal! Bob Hope reminds me of Armand Hammer, who swore his company Oxy Petroleum would drill for oil in Santa Monica Bay before he died. Hammer failed, but Hope succeeded.

Strangely enough, I once worked for Bob Hope, for about an hour. I used to work at a service bureau as an Iris inkjet operator, and a job from Bob Hope came in. It was a CD cover for a birthday present Hope had personally made for his wife Dolores. This was back in the days when CD recorders cost thousands of bucks, and mastering a CD was done by professionals at high prices. Hope spent thousands of dollars producing a one-off CD for his wife’s birthday, complete with my custom $75 Iris print for the cover art. The artwork was a picture of Dolores, it showed signs of an expensive retouch job, and it surely cost hundreds of bucks to remove her moustache and smooth out all the wrinkles. The vanity of Hollywood people never ceases to amaze me.

There is so much to hate about Bob Hope, I can hardly collect all the reasons. But I found one exceptionally interesting fact, courtesy of the Internet Movie Database, Hope’s longterm golf buddy was Prescott Bush, the notorious Nazi supporter and progenitor of presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. Hope was a right-wing extremist, just like Prescott Bush.

Now that Bob Hope is dead, TV viewers will be subjected to endless reruns of his horrid old movies. A whole new generation will become acquainted with his work, and their reaction will undoubtedly be, “people actually laughed at this crap?”

My house is at war with chipmunks. I have been at war for years, and will probably be at war for many years to come. Chipmunks vex me terribly, and they are winning the war. Here is a picture I took of the enemy, standing right outside my back door.





When I first moved in this house and discovered the chipmunks, I thought they were cute. But the little varmints ravage my garden, destroying my tomato and pepper plants. My garden is up on an elevated deck, the chipmunks climb up the stairs and get into the plants and take one bite out of each of the best fruits. Damn those varmints!

My cat discovered the chipmunks and became obsessed with catching them. But chipmunks are extremely quick, they are almost impossible to catch unless you corner them. Kitty discovered you could corner the chipmunks once they got up on my deck if she blocked off the stairway. I think she liked cornering them and toying and tormenting them, but she never actually caught any of them. I cornered them a few times myself. They behave quite strangely when cornered, they will freeze as long as there is something between you and them, but if exposed, they will flee. I accidentally chased them right off the deck a couple of times, and it’s not like these are flying squirrels, they belly-flopped on the ground with a loud smack. That kept them at bay for a couple of weeks, but they still came back. But Kitty and I could not corner and capture the enemy chipmunks.

I decided to consult my veterinarian about the problem. Perhaps there was some chipmunk repellent or natural remedy. One of the young vet trainees said she just saw a chapter on chipmunks in her veterinary medicine textbook, she xeroxed it and gave it to me. I learned quite a bit about the psychology of the enemy. Chipmunks live in burrows that always have at least 2 exits. No chipmunk will ever allow itself to be trapped in a spot with only one way out. The textbook recommended that aggressive chipmunks that invade human turf be killed by poisoning. I was not prepared to use chemical weapons against the enemy, I would have preferred to capture the enemy, put them on trial, and exile them to nearby farmland where they could live out their lives without causing further trouble.

One day I was sitting at home and I heard Kitty outside, she was making the most godawful hissing and howling sound. My kitty is very neurotic and it took me years to get her even to meow, she never hisses or howls, and this was the first time had ever heard her in such a frantic state. I rushed outside and Kitty was poised at taut attention, eyes focused on a tarp sitting in the corner of the deck. I could not figure out what was going on, so I went over to lift up the corner of the tarp, and the chipmunk went shooting out. Kitty lunged, but the chipmunk escaped. I had given aid to the enemy, allowing the chipmunk to escape just as it came closer to capture than it ever had before. Kitty was crestfallen.

After this humilating defeat, Kitty lost all interest in hunting the chipmunks. She never wanted to go outside anymore, she lost weight and died a few months later. I felt like my inopportune intervention in the chipmunk war had broken her heart, and she pined away.

So now that my most trusted soldier has passed away, there is nothing to keep the chipmunk population from exploding. Kitty is no longer keeping the enemy at bay, and they are running a new guerilla war, encroaching on my territory. I am in an interminable war, and I have no exit strategy. The chipmunks are winning.

Here’s a random newspaper clipping from my files, as it appeared in the LA Times in 1991. This image is in the public domain since it was released as court evidence in a public hearing, so feel free to copy it and do what you like.

One of the endless amusements of blogging is checking your logs and seeing how people find your site, and what phrases they are searching for. Some of the perennial favorites are phrases like “epicanthic fold” and “cisco sucks,” and then there are the scary searches like “innocent children manga.” Once in a rare while I see a search that pleases the hell out of me, like “japanese design or pattern or motif -tattoo” which indicates the searcher wants to look at japanese designs excluding tattoos.

But there is one complete and utter moron who has hit my site over 200 times using the exact same search phrase, “Picture of Dorian Gray.” Apparently someone thinks I am continually updating an article I wrote a long time ago, and it is somehow relevant to their search. No, there is no information whatsoever on this site pertaining to a comic book character named “The Picture of Dorian Gray” or that comic character’s appearance in an upcoming movie. I made one extremely oblique reference to Oscar Wilde’s famous story “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” and there is nothing else about the subject on this site. I have specifically loaded this message with keywords that will surely cause this moron to find this new post, so I have one thing to say to him: if your interests in Dorian Gray extend merely to this comic book character, there is nothing for you on this website. If your knowledge of Dorian Gray comes from a comic book, you will be unable to comprehend my literary reference, no matter how many times you read it. So knock it off, go read the BOOK instead of the comic if you don’t get it.

I’m bummed out because I just learned an old friend died. An obituary for my handyman, who I will call “R,” just appeared in the morning paper. R mowed my lawn and did all the odd jobs at my house for the last ten years. Then suddenly I noticed the lawn is getting overgrown and R hasn’t showed up on schedule, but that wasn’t a particularly unusual thing. The odd thing was that he wasn’t answering his cel phone. After R was missing for another week, I checked at his day job and he hadn’t shown up there either, they didn’t know what happened to him. I figured I’d put out an intensive search after the 4th, maybe he was just goofing off and wanted an extended vacation. But now the mystery is solved, with an unhappy ending.

I’ve finished this server’s upgrade, I can’t think of anything I left out or any improvements to the OS I could make. I put the OS back on the high-speed 10kRPM drive, so performance is as good as it gets on this CPU. If anyone finds even the most minor problem with streaming videos or the Apache server configuration, please leave me a comment.

Now that the major work is done, I can get on with fixing up the site’s appearance. I never managed to get the new Movable Type installation to look much better than the default templates. There’s a lot of work remaining on the look and feel of the site, but that should be easy in comparison to the server upgrade.