Adaptive Curmudgeon

Mrs. Curmudgeon cooks well. It’s a thing of beauty and a pleasure to watch. Her stuff is delicious. It’s an art. She’s creative. She’s got tons of recipes and she’s literally never followed one all the way through. “I was out of ingredient X so I substituted Y, plus I decided to use a little more ingredient Z for an extra bit of flavor.”

I’m a nerd and just don’t do that. If the recipe calls for eye of newt then it damn well needs eye of newt. I’ll get eye of newt or I’ll make something else.

Mrs. Curmudgeon has this unfathomable ability to recite a list of ingredients and imagine how delicious it’ll be. That ability is not wired into my brain. She’ll say something like this: “It has arugula, and beets, and red wine, and asparagus, and a savory compote. Isn’t that great?” What I hear is random nouns in no logical order: “It has motor oil, and tree bark, and Dawn dishwashing soap. Isn’t that great?”

Don’t blame me, I’m a guy. I don’t cook. I manufacture food.

As much as the finer sex (and men that are good cooks) laugh, my way is a fine way to go. My cooking is neither morally inferior nor spiritually bereft. Food I cook is not bad. It’s perfectly adequate. It’s reasonably good. Sometimes it’s excellent, but excellence is never my goal.

Because I use no creativity at all, my dishes are completely reproducible. I don’t wonder how this new thing will taste because I made it once, figured it out, and haven’t changed a fucking thing. I don’t usually burn shit. If it’s baked it’s baked for the right time because I set a fucking timer. The food I make tastes about the same if I prepare it in our kitchen or cook on a fire of cut up pallets in a desolate swamp.

I follow recipes like they’re laws of nature. I measure ingredients like they’re reagents. And I consider the entire process holistically; cooking means gathering ingredients (even if you have to kill something), preparing the food, eating it, and washing the dishes.

Our kitchen is where a beautiful unicorn shares space with a T-800. If I could somehow involve my 3d Printer I’d be approaching T-1000. Poor suffering Mrs. Curmudgeon.

Anyway, I like making bread. I can make bread by hand. I have a grain mill and I can make my own flour too. I can literally start with a bag of wheat kernels and end with a sandwich. But, I’m pretty lazy so I almost always use a bread maker.

I don’t want to hear any shit. My bread is wholesome, tastes good, and cheaper than store bought. Just because I didn’t spend an hour kneading dough doesn’t mean the food is crap. I’m not in it for the atmosphere and I’m happy to use whatever level of technology is most efficient at the moment. You can boil water on a fire or use a microwave; neither the water nor the consumer can taste where the BTUs came from.

Anyway I literally wore out my third bread maker and my “backup” bread maker (#2) just wouldn’t go. So I bought a new one.

The new machine has a recipe book that was written for space aliens, or perhaps Europeans. I expected to scoop something like 3 cups of flour. The recipe that came with the machine calls for unholy measures like 7/8th of a cup and/or grams. (Don’t run to the comments and get all “well actually”. I know about volume versus mass. This ain’t my first rodeo.) The book is so goofy I wonder if it was translated? Maybe written by AI?

I ran a few loaves and they came out fine. So I knew the machine was working right. Then I set out to make “milk bread”. Why? Because there was milk in the fridge and I didn’t want it to go to waste. That’s what happens when you’re into “manufacture” rather than “art”.

I followed the recipe with the care one would use for defusing a land mine. It wanted so many grams of this and a tablespoon of that and by God that’s what I did. The machine even has “menu 9: milky bread”. I was instructed to choose that option. I did.

The bread came out looking like a train wreck! (I didn’t think to take any photos. I wish I had.)

I was pissed.

But I cut it open and ate some. Big surprise, it was good! Way better than I expected. The next day Mrs. Curmudgeon cut the rest up and made French Toast. Holy spacebats! It was awesome. If you have never had French Toast made from hand cut milk bread slathered with real maple syrup then you’re missing out.

I decided to figure out how to make milk bread that doesn’t look like a dumpster fire. I found some nice person who had the exact same machine as the one I own and who was using the exact same recipe as I’d tried. She got the exact same results I did. (Forward to 2:50 to see bread that looks weird but tastes good.)

My initial theory was that I’d fucked up. That theory didn’t seem to be the case. The recipe in the booklet is probably shit. So I searched for a milk bread recipe and found one.

Now I was listening to someone who sounded like an eleven year old girl. This throws up red flags but then again who am I to think a kid can’t make bread?  The kid is probably a fucking genius. I copied all the ingredients from infernal video format to scribbled notes and was all set to go.

But then there was a problem. The kid used the “bread dough” setting, then added ingredients which had been withheld at the beginning of the process, then switched to a different setting.

Not cool! The reason I have a bread machine is to set it and forget it. Plus her machine was different than mine.

So I searched again and got my final set of YouTube instructions.

Hot damn! This lady looks like someone’s grandma. She’s got a southern accent and the exact same machine I own. Perfect.

She went into real detail, in particular pointing out that the pamphlet with the machine had sketchy recipe. She also pointed out that bread is baked based on “feel” and not perfect ingredient measurement. This is an absolutely true fact which I chose to disregard.

Just like the kid, she ran for a while on “dough” then reset the machine to “milk bread”. Message received! If two people did the same approach the logic of an LLM (and most of society) is to accept the consensus opinion. For something irrelevant like bread I can go with it

Here’s what I did:

1. I measured stuff following the kid’s recipe. I could have followed the grandma’s recipe but I was getting sick of going back and forth in video and writing shit down.
2. I held back the unsalted butter. The kid had done that. Why not?
3. I ran the “dough setting” just like both of them had. I wasn’t clear how long to let it go so I just ran it the whole cycle (something like 20 minutes).
4. I had no idea when to add the butter; which the kid had withheld for 15 minutes and the grandma hadn’t mentioned. About 6 minutes in I said “fuck it” and dumped it in the machine. It seemed to work.
5. The dough looked great. When grandma switched from “dough” to “milk bread” she pressed some buttons for “reserve” to give it a 15 minute break. I fucked up and paused. About 20 minutes later I figured out my mistake. I said “fuck it” again, reset everything, launched the milk bread routine, and assumed I’d ruined everything.
6. Grandma removes the bread paddle after ferment 3. That’s a great idea. I took a nap instead. (Napping while something else cooks is precisely why I have a bread machine.)
7. It came out PERFECT.

Measuring stuff:

Success:

My shop had a wall clock. It broke. I tossed it. I decided to 3d print a replacement.

I had a specific clock in mind and was pretty adamant about it. I wanted the plainest, simplest, most unremarkable clock to ever exist. I was thinking of the clocks in my old high school. (At the time I hated those clocks. Even now I’m still thankful I’m out of school… fuck that place. Weirdly, the clocks in my school would click backwards just a little bit, before moving forward for each minute. I never knew why. Nobody knows why. To replicate that would be far more involved than I care to go.)

Makerworld had a shitload of clock models. Some were very impressive! I sorted through them rejecting dozens for the odd reason that they were too flashy, or too clever, or too beautiful. I didn’t want a work of art. I wanted a humble, easily ignorable clock. I wanted something not too big. The footprint of my Bambulab A1 is about 10″ diameter so that worked out nicely. (The Bambulab has a 256 mm cube build envelope.)

I found just want I wanted. If you want to make the same thing: go here.

I had to buy a clock movement. Makerworld has the exact right movement for this model but it’s nine bucks. I thought I could get the same thing cheaper from Amazon and I’d get “free” shipping.

This got weird because I couldn’t remember the word for “movement”. If you can’t remember “clock movement” searching on “clock guts” is just going to make the algorithm cry. I eventually ran into “Persistence of Memory” by Salvador Dali.

That distracted me big time! For inexplicable reasons Dali’s image, painted in 1931, drilled into my brain when I was just a kid. Why did a kid who should be watching cartoons get obsessed about a 40+ year old painting? No idea. Maybe Dali was the real deal?

Eventually, I ordered exactly what I wanted. It cost seven bucks. No matter how much you shop around, it’s going to cost about $7. Was all that effort worth it to save two bucks? NO!

Seven bucks was still about twice what I expected to pay. Then again it’s a fair price and the source of confusion is me.

Warning geezer cogitation incoming!

The world has changed. Fiat currency has done what fiat currency always does. Numbers just aren’t what they were when I was learning “the value of a dollar”. I was fine with prices until the Bidenverse turbocharged everything. Those old numbers are gone; never to return. I think I’ll always feel that way. Inflation was annoying but steady for decades. Then some dude got more votes than any other candidate in history in the middle of the night after the election had been decided. The election was subsequently undecided, and I lived in a new universe where a mini-van costing fifty grand doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. I think some things just hit the limits of plasticity of the mind. It’s not necessarily political, it’s just human.

I remember the novelty of spending Escudos (Portuguese currency before the EU ate Europe). Or of spending Pesos in Mexico. It was always a reminder I was in a different world; spending such large digits on such small things. It was as if people quoted prices in dimes or nickels. “The cost for that pair of boots? 480 dimes.”

I knew it wouldn’t last. Everything feels more or less like Peso-ish numbers now. It’s not hard to drop a grand on a set of four tires. Burgers and a beer for a couple is now a C-note. I remember when a twenty dollar bill was plenty. I remember it cost about 2,000 +/- Escudos for a burger and an evening getting drunk in a tavern in Lisbon in the 1990’s.

I’m not complaining, just observing. I’ve known old people whom said the same thing. Now it’s my turn. Perhaps you had a grandparent who never got used to gas costing more than a buck? Ever hear a Boomeriffic geezer wonder why a Millennial can’t pay off college by bussing tables in the summer? It is what it is.

Live long enough and you’ll be there. You’ll spend two hours shopping for a $9 item to score a deal at $7 and yet wonder why you couldn’t get it for $3.50.

/Geezer Cogitation

Despite my shopping hassles, I thought $7 for a clock was damn cheap. It would be double that once I added in the filament. Make your own clock for $14! What a brilliant guy to save so much money…

WRONG!

In the middle of this project I wandered through a Walmart. I thought a clock was like $25 – $30. Nope. They’re cheaper than that. The smallish ones in this display ranged from about $15 – $20.

It’s hard to compete with plastic injection molded Chinese crap. My 3d fused deposition molded clock would not save me any money.

The next step was to pick filament. I freaked out and bought way too much of filament when I started selling sawhorse jigs last December so I’ve got many options. Since it wasn’t load bearing or anything special I could use either PLA or PETG.

A new roll of PLA black had a spool malfunction last month. It was a perfect time to fix it and use it. I 3d printed some tools to manage the mis-aligned spool and hook a different spool to to my power drill. I respooled, thus rescuing the filament. That was a fun challenge.

For the clock face I used a spool of white PLA filament. For the “text” I used black. Not very creative but that’s what I wanted. Time to start printing!

Whomever made this design was smart. Rather than embedding the clock numerals, which would require swapping filament with the AMS Lite, the designer split the numbers and the background into two parts. One is a backing of black (or any color you want) with the numbers embossed (sticking out). The other is a front of white (or any color you want) with voids perfectly aligned so the embossed “text” pushes through. Brilliant! The whole thing is held together with a third part that screws everything together with huge coarse threads. Also brilliant.

Part 1: The face: This went easy peasy. Very satisfying!

Part 2 the backing. This has huge bridges with no support. Not ideal but it worked.

I planned to make the outer ring in black. But then I decided on red to match the Milwaukee Packouts scattered about the shop. I didn’t have any red PLA so I used red PETG. Would the threads from two different materials work together? I’d find out.

The horizontal unsupported PETG made stringy crappy threads.

But it didn’t matter. It wasn’t a tight tolerance part.

There are a few parts where the white face couldn’t fill embossed voids; like the zero in “10”. The model printed little white things to fill them in. I installed them with superglue.

I could have printed clock hands but I liked the ones that came with the movement. The “seconds” hand was red. It matched my red housing quite nicely.

It cost $15.37 total; $7 for the movement and $8.37 in filament. I didn’t go overbudget, in fact it was at the low end of Walmart clock costs. Whew! But I didn’t save a lot either.

That’s OK. I think it looks cool and I made it myself.

It’s a little late considering it’s a few weeks after Christmas but it’s functioning and that was a thing on my New Year’s list. If you’re interested in shopping please go to my “store“.

Scott Adams is dead. I’ll miss him. Much of the time he annoyed the hell out of me, but that was part of the fun. Even (particularly?) when he grated on me, it was thoughtful and I always appreciated it.

Half the time, Scott Adams pissed me off, but the other half was so insightful I was glad to have him. I believe he earnestly believed what he was saying and (unlike most happy believers) he was no dummy. Anyone who thinks deeply about anything should be treasured. It was worth wading through Scott’s ego because that was the price of getting to the good stuff.

His was the only podcast I’ve habitually listened to. He was smart as a whip and always interesting. He claimed to be a master persuader. Indeed sometimes I’d be persuaded by his ideas. “Yeah, that’s pretty spot on. I’ll have to revise my earlier conclusions.” Other times he’d venture into topics about which he knew little (at least compared to me) or he was just way off in “nerdland”. Those times it sounded like an eight year old discussing what adults did at work. (Listening to him talk about farming or food production was painful!)

Even when I was thinking “what fresh hell is that goofy egghead up to today?” I listened carefully. He might have cogent logic to sway me to his point of view. There is no higher praise.

If you meet someone and five minutes into it you know how they’ll frame every topic, there’s no point in engaging deeply with them. Adams was not that. Also, the dude burrowed into my brain enough that I used “framing” in a sentence. Well played Mr. Adams!

Like everyone, I enjoyed Dilbert. I once bought a Dilbert book in Portuguese translation (I can’t read Portuguese). I was amused that Dilbert was universal. Scott got cancelled, as many deep thinkers did. By now I distrust any public figure that didn’t get cancelled.

Like many, I started listening to Scott during the height of the COVID madness and kept on from there. Back then Scott planted his flag on “VAX!” . He diligently explained why I should agree with him. I listened, knowing my life would be better if I just agreed. But I couldn’t. He himself had provided the “two movies on one screen” concept which seemed to apply.

The dude was risk averse in a way I could never imagine for myself. He was locked in his house fretting over a pathogen while I rambled about on my dirtbike. He talked about his wife, a hot flight instructor and would be neurologist. She was doing aerobatics while he was too scared to travel. I thought “she’s gonna’ dump you”; and she did. He’s a millionaire and a genius. He could have done more than hid. He could have worked out logistics to get to her even in a zombie apocalypse. But that’s not how he rolled. Instead he did a podcast. Two movies in the same screen.

I bitch when cars have automatic transmission. He raved over the future of self driving cars. Intelligence does not mean “alike”.

We both saw the stats, he got the vax, I didn’t. Later he decided the vax was ineffective and possibly harmful. Nothing wrong with changing your mind. Yet he went with the “even if I was wrong, nobody that made a rational decision could have come to the opposite conclusion”. I imagined Vox Day dipping into his inkwell and writing “gamma” on Adam’s forehead. (Vox is another genius that got cancelled. He too is well worth wading through massive ego to glean knowledge.)

I’ll note that Adams embraced more humility as mortality loomed. In fact, he handled the ultimate challenge like an absolute boss. Well done sir.

I’m going to miss Scott. Not just when I see people doing stupid things en masse and my mind dredges up Scott’s ramblings about hypnosis. I’ll also miss him when I see smart people coming to their own conclusion; however unpopular. Society is weaker without his cheery yet thoughtful prognostications.

I’ve upgraded sawhorse jig sales from my old cut & paste form to https://adaptivecurmudgeon.com/shop/. It has (I think) a “normal” shopping cart with integrated billing and shipping and all that.

Sawhorse jigs are added.

Sawhorse rigs will be added soon.

One last note, PayPal insists on offering financing(!). I think you can click an option to split the purchase into four payments. I can’t eliminate the button. But just because you can doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. I wouldn’t sleep at night if I thought someone was paying interest for months(!!!) on a cheap and fun little gadget I made.

Please do NOT pay interest on a payment plan for a $12.50 object! Just don’t! The stuff I’m selling costs less than a pizza, you can handle it. Don’t let bankers “monetize” any more than they already do.

Thanks.

A.C.

Now that WooCommerce has gotten it’s mitts in everything it could (maybe?) create a transaction without logic (which Congress does every day). My best temporary solution is to tell it everything is out of stock. Which is what I did.

It’ll take a day or two while I sort this mess. In the meantime, I’m going to turn off this infernal computer and drink a beer.

In case you’re wondering, this is what the blog looked like 10 minutes ago:

Have you ever pressed a button and then watch 20 years of work scramble? Well I have!

If you’re looking at my blog and it suddenly went apeshit there’s a reason why. WooCommerce ran with scissors and nuked my blog. It was horrible. In one fell swoop it looked like a handful of mentally deficient marketing executives and a team of woke urban hipster doucehbags did some unholy deviant shit to my old school basic text centric blog.

Sorry about that.

WooCommerce, wants to integrate with everything. This meant I was messing around… with everything. I am absolutely not qualified to be doing that.

Also, now I know why all the big blogs look like shit. They’re set on themes that all look like… well they look practically identical. I looked at a hundred themes that all looked very professional and completely artificial and annoying. I always wondered why I look on the internet and I want almost none of it. Now I know. It’s ugly and shitty and marketing driven and just drips fake and gay because the underlying software makes it so.

This is why modern cars suck. Nobody that knows how to use a clutch has been part of car design for decades. They operate like iPhones with wheels. But I digress…

WooCommerce changed my blog’s theme (which I’ve been using well over a decade). I guess I told it that I approved. That’s on me. It’s also why all hell broke loose.

I think I got it back. Mostly. I think. Unless I didn’t.

A final note… for the love of God don’t buy anything today. I have no idea what’ll happen if someone tries to buy a sawhorse jig now that WooCommerce has gotten it’s mitts in everything. It’ll probably multiply the tax rate in Moldova by the number of molecules in a jar of yoghurt and then deposit as pesos in Peter Thiel’s account.

If you wanna’ buy something, please wait a day or two while I sort this mess.

Thanks.

America (and all nations on earth from the beginning of time) add and subtract territory. They also change degrees of administration. Alaska and Hawaii weren’t states until 1959. Puerto Rico doesn’t seem to want to be a state (but it does like to bitch). Washington DC is… well that’s a whole post of its own.

Territory acquisition and release doesn’t have to make sense. As a wee lad sometime during the Carter administration I found myself asking a elementary school teacher; “Why on earth are we giving away the Panama Canal Zone?” My teacher muttered something like: “It’s a complex situation.” I was like “No it’s not. If we own it, why would we give it away for nothing?” My teacher looked at me like I was an evil capitalist demon. (You think teachers being socialist bots is a new thing?) “Are they trading us an island or something?” I asked. My teacher’s answer: “Shut up kid.”

Hmm… my teachers said “shut up” a lot.

We own Guam. Representative Hank Johnson thought Guam might capsize.

A man can be so stupid to think an ISLAND might CAPSIZE and still win elections. Here’s a thought for you to mull over, Hank Johnson is “the Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet”. THE GUY THAT THINKS ISLANDS CAN CAPSIZE IS SUPPOSEDLY MANAGING ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE! You’re welcome.

Anyway, territories moved and shifted until something happened in people’s minds. They’ve solidified the false idea that whatever is now must be always. I suspect Boomers locked down politics forever. Nothing can change once Elvis died (1977). We must live in concrete now and forever. (There are other theories.) All I know is that America could add States in 1959. It could give away territory in 1977. But God forbid anything change now.

Into that bear trap wandered God’s own tornado of activity… Trump. Dude wants Greenland. I don’t know why. I don’t even care why. I just love the idea of something new.

Trump offered to buy Greenland. Why not? Everyone is too scared to do a fucking thing anymore but Trump at least broached the idea and whipped out a checkbook. Half of America has TDS and shrieked “America can never add or lose territory in the modern world because change is death!” Another part of America said; “Greenland? All it’s got is glaciers, who gives a shit?” A tiny fraction said “Greenland is important for military reasons of…” and loaded up PowerPoint presentations about logistics, submarines, and whatever other boring reason why it really matters; causing the rest of us to flee.

It’s an interesting thing to observe. For the first time in my life, someone in Europe didn’t want American money. Denmark said “It’s an affront to our dignity! We will never give up a square inch of our Kingdom! We love our frozen land that perpetually costs money to support! It’s part of our cultural heritage of something or other we can’t quite explain now but it’s fucking important.” What else could Denmark do? They’re in the EU. It’s a club that does nothing but bitch about the US (and especially Trump). All they want from us is money and military support… for which they’ll shit on us.

Which brings me to the first half of my silly little opinion. I like adaptability and we need to practice it or lose it. So far we’ve lost it. A world where nothing changes allows pressure build up until shit gets unsustainable. Look around; you’re surrounded by shit that’s been unresolved for decades. It’s unstable and y’all can feel the tension in the air. Any change, big or little, is probably a good thing. Planting a flag on a frozen nowhere is probably the easiest way to get the ball rolling.

If Greenland can be acquired, why not? Let’s trade for it. Maybe Denmark would like Rhode Island? Maybe they’d like a big pile of money. Maybe they’d like a good deal on something America is sick of… would they like Hollywood? Denmark, like the ossified Americans, have done nothing but bitch… which is pretty standard for Europe in general. Recently they shouted about kicking us out of NATO… which is awesome! Your terms are acceptable! If Trump gets Greenland and simultaneously gets us out of NATO he’d be a hero. That would merit a gold plated statue of his clanging balls hung from the Washington Monument.

Mostly, it would be good for America to demonstrate it can initiate change. I feel like we’re locked into a multi-generational stalemate. It doesn’t have to be that way. What Americans could do in 1959 or 1977 we’re too fucking pathetic to do now. I don’t like that. Think about how everyone said Brexit would kill the entire hemisphere but it happened in 2020. Or think about how East and West Germany reunified in 1990.

Then comes the second part of my silly little opinion, I hope we buy Greenland so I can go play there. Iceland has all sorts of awesome 4×4 roads but I can’t afford to go there. The place has EU prices and EU bullshit and I’ll never afford it. Maybe Greenland can be a shitty low rent place to go have a redneck hootnanny?

Caribou hunting? Cod fishing? Whatever. If it’s cheap just do it.

I know it’s 99% impassible but get the military out there and have them build a trail across some glaciers and shit. Somewhere rugged and cheap. Did I mention cheap? Subsidize ATV shipments or rentals and let me drive my ass across the tundra. Why the fuck not? I can recreate in Alaska… but if Greenland were cheaper and weirder how cool would that be? If it were American territory maybe I could go there with less passport bullshit. I could go camping with a pile of guns and my dirt bike. Shoot a rabbit? Set off fireworks? Yee haw!

I don’t know what’s going to happen. All I know is everyone has been trained to focus on the negative. We’re just so damn practiced at listing things we can’t do. I mention driving an ATV that isn’t yet there on a trail that hasn’t been made in Greenland and you can almost see the Sierra Club protests about endangered lichen materializing before your eyes. Lets stop that.

I propose things can change. I propose things can be done simply because it’s fun. I propose a bazillion acres of impenetrable glaciers and frozen tundra can spare a few spots for trails. Trump’s military base or whatever could come with a heaping helping of cheap stupid redneck entertainment.

It probably won’t happen but it could. Think of all the things that could happen that are rejected out of hand. Lets not be like that.

Around Thanksgiving my simple idea for an online form to sell sawhorse jigs turned out to be unworkable. You don’t know what you don’t know.

Luckily there was no harm done. I resorted to a kludge at https://adaptivecurmudgeon.com/sawhorses/ and it worked just fine. I think my audience is a little more adaptive than the usual. If ya’ can drive a car with a clutch ya’ can cut and paste for an e-mail.

By the way, the sawhorse jigs and rigs are still for sale. I can make them at will and bought a pile of filament. They aren’t a Christmas only thing.

Another step on my Curmudgeonly voyage of self improvement is to sort out a better approach. I installed the WooCommerce “plugin” for WordPress. It purports to do everything I could ever want. It will take orders, accept the money, forward the order to me, calculate shipping, print shipping labels, it’ll detail my car, it’ll clean out my refrigerator crisper drawer, it’ll empty the cat box, it’s a slicer, it’s a dicer…

Is there anything this wonderous plugin can’t do? Yes! It can’t leave me alone. It wants to integrate everything. It wants me to setup some sort of captcha thing. It wants to know my PayPal account details, it wants to know where I was last night, it wants to crawl up my ass and take measurements, it wants… ok I’m exaggerating but only partially.

In order to do everything it needs to know everything. But I’m the kind of guy that doesn’t bother to already know everything. I can barely remember how to login to the various bits and bobs of my half ass online existence. Sorting it all out for a damn plugin is not my forte.

So, there’s a link on my blog that you may or may not see. It says “store coming soon” (or at least it does on my “admin” version of the blog). The store thing may happen, assuming I can jump through enough hoops. But I’m in full procrastination mode so don’t hold your breath.

Part of my delay is that I find the whole thing boring! I’ll happily spend hours trying to figure out the proper chamfer on a 3d part. That feels like a real life challenge and I love it. Configuring linked cascading software feels like a fake and gay simulation of a real task. It makes my brain fall out. It’s just a personality thing. It’s a task ideally suited to some permanently on-line social media addicted millennial with a cell phone glued to their hand. If I find one I’ll offer them an unpaid internship that offers massive “career building synergy”!

The long game is that I get an online “store” setup now so the next time I come up with a 3d printer idea (or maybe just something I make by hand) I can “go to market” with minimal drama. Wish me luck. Life is a learning experience.

What a glorious Christmas it was!

I did nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was everything I hoped it could be.

I’ve been hoarding and growing… peace. One needs to! Modern society is as irrational as it is corrosive. You have to take care.

So I attended to my health, enjoyed the world around me, and stayed unplugged. This seasons feels so much more sweet after fate rattled my cage last summer. For Christmas I rode out a head cold and instead of being pissed at the interruption I was thankful that fluids and rest cured it.

I also made merry, though not too much. There’s a time to party like a rock star. There’s a time to contemplate in quiet satisfaction. Now is the latter. I enjoyed every minute with family. I was happy ever moment I was with Mrs. Curmudgeon. Even the new kitten played a role. He kept me occupied by alternating between cute fluffy sweetheart and actively trying to kill me. (I’m not a cat person, but I like that our kitten has the heart of a lion and the mind of a butterfly.)

Mostly, I had a lot of gratitude and basked by my woodstove. Couldn’t have been happier. I didn’t do much over New Years. This too, was all I hoped it could be.

Then, like a lightning bolt, the new year was a real thing. No holiday lasts forever. Like everything else in our unbalanced world, it was full of surprises. Not bad surprises, good ones. I’ve seen a lot of… correction. (I feel or hope there’s going to be a lot of that in 2026.)

Literally hours into the new year, the oppressed people of Venezuela breathed a little freer. I didn’t see that coming. Who did? Folks can debate geopolitics but all I care is that more people are more free now than were free a month ago.

I’m glad it happened but I’m reluctant to wallow in the politics of the day. I wrote a post about it. I shelved it. Nobody needs nor cares what I think about the global stage. A wise man seeks the maturity to let things pass without comment. (I don’t always succeed but I try.)

After Venezuela what more could I hope for? How about a figurative broom sweeping the turds of Minnesota sidewalks? Inconceivable!

A week into 2026, the people of America, seemingly all at once, noticed obvious, continuous, and well known corruption orbiting certain activities in Minnesota. Why did they not notice before? I have no idea. I feel like millions of people worked very hard to preserve their ignorance. I have no special investigative authority, yet I knew. If a wandering forest creature such as myself knew, how could anybody not?

Regardless, that which was unthinkable was publicly acknowledged. One more corruption iceberg in the sea of icebergs is now on our radar. I have no idea what threshold was crossed, only that it was.

Tim Walz, the nation’s would be VP and Minnesota’s embarrassing mincing retard of a Governor, shocked me by bowing out of his re-election campaign. Now? After all these years? Imaging watching a toddler who’d been trying to stick it’s feet in its mouth suddenly grow to a full human and act accordingly. I’m shocked and impressed. (Yes, I know he didn’t do much and only under duress and he’s still the governor. But who expects change will come to a man who seemed to have a mind of Play-Doh? Take time to appreciate it!)

Such is the wonder of seeing a moron gone to seed. Who among us hasn’t seen some politician or CEO flame out and thought “how did that wingnut ever get that far?” Regardless, be thankful. A city that self-immolated in 2020 might stabilize in 2026. (It might not. There’s months of faffing about that still must happen. But I can hope.)

Also, don’t misread me. I’m not expecting a sudden outbreak of competence. Whomever steps into the Walz’s void will probably be another complete blithering moron. The Peter Principle cannot be denied. And, I’m sure the election will be ugly, tainted, and gross. But where there’s change there’s the possibility of improvement.

Anyway, two things happened that I perceive benefit humanity. Surely some, steeped in their own biases as I am mine, are fuming over both events. I wish them well. The best I can say is I didn’t cause either, so I don’t want to hear any bitching aimed at me. If you’re pissed off, take it up with the Universe. I control nothing.

Alas… nothing is clean.

I’ve been wondering what gross, incestuous, circular firing squad, bullshit will taint one of the two events. Call me cynical but when corruption is stopped (or in these two cases noticed) I start wondering what isn’t as it appears. It’s been years since I took for granted that a crime could happen without the FBI (or someone) using my taxes to cause it. Since I already knew most Minnesota corruption was Federally funded, I turned my eye to Venezuela.

What’s the ugly secret nobody’s talking about? Drugs? Oil? Commies being commies? Zoo animals on the BBQ? I doubt it. All that stuff I already knew.

Something is going to come to the surface that I don’t know or in a scale I didn’t imagine. It almost has to be so. If something good has happened for the people of Venezuela (or Minnesota) there almost certainly is some further layer of degradation I’ve not yet considered. To quote from Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead:

“Things have gone about as far as they can possibly go, when they have gotten about as bad as they can reasonably get”

What is missing about Venezuela? Idly, and with no malice whatsoever, I remembered a factoid from the past; Smartmatic.

I knew (as anyone who isn’t trying hard to not notice) that Venezuela’s elections were sketchy. Let’s not freak out when I state the obvious. We’re all adults here. Our election are sketchy too. I’m required by tradition, humor, and lawfare to state that Joe Biden got more votes than any other candidate in history. But if Georgia’s behavior in 2020 was squeaky clean, they sure worked overtime to make it look dirty.

As far as I know there’s two election software / hardware companies. Dominion and Smartmatic. I’m 100% sure that both are perfect. Both should have a halo hovering over each machine. Etc…

As far as I know (and I don’t know much) Dominion seems to be the biggest player in USA. Smartmatic seems bigger in South America but I’m not sure about that either.

It would be awesome if nothing weird happened to unfairly give both honest and transparent systems the slightest appearance of taint. I’d sure like to live in a world like that. But this is what went down in 2020 in Venezuela:

“The electoral council in Venezuela says a fire in its main warehouse near the capital, Caracas, has destroyed most of the voting machines held there.

Almost 50,000 voting machines and 582 computers used in the country’s elections went up in flames…”

Ah there it is.

Nothing looks clean and above board like a unexpected event that happens at exactly the right time. I’m not saying Smartmatic was up to hinky shit in Venezuela. I’m not saying Dominion was up to hinky shit in Georgia. I’m saying I’d prefer a world where nobody even looks like they’re up to hinky shit.

I’d like a world where oppressed people could be freed simply because it’s good to be free. Then again if wishes were fishes, we’d all cast nets.

Take care of yourself. It’s a good time to be alive. It’s going to be a hell of a year! America is about to have it’s 250th birthday, I got a “free” kitten, and gas is cheap. Don’t ignore things crawling in the shadows but don’t despair. If you didn’t crawl up your own ass in 2020, you’ll ride out 2026 just fine.

A.C.

P.S. Even if you see the truth you don’t have to admit to it. Just “don’t notice”. For your own entertainment, ponder the phrase “we do not dispute that the tapes were not signed. It was a violation of the rule. … We don’t dispute the allegation from the 2020 election.” That’s just a boring thing said at a State Election Board Hearing. Don’t worry about it. There’s no question that Joe Biden was totally legit, won fair and square, and got more votes than any other candidate ever. I believe that with all my heart because I live in a nation that had political prisoners. However, if you’re rebellious enough to “notice” things, ponder the following two sentences. That 315,000 ballots were improperly counted is no longer contested. That the margin of victory was 12,000 votes is a matter of record. Now quit noticing. Everything is awesome, nothing weird happened, and voting machines in places like America and Venezuela are flawless.