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Little late start and a short month at that. Spring that much closer I reckon. Weather not half bad, lotta rain last few days but no more freezing. Be out watching for green stuff to emerge. Kitty cat chasing voles around, gettin' some good natural food. Get out and check some flea markets this week if it stays this nice. Only bad part is some serious wind, pretty much might as well stay inside. Get the little shop cleaned up and some new lights. Okey-dokey.
The Death Dealer books were inspired by the Frazetta painting, back early when he was doin' the Conan books. Whoever was doin' them in the '70s, my old ones look like the Lancer editions. Lots of later ones, and tons of new ones by other writers. Howard died years before the books - collections of several short stories - were published and the '60s and '70s when the paperback business got going good. Wonder what Robert and Edgar would think about the billions of dollars generated by whey were getting paid a few bucks for. Burroughs lived longer, into the movie age and did pretty well financially. The Death Dealer books came in he late '80s, with the general boom in SF/fantasy stuff. Dunno anything about the author, he had a little different style than the mainstream writers, some disturbing passages in there. Only wrote the four apparently. Google just gives you stuff about the DD books. Coulda been a pseudonym I reckon. Probably read'em again sometime, or not. Probably the most exposure the original art got was when Molly Hatchet used it for their debut album cover. They used a couple more on subsequent albums and one by Boris. Along with the books there was a lot of good fantasy art from that time.
Sunday 11 February 2024 18:20:24 1707697224 OK, that about right. First peacans from one of them trees the squirrels planted. Plant ever year in fact. Nice trees, easy to get'em to grow tall and straight if you take care, prune every year 'til they tall enough the lowest branches about six seven feet. Seven better. Them not bad fer a planted tree, the one in the lower right about as big as the ones they grew from, tame trees of neighbors I reckon. Nearest ones dang near a quarter mile off, dunno why they over here buryin' nuts. Oak trees too, and the nearest oaks about as far. 'cept that little scrawny one down on the south line. Don't care 'bout the nuts, don't taste that good, never eat pecan pie. That much sugar and stuff, think mom and grandma put Karo in it. I eat enough bad stuff as it is. Hear somewhere pecan wood good for somethin, mebbe furniture. Someday they can cut them trees and make stuff I reckon, me being long gone. Gotta plant thirty more pine trees, save me about a quarter acre of mowing. When they get big anyway, for now hafta mow around'em and keep the grass trimmed up next to'em. Big ones finally gettin' to where the needles keep the grass down, somethin' else the heirs can enjoy. February dang near half gone, no terrible weather so far. Nice and wet and that's fine with me, ponds fill up quicker. Only the greywater pond in the back stays full and hafta leave a hose in there lot of the time to drain it off. Wet summer and moderate heat fine with me.
Friday 16 February 2024 19:01:05 1708131665 Thinkin' about old cars for preppers. Simple, no electronics, easy to get parts and fix. Someone brought up VW Beetles. Not the new ones, the old ones they made about twenty to thirty million of, back in the day they all over the place, lot of people had Fords and Chevys (Chevies? Chevvies?) and Oldsmobiles and Chryslers and such and they a lot of them had a VW Beetle. Sposed to be a cheap car for folks couldn't afford much, ended up bein' an extra car for a lot of people. Kids drov'em a lot. Remember ridin' in a lot of'em as a kid, didn't have one then. Some mad'em into dune buggies, put a Rolls-Royce hood on'em. Fun little cars, cheap and reliable and durable. Usually then there'd be a shop or two around specialized in Beetles, JC Whitney had oodles of parts, even engine rebuild kits. Never owned one of the old ones, but in 98 or 99 or so they started makin' the New Beetles. Nothing like the old ones except shape. Front engine front wheel drive like dang near everything else. Buying mostly trucks by then, not likin' front drive that much. Had a couple of Mustangs. Even got front wheel drive trucks these days. Guess I'd go all wheel if I's buyin a new one. Anyhow me and a bud at work bought 2000 Beetles. We's both programmers making big bucks, what they call developers these days. We wrote code line by line, developers download chunks of code and plug it in and hope it works. Did that too, by the time I retired. Anyhow we been coding since the late '70s, didn't start hearin' about the Y2K bug until the '80s. We'd done fixed our code, outfit we's working for was in the banking software business, had to be able to calculate loans out thirty years or more. So it got fixed anyway. Reason being most people thought it was there was before cheap computers programmers saved storage space by leaving off the '19' on all the dates. Storage space was especially expensive so that was something they did to not have to buy as much. Anyhow by the end of the eighties hardware so cheap it was all gettin' swapped out and all gone by the end of the '90s. Anyhow people ignorant, some as in just don't know and don't pay attention, vote for dimmocrats, believed all the Y2K stuff. Civilization would end, people actually prepping for disaster. Some folks cashed in of course. Rog and I bought 2000 Beetles. Now we old guys was from when they used to call the Beetle the 'bug' a lot. So we each had a Y2K bug. Decent little car, looked cool, fun to drive. Anyhow 1999 ended and civilization didn't (until about 2008) and people asked about the Y2K bug we say the only ones around here are out there in the parking lot. Sold mine eventually, too many cars. Wouldn't mind havin' an old one though. Pay 10-20K for a good used one? Fix up junkes? Find a good supply of cars and parts a feller could do it, fix up two or three and lay in some parts. Probly not for me anyway. Got my fleet of while 09 Ford Rangers, long as the big EMP thing don't happen they'll last longer than I will. Maybe somebody doin' it somewhere, way they do with old military jeeps. Still see one of those now and then. Alright, spring soon be here, elderberry bushes got a little green. Daffodils and lilies peeking out. Hasta la vista.
Still a little of February left but looks like not much bad weather. Plum nice today, near 70 afternoon. Trimmin' trees and makin' brush piles for the rabbits and voles to hang out under. Kitty cat done learnt how to catch'em, rabbits chewing bark off stuff, grass ain't growin yet. Ever get desperate for food put some traps out, they all over the place. Lot of cleanup, gotta move that trailer I stayed in after the tornado. Figger have it checked out and some plumbing and lectrical stuff checked out and park it alongside a couple 40-foot containers. Shouldn't hafta worry about blowing over, any wind moves them things I don't wanna be in. Lot worse than that tornado. Get a generator and couple hunnerd pound gas bottles and crash in it if the lectric goes off for a while. Don't do a lot of expensive seegars these days but once in a while one looks promising and hafta try it.&ens;; Sometimes it's worth it. Tried one of these and not bad. Kinda have to prepare, get a libation and a snack to start. A Little Debbie cherry pie (the little ones that come in six-packs) and E&J vanilla. Kuba Maduro, random selection from the sampler box, little cool out on the deck but not bad. Smoke some of the low-end Acid sticks now and then, they come from the same folks do them little tins I get sometimes, call'em ponies, 4x32 a little under a buck a stick, mebbe semi-premium. Real nice, usually a midnight smoke.
Lookin' at speakers for the main room, lot of good stuff out there, notihn' hardly with big-ass woofers like there was back in the day. Still got my dos pairs of Pioneer HPM-100s out there with the vintage stuff, oldest pair, somewhere around '76 got the foam rubber around the woofers and it plum rotted out. Hafta fix'em if I wanna use'em, used to stack the two pairs, about six feet high. Newer pair got overseas in the early '80s, had a different surround on the woofers, still good. Anyhow little bulky, my KLH set I got three-four year ago the more modern look, skinnier and still good bass. Dunno why I'm not using those, had'em out in the studio at the lake a while. Good speakers. Anyhow Cerwin-Vega has had that look since the '70s I reckon, must work. Good sound too, crankin' big amps into'em. So this pair almost three feet, need a base about a foot high to get them up where they need to be. True for most these days, so no big deal there.
Just assuming that the Swift product is extant in fifty years (who would it be - it's a product with a sell by date no more than a couple of years out) would there be Taylor Swift fans going to see her? Aside from the fact she'd be 80-something. Probably the last product you could say had fans was Elvis, and they was mostly women of a certain generation. But there's Priest fans over fifty years on, and Heep fans, and Maiden fans. Not a billion dollar business, just a few million year after year. The current thing sucks up a lot of money for a few people but it is just the current thing, and then there's a new current thing, and another one after that. My first Priest concert was in '82, btw. I presume that there are folks like me, twenty, thirty, forty years younger that are fans of the old bands and the newer ones, and I suppose the iconic artists like Priest will occupy a position like that of the great classical composers, in their own genre. And as just a few people listen to classical and jazz and whatever. Part of that five percent of whatever that's intellectually the top of humanity. It's lonely up here sometimes, but better than being a faceless sheep in the herd.
This the last day of the long Feb-yew-ary, way most folks say it. Far as I'm concerned it spring even if the official spring is a ways off. Close enough, even if today was still a bit chilly. Do the midnight seegar outside for sure tonight, kitty cat be underfoot if she sneaks in before I get the door closed on the smokin' room, and if I leave her outside she lay out there and stick her paws under the door and meow for a while 'fore she wanders off. Who knows what a cat thinking, not real sure they know. Dogs more straitforward, don't mean they simple-minded. Anyway grabbed a chicken at the deli on the way home couple nights ago, put the bones in a dish out on the deck. Took her a bit to get used to it, but they catch on quick. Go out sometime see some blackbirds take the .410 and harvest a couple now and then, cat knows what to do with a bird natural, funny seein' as they rarely get hold of one on their own. Anyhow cats is what they is and that's about that. Got some more windy days comin' up, just as well stay indoors at times. Good with that, get us a mild damp summer and be OK, last year stayed hot and dry too long at times. Got a bit of trimmng trees to go yet, waiting for a new saw to arrive. Leave a half acre unmowed til fall here and there and spend a bit less time doing that. Last year there was enough to keep the deer from gnawing the bark off the trees, set some of the elderberries back last year, no problems this year. Anyhow, seeya later. Text in images  Thu 29 Feb 2024 08:35:01 PM CST |
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