View allAll Photos Tagged CleanOuts
Here's a picture from this morning. The sign has been removed, and it appears the cleanout has been finished. I imagine it will not be too long before construction starts and I finally figure out whether it is Home Depot or Lowe's that bought the lease.
Funny story: There were some dumpsters along the side of the store. I found somebody that looked like a hobo inside one of the dumpsters. As it usually does in potentially dangerous situations, my mind blanked out and I decided to talk to him.
"Finding anything good?"
"Oh heh- didn't see ya there. Caught me red handed"
"Oh, no, I'm just snooping around, too. Is there anything good in there?"
"Nah, just a couple wires and cords. I can probably get a few bucks for these"
"Oh... Good luck. I'm gonna go now"
As I get into my car, I see him loading an armful of wires into the back of a horribly decrepit 1995 Honda station wagon. From what I could see, the dumpster was mainly filled with old trash cans (none with the Kmart logo, though), and some pegboard from the shelving.
It’s probably been a decade + since I had the five, 45 RPM record boxes out of the closet.
The closet got a cleaning out and rearranged so the records are easier to get to now. I guess you could say buying a new record player two weeks ago prompted the closet cleanout.😁
Album’s are in multiple rooms and are easy to get to.
I either forgot or just never paid attention that the record labels got an ugly bar code symbol added on around 1987-88. I could never figure out why the labels have this grayish, chalky build up. They were like that right from the store It seemed to be a thing on darker labels in the 80s.
Claire has begun our project of painting the basement. The back room is full of stuff - we need to do a huge cleanout. But there's so much I don't want to get rid of!
Does ANYONE know who makes this sweater?
It is my favorite cardigan and I got it in a Sundries cleanout so I don't know who made it and I want more of them.
Can you make us one or two of them?
Please contact me if you make this sweater or know someone who does!
Thank YOU!
great dolly friends!!! ♥
I managed to snatch a Bambina Carabina helmet from a closet cleanout last week. I received the adorable helmet along with an unexpected note wishing me luck on studying for my exam this week. Thank you so much Gabriela! I love my dolly friends, they are the best!
Happy BA Friday!!
I've been thinking for a while it would be fun to take a photo with Pudding and all of our darling BA dresses. Each and every one is loved and special to us, but the dress Pudding is wearing is the only one we have ever scored in one of Kyle's shop updates (vs commissions and cleanouts) and it might actually be Pudding's favorite. :)
Thank you dear Kyle! We love our BA dresses, but we love you even more. ♥
wearing a pinafore i made today with a shirt i got a long time ago in a cleanout. not 100% happy with the result - is the fabric to thick? but i really do adore Pickles. she is everything i liked about GG but 100 times more.
The familiar blue glow of 1978 Marantz, seamlessly upgraded with state of the art LED lamps. Also gave it a clean-up, inside and out. Cleaned and lubed all pots and anything else that visibly needed attention.
The Great Photo Cleanout Continued...
So, I'm still working on the whole organized picture files thing... hahaha.
Decided to just randomly pick a few never posted photos and upload them to a blog. Turned into a sort of photo commentary thing:
smidgehouse.blogspot.com/2012/07/photo-commentary-saturda...
The following is an excerpt of a blog written by Tim Dees who relates his experiences working for Silva's in the mid 1970's.
Link: timdees.com/blog/?p=375
The ambulances were pink, because that was the owner’s wife’s favorite color. Pink bed linen, and when I got there, they were just moving away from pink shirts, as they were too difficult to find. Bob Silva never bought a new ambulance. They were all used Cadillacs, as he believed a used Cadillac was much classier than a new van-type that actually ran. I was taking a woman in labor to a hospital in San Francisco when the tranny gave up the ghost in Hunter’s Point. I’d told Bob the day before that it was on its last legs, and he advised that I should shut up and drive what I was given to drive. We were dead in the water, and just barely within radio range to call for another rig to take our patient.
The county came out with some new regs for gear that had to be on the rig, and one requirement was an obstetrics kit. Pre-packaged OB kits from Dyna-Med were $7.50 each. Silva bought one. He put it on a rig, sent it to be inspected, then brought that one back and put the same kit on the next rig to be inspected. When it was finally left in the rig he usually drove, he wrapped it in strapping tape to discourage anyone from actually using it. It wasn’t like we didn’t need OB kits. I delivered three babies while I worked there.
The electronic sirens we’re so used to now were just coming into widespread use in the 1970s. Most of our ambulances were equipped with mechanical sirens that wound up slowly when activated. They had brakes on them, and if you forgot to brake the siren before you left the rig, it would take a minute or more to wind down, growling the whole time. The big daddy of these mechanical sirens was the Federal Q2. Some of these are still in use on fire engines. The Q2 is a massive thing, and drew so much power that the engine would knock when you leaned on the button too long—the spark plugs didn’t get enough voltage. Few man-made things are as loud as a Q2. One day, while en route back to the station with a new attendant, I stopped at a Safeway for some groceries. I left the attendant in the rig, telling him to tap the siren if we got a call. When the call came in, he didn’t tap on the horn ring that activated the siren—he held it down. The ambulance was parked facing the store and its large plate glass windows. I heard the siren, then heard the window start to reverberate in its frame as it resonated with the blast of sonic waves—“whap-whap-whap-whapwhapWhapWhapWHAPWHAPWHAP.” I made it back to the rig, screaming ineffectively, before the window shattered.
Between the mechanical siren, separate heater for the rear compartment, more blinking lights than a Vegas casino, etc., the ambulances needed a lot of electrical power. A single battery would be dead before you got to the hospital, so most ambulances had two car batteries, cross-connected via a big rotary Cole-Hersee switch. The switch, which looked a little like the access cover to your house’s sewer cleanout pipe, had four positions: Battery One, Battery Two, Both, and Off. “Both” was the usual setting, but when the rig was parked, it was common to switch it to “Off,” so the batteries wouldn’t be drained if you had forgotten to turn something off. This effectively disconnected the batteries from the rest of the rig. If you wanted to have some fun with another crew, you could turn everything in their rig on, but leave the Cole-Hersee switch off. When they turned it back on, hilarity would ensue.
The gear we had in these ambulances was very basic, and most of us purchased and brought our own equipment to work, rather than provide inferior care for our patients. I bought my own stethoscope and sphygmomanometer (blood pressure cuff), chemical cold packs, wire ladder splints, ammonia “wake up gizmo” ampules, etc. Consumable supplies, such as self-adhering Kerlix bandages and waterproof tape, were stolen from the hospitals. The bandages we had on board, furnished by the company, were made of crumbling linen material from the Korean War era. Oropharyngeal airways were supposed to be either used once and discarded, or autoclaved between patients, but we had neither replacement airways or an autoclave, so we wiped them clean with alcohol and hoped for the best.
Our suction apparatus was powered through the engine’s vacuum manifold. Suction power went to zero when the engine was accelerating. If you were trying to clear gunk from a patient’s airway while your driver was flooring it, you’d tell him to coast until you had made some progress.
We weren’t allowed to say someone was dead, even if the flesh was falling from their bones. Law enforcement officers could make that determination, but doing so meant they would have to remain at the scene until the coroner arrived, which could take hours. This being the case, many officers chose to see some glimmer of life in corpses long past resurrection. We responded to an “11-80” (traffic accident with serious injuries) attended by a member of the California Highway Patrol to find a pickup truck that had rolled over with an unfortunate passenger in the back. The passenger had not quite been decapitated, as his head was hanging by a few strips of flesh. This was one of the more obvious dead people I had encountered, but the Chippie ordered us to run him in. Getting the body onto the gurney had the same effect achieved in kosher slaughterhouses, where the neck veins are severed and the blood is allowed to drain from the carcass. By the time we got to the hospital, the floor of the rear compartment was literally awash in blood, with it sloshing over my boots. I called the office and told them we would be out of service for a while.
This pre-dated the AIDS scare, and even though hepatitis and other bloodborne pathogens were just as nasty then as now (and there was no vaccine), we had no latex gloves to wear. Back then, gloves were worn by medical people to protect the patient from infection. There wasn’t a lot of thought given to protecting the caregivers. I remember cleaning up after an especially gruesome call and thinking that I wasn’t just cleaning something, but rather someone, out from under my fingernails.
One case where we didn’t have to transport was at the home of an older gentleman. I never knew the circumstances that prompted the call, but we arrived a few minutes after the fire department and before the cops. As we walked up to the house, the firemen were walking out, chuckling to one another. “He’s dead!” they said with some amusement. We entered the bedroom to find an older man lying supine on top of his bed, naked. Rigor had set in, so he had been gone for some time. What the firefighters found so funny was that the man had expired while engaged in an act of self-pleasure, and still had the weapon in hand. My partner and I looked at each other and registered much the same expression the firemen had. As we walked out, the cops were just arriving. “He’s dead!” we told them. I suppose there are worse ways to go, but that’s not how I want to be found.
I ran a lot of calls at Silva’s. The shifts were 120 hours long–yes, five days straight. You got paid straight time ($2.00/hour in 1974) for the first eight hours, a guaranteed time-and-a-half for five more hours, and were unpaid for three hours of meals, whether you actually got to eat them or not. Between midnight and eight in the morning, you got overtime for the time you were actually in service on the call. If you rolled and were cancelled two minutes out–which was common–you got two minutes of overtime. I swear some of those rigs could find their own way home, because there were many nights I have no memory of having driven them there. When my days off finally arrived, I would usually sleep through at least one of them.
The full Silva’s uniform was a sartorial delight. Each time they would give me a new uniform article, it would fall to a mysteriously tragic end, so I wore a white shirt, navy blue knit slacks, and a nylon bomber jacket. If you wanted to show you were management material, the required outfit consisted of a white (formerly pink) shirt with royal blue trousers and Ike jacket. The trousers had white piping down each leg, as did the cuffs of the jacket. On each shoulder of the Ike jacket was a huge purple and gold patch, proclaiming the wearer to be employed by Silva’s Ambulance Service, the words spelled out in metallic script. One was also obliged to wear a royal blue CHP clip-on neck tie. Mandatory accessories to the ensemble included a gold metal nametag, white belt, and white leather shoes. Worn on the shirt or jacket was a shield-type gold badge, about the size of a soup plate. All the badges identified the wearers as “Technician,” except for Bob Silva’s. His said, “Owner.” There was a $20 deposit on the badge. Those who were really in with the in crowd had huge custom Western-style belt buckles with their first names spelled out diagonally, and the corners adorned with red crosses, stars of life, or tiny ambulances. However, the crowning glory accessory–and I only saw one of these–was a gold tie bar, wider than the tie itself, with a fine gold chain attached to either end of the bar. Dangling from the chain was a pink Cadillac ambulance. Its wearer was extremely proud of this, and wouldn’t tell anyone where he got it, lest someone steal his thunder.
Employee turnover was around 200% annually, and I was a prized employee because I always showed up on time and sober. I was able to work full time on school vacations and summer, and from Friday evening to early Monday morning, when I’d leave to make it to my first class at San Jose State. It wasn’t uncommon to have an employee go AWOL, and have the cops show up a day or so later, looking for them. You had to be fingerprinted to get an ambulance driver’s license, but all you needed to work as an attendant was a first aid card, which management would procure for you for a small fee.
Bob Curry, in almost the full Silva's uniform (no badge), posing with a "new" ambulance, formerly used by Allied Ambulance in Oakland.
Bob Curry, in almost the full Silva’s uniform (no badge), posing with a “new” ambulance, formerly used by Allied Ambulance in Oakland.
There was one very senior employee whose name was also Bob. Bob thought he was the manager, and would tell you he was if asked, despite advice to the contrary if one of the Silvas was listening. Bob was very possessive of “his” ambulance, which was always the newest one (given that they were all used, “new” was a relative term). One night, I had just come in to work, and a call came in. The dispatcher told me to take it, so I grabbed an attendant and got in the first rig I saw. It was Bob’s, of course. When I returned, Bob screamed my face, lest I forget that that particular rig was HIS ambulance, and I had better stay the hell out of it if I knew what was good for me. Bob had an apartment near the main station, so he didn’t have to sleep at the station when he was on duty. If you were Bob’s attendant (Bob never worked in the back unless there was some real hero stuff going on), you were allowed to drive Bob’s ambulance to his place, where you switched seats. That night, a co-conspirator and I did a little customizing to Bob’s rig. When he got in the next morning, he found the handle on the driver’s door adorned with some adhesive tape, reading “Bob’s Door Handle.” Inside, more tape indicated Bob’s Steering Wheel, Bob’s Cigarette Lighter, Bob’s Gearshift, Bob’s Turn Indicator, Bob’s Accelerator, Bob’s Radio, Bob’s Other Radio, and so on. Tucked under Bob’s Sun Visor was a card on a little string, trimmed to drop to eye level: “Hi, Bob.”
Silva’s didn’t have the market cornered on odd employees. A rival company employed a guy we called Captain Action. Captain Action worked for a company that had more traditional uniforms, but still included a badge. The issued badge wasn’t up to Captain Action’s high standards. He had his own badge made up. It was a thing of beauty. It was a gold seven-point star (the most common style of police badge in those parts), but much larger than most police badges. It put the Silva’s badge to shame on size alone. I remember it had a big California State Seal in the middle, and a lot of text on the banners and inner ring. There was so much lettering on the badge that I never got to finish reading it, although I saw it often. Captain Action also wore a police-style Sam Browne belt with various snaps and cases, including a cuff case, handcuffs, and a baton ring. I never saw a baton, but I’m sure he had it around somewhere.
Captain Action loved to talk on the radio. Each ambulance had two radios, one on the company channel, and one that broadcasted on a shared, county-wide channel, called County Control. There was no direct channel to the hospitals, so one was obliged to tell County Control what you had and where you were bringing it, so the dispatcher could give the appropriate ER the heads up. An appropriate message might be something like, “County Control, Ambulance 3335, en route Code 3 to Peninsula Medical with an unconscious head injury.” Captain Action preferred to be somewhat more detailed, and made liberal use of the phonetic alphabet. “County Control, Ambulance 3330, en route Peninsula Medical Center with a 33-year-old white male with a history of cardiac myopathy, I spell CHARLES-ADAM-ROBERT-DAVID-IDA-ADAM-CHARLES-BREAK-MARY-YELLOW-OCEAN-PAUL-ADAM-TOM-HENRY-YELLOW…”
After one of these lengthy naratives (keep in mind that there were ten or twelve other ambulances in the county that used the same channel), the dispatcher was oddly silent. Captain Action made another try to ensure his message made it through. “County Control, Ambulance 3330, did you copy?”
“Ambulance 3330, County Control, TOM-EDWARD-NORA-BREAK-FRANK-OCEAN-UNION-ROBERT.”
Ah, the good old days.
Written by Tim Dees on January 1st, 2015
Button Collection, Journaling Cards, First Pair of Walking Shoes, Journals, 75th Anniversary Raggedy Ann and Andy Dolls, Aldo Vintage Sequined Bag - Fun Finds!
All pics by La Viri.
I am very excited to welcome a nerdy La Viri custom to my dolly clan. I have wanted one ever since I saw Pam's Maple and Nancy's Pirri. Vir's girls have loads of personality, that's for sure!! It will also be my first dolly ever with teeth, so that is quite exciting too. :B
Look out for a closet cleanout soon :P
So I soaked a xs goodnite, and smushed it with other trash. Other trash was baby blankets and stuffies.
Shortalls over a bodysuit.
Shortalls / Dungarees - Kmart
1980s Singlet Bodysuit / Leotard - Found in my wardrobe in a recent cleanout. Seriously, bought this 30 years ago!
Leopard Print Jelly Sandals - Jelly Beans
Nail Wraps - Jamberry
After having taken a series of photographs - see the story below - inside the dead brother's little house, the departed man's brother gave me his card so I could contact him later on if I so wanted.I, in return, noted down my name and mobile phone number on a piece of paper torn from a dirty notebook that was lying there somewhere.
"I'll call you, or, you call me" he said. "But don't expect a call anytime soon because we're gonna be busy clearing out my departed brother's house the coming week" "Not to worry" I said.
We talked for a little while and I said goodbye to the older man and his girlfriend.
I needed a rest and a think.
The story is gonna be a long one.Please bear with me.
As almost every thursday, for the past few months, I've participated in the Utata.org "Thursday Walk" project.This thursday I decided to pay the birth village of my late father and consequently, my grandparents, a visit.After roaming around on the few streets of this small village (which lies in the province of Antwerp, Belgium, and is called "Hingene") and having taken some shots, it started to rain.I went for a coffee in a brown pub and waited for the rain to end or at least diminish slightly.It got dryer again and I packed up my camerabag and decided to hit the streets again.I didn't have much hope of shooting anything decent any more and was in fact heading back to my mountainbike.Now the village has some quaint little (uninhabited, or so I thought ) houses that date back maybe 150 years and on one of these little houses the door was open and I saw two people, an elderly man and woman, doing things inside this house.The man noticed me from inside and I said hello and asked him what they where doing.I asked the man if he was from this village or was born here and mentioned that my late father was also from this village and the man had known my late father well.In fact, they had gone out (partying) together when they where both young men (somewhere in the mid-fifties I presume) So the man came to know that I was in fact the son of my father and we started talking.The man's younger brother, age 55, had just passed away and he and his girlfriend where busy clearing out the little house where the departed brother had lived all his life.He (the departed brother of 55) had, I found out, had once lived there with a woman ( she to had previously, a couple of years before, been found dead in the house) that was well known in our community for her weirdness and awkwardness ; the woman's name was "Zotte Betty" (translated as "Crazy Betty" ) and one of her sons.The son of Betty, the crazy woman, had lived with the brother till the day they found him dead.
At that point I had to just ask if I could take some photos of the inside.This had to be a one time opportunity.A once in a lifetime chance.I appologized several times if I was being impolite or intruding ( after all, this man's younger brother had just died ! ) but the man and his girlfriend saw no objections.So I stepped through the little door and was immediatly struck by the ackwardnes of the place.How in earth people could have lived in such circomstances was beyond me.It most resembled the home of some horder who never in his live decluttered !
I will save you a detailed description of the state the place was in ; look at the photos and let your mind do the work.
On the other hand, the house was full of memories of a man who must have lived the live of a recluse and now his things, his memories where about to be thrown away, to dissapear.
The more I photographed the interior, the wallpaper with this frail golden color, the odd trinkets and old objects, the more the man and his girlfriend became at their ease and they let me share their thoughts and insights in the life of their brother( in law).The woman even let me take a couple of shots where she was on inspite of her being very wary in the beginning.
I am deeply indebted to these people who have let me in in their personal lives whilst in the midst of a beriefment.
I express my gratitude.
These photos where taken with love.Be so kind as to threat them that way.
copyright Ange Soleil ( a.k.a Tweng) 2008
Bob Curry, in almost the full Silva’s uniform (no badge), posing with a “new” ambulance, formerly used by Allied Ambulance in Oakland.
The following is an excerpt of a blog written by Tim Dees who relates his experiences working for Silva's in the mid 1970's.
Link: timdees.com/blog/?p=375
The ambulances were pink, because that was the owner’s wife’s favorite color. Pink bed linen, and when I got there, they were just moving away from pink shirts, as they were too difficult to find. Bob Silva never bought a new ambulance. They were all used Cadillacs, as he believed a used Cadillac was much classier than a new van-type that actually ran. I was taking a woman in labor to a hospital in San Francisco when the tranny gave up the ghost in Hunter’s Point. I’d told Bob the day before that it was on its last legs, and he advised that I should shut up and drive what I was given to drive. We were dead in the water, and just barely within radio range to call for another rig to take our patient.
The county came out with some new regs for gear that had to be on the rig, and one requirement was an obstetrics kit. Pre-packaged OB kits from Dyna-Med were $7.50 each. Silva bought one. He put it on a rig, sent it to be inspected, then brought that one back and put the same kit on the next rig to be inspected. When it was finally left in the rig he usually drove, he wrapped it in strapping tape to discourage anyone from actually using it. It wasn’t like we didn’t need OB kits. I delivered three babies while I worked there.
The electronic sirens we’re so used to now were just coming into widespread use in the 1970s. Most of our ambulances were equipped with mechanical sirens that wound up slowly when activated. They had brakes on them, and if you forgot to brake the siren before you left the rig, it would take a minute or more to wind down, growling the whole time. The big daddy of these mechanical sirens was the Federal Q2. Some of these are still in use on fire engines. The Q2 is a massive thing, and drew so much power that the engine would knock when you leaned on the button too long—the spark plugs didn’t get enough voltage. Few man-made things are as loud as a Q2. One day, while en route back to the station with a new attendant, I stopped at a Safeway for some groceries. I left the attendant in the rig, telling him to tap the siren if we got a call. When the call came in, he didn’t tap on the horn ring that activated the siren—he held it down. The ambulance was parked facing the store and its large plate glass windows. I heard the siren, then heard the window start to reverberate in its frame as it resonated with the blast of sonic waves—“whap-whap-whap-whapwhapWhapWhapWHAPWHAPWHAP.” I made it back to the rig, screaming ineffectively, before the window shattered.
Between the mechanical siren, separate heater for the rear compartment, more blinking lights than a Vegas casino, etc., the ambulances needed a lot of electrical power. A single battery would be dead before you got to the hospital, so most ambulances had two car batteries, cross-connected via a big rotary Cole-Hersee switch. The switch, which looked a little like the access cover to your house’s sewer cleanout pipe, had four positions: Battery One, Battery Two, Both, and Off. “Both” was the usual setting, but when the rig was parked, it was common to switch it to “Off,” so the batteries wouldn’t be drained if you had forgotten to turn something off. This effectively disconnected the batteries from the rest of the rig. If you wanted to have some fun with another crew, you could turn everything in their rig on, but leave the Cole-Hersee switch off. When they turned it back on, hilarity would ensue.
The gear we had in these ambulances was very basic, and most of us purchased and brought our own equipment to work, rather than provide inferior care for our patients. I bought my own stethoscope and sphygmomanometer (blood pressure cuff), chemical cold packs, wire ladder splints, ammonia “wake up gizmo” ampules, etc. Consumable supplies, such as self-adhering Kerlix bandages and waterproof tape, were stolen from the hospitals. The bandages we had on board, furnished by the company, were made of crumbling linen material from the Korean War era. Oropharyngeal airways were supposed to be either used once and discarded, or autoclaved between patients, but we had neither replacement airways or an autoclave, so we wiped them clean with alcohol and hoped for the best.
Our suction apparatus was powered through the engine’s vacuum manifold. Suction power went to zero when the engine was accelerating. If you were trying to clear gunk from a patient’s airway while your driver was flooring it, you’d tell him to coast until you had made some progress.
We weren’t allowed to say someone was dead, even if the flesh was falling from their bones. Law enforcement officers could make that determination, but doing so meant they would have to remain at the scene until the coroner arrived, which could take hours. This being the case, many officers chose to see some glimmer of life in corpses long past resurrection. We responded to an “11-80” (traffic accident with serious injuries) attended by a member of the California Highway Patrol to find a pickup truck that had rolled over with an unfortunate passenger in the back. The passenger had not quite been decapitated, as his head was hanging by a few strips of flesh. This was one of the more obvious dead people I had encountered, but the Chippie ordered us to run him in. Getting the body onto the gurney had the same effect achieved in kosher slaughterhouses, where the neck veins are severed and the blood is allowed to drain from the carcass. By the time we got to the hospital, the floor of the rear compartment was literally awash in blood, with it sloshing over my boots. I called the office and told them we would be out of service for a while.
This pre-dated the AIDS scare, and even though hepatitis and other bloodborne pathogens were just as nasty then as now (and there was no vaccine), we had no latex gloves to wear. Back then, gloves were worn by medical people to protect the patient from infection. There wasn’t a lot of thought given to protecting the caregivers. I remember cleaning up after an especially gruesome call and thinking that I wasn’t just cleaning something, but rather someone, out from under my fingernails.
One case where we didn’t have to transport was at the home of an older gentleman. I never knew the circumstances that prompted the call, but we arrived a few minutes after the fire department and before the cops. As we walked up to the house, the firemen were walking out, chuckling to one another. “He’s dead!” they said with some amusement. We entered the bedroom to find an older man lying supine on top of his bed, naked. Rigor had set in, so he had been gone for some time. What the firefighters found so funny was that the man had expired while engaged in an act of self-pleasure, and still had the weapon in hand. My partner and I looked at each other and registered much the same expression the firemen had. As we walked out, the cops were just arriving. “He’s dead!” we told them. I suppose there are worse ways to go, but that’s not how I want to be found.
I ran a lot of calls at Silva’s. The shifts were 120 hours long–yes, five days straight. You got paid straight time ($2.00/hour in 1974) for the first eight hours, a guaranteed time-and-a-half for five more hours, and were unpaid for three hours of meals, whether you actually got to eat them or not. Between midnight and eight in the morning, you got overtime for the time you were actually in service on the call. If you rolled and were cancelled two minutes out–which was common–you got two minutes of overtime. I swear some of those rigs could find their own way home, because there were many nights I have no memory of having driven them there. When my days off finally arrived, I would usually sleep through at least one of them.
The full Silva’s uniform was a sartorial delight. Each time they would give me a new uniform article, it would fall to a mysteriously tragic end, so I wore a white shirt, navy blue knit slacks, and a nylon bomber jacket. If you wanted to show you were management material, the required outfit consisted of a white (formerly pink) shirt with royal blue trousers and Ike jacket. The trousers had white piping down each leg, as did the cuffs of the jacket. On each shoulder of the Ike jacket was a huge purple and gold patch, proclaiming the wearer to be employed by Silva’s Ambulance Service, the words spelled out in metallic script. One was also obliged to wear a royal blue CHP clip-on neck tie. Mandatory accessories to the ensemble included a gold metal nametag, white belt, and white leather shoes. Worn on the shirt or jacket was a shield-type gold badge, about the size of a soup plate. All the badges identified the wearers as “Technician,” except for Bob Silva’s. His said, “Owner.” There was a $20 deposit on the badge. Those who were really in with the in crowd had huge custom Western-style belt buckles with their first names spelled out diagonally, and the corners adorned with red crosses, stars of life, or tiny ambulances. However, the crowning glory accessory–and I only saw one of these–was a gold tie bar, wider than the tie itself, with a fine gold chain attached to either end of the bar. Dangling from the chain was a pink Cadillac ambulance. Its wearer was extremely proud of this, and wouldn’t tell anyone where he got it, lest someone steal his thunder.
Employee turnover was around 200% annually, and I was a prized employee because I always showed up on time and sober. I was able to work full time on school vacations and summer, and from Friday evening to early Monday morning, when I’d leave to make it to my first class at San Jose State. It wasn’t uncommon to have an employee go AWOL, and have the cops show up a day or so later, looking for them. You had to be fingerprinted to get an ambulance driver’s license, but all you needed to work as an attendant was a first aid card, which management would procure for you for a small fee.
Bob Curry, in almost the full Silva's uniform (no badge), posing with a "new" ambulance, formerly used by Allied Ambulance in Oakland.
Bob Curry, in almost the full Silva’s uniform (no badge), posing with a “new” ambulance, formerly used by Allied Ambulance in Oakland.
There was one very senior employee whose name was also Bob. Bob thought he was the manager, and would tell you he was if asked, despite advice to the contrary if one of the Silvas was listening. Bob was very possessive of “his” ambulance, which was always the newest one (given that they were all used, “new” was a relative term). One night, I had just come in to work, and a call came in. The dispatcher told me to take it, so I grabbed an attendant and got in the first rig I saw. It was Bob’s, of course. When I returned, Bob screamed my face, lest I forget that that particular rig was HIS ambulance, and I had better stay the hell out of it if I knew what was good for me. Bob had an apartment near the main station, so he didn’t have to sleep at the station when he was on duty. If you were Bob’s attendant (Bob never worked in the back unless there was some real hero stuff going on), you were allowed to drive Bob’s ambulance to his place, where you switched seats. That night, a co-conspirator and I did a little customizing to Bob’s rig. When he got in the next morning, he found the handle on the driver’s door adorned with some adhesive tape, reading “Bob’s Door Handle.” Inside, more tape indicated Bob’s Steering Wheel, Bob’s Cigarette Lighter, Bob’s Gearshift, Bob’s Turn Indicator, Bob’s Accelerator, Bob’s Radio, Bob’s Other Radio, and so on. Tucked under Bob’s Sun Visor was a card on a little string, trimmed to drop to eye level: “Hi, Bob.”
Silva’s didn’t have the market cornered on odd employees. A rival company employed a guy we called Captain Action. Captain Action worked for a company that had more traditional uniforms, but still included a badge. The issued badge wasn’t up to Captain Action’s high standards. He had his own badge made up. It was a thing of beauty. It was a gold seven-point star (the most common style of police badge in those parts), but much larger than most police badges. It put the Silva’s badge to shame on size alone. I remember it had a big California State Seal in the middle, and a lot of text on the banners and inner ring. There was so much lettering on the badge that I never got to finish reading it, although I saw it often. Captain Action also wore a police-style Sam Browne belt with various snaps and cases, including a cuff case, handcuffs, and a baton ring. I never saw a baton, but I’m sure he had it around somewhere.
Captain Action loved to talk on the radio. Each ambulance had two radios, one on the company channel, and one that broadcasted on a shared, county-wide channel, called County Control. There was no direct channel to the hospitals, so one was obliged to tell County Control what you had and where you were bringing it, so the dispatcher could give the appropriate ER the heads up. An appropriate message might be something like, “County Control, Ambulance 3335, en route Code 3 to Peninsula Medical with an unconscious head injury.” Captain Action preferred to be somewhat more detailed, and made liberal use of the phonetic alphabet. “County Control, Ambulance 3330, en route Peninsula Medical Center with a 33-year-old white male with a history of cardiac myopathy, I spell CHARLES-ADAM-ROBERT-DAVID-IDA-ADAM-CHARLES-BREAK-MARY-YELLOW-OCEAN-PAUL-ADAM-TOM-HENRY-YELLOW…”
After one of these lengthy naratives (keep in mind that there were ten or twelve other ambulances in the county that used the same channel), the dispatcher was oddly silent. Captain Action made another try to ensure his message made it through. “County Control, Ambulance 3330, did you copy?”
“Ambulance 3330, County Control, TOM-EDWARD-NORA-BREAK-FRANK-OCEAN-UNION-ROBERT.”
Ah, the good old days.
Written by Tim Dees on January 1st, 2015
a lot of this is from the hoarders house (I guess Im glad I went through the trash - at the bottom of a bag filled with random stuff - would be a smaller grocery bag and at the bottom of that would be a really small paper bag or something with an old forgotten candy or gum item - the Sno-Caps was in a tupperware container with newer candy at the last estate sale/cleanout I set up - I think its 80s
I have way too many fabrics, so I decided to do a little cleanout of the ones suitable for dolly clothes (with tiny prints). I might make others happy with these...?! Scraps of approximately 35 by 35 cm (enough for more than 1 dress or skirt in Blythe size, for example) will go to the place in sets of 5!
pretty cool huh -I think so - made my weekend - could be early 70s as well I suppose ....I know who threw this out (on a cleanout) - I was at the dump when they were leaving......getting people to save you stuff is hard sometimes - I have an extra to trade....
the usual delights of a saturday await us,
soccer sidelines,
chicken coop cleanout,
shed tidy,
and the inevitable laundry mountain.
but for a few moments, early on a saturday morning
before the day truly begins...
he always watches the soccer and i always dabble with a hook :)
233 515-6
Stored Z for Scrap 08/11/2011 (REV & Verls expired).
Stored at SSM Mukran from at least 19/08/2012 to 04/2018, when it was moved to SSM Chemnitz with the cleanout of Dloks from Mukran (still at Chemnitz July 2020).
I did a thorough closet cleanout on Saturday and found this dress. I’ve had it for nearly eight years. It’s shorter than when I first bought it (I took it up a few inches) and the velveteen is marred in a few spots, but it’s otherwise unchanged. Polyester really does last forever.
Jacket, Mossimo. Blouse, Sans Souci. Dress, New York & Company. Tights, MeMoi. Boots, Lauren Ralph Lauren. Bag, Charming Charlie. Tassel charm, Epcot Morocco. Arrowhead pendants, thrifted.
Yeah, just open the front door and throw it all out!
Life, of course, tends to be a spectrum. On one end you have, say, Martha Stewart and Marie Kondo. On the other end ... this guy. The former occupant that is. His house was declared a Public Nuisance by the city. Wonder what happens next. A big yellow rolloff dumpster has been put in place though. We'll see.
Oh, and this isn't the sum total. A good bit of stuff was removed earlier. This may be the final eruption.
A couple pairs of old boys nylon soccer shorts I bought and they never got used. So into the trash they go. They aren't nice enough to even give away.
www.recyclart.org/2016/08/hand-crank-wash-tub/
There are many hand-crank washing tubs out there, but they cost money. Heck with that! I made my own Hand-Crank Wash Tub out of recycled and upcycled bits & pieces lying around my shed for FREE! The motivation behind it is that I like to do basic maintenance on my cars and motorcycles, and it always generates a lot of dirty, greasy rags.
I don’t like to run them through my washing machine because of the risk of spreading grease to my regular laundry. I also don’t like to take them to the laundromat for the same reason. It’s not fair to the next customer to ruin their clothes! So, I decided to make something that would at least do a good job of a first wash so that I could then use my own washing machine.
When I looked around, the cheapest ones were around fifty dollars. I looked around for plans, and the most prominent ones were basically versions of wash boards or the style that uses a plunger in a lid. I didn’t want to sit around and basically “churn butter”, as agitating washers work better. So this is my version of an agitating washer!
Hand-Crank Wash Tub – supplies & tools needed:
Supplies needed:
5-gal. bucket (like a used latex paint bucket that you’ve cleaned out)
Two 2x2” pieces of wood, approx. 18” long (I used redwood pallet boards for all wood on this project)
Two 2x2” pieces of wood, approx. 4 to 5” long
One 2x2” piece of wood, approx. 6” long
Front fork set from a kid’s BMX bike (don’t need the handlebars)
One piece of 6” black PVC pipe (the type used for sewer cleanouts, etc), approx. 8” long & cut into two pieces vertically
4 sets of nuts/bolts/washers – approx. 1.5” long (enough to go through forks and piece of PVC pipe)
2 sets of nuts/bolts/washers – approx. 4.5” long (enough to go through your 2x2 boards to clamp together)
4 wood screws, 2.5” or 3” long
1 pallet block (ensure all nails/screws are removed)
1 set of nuts/bolts/washers – approx.. 6” long (enough to go through hand crank and the 2x2 board
1 piece of wire (heavy gauge – like fence wrapping wire), enough to wrap around the bucket a couple times so you have places to hook bungee cords to. I used approx. 4’ of wire
Tools Needed:
Band Saw
Reciprocating Saw
Draw knife
Drill press
Drill & a few different drill bits
Hole saw bits (optional – can use the band saw too)
Impact driver
Circular Saw
Chop/Miter saw
Wrench & socket set
Utility knife
¼” chisel
Pencil
Tape measure
Sand paper (from 80-grit to 2000 grit)
Hand file
Small wood lathe
Sanding sponges (medium and fine grit)
End cutting pliers (dull is fine – you’re not cutting anything – just prying nails from blocks)
Hand-Crank Wash Tub – A BMX bike front fork set:
We had a leftover kid’s BMX bike that my husband had picked up at a used store for 8.00. He used the crankset for another project he made. The front fork set had been sitting around, so I thought I’d use it, as it has free-spinning bearings. I used a reciprocating saw with a metal-cutting blade to cut the front fork set loose from the frame just behind where it was welded together.
Hand-Crank Wash Tub – Tub & Supporting Frame:
My wash tub is a leftover, heavy-duty 5-gal bucket. I happened to have an old Behr latex paint bucket that we’d used up, let dry, and then peeled out the dry latex paint remnants. The frame is made from pallet wood. To begin the frame, I started with with the two 2x2 x18” pieces of wood. I placed them across the top of the bucket, side by side and used clamps to hold them together. I marked the outside and inside diameters of the bucket with a pencil on the bottom sides of the wood. Next, I used a band saw to cut notches into the wood along the cut lines, approx. 3/8” deep. It just needs to be deep enough to create a channel so the wood frame will sit securely on top of the bucket. I used a chisel to clean up along the ends of the curves that the band saw couldn’t cut.
Find the approximate center of the two boards, and if you have them clamped tightly, you could use a hole saw to drill one hole down between the two for where it will clamp around the top tube. If not, you can use a band saw and cut the half-circles out. My cut was a little crooked, so I just notched around my bad prep job. I’d suggest you cut it more evenly, haha! Then I re-clamped the boards together and drilled two holes, equidistant from the center hole. The bolts will clamp the top tube in between these two boards. Sand the boards down the way you want. They don’t have to be perfect.
Hand-Crank Wash Tub – Correcting my error (do yours right and skip this step):
I test-fitted mine, and because of the crooked frame cut, it caused it to slip a little when I tried it, so the two shorter 2x2” boards were my solution. If you cut straight, you may not need them. Repeat the hole cutting process, as these two smaller boards will squeeze tightly around the top tube, basically clamping all 4” of the top tube. I screwed these two smaller boards together and then down on top of the longer boards to anchor the tube tightly.
Hand-Crank Wash Tub – Woodturning!
To make the handle, I used a pallet block. It is CRITICAL when using a lathe, or most of your saws, to remove any nails or screws. I used a circular saw to make shallow cuts around the nails that were cut flush when I dismantled pallets with a reciprocating saw. After cutting close to the nails, I made more cuts around the edge that I just sliced across so I’d be able to chisel the wood away easily to expose a bit of nail top. Next, I chiseled the wood away, exposing about ¼” of the nail heads, and used an old pair of end-cutting pliers. The rolled cutting end does a great job of clamping onto the exposed nail, and then allows you to roll the pliers over and pull the deeply-embedded nails out easily.
Identify the approximate centers of your block. Use a ruler and draw a line from one corner to the other diagonally. Do the same in the other direction. X marks the spot! Do this on both of the end-grain ends of the block and carefully center it into the lathe. I used a draw knife to round over the edges. You can use a band saw or other tools if you choose, but a draw knife is fast and convenient for me. I turned the wood into the shape of an old-style hand-crank drill. Those old handles are a good fit for my hands, and I know my husband won’t be doing it, haha! I turned it, smoothed it down, starting with 80-grit sponges, all the way down to 2000 grit paper while still on the lathe. I removed it and cut the excess wood off, then sanded the ends. Next I turned the horizontal piece of handle from more pallet wood – the last piece of 2x2x6” wood. Find the centers again and load it into the lathe. You could chip or sand down a dowel instead, but I didn’t have any leftover dowels. Besides, I only needed about 2-3” of round wood that’ll fit into the round-shaped clamp at the top end of the top tube – where the handle bars clamp in. I turned it down to the size I needed, and then rounded over the edges just so if I hit my knuckles, it wouldn’t be too uncomfortable.
I used a drill press and a wood-boring bit to drill a centered hole through the handle knob and then through the location on the horizontal piece of wood. Cut it loose around the size of your bolt so it’ll turn freely like a drill handle.
Hand-Crank Wash Tub – hardware stackup on crank knob assembly:
The hardware stackup is as follows: Long machine bolt, large washer, crank knob, large washer, connecting wood piece, large washer, and either a nylock or, if you don’t have those, I just used two bolts and tightened them against themselves so that the handle could turn freely. Bolt the crank knob assembly into the handlebar grip point and secure.
Hand-Crank Wash Tub – wash paddles (the agitator):
To agitate the dirty rags, I had to come up with something that would be a little flexible, but very durable. So, I used a piece of large, black PVC pipe – I think it was left over from when we installed a new cleanout drain on our 1920’s home. I cut a short piece off of the long tube – approximately 8” with the reciprocating saw, and then split it in half. I used the band saw to round over the corners, and then a hand file to smooth over the edges. It doesn’t have to be perfect; just not so rough that it’ll snag and tear your terry-cloth rags.
Next, clamp them onto the forks, in whatever pattern you want. You can stagger the height, or change the curve directions; it’s up to you. I put mine the same direction, but staggered the height. Drill two holes through the paddles and all the way through the forks. Hardware stackup: Bolt, tooth-washer, paddle, fork, tooth washer, nut. Repeat for the 2nd paddle, so you’ll have four holes to drill total (or more if you make your paddles bigger).
Hand-Crank Wash Tub – Putting it all together:
Final assembly begins now! Install your top tube in between your first two boards you cut, and secure tightly with bolts/nuts. Ensure that your tube assembly is level, or the paddles will slap up against the sides of the bucket and create drag. Put the entire assembly into the bucket and align the grooves on the two mounting boards onto the edges of the bucket. Secure with bungee cords. I did a non-permanent mounting so if anything got tangled, I could just unhook the bungees and pull it all out easily. However, you can mount the assembly any way you choose.
Now, time to give her a twirl! My assembly WORKED – other than the oops I listed above. With the extra little corrective boards I added, it stays level and slaps the dirty rags around. This probably seems like an excessively long post for such a little project, but I wanted to make this and not spend a single dime, and accomplished it! Are there other ways to make hand-crank washers? Sure. But I’ve got one load of rags that have been washed already so far. :D
Only counting books I read (or soon-ish will have read) in their entirety…
Below are starting dates, titles, authors, and some quotes / comments that I could think of. :p Hopefully I have not typo-ed up the quotes too badly.
------------------------------
15-Jan-2022: 1. Kompendium i klinisk kemi by Ulrika Falkenö, Anna Hillström, Bernt Jones, Inger Lilliehöök, Emma Strage, Bodil Ström Holst, & Harold Tvedten
Almost-a-book on clinical chemistry. Directed at vet students, but my vet nursing class also got copies in 2017. I never got around to reading it until now. :p Promptly LOST my copy at a train station :'( BUT it turned out that my nice boss had it as a PDF! :D
25-Jan-2022: 2. Little brother by Cory Doctorow
Fave! And a re-read.
12-Mar-2022: 3. The alchemist by Paulo Coelho
A re-read.
14-Apr-2022: 4. The language instinct: How the mind creates language by Steven Pinker
"Thinking of language as an instinct inverts the popular wisdom, especially as it has been passed down in the canon of the humanities and social sciences. Language is no more a cultural invention than is upright posture. It is not a manifestation of a general capacity to use symbols: a three-year-old, as we shall see, is a grammatical genius, but is quite incompetent at the visual arts, religious iconography, traffic signs, and the other staples of the semiotics curriculum. Though language is a magnificent ability unique to Homo sapiens among living species, it does not call for sequestering the study of humans from the domain of biology, for a magnificent ability unique to a particular living species is far from unique in the animal kingdom. Some kinds of bats home in on flying insects using Doppler sonar. Some kinds of migratory birds navigate thousands of miles by calibrating the positions of the constellations against the time of day and year. In nature’s talent show we are simply a species of primate with our own act, a knack for communicating information about who did what to whom by modulating the sounds we make when we exhale."
Quotes "the following pseudo-German notice that used to be posted in many university computing centers in the English-speaking world:
'ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!
Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen and poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das rubbernecken sightseeren keepen das cottenpickenen hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.'"
"Another team is trying to teach a computer the basics of human common sense, which they estimate to comprise about ten million facts."
"Let me begin with the ability to learn, and by convincing you that there is something to explain. Many social scientists believe that learning is some pinnacle of evolution that humans have scaled from the lowlands of instinct, so that our ability to learn can be explained by our exalted braininess. But biology says otherwise. Learning is found in organisms as simple as bacteria, and, as James and Chomsky pointed out, human intelligence may depend on our having more innate instincts, not fewer. Learning is an option, like camouflage or horns, that nature gives organisms as needed – when some aspect of the organism's environmental niche is so unpredictable that anticipation of its contingencies cannot be wired in. For example, birds that nest on small cliff ledges do not learn to recognize their offspring. They do not need to, for any blob of the right size and shape in their nest is sure to be one. Birds that nest in large colonies, in contrast, are in danger of feeding some neighbor's offspring that sneaks in, and they have evolved a mechanism that allows them to learn the particular nuances of their own babies.
Even when a trait starts off as a product of learning, it does not have to remain so. Evolutionary theory, supported by computer simulations, has shown that when an environment is stable, there is a selective pressure for learned abilities to become increasingly innate. That is because if an ability is innate, it can be deployed earlier in the lifespan of the creature, and there is less of a chance that an unlucky creature will miss out on the experiences that would have been necessary to teach it."
"What an irony it is that the supposed attempt to bring Homo sapiens down a few notches in the natural order has taken the form of us humans hectoring another species into emulating our instinctive form of communication, or some artificial form we have invented, as if that were the measure of biological worth. The chimpanzees' resistance is no shame on them; a human would surely do no better if trained to hoot and shriek like a chimp, a symmetrical project that makes about as much scientific sense. In fact, the idea that some species needs our intervention before its members can display a useful skill, like some bird that could not fly until given a human education, is far from humble!"
"Until the recent invention of the Heimlich maneuver, choking on food was the sixth leading cause of accidental death in the United States, claiming six thousand victims a year. The positioning of the larynx deep in the throat, and the tongue far enough low and back to articulate a range of vowels, also compromised breathing and chewing. Presumably the communicative benefits outweighed the physiological costs."
Contains a list of "human universals" compiled by anthropologist Donald E. Brown. As the list is a 2-page wall of text, I'll just link to the quote here. :)
9-Jul-2022: 5. Vägen till Jerusalem by Jan Guillou
Fave! And a re-read. Book 1 in a trilogy about a knight in the 1100's. The trilogy (which is available in English) has feminism and Arabian horses and shit. :) And there is just something about historical novels, man. :q Now I really want to read another novel series by Guillou, 10 books about the 1900's. :D
15-Jul-2022: 6. The call of the wild by Jack London
My fave novel! And a re-read.
18-Jul-2022: 7. A Shropshire lad by A.E. Housman
Collection of poems that Richard Dawkins kept going on about, so I checked them out. Here's my fave from the collection:
"Along the field as we came by
A year ago, my love and I,
The aspen over stile and stone
Was talking to itself alone.
'Oh who are these that kiss and pass?
A country lover and his lass;
Two lovers looking to be wed;
And time shall put them both to bed,
But she shall lie with earth above,
And he beside another love.'
And sure enough beneath the tree
There walks another love with me,
And overhead the aspen heaves
Its rainy-sounding silver leaves;
And I spell nothing in their stir,
But now perhaps they speak to her,
And plain for her to understand
They talk about a time at hand
When I shall sleep with clover clad,
And she beside another lad."
20-Jul-2022: 8. Books do furnish a life: Reading and writing science by Richard Dawkins
Fave! A compilation of book reviews and the like by the Dawk, my fave writer.
"And the point has often been made to me that if you call somebody an idiot you're not going to change his mind, and that's possibly true, but you may change the minds of a thousand people listening in and so I'm less inhibited about calling him an idiot."
"It is possible to take a robust view of extinction, even mass extinction. We can tough-mindedly point out that extinction is the norm for species throughout geological history. Even our own swath of chainsaw and concrete devastation is only the latest in a long series of cleanouts from which life has always bounced back. What are we and our domination of the world but another natural process, no worse than many before? The catastrophe that ended the dinosaurs had a consequence that might lead us to take a positively cheerful attitude towards it: us. From a more dispassionate point of view, every mass extinction opens up yawning gaps in the market, and the headlong rush to fill them is what, time after time, has enriched the diversity of our planet.
Even the most devastating of mass extinctions can be defended as the necessary purging that makes rebirth possible. No doubt it is fascinating to wonder whether rats or starlings might provide the ancestral stock for a new radiation of giant predators, in the event that the whole order Carnivora was wiped out. But none of us would ever know, for we do not live on the evolutionary timescale. It is an aesthetic argument, an argument of feeling, not reason, and I confess that my own feelings recoil. I find my aesthetics incapable of quite such a long view.
The dinosaurs are gone. I mourn them and I mourn the giant ammonites, and before them the mammal-like reptiles and the club moss and tree fern forests of the coal measures, and before them the trilobites and eurypterids: but they are beyond recall. What we have now is a new set of communities, our own contemporary buildup of mutually compatible mammals and birds, flowering plants and pollinating insects. They are not better than the communities that preceded them. But they are here, we have the privilege of studying them, they took agonizing ages to build up, and if we destroy them we shall not see them replaced. Not in our lifetime, not in five million years. If we destroy the ecosystems of which we are a part, we condemn not just our own generation, but all the generations of descendants that we could realistically hope to succeed us, to a world of devastation and impoverishment."
"I was invited by the world's largest computer company to organize and supervise a whole day's game of strategy among their executives, the purpose of which was to bond them together in amicable cooperation. They were divided into three teams, the reds, the blues and the greens, and the game was a variant on the prisoner's dilemma game which is the central topic of Axelrod's book. Unfortunately, the cooperative bonding which was the company's goal failed to materialize – spectacularly. As Robert Axelrod could have predicted, the fact that the game was known to be coming to an end at exactly 4 p.m. precipitated a massive defection by the reds against the blues, immediately before the appointed hour. The bad feeling generated by this sudden break with the previous day-long goodwill was palpable at the post-mortem session that I conducted, and the executives had to have counselling before they could be persuaded to work together again."
Aaaaaaand… In passing, he mentions an evolutionary biologist called Malte Andersson. This… happened… to… be… the… name… of… my… thesis… examiner… in… 2008. :O Erm. Andersson is a supercommon name; Malte isn't. :B Basically, we can assume that the Dawk mentioned someone who read my craptastic little biology thesis "Breeding requirements of neotropical birds at Universeum science centre, Göteborg"!!!!!!!!!!!11111!!!1 In the same sentence as the great Steven Pinker and 19 other names. He referred to them as "distinguished". Sooooo… THE DAWK THINKS MY THESIS EXAMINER IS DISTINGUISHED! MAYBE THAT MAKES ME APPROXIMATELY 0.00000000001% DISTINGUISHED! THANKS I CAN DIE NOW ^_^
PS. IN OTHER NEWS, THE DAWK GAVE A LECTURE AT THE GOTHENBURG SCIENCE FESTIVAL ON 3-MAY-2022 AND I WAS THERE AND HE SIGNED MY COPY OF "UNWEAVING THE RAINBOW" AND I TOLD HIM HE IS MY FAVE WRITER! :DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD Will upload the pics soon-ish.
14-Aug-2022: 9. Tempelriddaren by Jan Guillou
Fave! And a re-read. Book 2 in a trilogy about a knight in the 1100's.
10-Sep-2022: 10. Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters by Steven Pinker
Both this book and "The language instinct" where OTTFMDA (Often Too Technical For My Dumb Ass), but had many bits my little brain could enjoy as well.
"A major theme of this book is that none of us, thinking alone, is rational enough to consistently come to sound conclusions: rationality emerges from a community of reasoners who spot each other's fallacies."
"And ultimately even relativists who deny the possibility of objective truth and insist that all claims are merely the narrative of a culture lack the courage of their convictions. The cultural anthropologists or literary scholars who avow that the truths of science are merely the narratives of one culture will still have their child's infection treated with antibiotics prescribed by a physician rather than a healing song performed by a shaman. And though relativism is often adorned with a moral halo, the moral convictions of relativists depend on a commitment to objective truth. Was slavery a myth? Was the Holocaust just one of many possible narratives? Is climate change a social construction? Or are the suffering and danger that define these events really real – claims that we know are true because of logic and evidence and objective scholarship? Now relativists stop being so relative."
He quotes Spinoza: "Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of humankind." (Though I, of course, corrected "humankind" to "sentient beings" - and btw, there should be a catchier word for the latter.) And he quotes Kant's Categorical Imperative: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." :) Good, eh?
"The press is an availability machine. It serves up anecdotes which feed our impression of what's common in a way that is guaranteed to mislead. Since news is what happens, not what doesn't happen, the denominator in the fraction corresponding to the true probability of an event – all the opportunities for the event to occur, including those in which it doesn't – is invisible, leaving us in the dark about how prevalent something really is.
The distortions, moreover, are not haphazard, but misdirect us toward the morbid. Things that happen suddenly are usually bad – a war, a shooting, a famine, a financial collapse – but good things may consist of nothing happening, like a boring country at peace or a forgettable region that is healthy and well fed. And when progress takes place, it isn't built in a day; it creeps up a few percentage points a year, transforming the world by stealth. As the economist Max Roser points out, news sites could have run the headline 137,000 PEOPLE ESCAPED EXTREME POVERTY YESTERDAY every day for the past twenty-five years."
"Trump told around thirty thousand lies during his term…"
"So much of our reasoning seems tailored to winning arguments that some cognitive scientists, like Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, believe it is the adaptive function of reasoning. We evolved not as intuitive scientists but as intuitive lawyers. While people often try to get away with lame arguments for their own positions, they are quick to spot fallacies in other people's arguments."
"My greatest surprise in making sense of moral progress is how many times in history the first domino was a reasoned argument." :O
8-Nov-2022: 11. Riket vid vägens slut by Jan Guillou
Fave! Book 3 in a trilogy about a knight in the 1100's. I… read about half of "Riket" in 2000! Then was interrupted for some reason (maybe a library deadline) and never got around to finishing it until now. :B
2-Dec-2022: 12. Arvet efter Arn by Jan Guillou
Fave! A 4th book in Guillou's "trilogy". The hero from the first 3 was fictitious. This one is about his grandson, who existed, and kind of invented Sweden.
"Mest angelägna var männen, föga överraskande, att finna en rik änka. Svårare att begripa var vad de sade sig kunna erbjuda i gengäld för denna rikedom de ämnade inhösta. Om detta som verkade svårfattligt för åtminstone de två Ceciliorna berättade Ingrid Ylva lustigt och i ogudaktigt tal att männen för det första var förvissade om att ingen kvinna kunde leva utan manlig lem och för det andra lika förvissade om att inga små söner kunde fostras utan man i huset."
"Ingrid Ylva kväljdes något av att se människor med gott lynne syssla med denna vedervärdiga djurföda. Ingen människa åt svamp utom fordom när det varit flera års missväxt och svälten härjade i landet. Så mycket visste dock de flesta att svamp var ett osäkert sätt att rädda livhanken även för den mest utsvultne. I värsta fall kunde det leda till döden och i bästa fall klarade man sig med några dagars feber och rännskita."
3-Dec-2022: 13. The return of the native by Thomas Hardy
An audiobook, read by… Alan Rickman, who had THE MOST BEAUTIFUL VOICE IN THE WORLD! D': I actually listened to maybe half of it in… 2007. o_O Usually after my nightly paper round, so I kept falling asleep in the middle of chapters and… Meh… Of course I always meant to finish it, though. :D And of course I now listened from the beginning. Haven't finished it yet. I only listen to it at home where I can properly hear and fully concentrate on THE VOICE. :q
24-Dec-2022: 14. Galileo's daughter: A drama of science, faith and love by Dava Sobel
I had never heard of it until it was recommended by Neil deGrasse Tyson's "Startalk" podcast. :) (A 2009 ep that I listened to in 2022…)
"In 1604, five years prior to Galileo's development of the telescope, the world beheld a never-before-seen star in the heavens. It was called 'nova' for its newness. It flared up near the constellation Sagittarius in October and stayed so prominent through November that Galileo had time to deliver three public lectures about the newcomer before it faded from bright view. The nova challenged the law of immutability in the heavens, a cherished tenet of the Aristotelian world order. Earthly matter, according to ancient Greek philosophy, contained four base elements – earth, water, air, fire – that underwent constant change, while the heavens, as Aristotle described them, consisted entirely of a fifth element – the quintessence, or aether – that remained incorruptible. It was thus impossible for a new star suddenly to materialise. The nova, the Aristotelians argued, must inhabit the sublunar sphere between the Earth and the Moon, where change was permissible. But Galileo could see by comparing his nightly observation with those of other stargazers in distant lands that the new star lay far out, beyond the Moon, beyond the planets, among the domain of the old stars. /…/ Having thus impugned the immutability of the heavens, Galileo further attacked the Aristotelian philosophers by turning the telescope on their territory in 1609. His telescopic discoveries transformed the nature of the Copernican question from an intellectual engagement into a debate that might be decided on the basis of evidence. The roughness of the Moon, for example, showed that some of the features of Earth repeated themselves in the heavens. The motions of the Medicean stars [some of Jupiter's moons] demonstrated that satellites could orbit bodies other than the Earth. The phases of Venus argued that at least one planet must travel around the Sun. And the dark spots discovered on the Sun sullied the perfection of yet another heavenly sphere. /…/ Galileo rued the stubbornness of philosophers who clung to Aristotle's views despite the new perspective provided by the telescope. He swore that if Aristotle himself were brought back to life and shown the sights now seen, the great philosopher would quickly alter his opinion, as he had always honored the evidence of his senses."
31-Dec-2022: 15. Den fräcka kråkan by Ulf Nilsson & Eva Eriksson
Fave! And a re-read, as it's a kiddy book that I used to have read to me in the 80's and that I vaguely remembered. IT'S FUCKING SAD :'(
------------------------------
Vegan FAQ! :)
The Web Site the Meat Industry Doesn't Want You to See.
Please watch Earthlings.
-----
You can reach me at yoze83 [AT] yahoo.com