Business & Land

The Founder Real Estate Business Scene
THESSALONIAN31N

A long time ago I heard something about small business - you really want to own the land where your business operates. Whether you have a mortgage or a lease, you are going to be shelling out roughly the same amount of money each month. The only problem could be is if you are in an area that is going down the tubes, like Detroit is (was?), but you probably don't want to establish a business in that area anyway. In any case, once you have been in business for 20 years, if you bought the land, you will now have something of substantial value even if the business goes bust. If you are leasing the land, you might have a business that will pay your salary and the rent, but will not have as large a value as it would if you bought the land.

View From the Porch got me started:

E'rrbody talking about the Red Lobster bankruptcy is all "Hurr Durr Endless Shrimp", but you never have to read far into these articles to find the words "private equity": "The following year, Darden sold Red Lobster to Golden Gate Capital, a private equity firm, for $2.1 billion. To help fund the deal, Red Lobster spun off its real estate assets in a transaction known as a sale leaseback agreement. Red Lobster had long owned its own real estate but would now be paying rent to lease its restaurants."

Meanwhile, here in Hillsboro, McDonalds closed one location which was in a very congested location and opened a new one a mile down the road near the Sunset Esplanade.

Blue Angel and Sea Dragon

CH-53K King Stallion and a Blue Angels F/A-18E Super Hornet - Ed Jones

Betteridge's law of headlines

From St. John:

 Something to keep in mind as election coverage becomes more frenzied!

Betteridge's law of headlines:

"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

Source from the Wiki article (note this is old news, look at the date):

February 23, 2009

TechCrunch: Irresponsible journalism by Ian Betteridge

The TechCrunch/Last.fm controversy has been all over the net over the weekend, and there’s not much that I can add to it factually. The one thing I will say, though, is that TechCrunch has behaved irresponsible: not so much for the original story - everyone gets it wrong sometimes. But when you get it wildly wrong like this, what you don’t do is use weasal words to try and cover up the fact that you’ve got it horribly wrong. For example:

“From the very beginning, I’ve presented this story for what it is: a rumor. Despite my attempts to corroborate it and the subsequent detail I’ve been able to gather, I still don’t have enough information to determine whether it is absolutely true. But I still don’t have enough information to determine that it is absolutely false either. What I do have are a lot of unanswered questions about how exactly Last.fm shares user data with the record industry.”

In a word, this is bullshit. It’s Daily Mail-style journalism, posing a statement as just “asking questions”. And even when Schonfeld got a detailed statement from Last.fm on exactly what data it gives to record companies (answer: no more than they could get just by looking it up on the public Last.fm site), he doesn’t retract the story.

TechCrunch got it wrong, and instead of retracting the story and apologising, it’s trying to wriggle out and say “it’s only a rumour”. Sorry, but that’s bullshit. And please, please, I hope no one brings up that old chestnut of “it’s only a blog, we don’t have to adopt proper standards for reporting”. The moment you can have a serious effect on a company or individual, you owe it to the world to be sure of what you say.

One thing though: This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word “no”. The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it. Which, of course, is why it’s so common in the Daily Mail.

The only bit I would argue about is that you won't know if your post will have a serious effect until you post it. If you are running a no-bit blog like mine you might think you are having no effect on the world. Websites that are getting a zillion hits a day probably should be a little more careful, but that isn't what gets you the hits, is it? 

On the other hand I will post something and then days or weeks or months later I will notice other people saying the same thing, so maybe I am having some influence (dream on chuck-a-geddon). More likely clear thinking people eventually arrive at the same conclusion and I just hadn't noticed anyone else saying the same thing until after I said my piece.

Villanelle

Villanelle is the villain in the Netflix series Killing Eve. She is a very talented, lovely young female  psychopath. She is employed as an assassin by the mysterious Twelve. They employ her to kill various high-profile people which she does with verve and style. They reward her with large sums of cash and a nice apartment in Paris. She socks some of the money away and spends what she wants on designer clothes.

Problem for Villanelle is that she doesn't feel anything. She enjoys the killing, and she enjoys having nice things, but her constant refrain is 'I'm bored' which she repeats at volume in the most inappropriate settings, kind of like a toddler. So perhaps she enjoys the killing because while she is on this mission she isn't bored.

She is in love with Eve Polastri because, near as I can tell, Eve is not boring. Eve is enamored of Villanelle, but she is conflicted because Villanelle is the killer Eve has been tasked with catching.

I'm starting to feel some sympathy for Villanelle. I mean, imagine what it would be like to not feel anything. You would have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning, much less getting anything done. Then again, I wonder how many working stiffs only keep getting up and going to work because they have trained themselves to do so. You work at the same tedious job for decades and you might not feel anything anymore either. Maybe that's where workers going postal comes from.

While Villanelle is a prolific killer, she has only killed one person (that I recall) who wasn't an assigned target. Since we don't know the affiliations of her targets, we don't really know whose side she is on. She might even be working for the same people as Eve, and they are just letting Eve investigate to see how much she can find out so they can fix whatever chinks she finds in their security.

I mean, there's the case of Andrew Peel. He is the scion of a wealthy family who has murdered the rest of his family. He is now in control of some data mining software that can reveal anything about anybody. He is offering it to various unscrupulous characters. Eve and Villanelle (wait, what? Yes, secret spy missions make strange bedfellows) are sent to find out who his customers are along with the caveat to not kill him. Villanelle kills him anyway on account of he wanted her to kill Eve. Or maybe she disliked him. What, feelings? Well, she is in love with Eve, so a bit of loyalty there.

The best part is that nobody is upset about Peel's death. Killing him put a stop to the sale to the evil software package, which is like the best possible outcome. Now we begin to suspect that Carolyn sent these two to Rome because she suspected this is what would happen. You know, a win-win situation. Either they actually get the information she wanted, or they flake out and kill him. Either one works for her.

Carolyn and Villanelle are both angling to move up in their respective organizations. I wouldn't be surprised if we find Villanelle and Carolyn going to the same meetings.

Cat Burglar

Stolen Gloves

Today is the annual neighborhood garage sale. Someone has taken the opportunity to hang up these gloves that their cat has stolen over the last year (month? decade?). 

MiG-17

MIKOYAN MiG-17 - Carson Zabel

Shot over Camarillo, California, home of the Southern California Wing of the Confederate, er, Commemorative, Air Force. First flown in 1952, the Soviet Union built 10,000 of them. North Korea still uses them. Wikipedia article here.

 

Baby Please Don't Go

Them - Baby Please Don't Go.mp4
MrGambitopardo
I heard this KQRZ this afternoon and I said 'dang, that sounds familiar', but I looked at the artist and I had never heard of Them. So to Mr. Wikipedia we go where the whole history is revealed:

"Baby, Please Don't Go" is a traditional blues song that was popularized by Delta blues musician Big Joe Williams in 1935. Many cover versions followed, leading to its description as "one of the most played, arranged, and rearranged pieces in blues history" by French music historian Gérard Herzhaft.

After World War II, Chicago blues and rhythm and blues artists adapted the song to newer music styles. In 1952, a doo-wop version by the Orioles reached the top ten on the R&B chart. In 1953, Muddy Waters recorded the song as an electric Chicago-ensemble blues piece, which influenced many subsequent renditions. By the early 1950s, the song became a blues standard.

In the 1960s, "Baby, Please Don't Go" became a popular rock song after the Northern Irish group Them recorded it in 1964. Jimmy Page, a studio guitarist at the time, participated in the recording session, possibly on rhythm guitar. Subsequently, Them's uptempo rock arrangement also made it a rock standard. Paul Revere & The Raiders, AC/DC, Aerosmith, John Mellencamp, Amboy Dukes, and Budgie are among the rock groups who have recorded the song. "Baby, Please Don't Go" has been inducted into both the Blues and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame.

Northern Ireland, who'd a thunk it?

 

Murder Mysteries

I started reading The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo this evening and on second page of the story (page 10 of the book) he mentions a bunch of locked room murder mysteries and I'm wondering if they are real or just something he made up. Turns out they are all real books.

	Title	Author
The	Plague Court Murders	John Dickson	Carr
The	Teeth of the Tiger	Maurice	Leblanc
The	Mystery of the Yellow Room	Gaston	Leroux
	Murder Among the Angells	Roger	Scarlett
The	Canary Murder Case	S.S.	Van Dine
The	Kennel Murder Case	S.S.	Van Dine

Pic of the Day - Platinum Mine

Platinum Mine

I haven't figured out just where this, it may even be an AI generated image, but it's still pretty cool, in a science fiction dystopia kind of way.

Today's Lesson

Stolen entire from JMSmith.

The Secret Badges that we Wear

“She bound the scarlet line in the window.” Joshua 2:21

A shibboleth is a special kind of password, which is to say a key or badge that opens a social door and grants admission to a social group.  As everyone versed in scripture knowledge knows, shibboleth was at first a word that the lisping Ephramites could not pronounce, and that the Sons of Giliad therefore used to identify the survivors of a shattered Ephramite army.  When a bloodied and bedraggled warrior staggered down to the ford of the Jordan, he was challenged to pronounce the word “shibboleth,” and thereby show his secret badge. Those who pronounced it “sibboleth” were immediately slain.

As I explained some years ago, shibboleths often take the form of sacrilege.  The password that grants admission to one social group is in such cases a violation of the norms of that group’s enemy.  Thus anti-Christian secret societies used to require an aspiring member to trample on a crucifix, spit on a Bible, or otherwise treat the sacred objects and words Christianity as profane.  In on-line culture, such sacrilegious shibboleths are called “shill tests,” and in these tests an aspiring member is required to type words that an undercover agent would find it very hard to type.  As I explained in that long-ago post, to get past the sentries of one group, you must often slay another group’s sacred cow.

A shibboleth is a password that prevents infiltration by spies.  A “scarlet thread” is a secret badge with which a traitor makes himself known to his new compatriots, and is thereby passed over when his new compatriots descend like wolves on the people whose compatriot the traitor only pretends to be.  Like shibboleth, the term “scarlet thread” comes from the Old Testament, and more particularly from the curious tale of a traitor known as Rahab the Harlot.

Rahab the Harlot dwells in the city of Jericho, and when Joshua sends two spies into that city, the two young men somehow fall in with Rahab, who we must never forget is a harlot, and she hides these two handsome young spies in her house.  This house was built on, or rather up against, the city wall; and on its city-wall side had a high window that looked out over the countryside.  It was from this high window that Rahab lowered Joshua’s spies on a “scarlet thread,” after telling them that her people were ripe for conquest because they were rotten with fear.

“Your terror is fallen upon us . . . the inhabitants of the land faint because of you.”

Rahab’s reward for betraying her people is that she and her family will be spared when Jericho is sacked and its citizens are slaughtered.  But to assure their deliverance, Rahab must keep her family in her house (of ill repute), and must display the “scarlet thread” in the front window. of that house.

“Behold, when we come into the land, thou shall bind this thread in the window which thou didst let us down by; and thou shalt bring thy father, and thy mother, and thy brethren, and all thy father’s household, home unto thee” Joshua 2: 18.

Thus a “scarlet thread” is a means whereby a traitor escapes the destruction brought down by his or her treason.  One wonders how many who “miraculously” survive some near-universal destruction owe their deliverance to display of a secret badge or “scarlet thread.”  Rahab was a harlot, so she knew how treachery works.

“She bound the scarlet line in the window.”

Not long after, as every Sunday-school scholar knows, Joshua’s army compasses the city of Jericho and “the walls came a tumbling down.”  Then, as many Sunday-school scholars do not know, before the sack and slaughter begins, a house displaying a “scarlet thread” is sought and a traitorous harlot is saved.   Which was very fortunate for that traitorous harlot and her family, because of Joshua’s army we are told:

“They utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.”  Joshua 6: 21

Like a shibboleth, a “scarlet thread” is a special kind of password, although it grants its possessor the privilege of escape and not admission.  It is a secret badge with which traitors and spies show their true colors to their true friends, and by which traitors and spies are exempted when their true friends utterly destroy their pretended friends with the edge of the sword.

 

Poetry

I have no use for most poetry, at least not the fancy kind, the high falutin' kind that uses esoteric words to talk about ephemeral concepts. Poetry that uses ordinary words, meaning words I know, and short lines that rhyme, like those by Rudyard Kipling or nursery rhymes are more my cup of tea. Poems like this one by JMSmith:

The Three Powers

Blooms come, they say, from April showers,
All else comes of the three powers,
Which I can name in a short list:
The purse, the pen, the pounding fist.
If the purse should aught require,
It can purchase, rent or hire,
All goods being to market brought,
All men on offer to be bought,
It can suborn, incentivize,
Pay fists to pound, pens to write lies.
The pen to enlist volunteers,
Fills hearts with lusts and heads with fears,
Sparks firestorms of righteous rage,
Plays now the pander, now the sage,
Coaxes the tight-tied purse to spill,
Cajoles the pounding fist to kill.
And very few can long can resist
Persuasion by the pounding fist,
So what brute force wants, it gets,
The toadying praise of scribbling wits,
The contents of the tight-tied purse,
These and much more it can coerce.
Sniff if you like the bright May flowers,
Slave you remain to these three powers,
Bought by the purse, by pen bewitched,
By pounding fist to hard toil hitched.

 

Up yours, Big Brother

Etienne Constable was told to build a 6-foot fence to hide the boat from view of his neighbors.

Via Bustednuckles

Annie - Musical at Keller

Annie The Musical | Official Trailer (2017)
London Theatre Direct

I can't say as I enjoyed the show. Most of the singing grated on my ears. However I can't tell you whether it was the singing, the sound system or my ears. It sounded like it was being overdriven. Or maybe I am just used to the sound that comes out of my Blue Tooth speaker and live music is just different. Whatever, the kids were just horrible, most of the rest just blared. Daddy Warbucks and his personal assistant were much better, they actually sounded like music.

But it's a curious show. It's set in 1933 right in the depths of the depression. We have half a dozen Hoovervilles in New York City. Things are pretty grim. Annie is living in an orphanage with half a dozen other little girls and she suddenly gets plucked out of her miserable existence and deposited in a royal palace. It's a ridiculous fantasy but it gives us an opportunity to examine poverty and wealth.

The 'aww' exclamation from nearly everyone in the audience when the dog appeared on stage was surprising. It was also a bit puzzling. Hasn't anyone ever seen a dog before?

Complete Little Orphan Annie Volume 15

The show is based on the comic strip Little Orphan Annie. I used to read it when I was a kid. I couldn't tell you what it was about, but I do know most of the principle characters:

• Annie
• Sandy, her dog
• Daddy Warbucks, super wealthy industrialist
• Punjab, a mysterious dude from India
• Asp, another mysterious dude.

Punjab and Asp are mysterious because all I recollect is that they were characters in the strip. I know nothing else about them. I used the picture from Amazon because it was the only one that had all the characters in it. I don't know who the chick is.

The Wikipedia article is enlightening and entertaining. Among other things, Harold Gray, the creator of the strip, hated FDR and his policies. I've heard some criticism of FDR's policies, but he was in charge and that's what we got. It's not enough to have a better idea, you need to convince the people in power that your idea is better. The convincing part can be a hard row to hoe. In the show Warbucks and FDR were at least cordial.

The blurb from the Amazon book paints a pretty good picture:

A chronological reprinting of one of the most important comic strips of the 20th Century. Annie is a cultural icon--in both her red-headed, blank-eyed appearance, and as the embodiment of American individuality, spunk, and self-reliance. Even those who've never read the comic strip are keenly aware of the plucky orphan, her loveable mutt Sandy, and her adoptive benefactor, Oliver "Daddy" Warbucks, through the Broadway play, the hit movie, and the song "Tomorrow," made famous by both.

It's "Open Season for Trouble" as America's spunkiest kid, "Daddy" Warbucks, and his bodyguards Punjab and The Asp battle wily Communist spies, search for a potentially game-changing mineral known as QX-7, contend with small-town cheats, and make a frightful discovery about disappearing patients at a shady rest home. The action ranges from the played-out mining town of Fiasco, where "Daddy" made his first million, to the land of the genii, where Punjab dispatches his enemies. Meanwhile, Annie and Sandy are separated, but their inevitable reunion may be a silver lining inside a very dark cloud! Volume 15 collects the daily strips and full-color Sunday pages from March 13, 1950 to October 28, 1951 in five vivid stories filled with mayhem and murder. It's not for the faint of heart!

 

Spill The Wine

Eric Burdon and War - Spill the Wine (1970 )
jmms429

Because I turned KQRZ and they were playing this tune. Beat Club has a video but the dirty dogs have disabled embedding. Screw you, Beat Club.

Kitchen Knives

Seems to be a theme today.

Not to mention there seems to be a lot of slicing and dicing in our current serial Killing Eve.

The Income a Family Needs

Family Income

The explanation in fine print at the bottom reads:

Comfortable was defined as the annual income required to cover a 60/30/20 budget, allocating 50% of earnings to necessities, 30% to discretionary spending, and 20% to savings.

One of my comments on the subject from earlier this year:

Last year you needed an annual income of $100K to be a middle class citizen. This year you are going to need $200K and next year it is liable to be $500K.

and another from last year:

It's now reached the point that a first-class, middle-class lifestyle in America requires pert near $200K a year. It wasn't too long ago that I was thinking that it 'only' required $100K per year.

In other news Argentina has a new far-right President and the rate of inflation which has been ridiculous since forever has collapsed. Okay, it hasn't collapsed, but it's slowed down a bit.

Inflation Rate in Argentina averaged 190.18 percent from 1944 until 2024, reaching an all time high of 20262.80 percent in March of 1990 and a record low of -7.00 percent in February of 1954. 

Via Midwest Chick

 

Brains

Downloading nematode brains from Github
Dungeonman from youtube

Nematodes are very small, slender worms: typically about 5 to 100 µm thick, and 0.1 to 2.5 mm long.

Nematodes are pervasive:

Nematodes have successfully adapted to nearly every ecosystem: from marine (salt) to fresh water, soils, from the polar regions to the tropics, as well as the highest to the lowest of elevations. They are ubiquitous in freshwater, marine, and terrestrial environments, where they often outnumber other animals in both individual and species counts, and are found in locations as diverse as mountains, deserts, and oceanic trenches. They are found in every part of the Earth's lithosphere, even at great depths below the surface of the Earth. They represent 90% of all animals on the ocean floor.

Story I heard was that they are so pervasive that if you took away all grass and trees and dirt but left the nematodes, everything would still look the same.

Worm simulation in your browser

CElegans Neurorobotics
Timothy Busbice

Toy robot running a nematode brain simulation to control its actions.

GoPiGo Programmable Robot Kit

More technical stuff:

• Heyseth github
• connectomeengine. Note: that is connectome engine, not connect to me engine.

What's a connectome?

A connectome is a map of the brain's neural connections, also known as the brain's wiring diagram. It's made up of neurons that communicate through synapses, and each connection is made up of the presynaptic axon, the postsynaptic dendrites, and synapses between the neurons. Connectomes can be represented in graph or matrix form, and are used to analyze network organization. 

Nematodes brains aren't the only microscopic brains the whiz-kids are studying - some people are studying fruit fly brains.

The Making of a Fly

Thanks to Matt Parker, we have this book about fruit fly genetics.

NSO Group

i cant stop thinking about this exploit
Low Level Learning

Ben Hawkes has a webpage about this.

So who is this NSO? They have a website that is completely opaque, it tells you nothing about who they are. Wikipedia is a little more forthcoming. Here is the introduction:

NSO Group Technologies (NSO standing for Niv, Shalev and Omri, the names of the company's founders) is an Israeli cyber-intelligence firm primarily known for its proprietary spyware Pegasus, which is capable of remote zero-click surveillance of smartphones. It employed almost 500 people as of 2017.

NSO claims that it provides authorized governments with technology that helps them combat terror and crime. The company says that it deals with government clients only. Pegasus spyware is classified as a weapon by Israel and any export of the technology must be approved by the government.

According to several reports, NSO Group spyware has been used to target human rights activists and journalists in various countries, was used for state espionage against Pakistan, for warrantless domestic surveillance of Israeli citizens by Israeli police, and played a role in the murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi by agents of the Saudi government.

In 2019, instant messaging company WhatsApp and its parent company Meta Platforms (then known as Facebook) sued NSO under the United States Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In 2021, Apple filed a lawsuit against NSO in the U.S., and the US included NSO Group in its Entity List for acting against U.S. national security and foreign policy interests, effectively banning U.S. companies from supplying NSO.

 

One Toke Over The Line

One Toke Over The Line - Lawrence Welk - WTF! (1971)
clotho98

This song came out in 1970. The Vietnam War was going on and hippies were running wild. I remember hearing one story that this song was about pitching pennies, and 'one toke over the line' meant a coin had gone too far. That was a fairy tale from some fool journalist. Wikipedia has a better version:

Mike Brewer gives this account of the origin of the song, "One day we were pretty much stoned and all and Tom says, “Man, I’m one toke over the line tonight.” I liked the way that sounded and so I wrote a song around it."

The song gained popular acclaim while the band was touring as an opening act for Melanie, after they received an encore but had run out of other songs to play.

In a 2012 interview, Brewer said "The president of the record company we were with at the time came backstage and said, “Oh man, you gotta record that and add it to the LP.” We were kind of like, “Really? Oh well, OK.” We didn’t even take the song seriously. Needless to say it came as a big surprise to us that they released it and not only that it was a big hit but it received so much controversy. The government came down on us."

In 1971, the Federal Communications Commission issued guidance to radio station operators: "Whether a particular record depicts the dangers of drug abuse, or, to the contrary, promotes such illegal drug usage is a question for the judgment of the licensee.... Such a pattern of operation is clearly a violation of the basic principle of the licensee's responsibility for, and duty to exercise adequate control over, the broadcast material presented over his station. It raises serious questions as to whether continued operation of the station is in the public interest."

This had a chilling effect and some radio stations stopped playing popular songs like "One Toke Over the Line." Other stations played the songs even more frequently in protest.

 Via Jay

Ukraine

Russian Tanks Rolling into Town

You might think the war in Ukraine is a war for freedom and independence and motherhood and apple pie. I don't. You might not enjoy reading this story on Alt-Market.US. I did.

Russia Is About To Overrun Ukraine’s Defenses – Why Are There No Peace Negotiations?

Which inspired me to comment:

There are two reasons for this war: Number one is votes: Most of the funding the US Congress has approved for Ukraine is going to the US defense industry. It’s not to help Ukraine, it’s to ensure that defense industry employees will continue to vote for these Congressmen who approved this funding. The other is greed: a fraction of the money approved is going to find it’s way back into the pockets of the Congressmen who approved these spending bills, either through kickbacks, bribes or special stock dealings. One percent of a billion dollars is still ten million bucks which can buy a nice vacation house. All the noise about the big, bad Russians is just propaganda. The US Congress and administration is full of psychopaths. They don’t care how many people get killed as long as their wallets get fat.

Ani

The most controversial place I've ever been
Tom Thornton

Ani, on the border between Turkey and Armenia.

De Havilland Floatplane

De Havilland Canada DHC-3 Otter

This must be the week for De Havillands. Here we have another Otter on floats, though this one is a single engine, not a twin. This one is operating out of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Heater Repair, Revised

Heater Controls

Last November I took the Mitsubishi to the mechanic to get the heater fixed. The first problem was the controller so I bought a couple of used control panels off of E-Bay. Took them into the shop and find they are the wrong parts. What it needs is new actuators that CONTROL the flapper valves in the heater box. So I order a couple of actuators and find they don't fit. The old, defunct actuator has a seven pin electrical connector and one of the new ones has five pins and the other has three pins. Wonderful. Search the internet and find nothing. Find a list of junk yards and start calling. I called a dozen and found nothing. I even posted a note on the national junk yard board but got no reply.

Actuator Internals
All the lines on the gear wheel are wear marks, there are actually only three wide lines of conductive paint.

Okay, let's take a look at this actuator and see what's going on. Open it up and I find a small electric motor turning a gear train. That part looks simple enough, but why do we have seven pins? Take out the big gear and I find some some brass brushes that contact the underside of the big gear. There is a spiral of something on the gear. It looks kind of erratic and my immediate impression is that it is some kind of pattern that encodes the position of the wheel.

Circuit Scribe Conductive Ink Pen

I take it to lunch and confer with my cronies and Jack suggests that it is resistive paint. The erratic pattern is simply where the paint has worn off. So I order a conduction paint pen and fill in the worn spots and put it back together. Put it back in the car and it seems to be working okay.

Electrical Testing

Test Leads Kit

Before I got to the paint, I thought I would see if one of the other actuators could be made to work. They all used the same case and the same drive shaft, just the electrical connectors were different. Though mine has seven pins it only uses five. Looking inside the 5-pin actuator, it seems to be very similar, so I thought to hook it up to a meter and see how it behaved. I have a collection of test leads, but none that were small enough to connect to these pins, so I bought a kit. Still had to drill holes in the shell surrounding the connector on the actuator, but I got them all connected. Hooked them up to the meter and a battery from a drill, and ran the actuator through it's whole range of motion. The resistance on the original actuator ran from zero up to 8K ohms, on the new actuator it varied from 0 to 6K ohms. Six is almost the same as 8, right? Or so I reasoned. I tried it but it would not go through it's full range of motion, so we're back to the original.

Lever Wire Nuts

I cut the wires to conduct that test, so now I need to reconnect them. I found these little lever action connectors on Amazon. They worked very well. They are just a little over an inch long, so they fit in the available space.

Mounting Screws

The two screws that were holding the actuator in place had gone missing, so I looked through my collection of screws and found a couple that seemed to be just right, except they were just a fraction of an inch two long. I used a couple of nuts as spacers and they worked fine.

The screws are like sheet metal screws, so anything that was approximately the same size would of worked, except one of the screws was buried way back in the dash so getting any kind of driver in there was difficult. So I wanted a screw that was as near to correct as I could find.

Right side underdash panel

The actuator wasn't hard to get to in spite of being buried in the dashboard. Just pull out the glove box which is held in place with four screws that are easy to get to. I ran into a little problem when I was putting in the screws holding the actuator. I was using a little screwdriver bit about two inches long to get one of the screws started and I dropped it and it disappears. Bah. There is a panel on the underside of the dash that is held in place with another four screws. Take those out, the panel comes out and there's my screwdriver bit. Get the actuator installed and now we have to put that underdash panel back in. This is a real struggle. With the panel in place you can't see where the screws go, and I can't get my head in the footwell far enough to see anything. I probably spent an hour getting those four screws into their holes.

Expenses:

Date	Item	Vendor	Amount
Nov. 22, 2023	Control Panel	Ebay	125.00
Nov. 22, 2023	Control Panel	Ebay	68.99
Dec 4, 2023	Actuator	Puente Hills Mitsubishi	141.45
Jan 19, 2024	Actuator	Amazon	24.99
Feb 5, 2024	Test Leads	Amazon	20.99
Mar 2, 2024	Connectors	Amazon	9.99
Mar 8, 2024	Paint	Amazon	15.49
	Total		406.90

I could have returned some of those parts, but I fumbled around and now it's probably too late.

I also paid the mechanic $300, but he did some other work, so maybe $100 went to investigating the heater problem. It was kind of a drag spending $400 on stuff I didn't need, but I was able to put off buying a new car for at least a year. Maybe ten. We won't count all the time it was out of service. Fortunately the Hyundai had returned so we still had two working vehicles.

Notes: 

• I started this post on March 15, 2024. Then I got distracted, but now I've finished it.
• I've tried several different ways of including a table in a blog post but none of them worked very well. Today I thought I would just try copying the data from the spreadsheet and pasting them here and it worked very well. Just highlight the rectangular area you want and press Control-C to copy it, move over to the blog and press Control-V. Worked very well.

Powell's City of Books

We went to Powell's Sunday afternoon. This time I was prepared, I brought a list of authors I had scraped from this blog. Usually I will confine myself to the Science Fiction and Murder Mystery sections but this time my list led me farther afield. Some of the names were easily found in my favored sections, I asked for help on some of the others. The only book they had by Frans G. Bengtsson that they had in English (!) was The Long Ships which I had already read. Doc Ford is a character, not an author.  Jon Krakauer was more problematic. He has all kinds of books scattered all over the store. I got several clues but I never actually found any. Just as well, I still picked up four books which should keep me occupied for a bit.

Let the Sunshine In

Let the Sunshine, Aquarius - Hair
Grupo Talía

It hasn't rained here for a week, so it seems like summer is actually here. You would think that after spending 30 years here I would be used to rain, rain, rain, but I really enjoy the sunshine. The performers here are Grupo Talia from Madrid, Spain, not the Morman Tabernacle Choir that some people, like Jack, seem to think.

The original was recorded by The 5th Dimension in 1967. The song is listed at number 66 on Billboard's "Greatest Songs of All Time". I don't understand why some people prefer big orchestral productions over small groups. Perhaps there is something in the sound, or maybe they just like big productions. It is kind of cool to see a big group all working together on the same tune. In some cases it might be because the originals are no longer available and any other individual singers would just not sound right. You get a hundred voices all together and that distinction disappears.

Virtual Reality

If you knew how your neurology reacts to narrative, would you pick the same stories?
Betwixt: The Story of You

I think we already knew all this without doing all the brain scan stuff, but I don't know that anybody talks about it. Or maybe we don't talk about it because we take it for granted, kind of like walking. We all do it, but it's automatic and we don't think about it, but when you start analyzing it you can see how all the pieces fit together. Anyway, this idea that what you read can influence how your brain operates is something worth thinking about.

The game seems to be relatively new and unfinished.

Joe Brandon

Dr. Jill Biden on a billboard in Newark, Ohio

Newark was the nearby big town when I lived on the farm in Ohio. Forgot to make a note of where I found this.

Killing Eve

KILLING EVE Official Trailer (HD) Sandra Oh, Jodie Comer Thriller BBC Series
JoBlo Streaming & TV

I dunno about this show. We've got two very smart women, one works for the British government in some kind of Ministry of Information and the other is an assassin operating at the behest of some shadowy group. Our girl, Eve (Sandra Oh), works for the government, is good at data analysis, but not too sharp when dealing with the real world. The bad girl, Viallanelle (Jodie Comer), has no patience with any kind of bureaucracy but is talented with all the tools of an assassin, knows how to fight and has plenty of street smarts.

Eve is fine in the office, but out in the field she is a bumbling nitwit. I find myself yelling at the screen in every episode because she is doing something boneheaded. Now that I think about it, I realize she is much like Sam Lowry, the hero/victim in Brazil. 

Villanelle takes an interest in Eve because she is the first person to get an inkling of just who she is, which makes her a worthy adversary. Eve wants to find out who Villanelle is working for. Her victims are all over the map, politically and geographically, so it is not apparent who is benefitting from all these killings. Villanelle and Eve sit down for dinner one night (not Eve's idea of a good time) and Eve asks her. Villanelle responds that if you go high enough, they are probably working for the same people. Aha! Conspiracy! I newd it!

Carolyn Martens (Fiona Shaw) is the head of the Russia Section at MI6. She is kean, as into neato-keano, as she is very quiet, keeps in the background, but wields a heck of a lot of power. I've seen Fiona around before, but the only shows I remember seeing were Enola Holmes and the Harry Potter films where she played Petunia Dursley.