What I Want for Christmas, (Other than an new iBook)

Just as I wrote this post the screen fell over flat on my iBook. I shut the cord in the hinge a while back and busted it. I am so really tired of being broke.
We didn't go to church this morning which probably means that my daughter will grow up to be a drug addict and an atheist or even worse, a unitarian, or worse than that, she will attend a megachurch where the guys all wear short pants and high five each other a lot, and hug, and send praise messages to each other on facebook and the youth group members blow each other smoke chronic cuss in the church bathrooms...
But, I digress...
I want one of these for Christmas- Specifically a Thorens 145 or 165 with a dust cover and a decent cartridge. Like this... Then I can record my Maria McKee album to MP3 and perhaps my daughter will be come a not-quite-famous singer and song writer and be incredibly attractive at age 19 and suddenly become very large at age 45 causing her old fans to freak out when they see her on YouTube and remember that they loved her for him mind and not her looks all those years ago.
I probably won't get this for Christmas as I really just need socks and underwear...
And a new iBook.
And 1.2 million dollars
Or a pat on the head and a kind word...

Slugs and baiting and mud and what to you say to people who are almost dead

Today I spread slug bait. The Pacific Northwest has been invaded by a multitude of the slimy little creatures from all over the world. Many of them have moved to our farm.
I have been waiting for the rain to let up so I can spread slug bait for a month now. I usually apply it when I plant so that the slugs eat the bait before the plant sprouts. However, we worked a lot of ground instead of no-tilling and I was hoping to avoid the slug problem. A lot of the wheat I spread slug bait on today has almost big enough to out grow the slug pressures. The annual doesn't look like it has a bag slug problem but I thought I'd just throw away $500 so I spread bait on everything that was short and I could find slugs.
Ironically our other major pest seems to be doing a very good job at eating the slugs. Geese are flocking to the fields where the worst slug problems were. However, they also eat the wheat and sometimes the annual ryegrass.

I have two photos. The first is of the slug baiting machine parked in a wheat field that is totally overrun with annual ryegrass. The annual ryegrass fields that I planted are not this thick. It has been scheduled for spraying for a while and they claim they can control the annual. I doubt it.

The next photo is of wheat that I no-tilled into a sweet corn field. It is pretty much bare dirt. I planted it at an angle and if you look the right direction you can see rows. I spread slugbait as there were slugs but there were also many goose turds so it is probably a lost cause.

Then I managed to hit a mud puddle at a high rate of speed which drenched me with very cold water so I went home for lunch. After lunch I needed two more $95 bags of slug bait and to get the kids from school so I also went to see an older gentleman who just had a relapse of cancer. Two weeks ago he was walking around fine and today he is in a hospital bed in his home waiting to die. Very depressing. He invented a really cool hay tedder that lifts and gently fluffs the hay instead of throwing it around. His family is all gathering. I never know what to say.
I think I'd rather get hit by a bus and get it all over with at once.

Positive thinking and the Junior Jihadist

I was discussing the Jihad Jr. (Christmas Tree Bomber) with another farmer this morning and we figured out where he went wrong. The visiting farmer was laughing about the cell phone recording they played on TV today (I didn't see it) and how there were obvious edits and things missing and complaining about how much this stupid scam was going to cost us tax payers and, suddenly we realized a totally overlooked opportunity,
I've been reading "How to win friends and influence people," and I saw an episode of "Earl" yesterday and it all came together in a flash.  Jr. Jihad had it made, he just needed to recognize the opportunity!
So, he gets an apartment and $3,000 and gets to hang out wild Jihadists and blow stuff up in the woods and he really has it made. What was he thinking in punching the buttons on that cell phone?
He should have said, "hey guys, I think next week would be better cause they will have bell ringers in Pioneer square and that is such a total symbol of the great Satan."
Or, "I really need to go to Panama City beach to recruit more Jihadists during spring break."
Or could you get me Net Flicks cause I need it for research.
Or I really need strippers to convince me of the vileness of the western world. Oh, yeah and more porn!
Or how about the DAY AFTER Christmas cause that is when all the shoppers are out.
Or after New Years...
Or I need more cash, and a Hummer, man all the real terrorists have hummers...
Or I could do this so much better with the new iPhone.
Hey man, can we go blow stuff up in the woods again I forgot how.
Or dang it I would have pushed the button but I have a cold.
Or there was a kitty cat and it was soooo cute!
I should start a consulting service!

I accomplish almost nothing today

I took dad to the Doctor.
His lack of prune juice caused some difficulties for him. The Dr. suggested a more reliable means of regulating certain functions and I discovered that medically approved and packaged fiber is about the same price as $3.75 a quart prune juice. There has got to be a cheaper source of prunes.
In other news, I attempted to buy dad a new printer yesterday. In his quest to sell enough moisture testers to make us independently wealthy dad has been scouring the yellow pages for businesses with any connection to wood, concrete, hay, soil, dry wall, carpet, or anything else that could possibly be tested for moisture with a hand held moisture tester. He has entered all these names into a database in Filemaker Pro 2.0 under system 9 which is running in Classic Mode on his G4  1.42  14" iBook and then he prints envelopes. He makes up his own flyers on the photocopy machine to put into the envelopes but that is not the problem. It is printing the envelopes. The printer won't print and so I get a call. This is due to one of four things. 1. The printer is turned off 2. The USB cable is unplugged  3. Laserwriter 8 is not selected in the chooser under control panels under the little OS 9 icon. 4. He put the print monitor on hold accidently.
Finally the printer died. It would not pull the envelopes through the tractor feed.
So, I went to town and bought a printer.
I wanted to get a capacitor for the electric motor on my wife's table saw but apparently this must come from Craftsman. Three electrical supply stores in town told me that.
You cannot buy a cheap simple under $100 printer. I ended up with an Epson all-in-one scanner, fax, copier, printer, with wireless networking.
I brought it home and it hooked up to the airport network and he was back in the envelope printing business again.
I attempted to play a trick on him by having him hold one end of the USB cord and touch the printer with the other hand because he couldn't understand how I would get it to print without plugging in a wire to the computer but he would not fall for it.
Dad is 92. Keep that in mind when you are thinking about his Moisture Tester selling empire. He does well for 92 but I often wonder what those people who receive his hand-made flyers think.
After I brought him home from the Doctor I changed the oil in the M670 and attempted to properly line up the sheet metal and find all the oil leaks. Then I decided to install a loader. Mostly I just wandered around aimlessly and was cold. Oh, and I put out mouse bait in the barn and a couple trucks. It took me till 7:30 p.m. to do all of this.

I also listened to a radio report about the FBI recruited fake Christmas Tree bomber. (latest news) For some strange reason the tape recorder malfunctioned while the almost-a-great-bomber was being recruited by the FBI. So, we will never know if he was set up or not. I really trust the authorities to do the right thing so I am absolutely positive that he begged the officer to let him join the local Christmas Tree destruction Jihad mosque team.
Or maybe it was because he was so angry that he somehow got on the blacklist no-fly list and lost his job in Alaska  that he wanted to blow up a great public building. I guess we will never know cause recording equipment malfunctioned.
The worst thing about this is (aside from more loss of civil liberties for us that will surely follow) is that I find myself defending someone/something that is morally reprehensible. I also read today that the Islamic state in Iran just hung a soccer players mistress for killing his ex-wife. The ex-brother-in-law happily kicked the chair out from underneath her. Remember now, this is the 21st century!
And with all the craziness associated with this religion it would seem that... oh I don't know. Something is wrong here. Somehow it is all a setup. Just too convenient.
Edit: The article I linked to does not mention the missing recording, nor does it detail how he was put on the no-fly list, then contacted, then given an apartment in Portland, money, trained in bomb making, given a list of targets (my words) or questioned if he wanted to blow up baby infidels and whorish western women. I can't find the article I read but I thought it was on Oregon Live.
You know this war on terror will never end... We are not even taking their oil-what is the point?

I'm selling my collections

My treasured set of American Plastic Bricks are on ebay and are now at $10. I bought them a few years ago at an estate sale. The fellow who owned them was quite an interesting person. He had old cars and old fishing lures and he drove the funny little jeep and read the meters from the local water district.
His uncle died a few years earlier and the neighbor say that he went into the fellow's house and got the title for the man's 1965 Pontiac GTO. The old farmer had bought it new in case he ever wanted to go Girlin'. That urge never really came, or perhaps the car was not effective and he died a bachelor.
The story was that the nephew brought the GTO home and listed it on ebay and it brought much less than expected. Perhaps $10,000 instead of $20,000. Not that it really matter much as in a few short years the man was dead himself.
So, I bought his collection of bricks. It looks as though someone built houses and exploded them with firecrackers. That is what happened to my Lincoln Logs. My Log cabin actually caught on fire and plastic Marx (highly collectable) cowboys and generic branded spacemen were serious maimed in the ensuing conflagration.

I may sell my Marx Happy Time and Lazy Days tin barns as well. I have a lot of stuff and it is too fragile to play with.

I find old Popular Mechanics on line-The free piston engine and the B-36 are amazing!

So what ever happened to the "free piston" engine as described in the September 1950 issue of Popular Mechanics?
Those old Popular Mechanics were amazing magazine. There were so many things to build and so many amazing inventions. Science was still capable of saving the future, the government was not out to get you, and we were going to win the cold war.
Not to get off the subject of piston-less engine trucks and spending 34 hrs in a B-36 but frankly I disagree with the clever people's understanding of the 1950's as the dark ages.
Civil rights issues were being resolved, while there were bad things happening things were moving forward-the whole thing had not been hi-jacked by the victimization crowd, people were making money, we actually had a good educational system, rap had not been invented, Television was still really hard to watch, cars were much cooler.
On the other hand tractors did not have air conditioning and people had lots of flat tires while driving so perhaps it really was the dark ages. I have no idea. I'm just rambling.
Anyway check out the cool magazines that Google Books has scanned.

If a terrorist is recruited and supplied by the FBI is he really a terrorist?

 Here is a link to a story about another lone bomber, who didn't get his encouragement from the vast underground Islamic terrorist organization, but from the FBI who got the idea from a comic book or a movie.
I would have expected it from a U of O student. Of course he was really a good kid. The really good kids are the true believers... They are bought up to do what they are told, to hold true to their beliefs.
Now who said the TSA protest and scanner boycott wouldn't get results!!!

Note: This does not mean I am a strong supporter of the religion of peace or I did not notice that it was not that hard for the FBI to get the kid all worked up to kill the infidel...  I'm just making an observation...
This tactic worked pretty good for authorities when they were trying to catch abortion clinic bombers and white power people. I read one observation that there were more FBI informants in the Aryan Nations then there were crazy Nazi's.