Icosian Game

A quiet week with some work done about the homestead...it is that time of year where the gardens begin to pass away---and all the work that had been done is now looking like shit---but it was an excellent summer for garden production and we cannot complain....either work has been quieter or my mental escapism project is working? Only time will tell the true story. 
49.9 for a MPG commute average this week--Many things occurred this week that i will not speak of---for there is no use in it---

Soon this ridiculous election will be over, empty men with empty promises fighting over who controls the corpse of a society in it's last days...I will give no more political advice...i was stupid enough to vote for hope last time---never a vote from me, ever again.

A most excellent recent discovery of 2500 year old Russian bodies, those of a noble woman and two warrior retainers...with wonderfully preserved tattoo's.
The above is a diagram of the markings of the males---this is both beautiful and amazing at the same time........

2500 year old beautiful body art

My favorite part of the RNC

People in New Mexico take their dogs to work with them quite a bit--- on my daily commute i see many dudes with a dog either hanging out in the bed of their Pickup truck or sitting up front with them like a bud.

I get somewhat envious of this---it must be nice to go to work everyday with your best pal......

We have two dogs, both Boston Terriers and Buddy our oldest, somewhere between 13 thru 16 years old is now pretty much blind and deaf....He is however teaching me how to get old---this has become his job----he gets around good, enjoys his naps immensely, is quite proud of his farting capability, He is intently interested in any visitor we get sniffing them from top to bottom since he cannot really see much any longer, and he really enjoys his doggie treats with lots of eating noise and lip smacking...

Getting old and having afflications has not crippled him---that's what he is teaching me...some days are better than others and he has spells where he gets a bit confused---or he has a hard time jumping up and down from the communal bed...but that's just the way it goes and he doesn't let a bad day ruin everything for him, he doesn't focus on the bad that just happened----he stills holds up his end against the younger dog BB when they play with the pull toys....Last weekend i was outside painting and Old Bud came out the two doggie doors and laid down in the sun with a smile on his face. He is the best role model for aging that i could every want to have...and i am trying to take in everything he teaches me..........

Playing with Javelins can obviously put an eye out---the link below leads to a German news story about how a 74 year old javelin coach was 'accidentlly' killed by a javelin thrown by one of his students while the codger was downrange..apparently this guy was the local, jolly old, hang around, track and field judge dude, loved by all---was is the main point here, as in past tense---now why do you allow a 74 year old guy anywhere near a field where javelins are being thrown about? At my age already i cannot see shit--much less observe a javelin traveling at the speed of sound heading for me and evade it--there is no dodging shit like javelins after 50 years old is attained---there is just staying the fuck away from impact area when you are an old dude....old dudes can hang around synchronized swimming, or that thing the canadians do with sliding an iron aross the ice with brooms---that kind of shit old dudes can hang around---not Javelin or archery---we wander about us old dudes and yelling watch out or duck does nothing for us since we also can't hear....mental note to self on retirement---no volunteering as a javelin coach. 

that hada leave a mark

I built a small vehicle trailer from scratch for an Italian vechicle set i am working on. Pretty proud of it I have to admit---the wheels that i salvaged from a bad 1/48th kit made the job possible---but the rest of the trailer is made from stolen coffee stirrers, and sheet plastic---a few odds and ends cobbled together from my still very small parts box for the added details....

i have to detail the trailer with cargo--tailgate handles and whatever comes to mind---but I am pleased with the job---I'll post additional photo's of the finished product painted and outfitted when completed.

Italian vehicles, armor and figures are offered by companies only on a limited basis here in the United States since there is apparently a very small market for them--Scratch building this little trailer is the begininng of a process of modifying kits, figures or building from scratch, Italian early-and prewar objects in 1/35th scale. After a fruitless search for an italian military 

truck kit---I just ordered a german end of the war, primitive cargo truck kit, they make a million german kits--where wooden cab and bed took the place of limited steel in truck production. My intention is modifying this kit during construction to match as closely as possible an Italian Royal Army truck of 1930's vintage....it may be difficult, but at this point based on supply limitations it is the best i can do---and may be way more entertaining overall that simply building the perfect kit.

It is also wonderous to build these items in my mind during work---the trailer simply flowed together since i had built it in my mind 20 times the week before while at work....i am hoping for the same success with modfying the truck kit...pictures to follow.

Failing societies require a greater degree security. We have reached that point. Storing food, creating power, attaining water all massively important to secure oneself against the coming future...but one's person and preparation's must be secured as well. What good is it to develop a garden system for years just to have it raided when you need it for survival?
Incorporating the closed circuit monitoring capability of our homestead I just added perimeter motion detection alarms.

I now have all standard entrances to our 50x190 lot covered by independent motion detection alarms. I am also placing the internal receiver/alarm units, in varying locations of the residence so that where ever our internal activity is taking place, a notification of entry to the property can be seen and heard. Nobody said that the future would be easy---nor can one ever be totally secure...but you can try, at least to be smarter than the other guy. 

"There has to be a mathematical explanation

for how bad your tie is.

John Nash in the film "A Beautiful Mind".

The Quest for Lie Group E8

MPG average of 49.9 for this week--headwinds on the way home from rainstorms we had almost every night this week---but to get rain i will not complain about the mileage drop---the water is worth it.....

Work actually went fairly well this week due to the new mental protocols i put in place. It was easy this week to, thought escape, from work jail---I only hope i can make this process continue...

The United Nations has requested that due to world wide crop failures this year the United States eliminate it's mandatory corn to fuel requirements domestically and utilized the corn that would have gone to produce syn fuel to be sold for food....

There has been no answer from us. None is allowed to speak about what may happen, food wise, in the next two years. Corn producers will certainly fight against and produce briefcases full of money to Congress to prevent the removal of their golden ethanol ticket...My belief system is that this year the dangerous effects of the grain harvests will be felt in the third world with our society facing only having to pay $12.00 bucks for a box of Cheerio's along with massive price increases in beef and other food products dependent on grains-----Next year, with an ongoing harvest catastrophe may be our time when the shelves go bare...our societies response to that problem is going to be interesting to say the least. I do wonder how our society will address rising food costs against unemployment and falling salaries?

Does food trickle down the way money was supposed to trickle down? I surely hope not.

BBQing---I have never been one of those guys whose idea of a great time is to pile a mass quantity of meat on a a phony representative of a campfire and pretend to be the manly Neolithic hunter cooking his kill. Sharing my burnt meat with a made up tribe who are pretending to respect my hunting power in my back yard---while sharing burnt game with everyone grunting and covered in Bar-be-que sauce.....the modern representation of roughing it.

JoJo and I never had anything close to a BBQ grill until a recent purchase of the cheapest propane grill we could find..which we desired only for emergency use in case of infrastructure failure. JoJo believes my small camping stoves would not be enough---to cook anything "real" so my darling JoJo goes to Home Depot to purchase a propane grill---and amongst the 500-1000 dollar super grilling monsters she finds a 99.00 grill--but on examination with the sales girl it appears damaged--no hood handle, short one foot on a leg making it wobble, and missing one of those side wings things you put stuff on...

Talking to the Home Depot manager she winds up getting the grill with two free containers full of propane for $35.00---when she gets them to load it into the Matrix wagon for her they find the hood handle, the leg foot, the side thing and a bunch of other stuff sitting inside it...but a deal is a deal and they said take it for that amount----so we got our emergency cooking source sitting on the back patio set up for $35.00----and since i am not Neolithic man and care nothing about grilling,  it will take an emergency for me to fire it up----but it is there just in case, plus a deal like that, a win against the corporate world, does not come along often........

One of the elements of my military modeling desire--is the time period I am interested in. 1919-1939.Researching the history and reasoning behind the development of this period's mechanical objects is incredibly interesting.... Mechanization of the military was new---in Italy, for example, pretty much no one had a car during this time period, the military had to teach inductee's involved with motorization not only how to drive but how to put gasoline in and repair small problems as well. There were no available large pools of drivers and mechanics trained by society at large. Can you imagine a farm boy--put into a huge, 20 ton moving monster--when it was possible he had never even seen a tractor previously? 

This time period and their military machines that fascinate me, are bolted together, welding was not an applied tool in this field yet. Money was tight worldwide---so research and development was paced slowly and to be truthful---Generals did not know what to do with the machines they did have....It was very Victorian, very Jules Verne...there were great advances--but these advances in technology were viewed through turn of the century eyes, that did not understand what to look for...all this created some mechanical monsters and some masterpieces.

I am fascinated by this time period and only wish to build model examples designed before science became involved in warfare and luckily Britain and Italy produced enough very,very strange vehicles that there are enough model kits representing this time period for me to work on for quite some time---modern machines are just killing machines---but the machines of my selected countries---were something different---something unique---child like when viewed from our position today---and this is fine by me.

I am beginning to work on vehicles and diorama's based on the Italian Army in Northern Africa through 1940---when Fascist Italy tried to conquer vast amounts of territory and create an empire, ranging from Libya to Ethiopia. I am now collecting rocks and sand for groundwork---probably appearing very strange as i walk along pushing sand samples into little brown envelopes.

Apparently Queen Elizabeth's Corgi's are not to be fucked with by other royal dogs. They kicked the shit out of one of the princess's royal nice doggies the other day--and the 'DOG BOY'---yes that is a position in the royal household, couldn't stop the Corgi's from dining on the other dog....Dog boy to the Queen---has a sort of nice ring to it---do you like, get an application for this spot, or take a test or what? How does one fill the position of Dog Boy in today's world?

Queen's Corgi's bite the shit out of everybody

THE RAID-Redemption- is one of the best action movies I have ever seen. Seriously---A swat team in training raids a high-rise building housing gang members..and things go wrong---this film has the best hand to hand combat I have ever seen on the screen, as well as an excellent plot, camera work, everything about this film is amazingly done.
Watch it in the original Indonesian with English subtitles, the dubbing in the English version is horrible...if you are a fan of action films this one has been rated 5 stars by everyone who has seen it---

"Gardens are not made by singing, 'Oh how beautiful,'

and sitting in the shade."

Rudyard Kipling

Logarithmic Spiral

Strangely several nights of very good rain, like the old days when New Mexico had a rainy season you could depend on---hard to deny climate change when all of Idaho is on fire ---how the hell does that work....?

50.4 MPG on the commute for an average this week---less than last week and there is no apparent reason as to why the average dropped---must be wind direction on the way home from work--that's all I can think of--but gas prices here jumped 10 cents a gallon in a single week---that bodes ill----and of course there is no reason any longer required to give the public---we just bend over now without even being commanded to do so.......

Well Romney got his Goring (who has two but they are small) in Ryan...and they deserve each other---and anyone who actually votes for them deserves what happens---although the best comment on this election I have read stated that the choice in this Presidential election is "between a Rabid conservative and a moderate conservative." Nicely put I thought.....

The Mutant Olympics are over and it's onto Cheerio’s boxes for two weeks until the fat blob of a public forgets everything.....

The garden is still producing like mad and we are even dining on our own small potatoes---and they are excellent I might add....JoJo is working like a dog organizing our coming increase in solar power production, of which there will be more on in future blogs as things progress......

Me I am seemingly drifting along---and I like it that way.

I never live in the town that I work in.

I accept commuting--at various times in my life, long distances to avoid residing in the town that I work in.

I care nothing about a short commute when compared to the disgusting possibility of catching a glimpse, even out of the corner of my eye of the place where I work even by accident even in passing of the physical presence of castle of horrors when I am off. I care nothing about commute times compared to the disgust of being reminded of work when I am on my own time over the two short days a week I own myself........living in the town you work in, well that can fuck itself.

Announcements were made this week  ( not very loudly or widely ) that there will be no prosecutions made against Goldman Sachs or for that matter any other company involved in our 2008 economic meltdown that regular people paid the bill for---

it was a suckers bet against that decision especially in an election year where donated money can get you off death row if there's enough of it---There will never be true honest justice directed against the 1% until we storm their fortresses and do what the French did a long time ago.........just funny how they slip this information out almost silently and the trailer park republicans in their wife beater t-shirts will still vote for the richest, Republican candidate who plans are to keep them and their children in ignorance and wage slavery forever....nice job with your vote there Bubba. 

with enough money you don't go to jail

and why do we call it our government?

I keep reading web pieces bemoaning the lack of gun control activity since the Batman movie massacre....demanding additional legal---well they really don't know what they want legally, but those voices are damn sure they want something done.

I have worked in the third world fairly extensively when I was younger, and I can absolutely state that although we are identical to 3rd world countries now in so many ways---the one for sure difference is that our citizens have guns....in the third world the army comes around and chops the feet off of every third person just to let you know they can do it because--- eh--- nobody has a gun other than them.....at least here they can try that but will probably be met at the door by an old lady with a 70 year old owlhead revolver and she'll be clicking the trigger--she may not actually hit anything but there will be a lot of bang noise and the army fascists will go elsewhere to try and find somebody without a gun to collect their feet requirement for the day....There are 314 million and some citizens now in this country and if 10% are psycho's, just for the sake of conversation, that's 3 million 140,000 insane people wandering around because Regan shut down all the asylums---- 

Shitheads are everywhere---and if it's not a gun they use it will be a knife or a car or an airplane or a chainsaw...because they are psycho fucks. Having a gun or not will make no difference---ask the guy in Florida who got his face chewed off--the rat brain that did that one didn't need a gun for that brunch---

Do you really want to be protected by financially cut back police departments, incompetent Feds, who cannot find Rin Tin Tin at a cat show, and/or minimum wage security guards---no fucking thanks---I’ll take my chances on my own pistol and my own spider sense-----so although in so many areas I am one of those screaming liberal, socialists who Mitt Romney warns you about---someone who believes in free eye glasses for all little kids---also happens to believe that their parents should be allowed to be armed when they take junior to get their free Regan Cheese allotment. The reason why nobody is doing anything for these weenies demanding gun control is that it's old news and doesn't work and the real boogey man that people are afraid of is our own government---a guy who wants to eat your face is easy to deal with compared to Feds with an attitude.

Currently finishing details on the Roll Royce armored car diorama, and working on the Mark E Vickers Armstrong project...finishing and detailing these two projects will take my available time off this weekend---I will also be working on figures for these projects...attempting the increased use of oil paints for figure uniforms and faces...and racing the learning curve on oil painting.

I am considering for my next project one centering on figures by constructing a British Vickers machine gun emplacement during the Phony war of 1939 in France and the construction of a British 6 pound anti-tank gun position. Both of these projects are figure/scene orientated with the machinery as more of a background rather than the focus of the situation. This will hopefully sharpen my overall techniques and especially my figure painting skills....

The other weird thing about modeling I am finding is the need to have stacks of kits available to build on demand...you can't just sit and think---"OK I want to build this" order it and wait for it and the supplemental supplies--paint colors and figures to come in....NOOOOO....an integral part of this hobby apparently is the requirement to order kits and stack them on your shelves with the idea of building them in the future...and of course the build order changes as each kit comes in....when I first started investigating military vehicle modeling I wondered why pictures of guy's workshops showed them filled with unopened kits....I completely understand why now---and am engaging in the identical process---the good part though is that I will have a supply of kits for after I retire when money gets tight......

Stability in modeling for me though is the time period I enjoy modeling---this does not change--I am still focused on that steampunk between the wars time period--although I recently branched out to Italian land ships but for now it will go in the kit stack while I continue work on my British fascination.

"In fair weather prepare for foul."

Thomas Fuller