*An Announcement: Matthew, who comments here, has started a tube of you channel in which he posts this blog turned to AI voice. He thinks this will appeal to people who want to LISTEN to posts, like while driving or cleaning, or any other time you feel a need to hear my often inane words. Full disclosure: Though the idea was his, if this works out (And tube of yous doesn’t ban it) I will derive some profit from this venture as will he. This is the link.* – SAH.
Lying To The Young, a blast from the past from 5/1/2015
One of the really interesting things about cleaning up the rest of the other house, to move, is that we’re hitting exactly the sort of things we’d even forgotten had happened/existed.
For instance, we opened a box last packed away in 1990, when we moved from our very first house together. It would have been exciting if it hadn’t been packed by movers, who don’t seem to have the ability to distinguish between trash and office stuff. So, we had Dan’s business cards hoard, now with a lot of names and addresses either no longer in the business or no longer at that address/number; we had some sketch pads with funny drawings which back then was his way of dragging me away from writing. You know exactly what. We were 27. There were pictures of cartoon guys with googly eyes and “here’s looking at you kid,” etc. There were also sheets of paper that from their crumpled look the movers rescued from the trash can. You know what I meant. Crumple marks on an old shopping list.
There is a certain factor of “Wow, really” to this, at least when you realize not only have you any idea what the party was you were hosting, but also when the number of apples and cucumbers required must have meant some sort of salad I no longer remember making or having a recipe for.
It is a reminder of both the permanence of who you are and the transience of many things that seem incredibly important at the time.
Take those business cards. If we’d found them 15 years ago, we’d never have shrugged and shaken the whole mess into the trash bag. We wouldn’t have done it because, even though we probably would never have contacted any of those people anyway (note we never felt the need to ransack the house for still-unopened boxes) we’d have had the feeling that it might “be important.”
Weirder still is finding evidences of me in that creature I don’t remember. Like endless miles of rejections, that mean I must have submitted a lot of stories, but I can’t remember any of those titles, and the stories I DO remember I’d rather I didn’t. (There’s miles and miles — and MILES — of twerpitude on the way to becoming who we are as the late Pterry (pbuh) said. What he didn’t say is that who we are is marginally less twerpy and our future selves, still a little less twerpy, will laugh at us.)
But then there are other surprise discoveries that have more meaning for both our society and us.
We found older son’s grade reports from sixth grade, for instance. And I blinked at the grades.
For background, both our kids are brilliant, which in this case is defined as “sharper than old mom” or to quote PTerry (pbuh) again “So sharp they cut themselves.” This means they have a ton of idiosyncrasies and that if I’d known what was really going on in elementary/middle school, AND if I’d known I could homeschool (listen bud, I was afraid of missing something essential. My formation has HOLES) I’d have taken them out in a New York minute, or even a Colorado one.
But one of their idiosyncrasies is that, being very similar, they like to play opposites. What I mean is, though their basic makeup is close to the same and though they are (like my brother and me) when not in contact likely to be reading the same book at the same time, or playing the same game for the same reason, when they are together they view it as their sworn duty to not be alike. So, since older son was a straight A student (or close enough) who gave himself an ulcer in high school worrying about grades, younger son studies for what interests him and lets the rest go hang, which makes him an A/D student or an A/F student on rare occasions. (Mind you almost everything in college at least interests him minimally, so last time I looked he maintained a B average, but he gave me white hairs getting him through K-12.)
So as I looked at the report card I thought “2nd son” but the name was #1 son, and I thought “#1 sonnever had an F in math” and “This must be a strange mistake.”
But I remembered, vaguely, being very worried about #1 son all through sixth grade, until we moved and changed schools and put him in an advanced program which was not that great in retrospect but which, at least, graded him on what he’d learned and his homework and tests.
Because you see my husband found the sheet explaining that grade. I.e. the sheet with the checks and points for various things during the semester.
I’m fairly sure I never saw that sheet, though I can’t swear. It might have been at the back of our desire to move which was so intense we picked a house totally unsuited to us by the method of “it’s in another district” and “We can afford it.” (There were other reasons, like that someone in the neighborhood was killing cats, and we didn’t know who.) Also, this was the year coming off Dan being unemployed and while he still was suffering from undiagnosed sleep apnea, which meant I was suffering from undiagnosed being kept awake (more than health issues were already doing) by apneaing husband, so heaven knows what I saw or what I made of it. The entire year is a fog. Which is good as it kept the berserker from descending on the school to create the sort of scene where the police say “the bodies haven’t been found yet.”
Because that check list leading to an F in math read as follows: Items, three, tests, with perfect scores. Item, “bring in x boxes of kleenex” with zero. Item, bring in three lightbulbs, with zero. Item bring in folders of appropriate size and 24 highlighter markers, zero. Item inspection of locker showing it messy, zero. Item, failed to organize his notes and use the appropriate colors to take them, zero. Etc. etc.
Now younger son often managed to have cs in classes where he aced the tests due to an allergy to homework. As the woman who grew from the kid who wrote her homework in the two seconds before class, whose stories of how her homework had disappeared (it was aliens. A UFO, I swear. They paralyzed me with their rays and took my long division homework) became preparation for her current career and who, up to her Junior year in college, was known to read essays from a blank sheet, I couldn’t really come down like a ton of bricks on THAT.
But this wasn’t even homework. It seemed a deranged combination of trying to stock up the school (okay, it’s a small village and I imagine they have trouble, but still, giving grades for it, and for that matter asking the kids for it isn’t cool) and trying to enforce blind compliance.
There were mitigating circumstances, too, that adults could have told the teacher about, but son couldn’t or wouldn’t. First of all BOTH our kids have a marked aversion to spending our money. Not their own, that they’ve earned, but ours. And back then the money was all ours, or at least son couldn’t drive to the store and buy Kleenex from the money he’d earned helping my friends with gardening projects. And we were broke. Dead, flat broke, as we’ve only come close to being since. Dan had lost his job in the middle of a tech flight from town, and we were scrambling and not sure when he’d find work again. Now we didn’t discuss this with the kid, but kids know. So he never even mentioned the shopping list to us, much less take the stuff in. And btw, since this was the ONLY time (and only because we REALLY were at the end of our rope) our kids have been on free-lunch program (Yes, I know I disapprove of those, but you know what? Part of the reason we were in the pinch we were in was the massive amount taken from Dan’s severance check. So it’s not like we weren’t paying into the maw of the government, not-by-choice. And it’s not like if we hadn’t used it it would have been returned to the tax payer. It would have been spent in ever more creative ways. It was, in fact, as the school (the shopping list notwithstanding) had a surplusage they spent on showy but useless equipment. And when the school more or less forced us into it, we thought that if we didn’t have money to eat, we wanted to make sure the kids did) the teacher could/should easily have known that and SHOULD have understood not only that we couldn’t afford a lot of those items to stock her in-class cupboard, but that it was insensitive and crass to ask the kids to bring this stuff in with no regard for parental circumstances at the time. (And these are the people who preach sensitivity.) I’m going to guess if son had abased himself before the class and told them we were broke she’d have excused him. Only, of course, he’d rather take the F and I can’t blame him, since I remember Middle School vividly.
Then there was the blind compliance of “dot this with this particular color” and “take notes in the approved manner.”
When we showed the list to Son he said “I was near suicidal that year. Because my mind doesn’t work like other kids’ I guess. I just couldn’t see where that stuff mattered. I mean, in college whether you take notes or rely on aural memory no one cares, as long as you KNOW the material, but it seemed in sixth grade knowing the material counted for nothing, and it was all how well I did these pointless tasks.”
This probably wouldn’t disturb me as much if I hadn’t gone through this, in spades, with younger son four years later and if school administrators hadn’t told me that the purpose of middle school is not to teach the kids anything so much as is teaching them “the process.” And the process as described by these bright souls seems to consist of “Ve hav ways und means to make you OBEY.” Seriously, with younger son, too the emphasis was on “You will dot all the is and cross all the ts in the color designated!”
Perhaps it’s just my kids (heaven knows where they picked it up, but they have slight problems with arbitrary, shouty authority) or maybe it is why all our friends’ BOYS (not the girls, not even in cases where we saw no difference in IQ between the kids) hit the wall in middle school and started lagging behind their sisters. Girls (present typist and a lot of readers very much excepted) tend to be more compliant with group mores and authority.
This girl, of course, faced with that course of “study” would not only also have had Fs but would probably have thrown shoes at the teacher’s head and got expelled. Fortunately her kids turned out calmer.
Anyway, the whole idea that middle-school is supposed to enforce blind compliance and that’s what they’re actually grading on (or was when my kids were involved) makes my gorge rise. It might be a very good way to raise machine-operators, but it sucks when raising free-thinking citizens in whom (we the people) the power and the legitimacy of the state is supposed to rest.
If I had my time again those kids would never have seen the inside of a classroom till I put them in the dual high school/college program Younger attended, in 10th and 11th grade. (And for those in the area, Coronado Highschool. Yes, they’re a magnet school and take kids even from out of district, though it’s a little harder. And unless it’s changed all out of recognition in the last 3 years, highly recommended.) Because colleges still prefer standard high school grades to portfolios.
But it’s past, and it’s past by a long time, and it was just a memory of gritting my teeth and a surge of annoyance at the items on that check list.
However, those of you with kids in school — check what they’re actually being graded on. Then ask yourself if that’s why you sent them to school and if that’s the formation you want them to have. Then see if there’s anything you can do, including but not limited to “teaching them at home after school.”
And cut our fellow citizens some slack. They are the product of this system. They’ll need to go through conditioning as well as twerpitude before they come out on the other side as free men and women.
And yet, I have faith a number of them will. Reality tends to beat this sort of programing.
Just don’t pile on with the school and assume the teachers are always right. This is not the school you went through (or at least I hope not.) And what your kids are failing on might be things that would hurt them in life and work should they learn them.
According To Hoyt 
Reminds me of my junior year of high school. Test scores were highest in the class, as were the daily assignments. But I got docked for not taking enough notes, so was 3rd in the class. “Do I need to take notes on how to breath and walk?” didn’t really endear me to the teacher.
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My ninth grade English teacher *loathed* me because I was a bookworm fresh out of home school. I knew every grammar rule plus a few she didn’t, I just couldn’t quote them. It was an…adversarial…year.
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c4c
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Just to expand on Sarah’s announcement, I turned the blog into Audio and am posting it twice a day in order (from her first post in 2006). With ~3800 posts, it will be a while before it catches up to anything near current, it was actually pretty refreshing to go over some of the older stuff as I was prepping it. As to profit, who knows if it will even happen, but I figure we have been bugging her to monetize her blog for like a decade now, and I was building tools doing some other YouTube projects, so why not? And if we can get YouTube to pay her by subscribing and listening to it, well, no real work on our part (and I maintain that the cut she insisted I take of any revenues is absurdly high, given that she wrote all of content).
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a text to speech voice that really resembles hers, but that’s life. Otherwise there *would* be stock audio of “moose and squirrel” somewhere in each video. Can’t have everything, I suppose.
Just a couple of nuts and bolts things:
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Have either of you considered Rumble for hosting this? YouTube has a well known track record for sneaky censorship.
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And even if they don’t just ban it, they will demonetize it as soon as the subject of COVID, elections, etc. are mentioned.
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Rumble gives no Fs about sill censorship games, from what I can see. Any vids that are mirrored on rumble get no views on yew (because it’s poisonous) toob from me.
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rumble has a well known track record for low viewership unfortunately. It’s like taking things down from amazon. Cutting off your nose, etc.
It’s okay to have it in rumble TOO but starting there is a non starter (From friends who do vlogging, not PFA opinion.)
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Most of the content providers I follow do both. They just expect certain subjects to get demonetized / banned, and don’t discuss those subjects at all on YT. They usually put up a message saying “Your getting all YT will allow; for certain subjects, here’s my Rumble link.”
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I’d watch/listen to Rumble more if there was findable content there. I know, catch-22. I no longer recall if that’s also a place where for most things one must ‘subscribe’ and can’t just look and be done.
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Orvan, I use Rumble a fair amount, and there’s 2 levels, Follow and Join.
Follow puts them in your personal feed for free. Join is where you can choose to send them money every month.
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Steve, I meant to ask – do you know of any social media schedulers thatvwork with Rumble? I can try and get an Api key and put some python together, but if a solution is already available, that would just be easier
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Not off the top of my head; I’m just an end user there. I’ll see if I can find something.
I’m also not familiar with the ins and outs of Rumble hosting contracts; I like Rumble simply because they seem to be more free speech friendly than yt.
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Here’s a link to their Content hosting terms.
https://studio.rumble.com/terms#:~:text=as%20a%20result.-,AGENCY%20AGREEMENT,set%20out%20herein%20which%20specifically%20govern%20this%20relationship%20(the%20%22Agency%20Agreement%22).,-Appointment%20of%20Agent
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Much appreciated, will read it over my lunch break
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Would love to do both, but the uploader I am using doesn’t have rumble integration. might be worth looking at alternatives on that score…
If I can figure it out, I will get it set up and let Sarah know..
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I had one guest post that I can recall, and while I don’t want it pulled as such, I’d like to read it myself, so when it comes up along the way, let me know and I’ll see about doing an audio version.
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I see 2 from you:
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2020/09/05/it-takes-longer-than-you-think-by-b-durbin/
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2020/10/01/perspective-by-b-durbin/
It’s going to be a while until they come up, but if you pass me a recording and (and this is important) a SRT file, I will render them and put them in the queue.
Let’s see… about 3100 items before them, 2 items/day,365 days/yr – you have until September of 2028 people start asking for 3/day.
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when our older son came out of a private elementary to 7th grade in a public school they “didn’t have room” in the advanced class. He had a portfolio of his work which was impressive. We finally had to have an attorney friend write a stern letter to the school citing laws about appropriate placement. They found room. You’ve gotta do what you gotta do.
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I’ve seen this myself. Son and daughter are both very intelligent. Guess which one graduated with a 3.9 gpa(missed valedictorian by only a whisker) which one had an IEP (special-ed, we used to call it), got horrible grades, and only managed to graduate by getting pawned off into the local community college’s GED program — and therefore into a place where it was suddenly possible to succeed— so as not to hurt the high school’s graduation rate?
There was lasting damage done to both of them by the public school system, and I’m trying not to kick myself for not realizing I could’ve taken them out of it and taught them better myself.
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That last paragraph? same, same.
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Luckily mine were in public schools in a good district in the late 80’s.
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Same. Our one child fared fairly well but then teachers knew both of us were paying attention. Accused of too close of attention. Even told tutoring wasn’t fair to son. (Since when?) Got the feeling at the second teacher parent conference the HS teachers thought they’d have it easy because only mom was there, with son. The look on their faces when we said that dad couldn’t make it because he was away because of work. We were choosing to not move son away from HS.
I think now with the options for homeschooling I would definitely lobby for it. But when our son was in school (class ’07, so mid/late ’90s, early ’00s) was not impressed with the families we knew were home schooling (interactions through scouts and kidsports).
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I hated high school. Hated it. Had the place been hit by a meteorite and ended up a big smoking crater, I’d have been happy. Still managed to pull out a C average even though I was in the lower middle of the class (we had 1100 students in my grade). Went to college after graduation and was invited not to return after the first semester.
Six years later I went back to school and graduated with a 3.3 overall GPA and 3.7 in my major. Got a fellowship and went to grad school (but didn’t finish; a job beckoned and I was in my 30’s by then).
My problem was not that I was incapable of learning but that the high school curriculum was boring. To give the perfect example…all through high school I hated history and did poorly in it. In college I majored in it, and went on to grad school in it. So…maybe my high school needed to learn something about how to teach history? Who knows. Just glad those years are over and I don’t have to get up in the morning and spend a dreary day at the high school.
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Attending college six or more years after HS, instead of immediately afterwards, makes a huge difference.
I did both. Attended college right out of HS, got the degree. My grades were at best a C, C+ in my major. Age 22 at graduation. Fast forward 5 years, two year program, program grades A (3.98 average). Brought the overall college grade to B. It takes a lot for 110 hours to combine with 203 hours from a C to B. Three years later completed the second 4 year degree, another 100 hours, brings total college average to a solid B+ (program average was 3.9). I was 32 when I graduated. It made a huge difference, at the university level at least, between 17 VS 29. Huge difference. At least it did for me.
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I learned one thing of any use in high school: typing. Everything else was wasting time.
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The Reader learned a lot in high school, but only because a history teacher recognized an unfed mind and arranged for me to have a pass to the library for all my free periods instead of ‘study hall’. The high school had a decent library and by the time I graduated I’d read almost all of it.
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Oh so much this. I was lucky that some ‘study halls’ were library time.
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My high school seems really different from your guys’ experiences. I never had a summer reading list. Our campus was open, so if we didn’t have class during that period we could leave. We didn’t have study hall and didn’t need a pass to go to the library, or sit in the commons, sit outside in the grass, etc. we even had a small cafe that was open before and after lunch hour where I typically would pick up a sandwich and bottle of tea or some chocolate/strawberry milk.
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Son’s HS had required study hall. Had to get permission to take a class during that period. He did for one term. In addition, JR and SR classes, had to leave campus for study hall. Could not even go to the library, or sit in their own vehicle in campus parking lot (leaving if you had a class afterwards was fraught. The parking permit was really just a legal parking spot hunting permit.) Son’s study halls worked out to last period on his split schedule. (HS worked on a split schedule for 6 periods.) Starting JR year he had a car (trunk became his locker too) so he came home.
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We didn’t have parking permits. And we had plenty of spots, as there was an there was an “overflow” lot just down the hill where the softball fields were.
I’m not sure how it is now, since they expanded the school into the old north side parking lots a few years after I graduated. Though, if they took out a couple of practice fields they’d have plenty of room for parking.
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I did not have a vehicle until junior college year. But even way back in the stone age, campus parking, be it HS, regardless of district, any community college, any state university, a parking permit was a legal hunting parking permit, no spot guarantied. Got there early in the morning claimed your spot, and did not leave until done with campus. University, if lived on campus, avoided leaving except on weekends. That bad. The university north of us, did have “free” parking if you used the stadium parking, except during games (or was when I was there in late ’70s). It has not gotten better.
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Sounds familiar. High-school English classes did an amazingly good job of making me hate the idea of working with words in any kind of organized setting. Tedious, pointless, agonizingly slow…I got consistent B grades by reading whatever they assigned in (usually) minutes to maybe a single night, paying zero attention to anything that happened in class, missing half the homework, and doing well on the big assignments. At least my teachers had enough sense not to bother me about reading novels under my desk in class (I tried to keep it on the DL, but I’m sure they knew).
That hatred persisted through 2 1/2 meandering years of college, the 5 years after I dropped out, and the first 3 weeks of the lit classes I begrudgingly signed up for because they were the fastest path to finishing an associate’s degree. The discovery that it was possible for literature, essay-writing, and research to actually be interesting *and* challenging blew my mind.
In fact, it disordered my sanity so much that I figured grad school was the next inevitable step. That’s the beginning of a whole ‘nother story, but I’ll skip over that sordid saga and just say that somehow, in the end, I wound up making my living with words — and *enjoying* it — despite the school system’s attempts at every level to beat it out of me.
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College pretty much beat writing out of me. Being the only one to write up (most) my support manuals, actually not bad at it. This is based off of feedback. Started doing writing because I despise explaining, again, and again, and again. Rarely the same people (happens, with some) but because sometimes the same problem comes in waves or reasons. Tend to over explain with not only how, but why. Some reason the people who complain about that, are the ones who my target audience complained about not giving enough information. (Go figure.) Or why the comments, when told I was leaving, were “Nooooooo. I understand when you tell me how!”
Still shy of writing fiction.
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Please, please tell me you were no longer sojourning the Old North State in 1990. (And I thought I was lagging in unpacking; oh, wait, this is from 2015. Shoot.)
By the way, any advice on a leaky hot water heater (possibly around the top heating element)?
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Replace it. Depending on capacity etc you might get out for around a grand.
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A *what*?!!!
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Going to second, third, etc. the whole bit on “replace it, soonest”. Tank and water heater are not cheap, no. What’s really not cheap? Having to replace everything at floor level in the house.
Guess how I know.
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If you can DIY, it’s not so horrible. [Looks at Home Desperate: rather more expensive than our previous one, but if you don’t insist on the bells and whistles (whatinhell is a “smart” water heater. Maybe I don’t really want to know…), you can go 40-50 gallon for $550-750. Also try plumbing supply houses; many (most?) will sell retail.
Did a gas water heater in the house in San Jose; it leaked, but we caught it right away. For the current house, we swapped out the 16 year old heater before it failed.
If you want to do the work, you can extend the life by replacing the sacrificial anode before it starts leaking. See
and follow the links. No, I haven’t done it; too damned old to want to mess, and we made sure to put in a) a drain pan and b) a water leak alarm–available at Home Depot for cheap.
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“whatinhell is a “smart” water heater. Maybe I don’t really want to know…),”
It’s net connected so the EPA can decide cold showers would be better for you, serf!
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As determined by the People’s Republic (h/t Kurt Schlichter), you don’t need a smart system for the commissar-dictated shutdown to occur. There’s another system for that, and not all “smart” (ie, Botnet of Things) water heaters are accepted for Oregon.
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We get our hot water heaters from Jerry’s which is local to Lane County Oregon. Sure Home Depot is available too. But why?
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Short answer, they sold what we wanted for a decent price.
Longer answer: The heater space was really confined, and I had to have measurements before we bought. Could get that information for the heater in advance, and Depot could get one on hand in a few days. We used a plumber who had done several jobs (ranging from installing the new kitchen sink plumbing to running the 300′ line from a new well to the existing water line), and this setup worked. We bought the heater, the plumber picked it up and installed it when it arrived at the store.
Depending on the job, I’ll frequently buy from Depot (the gift cards through Fred Meyer/Kroger help with gasoline prices), but I’ve bought a lot of stuff from Grover’s. (Good service, great selection and they have the odder stuff I seem to need.) Things like the surge tank for that well came from Grover, as did a kitchen sink and faucet. Larger electrical projects usually mean I’ll spend a fair amount of money there, too.
I’ve not checked out Ferguson for plumbing supplies. Was under the impression they preferred to sell to the trade, but like Platt Electric, they do retail, too. (Got some major solar bits from Platt. It’s nice not having to pay shipping for 11′ solar panel rails and a pallet of panels.)
Last bit on Depot: the web site is good for information, much of it from the manufacturer.
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We use Home Depot a lot. Just not if we can get it reasonable from Jerry’s, or can’t get it at all. Just got our new (cheap) grill from Home Depot. Jerry’s sells grills but stock only the expensive ones. Our experience is the cost isn’t worth going expensive. While better materials the better materials don’t last enough longer to be worthy of the expense.
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Our circa 2001 Weber gas grill is in semi-retirement; we decided a somewhat bigger grill made more sense. (We cook hamburgers 5 pounds at a time. I can do 2 batches with the new Weber, but the old one needed three.) The stainless surfaces are a nice touch, though we cover the working grill. (The older one is in the back of the RV shelter. That one was painted alloy, and is showing its age.)
Several places sell grills, ranging from pretty cheap to OMG (looking at you, Big Green Egg), but AFAIK, Depot is the only local outfit selling Webers. The Traegers look neat, but our cooking doesn’t align with what they do well.
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Off brand cheap won’t last a year. An inexpensive decent Weber we get 4 or 5 years out of. They get recycled to near by yard debris recycle/supplier. Don’t know how long that will last.
Reason we can do that is someone takes them and recycles the parts either into a grill or to metal recycling. Plus since we have to take the utility trailer to get a new one, the recycling location is (more or less) on the way. If we have to take it to dump recycling it’ll sit there. Or more likely we have taken months and recycled one through the recycle bin, a few pieces, or one larger piece, at a time.
Jerry’s carries the expensive Green Egg, Traegger, and high end Weber. Jerry’s also has the replacement parts that burn out, but that costs as much as a new grill. We got the $249 Weber, this last time. (I know, cringe when $249 is “inexpensive”. Had cheaper, but the grills were cheap materials.)
We grill all year (have a covered area). Don’t massive grill. I buy meat, then package based on how many servings, and freeze. Have one more set of individually wrapped hamburger patties, before have to make up more.
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I get nervous about using charcoal in fire season, so we’ve been using gas grills since we moved here. Bought the original in San Jose, and got the new one a couple years ago. The old one is still working, but the exterior paint is flaking off, and the thermometer died a while ago. The replacement was in the $400-500 range, but with the cover in place, they seem to last a long time. I did have to replace the diffuser bars (weber calls them “flavorizers”) once. Those were enamel covered steel, while the new ones are stainless. We’ll see how they do.
Most of our grilling is stuff done in advance. The 5 pound chubs give us 20 burgers. I’ll slightly undercook them, and we microwave ’til done for the meal. Country ribs get similar treatment. Those get cooked in water, then a short sear, then they’re frozen into dinner packs.
Didn’t last year, but previously, we’d peel zucchini, oil and spice the spears and grill them. Those, just enough for dinner. I cheat and spray them with cooking spray. As memory serves, I’d cook 3 minutes on one side, flip and do 3 more minutes.
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We do not use charcoal either, without the reason.
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Ditto. Replace, soonest. There are very few things in a home that can do more difficult-to-fix/you-want-HOW-MUCH???!?!11!? damage than a leaky hot water heater.
Make sure it it is in a non-corrodible drip tub of significant size.
They also sell fairly inexpensive leak detectors. its a 9v screamer box with a pair of electrodes on the bottom.
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And get the drip tub / AC evaporator drain inspected when you do it.
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If it’s more than 5 years old, replace it. Less than 5, repair might make sense, but if repair is more than 1/2 the cost of a new one, forget it.
I just replaced a gas water heater. The new one, plus a drip pan, cost $870. I could have got a cheap one for around $650, but decided to go with ‘Pro Grade’ instead.
The old one wasted $40 of gas the month it croaked.
I exercised some foresight when installing the old one, so replacing it was pretty simple. I use 3/4″ stainless steel braid hoses instead of those funky copper flex pipes. Makes the job much easier.
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Replace it.
We don’t bother with the drip pan as the hot water heater is in our garage on the floor. Leaks just flow out under the garage door.
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I managed to persuade my oh-so-Lefty sister to let me put her (brilliant) kid through a private (Montessori) school. While they had their share of Leftroid silliness, they did teach her how to read, write, and math. And they were largely free of the horseshit and evil of thelocal public system.
She -thrived-.
At high-school time, My sister decided kid -had- to go to public High School. Sadly, it did damage. But the kid remembers how to think, how to learn, and she continues to be far more mature than her age would suggest.
“I want to be an (artist – odd field). But I have to make a living as an (artist – odd field). So I need to make a living while I figure out how to be an (artist – odd field) and how to make a living.”
At 16.
She has been working, by her insistence, since legally able to do so.
Proud of her.
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Kudos to her!
I’ve heard mixed things about Montessori schools. I suspect each school is slightly different, which contributes to the “it was great” and “it was almost as bad as public schools” variation.
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In absolute fairness (and this is not a defense), a lot of elementary school teachers are morons studying to be midwits. Genuine intelligence scares them, when they manage even to recognize it. To most of them, “do it this way” is the smart way, and anyone who does not obey must be dumb. And to the rest, forcing the actually-intelligent kids to conform is revenge in the abstract against every person they ever encountered who made them feel as stupid as they actually are.
The public schools are not designed to educate but to indoctrinate, to incarcerate, and to humiliate. Those that are exceptions, are exceptions.
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That, and to allow the delicious vengeance of the “I love to fit in!” teachers on those of us odd ones who might be persecuted into miserable hospitalized heaps, if not graves. All it takes is them… not doing anything to stop the other kids.
Yeah. Homeschool if at all possible.
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Once, in the 9th grade, had a teacher that told me “maybe YOU should teach the class then?”
Should have taken him up on it. He was mangling “teaching” so badly I had to translate for the rest of the class more than half the time.
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Mal: “Do you want to be in charge?”
Jayne: “Yeah!”
Mal: “Well…you can’t.”
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Math teacher did that.
Was not pleased when I informed him that I was willing to copy the stuff out of the back of the book like he did, if I got to actulally HAVE the book with the answers to do so.
Same teacher that required asking everyone else in the class before he’d help anyone, so I was already teaching the class… and it was a new curriculum, so I’d never been exposed to this before.
It was not fun.
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I’ve seen town and state governments take surplus funds and reduce the next year’s tax rates with them.
I have NEVER seen a single U.S. school district in any state I’ve been in ever return a surplus to the taxpayers.
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Never seen a town take surplus and do anything smart with it, but then the closet town (not that we pay into the coffers no matter how much they want us to) is Eugene.
Our state, Oregon, returns excess funds over budget. Not that they want to. They are legally required to. Lately almost every two years we’ve gotten kickers applied to taxes owed. This year meant a $2200 refund.
Agree. We have two school districts for our city and unincorporated near by area (not counting the outlying rural town school districts). Both are always crying poverty. District we are in just closed one elementary, due to budget, and rumors another is on the chopping block. They don’t have the option to close down a HS, there is only one in the district.
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Well, I prefer reading.
But there’s no reason to not turn it on when I’m doing something else that doesn’t need the speakers. (Plus subscribe and like, of course.)
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Urk. Something strange with the transcription software here! At least on the one video that I’ve audited so far (“Burgers In the Time Machine”).
Somehow, it’s turning apostrophes into circumflexed “a” – and the word is therefore being spelled out, since the audio converter has no idea what is meant.
Oh. I left this in draft and did some poking around while waiting for the daughter to get out of work (VERY late tonight, well past eleven). Apparently, many of the lower level “readers” only handle code page 1252 (the old eight bit “IBM” character set). So it converts anything outside of that down. Which probably explains the odd wide space in the text transcript ribbon after those circumflexed “a”s – that’s some other character conversion of the other half of the Unicode, maybe non-displayed controls, who knows?
It could also be that the software hasn’t been told that the text is Unicode – just like web pages, it needs to know what character set is in use.
Hope this helps Matthew deal with the weirdness. (Sigh. Spelling and grammar checkers. WPDE. All supposed to make our lives EASIER, right?)
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I’m currently writing some python code to do a find/replace in the text files of the blogposts I am using. If I’m lucky, it should solve most (though not all) of those issues by dealing with punctuation and special characters on the front end. I think.
The main problem is that I then have to re-encode everything, which with the tools I’m using is about a 3 week job, just in terms of computer time, so I really only want to do it once if I can manage it.
I am going to try and bundle as many fixes as possible, so there is this, lowering the music volume, and whatever else people point out to me in the next several days. I should have some time next week to implement fixes and start re-encoding. Hopefully I can set it up so that it will feed new files into the hopper as they are created, instead of waiting for the whole job to be done, That will let the quality improve much sooner (like next week instead of next month).
The larger problem: I have very little idea of what I am doing, and learning this stuff as I go. I have no idea what mistakes I am making, and won’t until someone spots them in the finished product, so there will likely need to be multiple rounds of improvements..
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SO much fun.
But know that we appreciate you greatly.
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eh, if I didn’t want multiple rounds of QI, I shouldn’t have gone into engineering
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ok, I ran the programmatic fix and it seems to have dealt with the majority of the problems.
The reading of the title now no longer has a pause before the first sentence, but I can live with that if it means getting the rest of the stuff fixed.
I’m re-encoding it all now. Speed is increased by ~20%, background music will be cut to half volume, and i *think* I got special character handling done. Since there are only a dozen or so videos up, I will pull them down and upload the fixed versions when they are ready. Depending on how flaky my computer is, might be after the weekend.
Are there any other major issues I should deal with? i am only 10 hours into encoding, so restarting now isn’t a huge deal.
Will announce here once that is done.
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I pretty much refused to do anything in school that I didn’t want to do, or that I had to do in a certain specific way. If they penalized my grades, I didn’t really care. Also, I read other books in every class, from seventh grade on, unless I was writing something else. I also refused to journal, for the most part, when journaling was supposed to be done every day for various classes.
By which I mean that I just didn’t do it. I felt kinda guilty about it, but honestly my brain shut down around most homework. It’s funny, because I have no trouble doing makework or silly tasks if I’m being paid to do it. Whenever I just don’t do things, I guess my brain has given up on their utility.
(Unfortunately, many workplaces do try to push makework and documentation beyond anybody’s tolerance for reasonable workload.)
Mind you, I was insanely perfectionist about everything else, and most of my teachers enjoyed the homework and reports that I did do. So I’m pretty sure that most of my participation grades were fudged in my favor, especially since I was tops on any standardized test that I was given.
OTOH, my parents knew who all the teachers were going to be, and which ones we should have, because they were part of both teacher and parent gossip grapevines. So I was consistently funneled into classes with teachers who would put up with me, which is not something a lot of parents can do, these days.
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The huge lists of school supplies that won’t be used by the kids — sometimes I wonder if there’s not some kind of grift where teachers are selling stuff on Ebay. I mean, yes, classes go through a lot of stuff, but not that much stuff.
I mean, I’ve never seen a teacher go through more than one tissue box a month, even in the depths of winter. Nobody’s handing out tissue boxes to kids, unless they’re the really shallow tiny ones. Kids usually get handed a tissue pouch of six, if they don’t have their own tissues.
Markers last for YEARS. You don’t even use markers in class much, because teachers and janitors hate to clean markers off desks or chairs.
And so on. There is NO FREAKING WAY that anybody is using all that stuff, so it must be going on Ebay.
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Also, I’m pretty sure that we were forbidden to bring markers to school, even in high school. Much less in elementary.
Markers were used exclusively for making posters, or for covers on school reports that were supposed to have snazzier lettering. We used them at home, and we couldn’t bring them on the schoolbus or into school.
Of course, pretty much everything was forbidden and subject to confiscation, if there were any chance it would make a mess or attract mice, or be played with during class. Or that kids would want to steal it. (Our school system fought theft by banning anything kid-desirable, really.)
That’s why I find school supply lists particularly surreal, because they’re mostly lists of things you were specifically forbidden to bring to school in my day.
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My students go through a big box of tissue in three weeks, at the peak of allergy/cold season. Granted, the past two years have been bad for allergies.
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Those mass shopping lists are usually explicitly redustributionist. The “out” kids have to supply the “in” kids.
When they tried to punish Kid X, lawyers got involved.
I knew one kid that was supplied by parents with pens, pencils, etc, with custom labels “Stolen from (Kid X)”.
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What the actual (HONK!)?
-How- the (HONK!) did WordPress (HONK!)ing do that?
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12 schools thru high school, not counting kindergarten. Including 4 years at one high school, and 2 years at one private middle school. Moved a lot, including 3 states. Mostly hated school. They really disliked left-handers in the 50’s/60’s. I resisted all attempts to change it. I never told anyone, even family, that I could write equally well with either hand then, even mirror image. Writing backwards seemed so bizarre and useless. The problem was that there was no creativity in my right hand. The difference was like comparing driving a trash truck to a racer. Really obvious when I took an introductory flight in a sail plane. It was great, until the instructor noticed, and demanded I fly with my off hand. Yuck. End of flying.
Oddly enough, it has been documented that even right-handers tend to be more creative when using their left hand for various activities, like sculpting, painting, and others. When I heard that, it had me wondering if fighter pilots might have been better with the throttles on the right side, and the stick set up for the left.
High school was pretty much a waste of time. Mom presented me with a list of potential classes, with no guidance from her or school. I didn’t pick a language, and didn’t find out that that automatically directed me away from college prep courses until maybe my junior year.
I was ADD/Asperger’s. Wild child until the AS took command around age 8-10. Wallflower time began. High school history class, reading a novel inside the textbook. Teacher decided to make me an object lesson for the others. Asked questions about the current chapter, and I gave her the full story. She moved to the next chapter, that she hadn’t covered yet. Same response. She’s getting flustered, moved up a couple chapters further. Again I answered. Flustered and pissed. “HOW DO YOU KNOW THIS?” I read the book. “What! How much of it?” All of it. “WHEN?” First week of school. She was flabbergasted. I normally read all the textbooks early in the school year. I normally read two books a day then, plus newspapers, magazines, cereal boxes, etc. Every time we moved, I had to break in a new batch of librarians at each accessible library. Walking up to the checkout desk with 14 adult level books to go tends to get their attention.
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Doesn’t everyone read the textbooks first day of school?
Also, I read 6 books a day at my peak. Now I’m down to one or two, at most, depending on how much writing.
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You see stuff like this, think about reports of students attacking teachers, and start to think the problem isn’t teachers getting shivved but the WRONG teachers getting shivved…
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Games Workshop’s woke mess…
Games Workshop (GW) is a British company best known for making game rules and 28mm scale figures for use in table top wargaming. Their most popular game is Warhammer 40,000, and the most popular figures in this particular game (BY FAR) are their Space Marines. 40K (as it’s often shortened to) is popular enough that you’ve all seen at least some of the memes. Shouts of “Heresy!”, the guy in the tank yelling “Drive closer so I can hit them with my sword,” and more all derive from the setting or artwork of the game.
The poster boys for the setting are the Space Marines of the Imperium of Man. For as long as the game has been around (since the late ’80s), they have been power-armored, genetically modified super-soldiers. And for *almost* that entire time, they have been exclusively male (there were a couple of metal female space marine figures released very early on, before the lore regarding space marines had been codified). This is part of the lore of the setting.
A while back, Games Workshop introduced the Custodes into the setting. These were the bodyguards of the Emperor of Mankind, and are power-armored, genetically modified super-soldiers that are even more powerful than the Space Marines. And because these sorts of things always happen, eventually (a little over a decade ago, I think) Games Workshop introduced rules for using them, along with additional background information about them. The lore described how the noble families would send a *son* to the Custodes, and that said son would be genetically modified so that he would be capable of serving the Emperor.
And now, suddenly, Games Workshop has announced that there are Custodes of both sexes. Now, frankly, having female Custodes isn’t that big of a deal to me. The Custodes are a relatively recent addition, and GW could just say, “When we said ‘sons’ we meant ‘children’, and just used the male term reflexively without thinking about what we were doing.” If that were the case, I’d likely shrug my shoulders and move on. It’s not the Space Marines, who have been exclusively male for pretty much the length of the setting. But according to what I’m hearing, that’s not what GW is doing. What I’m hearing is that GW has taken the “Who are you going to believe – us, or your lying eyes?” approach, and is claiming that Custodes have always included women from the start. This is even though the terms used to refer to the Custodes have always been exclusively male whenever possible.
This is not going over well, and a good-sized chunk of that is the suspicion among many that before too long, GW is suddenly going to announce that there are female space marines.
And note that there are two exclusively female organizations within the Imperium that are represented with figures on the tabletop. The Sororitas is an organization of warrior nuns wearing power armor. They’re not super-soldiers, but they have faith on their side (literally). And the Custodes often work alongside an all-female order of psykers called the Sisters of Silence. The other military arms of the Imperium are not exclusive to one sex, with both men and women serving in the Imperium’s ground forces (known as the Imperial Guard, or Astra Militarum; usually – though not always – in sex-segregated regiments).
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Henry Cavill – after getting burned by the Witcher on Netflix – decided he wanted to do some shows based on the Warhammer 40K setting. He’s a fan of the game, and has quite a few of the figures for it. But unlike with the Witcher (where he reportedly suggested the franchise to Netflix, but allowed others to write and direct the series), Cavill intends to retain creative control of the product so that he can ensure it stays faithful to the source material. Cavill has arranged with Amazon and GW to produce shows that will air on Amazon using the 40K setting.
And now for the rumor…
This is a rumor, originally from 4Chan, so take it with a pound of salt.
According to the source – who claims to be a low level employee at Amazon – the female Custodes are the fault of Amazon putting pressure on GW.
Amazon is offering to pay GW a lot of money to license the 40K property, which gives Amazon some leverage over the British game company. And apparently, someone (or someones) at Amazon got the bright idea of using that to put pressure on GW to woke things up a bit. And the (only known so far) result of that is female Custodes. According to the source, GW has no intention of going any further with this than mentioning that they exist. They don’t intend to make any female Custodes figures to go along with this. But give it ten years, and I’m sure that attitudes at GW will change, and we’ll see figures appear. That’s just the way these sorts of things work, even if there isn’t a lot of outside pressure (and there will be).
Cavill, according to the source, is not happy with Amazon’s meddling, and has threatened to bail out. If true, this isn’t exactly an empty threat. Even if Amazon retained control of the license (and I’m not sure whether they would), the spectacle of Cavill – who everyone knows is pretty much entirely responsible for this coming about, and has been making public appearances talking up the game as a form of advance advertising – suddenly walking away would be a huge embarrassment for Amazon.
But, again, this is a rumor from 4Chan. So take it with a pound of salt.
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Eh. Amazon borked up badly with their Ringy Powy thing already, and the stink still hasn’t worn off. It’s probably just pontificating posers on the internet, but there’s at least *some* foundation to it. Little bit and speculative, but we will see.
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I suspect that Amazon is like a stupid hound dog — they’ll chase a skunk while still stinking from the last skunk they chased. Or a porcupine while still sore from the last one’s quills.
In short, embarrassment and pain won’t stop them from obsessively chasing ‘woke’.
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It’s about the ESG social credit score. According to the video I watched that discussed the 4Chan rumor, the ESG score goes from 0 to 50. And from the woke pov, the lower the score the better. Despite shows like Rings of Power, and Wheel of Time, Amazon’s ESG score is apparently in the low 30s, which is bad from the point of view of the people creating the scores. So Amazon no doubt wants to find ways to get the score down. This might tie into that.
There’s also another data point worth mentioning, given the topic – Games Workshop is a publicly traded company. Black Rock and Vanguard combined own roughly ten percent of GW’s stock, and are the second and third largest shareholders respectively. So while they don’t have a controlling chunk of stock, they’re no doubt trying to exert pressure to influence elements of GW’s game settings.
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Has anyone got a good handle on why Black Rock and Vanguard are all in for woke stupidity?
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For the same reason that many of the other TPTB are. The company leadership really does think what they’re pushing is better than the current values and mores of our society. They’re drunk on the idea of remaking society in their image, and confident that they know best.
In my previous comment, I mentioned that Blackrock and Vanguard are the second and third largest shareholders of Games Workshop. They were shown in a list of the top three shareholders. I didn’t recognize the name of the top shareholder. But I have since learned that this company (which (iirc holds about 13.5% of GW’s shares) is apparently a European equivalent to Blackrock, and has the exact same sorts of goals. The main difference is that they’re in Europe, exerting pressure on Europeans, instead of in America like Blackrock and Vanguard are.
All together, these three companies hold roughly 25% of GW’s stock.
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Actually they think most people agree with them. That’s it.
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There is a certain amount of willful blindness going on, and I’m not just talking of the opinion bubble sort. As an example, the Cass Report in Great Britain just concluded that giving puberty blockers to teenagers is a REALLY BAD IDEA, and was apparently convincing enough that even the British Labour Party is claiming to be against blockers. But I’m sure that within a few months, there will be a new “convincing” report claiming the exact opposite, and that’s the one that TPTB will decide to listen to.
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…and the authors of that Cass Report will suddenly start having all sorts of difficulties getting funding. They’ll be Grant Poison to any project they’re involved with, until nobody will work with them and they are shunned as pariahs.
———————————
“Politics perverts science. Scientists are rewarded not for finding and reporting the truth, but for telling those in charge of doling out the money whatever they want to hear. Play the approved tune and you get government grants, you get consulting fees, you get published. Make the wrong waves, and you don’t. Such measures do not produce good science, or good scientists.”
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“Just the tip.”
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I went to visit the yt blog. Tone down the music in future episodes, please. I found it overwhelming the voice at times.
Thank you for doing this, btw.
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It’s all integrated in, so I would need to re-render all 3800 files (doable, but not happy-making). That said, if it is a major issue for people, I will get it done. Honestly, the music is there to mask the fact that the TTS voice lacks the upper harmonics of a true human voice, and veers a bit into the uncanny valley. I have no objection to making it softer, it’s just that it will take roughly 3 weeks of runtime on my laptop to redo all of the videos.
Actually, this is a general thing: Seriously guys, i have no real idea of what I am doing here. If there are major issues, that prevent people from enjoying this, please point them out and I will try and fix them. Pop me an email at matthew dot excels111 AT gmail DOT com
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It’s not a major issue, just something I noticed. Don’t worry about redoing anything.
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Other larger issues have already been pointed out to me, so I will be starting a re-encode next week. I will include this in the fixlist – once I am redoing it, this is changing about 3 characters of python script. If it makes for a better product for you guys, I am happy to do it.
Figure dropping the music volume 30% in relation to the voice would do the job? I have a tin ear, so it is hard for me to tell.
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There’s that, but also if you have the ability to selectively drop frequencies, cutting down the midrange frequencies more than the high or low will work well too. Human voices hang out in the midrange. (Look for the term “EQ” in your music program. That would be the “equalizer.”)
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See, that comes under “no clue what I am doing”. I never even knew what the equalizer was for.
So if I filter the midrange frequencies from the music, the voice might come through better?
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Don’t filter them out entirely, but if you drop those 50% or so, that will make the voice clearer without making the music sound completely weird.
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ok, that *sounds* reasonable to do. Lemme see if I can figure out how
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I have trouble with background noise. If there’s any “music” playing *at all*, it drowns out voices, even when it’s theoretically at a much lower volume than the voices.
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Interesting… I’m the exact opposite. A bit of background music actually helps my brain focus on the words.
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Once upon a time, one of the 10 schools I attended (a Junior HS) gave two sets of grades: one for material learned, one for “Good citizenship”
Tanking either got parent conferences, as I discovered from Sex Ed. Acing the latter got you out if class for fun events, like the Globe Theater performing a slightly ammended As You Like It.
Since it did a decent job of keeping the place sane and learn able- I only got bullied hard outside of school grounds and hours – it is no doubt gone.
Balancing the individual with the collective requires judgment.
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Sarah says it’s just voice to speech…they’re actually training a new SarahGpt for download into potatus at his next oil change.
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Great! The Reader can’t wait for the next press conference when Brandon describes how this tribe of Usains saved his uncle from the cannibals.
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Oil change? I thought he was an electric potatus, which is why he runs down so quickly during his appearances and why it takes so long to recharge between them.
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Nah. Clockwork. Needs to be wound up frequently because the mainspring is worn out. Some day it will snap, and they won’t be able to pretend any more. :-P
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I still want to see Sarah as Press Secretary for a day (image of her smacking idiot reporters with a broom)
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The Reader would prefer to see her use her ax.
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Footage of the much stories Weaponized Umbrella in action
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You’ll be able to tell if there are any Hun reporters in the Press Room. They’ll be the ones asking her to say, “Moose and squirrel!”
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Throwing bacalhau at them.
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I would pay good cash money to see that :)
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Just wait until the wokerati hear Sarah’s accent— they’ll be certain she’s Putin’s twin sister. 😉😇😂
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In that thing I have no accent. It’s an ai voice. I’ll be reading stories starting this week, I think.
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Seriously looking forward to that, btw
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well, I personally think she should play Natasha in a live action Rocky and Bullwinkle, so….
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“Muse and Squirrels”
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“Muse and Squirrels”…
So, that would apply to an address by her to the DNC? 😎
Seriously, though. did they pick “DNC” because, said even reasonably fast, it can’t be distinguished from “D&C”, and the similarity of the group to the process is eerily close? Just asking… 😁
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