I’ve been doing some straightening in the basement. And I’ve stumbled across a couple things worth sharing. These will be of interest to my dog agility friends.
This was my boy Bogie’s MACH bar circa 2001. Now, back in the day they didn’t give out MACH bars. So the practice was, among some of us, to snatch away the actual very last bar your dog jumped as he earned the Championship title.
This was at a club up in Pennsylvania. I remember that the equipment manager was pretty pissed at me for making off with his equipment.
It’s fun looking at some of the names on the bar and knowing who was there on that day.
After I got the MACH I pretty much stopped trialing Bogie in the AKC. I did the same thing with the USDAA, when Bogie got his ADCh. I preferred instead to play league play at my own training center. I’ve never been the kind of exhibitor that the agility organizations really love.
BLOG1636_05.JPG
I also found this polo shirt in a box downstairs. As I’ve lost a lot of weight recently (about 45 lbs); I find myself fitting in clothing that I haven’t worn for a long time.
I’ve been wracking my brain trying to remember where the 2006 Petit Prix was held. My memory isn’t cooperating.
BLOG1636
Send your Questions Comments and Impassioned Speeches to Bud Houston, Houston.Bud@gmail.com.
Funny how one thing gets you thinking about another thing. Sometimes it’s hard to trace back through how your thoughts trip over each other on a common thread that might not be easy to unravel. How did I get here from there?
Take this as fair warning, don’t expect the writing below to summarize as some kind of cogent essay. It’s just rambling, following the connecting threads.
Kerouac
On rereading On the Road I’m provoked to consider the color and character that America has lost in the homogenization of our culture. I expect to write about that one day soon. But forgetting that provocation I’m captivated by Jack’s prose. Consider this salvo:
“The sun goes down long and red. All the magic names of the valley unrolled—Manteca, Madera, all the rest. Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”
I am agog.
The protagonists Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty were beat generation. They softly spoke the language of the so-called beatnik. It wasn’t a cartoon-like speech like Maynard Krebs (Bob Denver / Dobie Gillis). I see them like the young people of any generation, consumed with the daily task of making a life and a living, partying at the least provocation, while soulfully searching for love and fulfillment of lust.
The portrait of America at a point in time is an abiding character of the novel: places and roads and modes of travel, how people dressed according to fashion and practicality, the discovered foods, places where people slept and ate and worked, where they drank and danced, and the music that colored their lives. And every place was unique in all those ways.
Aside from country music, and soulful Mexican serenades, the Bop was mentioned more than a few times. I had to research it a bit. This was a sound and a dance that came into vogue in the early 50’s and was apparently the sound and dance of that generation.
Aunt L’Marie
A compelling family legend has my aunt L’Marie winning a Bop dancing contest in Brinkley, Arkansas. And before you dismiss this as a minor contest in a hick country town you should know that kids from all over that part of Arkansas traveled there to dance, which would include Wheatly, DeValls Bluff, and even kids from as far away as Clarendon. It was a big deal, you see.
It was L’Marie’s 15 minutes of fame.
Pleasanton
In the early 80’s I lived down in Pleasanton, Texas and commuted every day all the way up to San Antonio.
My next-door neighbors, by the way, were Ben and Mona Parker, who were quite famous and revered in the area, though I was too self-absorbed in my own life to recognize it at the time. Mona was the engineer who built KBOP AM radio transmitter.
I’m fascinated by the BOP part of the call name. I can’t help but believe that it was literally named after the favored young peoples’ dance of the era.
Along about 1983 Robert Johnson Advertising—where I worked—up in San Antonio got a contract to promote a Willie Nelson benefit concert down in Pleasanton to finance the launch of the Mona Parker’s Longhorn Museum.
Turns out that Willie Nelson worked for Ben and Mona at KBOP in the early days of the station. People in the area remembered Willie as a short-haired skinny young cowboy that wore a white suit and had a live KBOP program on which he played his acoustic guitar and sang country melodies. That’s the way the story was told to me.
In my youth, circa 1972, I took a trip to Arkansas to visit my brother who lived in a little town name of Hunters Mill. I applied for a job as an assembler over in Forest City and was hired. But I never quite made it to my first day of work.
My cousin Billie Joe and I took up a trip on a Friday night down to a dance club in Hazen with a mind to dance, drink a few beers, and maybe get lucky. On our way out of the club a police car followed us out, pulling us over before we could get on the Interstate. Having Arizona tags on the car was a red flag.
I was arrested for intoxicated driving. I’d had four beers, after all. And I was sentenced to serve six months in the Phillips County Penal farm, down by Helena.
I spent the next couple of months doing the work of the farm, which was building a bridge [impressive engineering complete with a pile driver that moved forward on the bridge as it was being built], chopping cotton, picking okra, and clearing right of way.
My mother, who had been vacationing down in Monterrey Mexico got wind of where I was when she got home to Tucson. She contacted the judge over in Hazen and made arrangements to pay off my fine. Whereupon I was released. Mom was born and raised in Arkansas and understood completely how that world worked.
I could write an entertaining short biography of that time; but that’ll have to wait. There’s another point I want to make here.
The 13th Amendment makes it unconstitution for a person to be held as a slave, with this important exception: “Except as a punishment for crime.”
After the Civil War the south with it’s shattered slave labor economy worked to recover economic viability by exploiting the “punishishment for crime” exception to the 13th Amendment. They targeted black people who were easy to demonize and were in ready abundance. Laws were enacted to make things like loitering, trespassing and vagrancy criminal offenses.
In 1972 there were roughly 350,000 convicts in American prisons.
Capitalism and Slavery
I cringe every time I hear a politician declare unwavering endorsement of the capitalist system! That system depends on the institution of slavery.
A prosperous capitalist system will thrive and grow. Today there are roughly 1,500,000 convicts in American prisons. These convicts work in conditions of slavery. We have 6% of the world’s population but 25% of incarcerated people.
Prison industries need cheap labor. Big corporations and billionaire funded think tanks (like ALEC) have played “ghost writer” to Republican legislation for more than 40 years; legislation geared to keep up prison populations to meet the production quotas of those prison industries.
Black people remain the primary target of criminal legislation to ensure a prison industries work force. Remember these bits from the American dialog: Habitual criminal; stop and frisk; mandatory sentencing; truth in sentencing; super predator; black music is criminal; drugs black people are more severely punished.
A Deferred Prosecution Agreement allows a judge to let a criminal escape punishment if he feels the person will likely forego a life of crime. A black person is 18 times less likely than a white person to be liberated by DPA.
A Premeditated Crime
The demonization of black people as human beings is objectively the same narrative as portrayed in “Birth of a Nation”.
To look beyond the racist viewpoint: a horrible crime has been perpetrated against more than a million Americans. Slavery is a crime against humanity. The capitalist system in cahoots with the legal system have made this crime an ongoing American nightmare.
Accessory to the Crime: The Federalists
The Federalist subscribes to the notion that the Constitution should be interpreted according to the sensibilities and beliefs of the founding fathers, as set forth in the Federalist Papers.
That’s all a bunch of happy horse-shit.
Our “founding fathers” were for the most part slave owners. And they wrote into the Constitution specific protections for the ruling class. Make no mistake about it, when politicians or jurists proclaim themselves to be “Federalist”, they are confessing to their support for the ruling class: Rich White Men; and for the modern institution of slavery.
Accessory to the Crime: The Supreme Court
Citizens United tilted political influence toward wealthy donors and corporations; enabling donors to buy elections, bribe politicians, and lavish gifts and money on Supreme Court justices. The law allows the donors identities to be kept secret.
The Supreme Court in 2013 struck down a section of the Voting Rights Act, weakening the federal government ability to block discriminatory voting laws. The court ruled that Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional.
The Superball Bonus
An added bonus to the modern American slavery scheme is that a person convicted of a felony is apt to lose civil rights for life, depending on state laws. That would include the right to vote. Somewhere I saw a statistic that 1/3 of black men in Alabama are unable to vote, having been convicted of a crime.
BLOG1634 ~ Day 18 of ?
Send your Questions Comments and Impassioned Speeches to Bud Houston, Houston.Bud@gmail.com.
Recently the dog agility community lost two pioneers and true heroes of the sport, Christine Joy Danielly and Ileana Mejias Nadal. Both of these ladies were forces of nature, building vibrant agility communities while promoting and growing the sport with their vision, work ethic, and unfailing enthusiasm.
Chris Danielly
Chris built Canine Capers, the club that hosted the very first ever dog agility trial in Georgia (USDAA circa 1990).
My favorite game for killing time (and brain cells, I suppose) is World of Warcraft. I’ve been playing for about 20 years. I started playing after hearing a fun piece on NPR describing the game.
Now I have written a guide (submitted for publication on WowHead) documenting my approach to collecting battle pets and earning heaps of in-game gold.
I’m trying to publish something everyday on my blog. So I’m attending to a bunch of back-burner writing projects. I would have published this World of Warcraft Guide much earlier… but I wound up spending most of the day figuring out how to use the damned WowHead Guide Editor.
I’d give you a link to the guide here, but it hasn’t yet been approved, yet and there is no link. So I’ll include the draft copy below to give you the opportunity to completely ignore it, and go do something productive with your day.
Introduction
Because battle pets are account-bound, this gold-making strategy envisions collecting, crafting and buying pets that can be caged, and then selling them on multiple servers. The strategy requires you keep auction house toons across (X) servers. I have toons on 11 servers!
Understanding the Battle Pet Universe
The battle pets universe has evolved over time. With each new release the crafty WoW developers have tweaked the circumstances for battle pets in that realm. The Pandaria and Warlords of Draenor releases were richly rewarding for the pet collector and, moreover, the pet farmer. But ever since Draenor the developers have backed away from exploitable drops and gold purchases. They’ve preferred instead to limit collection to rewards for achievement; boss-drops in dungeons; one-off quests; and a variety of grind-as-you-go material currencies.
Important: All of the old exploits remain. Many of them require tedious rep-grinding just to qualify to make or purchase the associated pets. But these pets will continue to be in demand. A novice pet collector might be reluctant to do a 3-day rep grind because all he gets from the work is a new pet in his pet journal. Your investment in the grind allows you to make or buy many as you want and then sell them on every Server where you have an Auction House toon.
Editor’s Note
This document has been edited for brevity. While the original vision included a lot of step-by-step documentation for earning qualifying reputation and how to gather mats that are that are pet-buying currencies, it became clear that reciting baby steps would swell this document to a dense 30 page tomb and obscure the simple explanation for the Battle Pets X-Server strategy.
Building Your X-Server Army
Expanding to a new realm means creating new toons. There’s no need to be in a hurry. Expand to a new server should be designed to exploit a specific pet or pet family. For example: I have a toon that does nothing but camp Environeer Bert in New Tinkertown for the drop of the Dibbler pet. I keep an Auction House toon in Iron Forge on this same serve.
Keep a main player for Alliance, and a main player for the Horde (on a different server). You’ll use these for rep grinding and traveling around for more advanced Pet tamer battles. The toons on all other servers are intended for working the auction house and camping pet tamers that drop pets.
Connecting Realms
Warning ~ Connecting servers are essentially the same server for the purposes of auctions. You’ll waste time getting established… just to find out that you are competing against yourself.
Follow this link to see a diagram of Connected Realms
The following list comes from a spreadsheet that tracks the pets I sell at auction. The table points to where the pet comes from and the purchase price of the pet .
Purchase Veilwatcher Hatch 950 Gold Vesharr Sprires of Arak
While technically not camping, you should run these:
Beasts of Fable Book II ~ Defeat Lucky Yi, Greyhoof, and Skitterer Xi’a; chance to drop: Mountain Panda, Snowy Panda, or Sunfur Panda. This quest available in Vale of Eternal Blossoms in Pandaria from: Sara Finkleswitch (/way 84.4 40) for Alliance, or from Gentle San (/way 60.8 23.6) for Horde.
Darkmoon Faire ~ Pet tamers Jeremy Feasel and Christoph VonFeasel. The Faire is typically up one week a month. Each day you can earn 15 Darkmoon Prize Tickets. 90 of the Prize Tickets allow you to buy—from Lhara—one of: Darkmoon Monkey, Darkmoon Turtle; Darkmoon Tonk; Darkmoon Zeppelin; Darkmoon Cub; or Darkmoon Hatchling.
Pet Battles
Doing pet battles to win dropped pets gives you the opportunity to level up your more valuable and useful pets. A level 25 pet might earn 2K more gold in auction than a level 1 pet. So, get in the habit of carrying a level pet when you battle.
Currencies
A part of your day will surely involve gathering the currencies you need to purchase pets to sell. This activity can be serendipitous with questing to stay up with the current Expansion.
At the end of the day time is the most valuable currency in World of Warcraft. While you might make a heap of gold, it’s worth remembering that it’s not real gold. Go outside sometime and get a little sunshine, take a walk in the snow, or reacquaint yourself with your family.
Design your daily activities in Azeroth to be time-efficient. This shouldn’t feel like a job.
The XServer Auction House
Keeping an inventory of 20 or 30 different pets, spread over any number of servers means that you will spend a lot of time refreshing auctions. But it’s worth noting that this strategy doesn’t work if you don’t keep your inventory in the Auction House. So don’t get lazy and put it off ‘til tomorrow.
When you do sell a pet you cage the same pet from your pet journal, and stick it right back on auction. If your pet journal is empty of that pet, then you have to go out and make or buy more of that pet to restock your journal. It’s harder to restock drop pets because most don’t drop often enough to have one to sell on all of your servers.
Buy Low Sell High
Check in the Auction House for pets that aren’t in your collection; There’s a filter for that!
The basic strategy is to make a list of maybe 20 pets you’d like to buy. Then go check the price for those pets on every server where you have an auction house toon. You want to identify pets on servers that cost half as much as they do on most servers. I will typically buy only about half that are on the list, and only those
Then you buy two or more of each, level them up, and sell them on the servers that have the higher prices. You will usually wind up having those pets for free for yourself, while still turning a profit on the extras you bought.
New Expansions
If you have a full collection, then the best time to buy more will be after an expansion, and WoW has added a couple dozen that aren’t in your collection. I typically wait about a month after a new Expansion release so I can do some intro questing, maybe do a few dungeons, and, regear my toon so that I don’t get killed by trash while I’m out collecting wild pets.
And, if you wait a month, the prices will settle down a bit and begin to regulate; and you’ll get burned less often by paying more for a pet than it will ever earn on Auction House. It’s a good idea when planning a gang purchase to wait for the beginning of a Pet Battle Bonus Event. This will allow you to quickly level up some or all of the new pets.
Summary
I started playing with WoW Battle Pets motivated mostly by profit. Over time I learned to be more legitimate and spend much of my time seeking out rare pets that aren’t drops and you can’t buy. Right now I’m closing in on that magical 1600 number.
This guide is documents a gold earning strategy using the XServer approach. For two to three hours a day the Auction House income is typically a minimum of 40K gold. And that’s not a bad rate of income.
Acknowledgements
WowHead is the invaluable research tool that informs my understanding of pet battles, quests and achievements. While I have left many elements of this Guide to your research labor, I am positive that you can and will use WowHead to find your way forward in implementing this methodology.
Weerd Horde Mage Zuluhed server
Questions Comments and Impassioned Speeches to Bud Houston, Houston.Bud@gmail.com; Include in the subject line “Battle-Pet Xserver” to get my attention.
BLOG1632 ~ Day 14 of ?
Send your Questions Comments and Impassioned Speeches to Bud Houston, Houston.Bud@gmail.com.
It is the Cholla cactus I’d like to talk about. If my anecdotal observations are of any use to scientists who research and care for the delicate riparian habitat, I would be gratified.
Overview
I grew up in San Manuel, Arizona in Pinal County a town built for mine workers in the southwest desert. Our house was on the west side of town, right up against an amazing forest of Cholla cactus.
Before I drift away talking about the cholla forest, I have to mention the smelters, with two smoke-stacks, right next to town that constantly (24×7) belched out smoke and ash. On some days the wind would blow the smoke through town at ground level. It was an acrid, foul stench that watered your eyes and choked your lungs.
This smoky pollution, I believe, in the few short decades that the smelter operated completely destroyed the cholla forest surrounding San Manuel.
The Story
Our house was up at the end of 4th Avenue with nothing but desert all the way up the backside of the Santa Catalina.
My brothers and I were complete desert rats. We had a regular hiking path through the desert that changed sometimes to investigate some critter or artifact.
We lived in a magnificent forest of cholla. While there might be the occasional occatillo or saguaro or ironwood tree, this was a cholla forest. There was Teddy Bear, Barrel Cactus, those little Buckhorns, and lots of Jumping Cactus and Staghorns and Cane Cholla. There was another kind, a lot like the Cane cactus but was colored purple, with a touch of burnt umber. And there was a knee-high cholla that had little red berries in the winter.
The cholla forest had a magnificent smell. It is a unique and poignant fragrance that exists nowhere but there, in the cholla forest. I could smell when a jumping cactus had loosed little land mines across the ground, primed to stick and cling to you if you brushed by.
When the desert blooms and the summer storms roll down from the mountain the desert air is sweet and earthy and full of promise.
The desert rabbits would make their burrows in the jumble of fallen parts at the base of the cactuses. These made for a formidable stickery defense. On many days our romp in the desert would have me pulling cactus stickers out of my dog Smokey’s muzzle when we got home. Smokey was a stub-tailed Black Lab that loved chasing rabbits.
Us kids were experts at removing jumping cactus stickers. Usually it was one pod that jumps up and fixes to you with dozens of sharp clinging needles. The trick is, get it off all at once. You put a stick up under it and you flick it away. Sometimes you get “the big one”, where you get a pile of cactus stuck on you from ankle to hip. Ouch! You gotta flick them, one pod at a time.
At our fort, in the relative shade of an ancient Palos Verde tree, we erected a statue made from fortuitously shaped cholla wood. The cholla skeleton is shaped like any tree, except the trunk and branches have a hollow center and a honeycomb of M&M-size holes that drill right down to the center. It’s like a big sieve.
On top of our cholla golem we put a couple mean looking devils’ thorns, sending a clear signal to the world that the 4th Ave gang is boss of the wash.
The Disappeared Forest
My family moved away from San Manuel when I was old enough to start high school. I didn’t return to San Manuel for twenty years.
But when I did, I could not resist a trip back out into my beautiful cholla forest, right up at the end of 4th Ave.
The forest was gone… disappeared.
And it had been gone for a while because there wasn’t so much as a cholla skeleton littering this pale ghost of the desert I grew up in. And the aroma of the cholla forest was gone.
It was a sad time for me. We’d grown up with a real relationship with that desert, a world of beauty and wonder. And it was just frigging gone. On that day I became an environmentalist.
Summary
I get that this accounting is anecdotal ~ one old man remembering a sliver of his childhood. But I witnessed the world changing. My belief is that the clumsy thoughtless pollution of the copper smelters very likely poisoned the world around them. Who could have foreseen the fragility of this habitat?
If you can pass this history on to your researchers I would be gratified. I am a witness.
Post Script
I found this picture on Google Maps Street View. Ours was the house with the pick-up parked in the lawn. I am happy to see little stands of Jumping cactus out in the desert. This might indicate that the Chollas can return now that the Magma Copper Co smelters are no longer active.
BLOG1631 ~ Day 12 of ?
Send your Questions Comments and Impassioned Speeches to Bud Houston, Houston.Bud@gmail.com.
I have a messed up diet right now. I’m unable to eat spicey food because spice burns the back of my tongue. I’m not talking a “spicey food” kind of burn; I mean a real painful scorching thing like you just popped a burning coal in your mouth.
So, my diet has been reduced to very bland fare: rice, bread, scrambled eggs vanilla ice cream, tapioca pudding; unsalted crackers. Funny thing, or kind of incongruous at least, I can use soy sauce and it doesn’t bother me a bit.
I’ve lost 40 lbs in the past month. There’s no cause for alarm. In fact I’m having a bit of fun with it, looking forward to wearing old clothes that haven’t spanned my girth for a few years. I’d like to trim down another 20 lbs; and then I’ll hold the line.
For a minute I want to talk about food. Pardon me if this this is just a random brain dump.
Cooking Rice
Funny thing about rice recipes is they don’t make any sense to me. Perfect rice is like the easiest thing on earth to cook. But recipes (including the one of the rice box/bag) want to dictate you how much water to use tell you how much time the rice has cook.
Here’s the simple perfect rice every time recipe:
Fill your pot with water and bring it to a rapid boil
Dish out however much rice you want to cook and, while you’re waiting for the pot to boil, rinse and strain your rice
When the water is at a full boil dump in the rice and give it a stir. Leave it there about a minute.
Now reduce the heat to a simmer and leave it on the burner for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
When the rice is cooked drain off all the water, and leave the pot on the stove so that it finishes cooking with the steam, and the steam finishes removing any water.
Definition of terms: A full boil means the water is agitated and furious. A simmer is also a “boil”, but it’s a gentle rolling boil. I’ll usually have a separate burner prepared set at a medium heat so when I move the boiling pot to the new burner, it will quickly settle down to a simmer.
The about 10 minutes timing is where you use a cook’s judgement. Several times in the last couple minutes bring out a couple kernels of rice and taste test them. If there’s a little crunchy center they need more cooking time. If the kernels are soft in the middle you can pull the pot off the burner and it shut off.
Chop Sticks
Marsha thinks that it’s so weird that I always use chop sticks to eat rice. I try to explain that chop sticks let you savor a bit at a time. When eating with a fork or spoon I tend to gobble the food.
She argued, the other day that you don’t get chop sticks in a Mexican restaurant. Well, there you go.
I had a good chuckle last night watching John Leguizamo Does America. He was having dinner with a Cuban chef at a Peruvian restaurant in Miami. And I’ll be danged if they weren’t eating with chop sticks.
Simmering Potato Wedges
While having a glancing discussion on boil and simmer, I thought I’d share a cooking method for baked or fried potato wedges. Many of my recipes come from my mother’s cooking, so I’ve always called these “Steak Night Potatoes”.
Peel your potatoes
Cut into wedges
Put the wedges in a big pot and cover with water. Bring the whole thing to a Full Boil.
The moment you have a full boil put the pot off on a burner to simmer for no more than 5 minutes; 4 minutes might be enough. The objective of this step is to soften a thin layer on the outside of each potato wedge.
Completely drain the potatoes.
Put a lid on the pot and shake the pot up and down a little bit. This will flake up the thin / soft layer on each of the wedges.
Arrange and stick the wedges into the oven or put them in your fryer.
The result is a skin on the potato wedges that is almost like breading. The crusts will be crispy while the insides soft.
Baguettes
This morning I made Baguettes. These are a fit with my diet (being on the list of stuff that I can eat). And since they are kind of expensive at the store, it’s too easy to make your own a couple times a week.
Sliced bread gets stale too quickly. It’s nice to have a Baguette or French bread loaf so you can just break off a piece to have with about any meal.
I Suck at Selfies
I bought me a good Jamie Raskin head scarf and wanted to share a picture here on my blog.
Jeez I can barely figure out how to take a selfie. Some people do it all the time; but it’s never been my thing. The easy thing would be to get someone else to take your picture. But if nobody else is around you have to do the selfie thing.
Lord save me.
BLOG1630 ~ Day 11 of ?
Send your Questions Comments and Impassioned Speeches to Bud Houston, Houston.Bud@gmail.com.
On yesterday’s blog I was lamenting the loss of a series of videos I made circa 2001 demonstrating a small number of dog agility handler movements. This compilation might possibly have been the first ever dog agility instructional videos to appear on the Internet. YouTube wasn’t invented until 2005.
My friends Katie Gibbons and Dave Steiner came to the rescue. Apparently Katie knows how to use the WayBack Machine to snatch out of the ether anything that has ever appeared on the internet and managed to find the missing video files, which were relayed to me by Dave.
Thank you, thank you Katie and Dave.
Republished
I could not resist editing these videos, adding title pages and credits to present the videos in an organized collection. And because I am an agility coach I added to the video what I called “Rufus Notes”.
For the record, Rufus was a fictional character played by George Carlin in the Movie “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”. Rufus was a traveler from 700 years in the future who came back to help Bill and Ted save the world with their reverence for Rock and Roll.
While the Rufus notes might not save the world they should demonstrate that I haven’t forever been stuck in that place in time.
Here is a link to the YouTube video: Handler Movements
Enjoy.
BLOG1629 ~ Day 10 of ?
Send your Questions Comments and Impassioned Speeches to Bud Houston, Houston.Bud@gmail.com.
I’m contemplating gifting a Sony Handycam and a tripod to the Wood Co WV Dems Executive Committee (hereafter “the Dems”).
The Dems would benefit from learning how to create messaging videos that can be promoted and distributed inexpensively on social media to thousands of voters in West Virginia.
Last year, in West Virginia, voters completely rejected a couple of Republican ballot initiatives. If my memory serves me… 1) Defunding public libraries and 2) Taking public works spending authority away from townships and giving it to the state government. While voters recognized these initiatives as bull pucky they none-the-less reelected the rascals that sponsored the legislation. We need to remember that there’s lots of evil stuff that Republicans can do to screw the little guy that doesn’t have to be on the ballot.
I listened to fellow name of Simon Hargus speak last year at a spaghetti dinner hosted by the Dems. He was running for a state house seat. He made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. He demonstrated a grasp of dozens of local issues that affect the health and welfare of regular people. People deserve to hear about these issues to make informed judgement in elections.
Social media is a lot cheaper than display and television advertising and can be, arguably, just as effective.
I’ve contacted people on the Dems Executive Committee to see if they’re interested. They might very well ignore me or tell me “Go away kid! You bother me.”
It is what it is.
Old Stuff
I was out looking for some old videos that were posted to the internet back in the late 90’s in which I was demonstrating agility movements. These were like the first agility videos on the internet (before YouTube was a thing) Unfortunately none of the video links work anymore because they referred back to a web site that I used to own. And everything is gone away. Sad really because I was demonstrating with my young Sheltie boy Bogie, who was a great little agility dog and taught me a lot.
I include the link here so you can see what the page looked like and see some of their weird terminology we / I used for agility movements.
But the bit that I really like seeing, after all these years, is the note from Lynn Sigman down at the bottom of the page. It still makes me grin, after all these years.
BLOG1628 ~ Day 9 of ?
Send your Questions Comments and Impassioned Speeches to Bud Houston, Houston.Bud@gmail.com.
Having spent a lifetime in search of truth and logic and sanity I was surprised and somewhat pleased to find that I am at the very center of the universe of truth, logic and sanity. I accept that some might dismiss this as a pseudo-intellectual egocentric affectation, without letting the notion bother me.
My approach to understanding reality is a matter of punctuation. The English major in me wants to organize the jumble of nearly incomprehensible information that assaults us throughout life. You do that with punctuation. Let me give you a for example.
Can you punctuate this string of words so that it makes sense? ~
I’ll await your solution in the comments section.
When punctuated correctly these words become a proclamation that either solves or poses (Bertrand) Russell’s Paradox. I haven’t decided which, yet. Just so that you don’t have to spend three days researching the Paradox that tied knots in the underwear of the world’s leading mathematicians at the beginning of the 20th century, allow me to summarize: “If you have a list of lists that do not list themselves, then that list must list itself, because it doesn’t contain itself. However, if it lists itself, it then contains itself, meaning it cannot list itself.”
Okay, We’re Alone Now
By this point anyone that finds my rhetorical banter obscure or indecipherable has abandoned the reading effort and has drifted away to other pursuits. The MAGA Republicans were first to go because they hate having to think about stuff.
What I’ve been trying to figure out, for several years now, is how to manage and how to survive the torrent of disinformation and propaganda that assaults us. What is the truth? We live in an age of lies and contorted logic. I don’t know if we will survive.
But don’t you know, this whole line of thought came to me while I was out in the back yard cleaning up dog poop. When you have like five dogs you’ve got to keep up with the task. Besides which, we have a poop eater in the pack; and I need to get things cleaned up before he goes out to investigate the smorgasbord. When you have a poop eater you’ll be uncomfortable with his big wet kisses across your face.
BLOG1627 ~ Day 8 of ?
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