Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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decay & ruin
Biosphere II
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dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

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Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

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   Girl Scout beers
Sunday, March 8 2015
Dog walking on the Farm Road just isn't fun when it's confined to the narrow beaten-down path, so lately Gretchen has been taking the dogs down to the corn fields in the nearby Esopus Valley. It's much easier to walk down there in the many snowmobile tracks left by presumably spoiled local teenagers. Today Gretchen, Eleanor and Ramona met Nancy and her dog Jack down there, but then she had other social engagements, so I drove down to pick up the dogs from Ray & Nancy's house. While there, I drank some coffee and we talked about things like ice damming (Ray and Nancy have a little happening on the north-sloping half of their roof). Unexpectedly, Ramona walked into the dining room, squatted, and unleashed over a cup of urine onto the area carpet, so then I had to clean that up. Thanks, Ramona!

I took a detour into town on the way home, getting some groceries at Hannaford, a little hanging and caulking hardware at Herzog, and investigating the still-open-for-business Radio Shack to see if they were having a going-out-of-business sale. They weren't, and the guy working there asked (as Radio Shack employees always do, except when the store is going out of business) if I needed help. I've always fucking hated that.
There was a bit of a thaw today, with temperatures rising about 40 and lots of meltwater dripping from the roof. Happily, there was little or no further leaks from the ice dams, and some progress was made in thawing the huge cylinder of ice trapped in the northwest rain barrel (that was the one that got stopped up and froze solid when the temperature took a sudden turn for the arctic back in January; there's been almost no thaw since then).
After getting some web work done, I drove back down to Ray & Nancy's place (giving Gretchen some much-needed alone time) so I could hang out with them and Mark, the guy who periodically shows up and feng shuis my greenhouse. Mark had come up to get in one last snowboarding before spring is upon us (something is easier to visualize now that we're in Daylight Savings Time again). Ray would be making a sort of Italian meal featuring bucatini with an oily onion sauce and a side of asparagus. When I arrived, I brought a twelver of Genesee Cream Ale, which I would later refer to as "Girl Scout beer" in reference to the cans' color; they matched a box of Girl Scout Cookies from Mark's daughter (though neither she nor Mark's wife had come Upstate this time). At the time, Ray and Mark were watching Alaska: The Last Frontier on live teevee. I don't really understand watching live teevee in 2015, but I guess Mark doesn't have cable back at home and fuck it, he was on vacation.
Later, after dinner, Ray amused us with a couple a'capella songs he'd made using an auto-tune app on his smart phone. It was like the next thing in karaoke; it could make anything or anyone sound musical. So I recorded a little ditty too, though I hadn't had any chance to think up lyrics, so the chorus ended up being simply "Elderly, elderly, elderly," sung in a slightly Appalachian accent. The auto-tune app did its work and it sounded like music. Amazing!
Mark is unusual among my friends (well, recent friends at least) in that he follows and believes a lot of conspiracy theories, and not just the goofy liberal ones against, say genetically modified organisms. He thinks, among many other things, that the lunar landings were faked and that the CIA has ways of turning off Earth's gravity. I'll nod my head and mumble something noncommittal when his theories are impossible to disprove (for example, it's possible, though highly unlikely, that the lunar landings were faked), but when they're clearly absurd I always say something. Today's absurdity from Mark was that the moon is actually hollow, and as proof Mark offered that it can be rung "like a bell." I replied that that couldn't possibly be true because there is no material strong enough to hold up the upper layers of the moon against the force of its own gravity.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?150308

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