Dropping Like Flies

Attempted 2016 presidential candidate. Dropped out before the primaries began.

New York Times:
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, Dies at 71  —  Mr. Graham died of a “brief and sudden” illness on Saturday evening, his office said.  He served in the Senate for more than two decades.Dan Diamond / Washington Post:

Lindsey Graham, longtime South Carolina senator, dies at 71  —  Graham, first elected to the House in 1994 and the Senate in 2002, was running for reelection this year.  He died of a “brief and sudden illness,” his office said.  —  Lindsey Graham, a longtime Republican senator from South Carolina …

Bloomberg:   US Senator Lindsey Graham Dies at 71 After Sudden Illness

Outlived another wretched bastard. How's that other sick cracker doing?

Music For Painting Plastic

Has other uses as well.Not only the version, but the original!Again, the original. You get it all here! I prefer this arrangement anyway.The 20-odd ft. of butcher paper used for packing makes a good surface for painting.

It Arrived!

Delivered at 1025, US$78.95, plus $32.94 S&H & $10.90 tax worth of plastic & nickel/steel from The People's Republic of China. Now I will cut it open & show you every item, one at a time. NOT!! Sweet Blood of Jesus, what is duller than an "unboxing" video? This is all track, nothing interesting, & now I have to paint all 24+ linear feet of rails & ties before I can try my luck laying it.

Want a mind-numbing video of that?

I am disappointed that the Postal Service didn't put it on a 'plane but trucked it across the country. Expecting some interesting plastic & electronics Fri., which left N.Y.C. this a.m.; maybe the P.S. will send that on a 'plane. I can at least hope for Thurs. delivery, air mail or not.

Jeeze, I'm like a consumer. When did that happen?

Holding Pattern

Definitely have to wait for the flex track."Expected Delivery" is Monday, but the pkg. left PHX suburb Avondale at 0822 today, so my optimistic heart hopes it's already in town & will be at the Nat "King" Cole station in time to be delivered tomorrow. If not, an exciting wknd. of replacing plastic wheelsets & couplers w/ metal ones & adjusting coupler heights.

Auto-focus my ass, SONY.

Even the Catalina is in a holding pattern atop the desk.Minutes later: My stuff arrived at the L.A. Reg. Dist. Ctr. at 1916, so my optimism may not be wrong. Sad when all one's optimism is because one's somewhat wiser than a Postal Service robot.

Friday F.O. & D.

A finger, or even two, are not enough to express my sheer disgust at this wk.'s pointless bullshit.

Friday Freak Out

Supposedly many big names played in Eckstine's band before they became big names.

Inanity & Idiocy Become Exponential

Talking Points Memo:
A Pro-Trump Christian Group Wants to Put a Cross on the Moon
Bennito L. Kelty / Raw Story:   Pro-Trump group has plans for a robotic lunar cross — and Elon Musk holds the key: report
The Register:   Ex-NASA boss points out small flaw in Moon landing plan: No lander

Stupidest thing ever? Sounds familiar.Do these buffoons live in an '80s &'90s cartoon universe? Shouldn't they be reading their "Good Book" (All other books are bad, dontcha know!?!) rather than watching telebision? 

Not that I think carving "CHAS." into the moon would be a bad idea, but what do I know?

Of course there's no lander yet. Bezos (Blue Origin) & Musk (SpaceX) are idiots. Are there no contractors other than the ones who bribe Fat Don?

You-Know-What Your You-Know-Who

Phony Tee Vee War Renewed

"Clash of civilizations" my sweet ass. Buncha grade-school sissies throwing rocks at each other.Men would put boots on the ground, throw punches & kick. How long have we been attacking Iran from the air? Off & on since 1987.

"ONLY CASH & Z"

Big Rock In The Sky

Further Proof Of The Existence Of A Kind & Loving Gawd

Got up at noon, felt like vomiting, had dry heaves & bile. Felt like crap, went back to sleep at 1400 & slept unil 1800. Jesus certainly 💘 me, does't he?

Now, some pictures of clouds & birds.

If there were a just gawd, birds would have pecked out your eyes that refuse to see & ripped your lying tongues from your ugly mouths long, long ago.

Impasse Hiatus Momentary Pause

Came to the realization that short bits of sectional track are not conducive to electricity or good running,

& I'll have to give flex-track another shot. Might neeed a slighty better voltmeter, too.

Decided to try TrainWorld again, so was awake before 1600ET, when they close, & spoke to a nice enough woman who set up a new acc't. for me & e-mailed the link to their form as we were on the 'phone. But it looks as if the pkg. won't be shipped until Tues., due to the holiday.

In other consumption news, I finally got an undamaged USN boxcar from Yankee Dabbler. Only took a couple of months.

Looks nice & rolls well. Certainly worth the US$34.99. Not worth the aggravation!

And the pirates at DoorStepInk have promised me a refund. Not there yet, & "It may take up to 10 days for this refund to appear in your account." Didn't take any 10 fucking days for the money to be taken from my acc't.! (Forget quite when I started this, but the refund did show on 5 July. Thanks again, clowns!)

I have been making good use of my time by getting the two areas that go nowhere fine-tuned again, & decided that amusing as it was to have the stock pen so close to the Yard Cafe & depot, it could be moved.

And the transload facility works better on the other spur as well. Win-win.

Then I realized that as soon as I have the new track laid everything will need fine-tuning again. And once I've bought turn-outs to replace some I bought when I didn't know what I was doing, or would eventually do, another round (theoretically the last🤞🏻) of alteration & adjustment. Gah!

Not to do anything the upper classes would, like set a goal, but having had this for four months less than seven yrs. now, it would be nice to have fully electrified, runnable track & even have glued a structure or two together & slapped it on the layout before Nov. I've had seven building kits, trees, plants, 'phone poles & other details in layout limbo for yrs. Pprobably beat inflation & Fat Boy's tariffs by buying early. Speaking of, even laying track like a dirty 19th-century Irishman beats the hell out of current events. An hr. passes like nothing.

Mounjaro® & Moi

Why I laugh & laugh (Sneer, even!) at your pathetic need for food. See? Breatharianism works!

I'm like a death camp inmate.

Note visible sternum, & hiatal hernia around navel. Not the one in the groin that is irritating. And tightened belt. Have gone from a 42" (107 cm.) to a 38" (96 cm.) waist & lost about 50 lbs. (23 kg.) in two yrs.

I now pay US$47.00/month for the stuff, but have literally no appetite. It's a struggle to consume a whole banana at one time; have to bag the remainder & refrigerate it until later. Occasionally I'll eat half a slice of toast (current loaf is "best if used by 6 May") or have a slice of cheese for protein. Haven't had or wanted meat for months now.

My only exercise is walking. No car, no moolah for Big Oil. (Gas & groceries? Wise up already!) Net result? Having paid all creditors their monthly pound of flesh, there is $1,150+ in the checking acc't. Barring disaster or emergency, I can't imagine necessary expenses being over $250, leaving me w/ 900 bones to blow on anything my foolish heart desires. Charity, maybe?

No, Eli Lilly and Company ("A Medicine Company") aren't paying for this, but I'll gladly take my money back from them if they're looking for a testimonial from a "real person" who is an "actual user".

"Stop Yowling About High Prices!"

Gaya Gupta / The Guardian:
Half of Americans struggle to afford groceries and gas, exclusive poll finds
Lauren Pearle / Straight Arrow:   Affordability crisis becomes rare point of agreement in divided America

Bradley Cortright / New York Sun:   Half of Americans Struggle To Pay for Gas and Groceries, Poll

Kathianne Boniello / Mediaite:   Bill O'Reilly Slams Struggling Americans Who Are ‘Yowling About High Prices’

You voted for this, you pieces of impoverished shit. Ha ha ha & fuck you! This reporter has no use for silly bullshit like gas or food, & he's sitting pretty. He'll laugh & laugh & laugh when you all starve to death in your shitmobiles while waiting for gas.

Via Ten Bears, what Big Gay Donnie's cost you sucker-ass chumps.Billions upon billions. Ha ha ha.

Knew It

It did arrive a day earlier than estimated, a die-cast PBY5-A Catalina. What a Navy seaplane w/ early WWII insignia is doing over an Army camp close to 150 miles from the Pacific & around 125 miles from the Gulf of California in the mid-'50s is anybody's guess; maybe it's a Twilight Zone episode.

Not bad for US$17.75. (Just saw the same model for $39.99. And I didn't even compare prices. Hah!) I do resent those pirate bastards at FedEx getting $8.99 for shipping. (And Jesus, next time leave it at the door to the bunker, not the mail boxes, & knock before you run away.)

No tax, which I think violates California law. Ah. Only if your operation moves more than $500,000 anually in Calif. I dunno; populous state full of chumps & suckers. Maybe someone should look into it.

There are few HO scale aircraft available; this is 1/144th scale & should look better flying from the convenient hook, used on the prototype to lift it from or lower it to the water.

Does not want to be grounded.

Not balanced for flight either, so my story is it's struggling taking off from a short field, heavily laden w/ poison gas or an H-Bomb, especially as the landing gear is still down. May have mentioned that the Rice area was considered for the Trinity test. Pretty damn sure something nefarious is going on at Camp Patton.

Now I have to figure how to attach it securely to the ceiling.

Provenance:

Does Macau/Bangladesh mean no Trump tariffs, or has this been on a shelf for yrs.?

The actual item.

Two Sevens Clashing

They Either Don't Know What It Is, Or They're Against It

From the yr. 1984. How do they know?
Not sure what to make of the LDS reference.

I s'pose the sheep have always been this way. They're apparently worse in 2026.

The evidence for this startling conclusion comes from the most significant opinion study you’ve never read or read about. Published in May, the Johns Hopkins Agora Institute and ReD Associates conducted an in-depth research of conservatives in three red counties in Michigan, South Carolina and Wyoming. The authors describe the content of “Faith, Freedom, Family, Place: An Ethnographic Study of Conservative Americans’ Relationships to Democracy” as follows:

This study relies on ethnographic research: sustained immersion in people’s homes, lives, and communities through extensive interviews, observations, participation, and relationship-building. Where much democracy research documents what people say they believe, ethnography examines how and why political worldviews take shape within the full context of daily experiences, relationships, and social environments.

The most fundamental issue the researchers attempted to resolve is the relationship their subjects had with what is commonly thought of as the American secular faith in democracy. What the study found is that the respondents either had a notion of what constituted democracy that greatly differed from what is taught in Civics 101 — when such a course is even offered — or rejected outright the very concept of democracy. In fact, the latter view was the majority opinion:

14 out of 21 participants in this study had an immediate negative reaction when asked about democracy . . . Sarah (mid 30s, WY), a homeschooling mother, put it plainly: “I don’t like the word democracy.”

Spotted at Hullabaloo. As noted, worth reading. No reforms or promises will give these people functioning minds that can be changed. Members of the "godless and wicked majority" who they think are "besieging" them had better get to work on actual besiegement, before it's too damn late.

Tuesday?

When I saw it was in Chino yesterday p.m., I figured it would be here today. But the estimated delivery date hasn't changed. Nonetheless, it's on the FedEx vehicle, so step on it, Jesus. My patience grows thin!

Mental Monday

Get Help Before It's Too Late For All Of Us!!

Bring anyone to mind? This reporter is reminded of several glaring examples in high positions.