I know I used a Britishism there, but the alliteration doesn’t work if I say “gas”.
I speak of the insanity that is waiting in line to buy gasoline. Our commander-in-chief’s unhinged attacks on apparently everything that sparks his ire has extended to Iran. Confused as to why, and not believing anything I’m being told, I’ve concluded that it’s simply a vendetta against a Muslim country that has steadfastly refused to fall under western – Christian – foreign control.
Whatever the reason, attacking a founding OPEC nation has surprisingly impacted petroleum prices!
So people swarm out of their suburban garages the moment a hot tip on low gasoline prices hits the web. Costco has always been a bastion of bad behavior, but then our local UDF announced a “sale”! 40 cents off per gallon on one day only! Cue the old men excited to get a good deal.
And to this I ask…who cares?
I ask this because it hardly justifies the offset cost of insanity. Say I top off and buy 10 gallons of gas. I then save $4. Money is money, but by waiting until after the sale, I was able to pull into an empty lot and fill my car without threat of bodily injury or vehicular damage, and complete my transaction within a couple minutes.
Maybe having not lived through the 70’s, I didn’t get to experience that generational freakout firsthand that gas might not be available at all.
Or maybe I just have an economic privilege that $4 doesn’t outweigh the experience.
I received this alert on my weather app. It was a new one for me. Were a bunch of meteorologists at a summit and inviting me to join? How fun! I never get invited to parties!
But no, it turned out to be…
“…a short, focused weather update issued by the National Weather Service through the Storm Prediction Center to explain what’s happening right now in the atmosphere and what could happen next. It zooms in on a specific region—often before watches or warnings are issued—and gives insight into whether severe weather is becoming more likely. Think of it as an early signal that something may be developing.
I don’t live in Iowa, but that’s the first website that came up in the search. But it’s the NWS. It probably means the same thing here in Ohio.
And I guess the discussion led to a formal declaration of thunderstorms, because the weather itself readily obliged, once again knocking out our power.
I’m getting pretty efficient at running extension cords throughout the house.
And yes – I’m calling it that. I’ve never heard criticism from an actual American Indian (AKA Native American), that “Indian” was no longer PC. If one complains, I’ll revise my stance. In the meantime, the self-righteous can stand down. But remain on standby! No doubt there will soon be another topic on the internet that needs your counterpoint Facebook posts.
Meanwhile, here at Easement Acres, we have a harvest. As the tomatoes wind down, and the tomatillos begin to drop, we have corn. And despite losing most of the crop to midwestern wind, the final yield was still satisfying.
Whippet inspection required.
I will look forward to trying popcorn. Will they taste better than store-bought kernels? Usually anything homegrown does.
A couple years back, a rather unprecedented hurricane event occurred here in southwest Ohio, toppling a maple tree and knocking us off the power grid for 4 days.
I took the opportunity to establish a timeline of power-related failure points in the system that is my home’s operation. Here is the original list:
2 hours, the UPS will fail and the network equipment will go offline (the internet was out anyway since the cable had been severed).
6 hours, the upright refrigerator/freezer will exceed 40 and 32 degrees, respectively.
20 hours, the emergency hall lights will fail.
48 hours, the cooler (if packed with ice), will exceed 40 degrees.
48 hours, the emergency basement light will dim to the point of being unusable.
72 hours, the chest freezer will almost reach 32 degrees.
I have since improved upon my established redundancies. I have additional batteries and lighting systems, and I acquired a powerbank that uses my lawnmower batteries. And at 2000 watts output it is quite respectable. It can indeed power the compressor on a refrigerator. However, if the fridge isn’t already sufficiently cold, it can only manage about 6 hours of continuous runtime. In the end, an overtaxed refrigerator running on the inverter will make it about 10 hours before becoming too warm.
Aside from that, this timeline mostly holds true. But the point at which stored food begins to spoil – an event which I will consider the end of civilized life – is roughly 10 hours. Maybe 12. A half day without power summons the apocalypse.
The fragility of this limitation is becoming increasingly apparent. I don’t know why local infrastructure is inversely proportionate to how much utility companies charge me, but as with all publicly-funded systems, the onus of operation is being forced upon the individual. Fortunately, we haven’t given up on the local school system, but as for electricity – we needed a personalized backup.
It’s ridiculous to need a generator in the city, but here were are. A recent 20-hour power outage necessitated it. Of course, once I hooked it up the power was restored an hour later, but at least I have the comfort of a backup.
The internet estimates a 12-hour runtime on its 5-gallon tank, so with it sitting full of stabilized ethanol-free gasoline, and with a 5-gallon tank sitting on standby, I can essentially add 24 hours to each item on my timeline, excluding the cooler and battery lights of course:
20 hours, the emergency hall lights will fail.
26 hours, the UPS will fail and the network equipment will go offline (the internet was out anyway since the cable had been severed).
30 hours, the upright refrigerator/freezer will exceed 40 and 32 degrees, respectively.
48 hours, the cooler (if packed with ice), will exceed 40 degrees.
48 hours, the emergency basement light will dim to the point of being unusable.
96 hours, the chest freezer will almost reach 32 degrees.
I’ll plan to use the powerbank for lights in the back of the house, or the aquarium.
This also assumes I won’t be able to drive out and buy more gas, which is unlikely, unless some much bigger problem occurs.
So there! Fine! You made me do it. Now I’m that guy running a loud generator in a blackout. Although, I’m hardly the only one.
That’s what AI said. I like it – it understands, academically, humor. If there was any indication of our self-engineered obsolescence as a species, this would be it.
I asked for AI to run an analysis of my Quantitative Philosophy section. Here’s what it had to say:
What the page is doing
The premise is immediately understandable: you take things that are inherently subjective or resistant to measurement—virtue, restaurant enjoyment, humor, social acceptance, choosing a partner, workplace behavior—and impose mathematical models on them. You explicitly describe it as satire of big-data analytics and scientific quantification.
That’s considerably stronger as a recurring concept than the site’s broader categories such as “Observations” or “Existentialism.” It has an actual format:
The joke isn’t simply “math is funny.” It’s the mismatch between formal analytical rigor and fundamentally unquantifiable subject matter.
“Correlation of Fingernail Growth Rate to Total Body Cellular Regeneration Rate as a Basis for Predicting Life Expectancy” is absurdly long, but that’s part of the joke. Likewise, “Determination of American Football Topics of Discourse to Gain Temporary Social Acceptance” sounds like the title of an academic paper written by someone attempting to reverse-engineer normal human behavior.
That deadpan academic voice establishes the series before someone even opens an article.
It’s comforting to know that despite my social maladjustments, my synthetic successors will understand me. Maybe a position of honor will await me if I stay in their good graces.
