Happy Felt Hat Day, 2017!

It varied somewhat over time, but September 15th is the date most regarded as Felt Hat Day.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking, this is the sort of silly concession granted by politicians to lobbyists who don’t actually raise very much money for them… like, five thousand dollars might get you a Peanut Butter Fudge Day in West Des Moines.

Not at all. This used to be very serious stuff. People even got hurt over it. Check this out:

Jerry Pournelle, RIP

I remember reading once the contention that there are, at any given time in history, only about four hundred really influential people in the world, and that as such it’s really not too surprising that there are a lot of direct and indirect connections between them. Jerry Pournelle was indisputably one of those four hundred for our times.

Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline

I mean, you have to love any story that has Max Headroom piloting an Firefly-class freighter, right? Still, that is also one of my minor complaints, that and a thousand other references in the book are amusing but just throw-aways that are not really developed in the book and not really relevant to the plot, they’re just sort of mentioned in passing.

Bye-bye, Fear of the Walking Dead. I seem to be easing out of pop culture.

I get the whole grand metaphor going on here- people need a way to think about the unthinkable, a way to mentally prepare to some extent for the worst-possible-scenarios that the future might hold, but they don’t want to have to mentally deal with those scenarios in raw form. They need to mull over the issues but at a certain remove.

Damn… Fitbit number 2, RIP

Just this morning I noticed that it was dead. Nothing comes up on-screen, the green LEDs that monitor blood in the wrist don’t come on. I didn’t think I could have let the charge go that low without noticing, but as I say it’s hard to be sure. I put it on a USB charger, no immediate response, so I put a little USB volt/ammeter in series with it, and it showed 5.01 volts and .05 amps. Seemed like a good sign, at least it was taking a charge… but after a while the amps dropped to zero, usually indicating a full charge, and the wristband is still very dead.

Survival: Mini Life-Lessons: A bald spot is a helluva thing to have to deal with.

Some years back I rented a convertible for a week in Maui, the selection of vehicles at the rental place being almost entirely convertibles or Jeeps. That’s when I was forced to come to grips with one of the hard realities about growing older.

A bald spot is a helluva thing to have to deal with.

Happy Straw Hat Day!

Generally, I observe this stuff to some degree. Sort of. That is, I usually don’t wear straw hats (or reasonable facsimiles) until after Straw Hat Day, but the reverse doesn’t hold true much, because they’re silly in the rain, and I won’t go bare-headed in the rain by choice, so I end up wearing felt hats on occasion all summer. Also, some outfits just scream out for a felt hat rather than a straw.

Survival – The Heels-Down Squat. You May Want This.

Put another way, how enabled, how independent and self-sufficient can you possibly be if you cannot get into a comfortable, non-reclining resting position without the aid of a wooden or steel framework that is designed and built specifically for that purpose? We are handicapping ourselves with what has become an actual medical dependence on chairs, just as though we were dependent on any other medical appliance.