Tag: blog

Daily Life

Weekly Wrap Up

It’s Friday people. It’s been a pretty good week. Lots of news going on, plenty of activities happening. Time for some random contrarian thoughts.

  • Wednesday was in the top 5 of my all-time best ski days. We ended up with 8-9 inches of the fluffy stuff dumping overnight in town. Up on the hill there was 16+ inches up on top. Hard to describe how much fun it was. We skied until the last lift stopped running. A great way to finish out the season. Still a few more weeks of spring skiing to come…

  • I finally stopped being lazy and built out the wall-mounted ski rack in the mud room I’d been promising to finish for at least a year (or two). I’m very pleased with how it came out. I’m not very good with that sort of thing, so it’s a great feeling of accomplishment when I do some sort of home improvement like that. (insert Tim the Tool Man grunt)

  • I had to back a large trailer up a narrow, icy driveway. A little ugly, but I got it done. Backing a trailer is an interesting skill that takes a lot of practice. Not something I ever had an opportunity to do as a young adult. Should be one of those mandatory basic dude stuff skills.

  • Ukraine surfaced again as a topic in the pending presidential race. DeSantis had the audacity to call it a territorial dispute. The warmongering class clutched their pearls in horror and called him a Putin stooge. Recall the two main questions I’ve asked for a long time. 1) How is this in our strategic interest? 2) If you actually think Russia’s plan is to continue rolling into Poland after Ukraine, why is Europe not fully funding and massively mobilizing a defense?

  • The United States (and NATO) have done everything in their power to provoke this conflict. Don’t believe me? I highly recommend reading this short book on the subject: “How the West Brought War to Ukraine“. It may open your eyes a bit. If nothing else, it will give a prospective other than what the chattering class on the nightly news gives you.

  • My weight loss has completely stalled. I’m below maintenance calories. I haven’t snacked, cheated or otherwise sabatoged my eating. High protein, low carbs. I’ve completely cut out alcohol. I Nordic or alpine ski 4 days a week. My weight has remained static for over a week (even gone up a few of the days). Extremely frustrating. It’s hard to remain motivated to deprive oneself day after day when you see zero progress. Sigh.
  • I read a great substack this week (that I can’t find now) that described the technical details of what happened to the SVB bank fail. It reminded me of the ’08 financial crisis. The root causes are extremely complicated, despite the simplistic news summaries we see. Ultimately, it’s a systemic lack of oversight that enabled the failure (similar to ’08). I see no appetite for the financial or political world to make any changes. It’s not a good long-term recipe.

  • I’ve been following a gal who has set the record (demolished it) for consecutive ultramarathon runs. She’s on day 132 of running 32 miles a day. It just shows what we’re capable of if we choose to. Meanwhile, I ski two days in a row and tell myself I better take a break so I don’t overtrain. LOL

  • We’re down to the last ten episodes of the last season of Walking Dead. (no spoilers please!) We’ve gone from why did we ever stop watching, to this is dumb, to this is great. At the moment we’re back to this is just stupid. I’m ready for this series to be put out of its misery. I hope it finishes strong.

The weekend in my part of the world is looking to be sunny and 50+ degrees. We haven’t seen that for a while. I see motorcycle rides, dog hikes, and yard work in my future. Ya’ll go enjoy the weekend and try to be good humans.

Daily Life, Diet, Health

Let’s Go To The Numbers

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again. Somehow this blog turned into nothing but writing about my (lack of) health and fitness. I don’t know how that happened and it wasn’t my intention. But for some reason, 90% of my few followers have some connection to the health/nutrition/fitness industry. I don’t get it. Write about some current event or a political issue, and crickets. Write about how many cookies I ate last week, and I get new followers. I find it bizarre. Anyway, clearly you asked for it, so let’s go into excruciating detail about my numbers.

As part of this years revolution (not resolution), I’ll be tracking my weight daily. I want to see how things fluctuate with food and exercise. I use an impedance scale (this one if interested) which provides a number of stats. First off, yes I know they are not a precise tool. The non-weight numbers tend to fluctuate quite a bit from day to day. But as a way to watch trends over time, I think it’s a fine tool.

A side note on interesting observations… I’ve been using the scale on and off for a number of years. Out of curiosity I went back to when I was at my leanest and most cardio-fit (was doing tons of mountain trail running). At that point my body fat was 17.5% and lean muscle mass was 132 lbs. I wasn’t exactly Viking warrior material – more like Chris Froome cyclist physique.

Fast forward to today. Body fat is, well… an embarrassing 26.8% I know, I know, we’re working on it. But here’s the interesting number. I’ve been lifting weights seriously for about four months now. Muscle mass today is at 147.8 lbs. A 15.8 lb gain in lean muscle mass! Now I don’t think that’s a super accurate number, but it has been steadily increasing over the last few months. Given my age and the back issues I’ve had recently, I’ll take muscle mass and core strength improvements over body fat%.

But we’re all vain creatures (if we’re honest) and I’m tired of struggling to button my jeans, so the body fat number is important. The official weigh in was Jan 2. Here’s what the numbers show:

Jan 2 food/exercise: several eggs + bacon; string cheese, grapes, a few pretzels; tri-tip, salad; a big piece of cake; went downhill skiing for the day.

Jan 3 weight increased .2 lbs, no change in body fat%.

Jan 3 food/exercise: stuffed bell pepper + cheese/sour cream; plate of Chinese food; big handful of chips; another plate of Chinese food; 1 small piece of chocolate; Split and carried wood up a flight of stairs for 40 minutes, went cross country skiing.

Jan 4 weight increased 2.4 lbs and body fat increased .4%

What the hell? So frustrating. Zero alcohol, nothing crazy calorie-wise (well, cake), was pretty active, and I gain 2+ pounds. This is why people get so frustrated dieting.

Here’s my guess – Because I cut out alcohol, I’ve been pounding fluids. Water, coffee, and 3-4 “vitamin waters”. It doesn’t seem like I’ve voided commensurate with overall fluid intake and I’m sure the Chinese food had tons of sodium. My theory is that most of that weight gain is fluid retention. Maybe? Unfortunately, the scale says my water percentage has actually gone down, so I don’t know what to think.

Obviously, the answer is to go back to tracking calories (I use this app) and map that to the scales data and watch the trend. Once I see a clear trend with calories to weight loss, I can create a bunch of known calorie meals and plan for the week. Remember – revolution, not resolution. Systems, not goals.

Sigh… why is this so hard? I want to go back to my twenties and the steady diet of burgers and nachos just to keep weight on.

Daily Life, Health

Do This One Amazing Trick

Ever notice how many YouTube videos, blogs, and ads use some form of this clickbait title? “Use this one trick to gain 10,000 followers in a day!” “The IRS doesn’t want you to know about this one trick”. I fell for one of them yesterday while surfing YouTube. I don’t remember the title, but it was something like “Follow this one rule to improve your channel”. I don’t have much of an attention span, so one rule is right up my alley. Convinced I’ll soon be scooping up all that sweet YouTube cash, I clicked on the thumbnail.

It actually ended up being a reasonable video, and the author made a good point that I think translates well to making videos, writing a blog, or life in general. He asked a simple question. “Are you an entertainer or an educator?” You have to pick an approach for your content and stick to it. Whether you’re writing a blog, an article, or creating a video, people will consume your content for one reason. They either want to be entertained, or they want to learn something. They’ll keep coming back to your content if they continue to see that same type of (quality) content. What generally doesn’t work is to post a bunch of how-to stuff, then suddenly post content that tries to be funny.

It almost doesn’t seem to matter what your niche is. How to repair things with duct tape. Heckling pro golfers. The history of manhole covers. It makes no difference what the content is as long as you’re consistent. If I am a fan of duct tape, the last thing I want to see on your amazing duct tape channel is a travel vlog of your trip to Disneyland with the kids. I have a friend who has a YouTube channel dedicated to cowboy action shooting. It’s a bit of an obscure sport and you wouldn’t think there’d be a be demand for that sort of thing. He has 20 thousand subscribers and posts nothing but 30 second clips of shooting matches. It’s all about finding your lane and then staying in it.

And therein lies my problem. It dawned on me that whether it’s writing, YouTube, or life in general… I’m a bit of a lost soul who can’t decide what niche I want to be in. That’s neither good nor bad. It just is. This blog drifts back and forth between trying to be funny, some random political/opinion stuff, and general reporting on the minutia of my daily life. As a reader it’s probably hard to know what you’re going to get (I’m honestly surprised people continue to subscribe). The same goes for YouTube. My pitiful little channel can’t figure out what it wants to be. I had visions of a broader category but keep resorting to the creative path of least resistance (and effort).

The end result for both blogging and YouTube is something that I’m clearly not terribly passionate about. As an example, for some reason still baffles me, 90+ percent of the subscribers to this blog are fitness related. I find this amusing and slightly embarrassing. I am not a fitness person. I am not fit. I’m not making much progress on my fitness journey at the moment. Because of that, I’m not very motivated to write anything about fitness. But anytime I even mention the word fitness… the views go way up, and I gain another handful of subscribers. So, I realize that I could probably focus 100% on fitness and diet topics and rapidly acquire readers. But is that really me?

Similar with videos. I like motorcycles and it was easy to crank out a few videos about some trips I took. But I didn’t have any desire to be only a motorcycle travel vlogger. The motorcycle only occupies a small portion of my life. But as it turns out, those motorcycle trips are what people watch. Do I stick with what gets views, or try to figure out what will motivate me to make lots of content rather than just an occasional video when I go on motorcycle ride?

It’s sort of an interesting life question. Everyone knows the old adage about working – “pursue your passion and you’ll never work a day in your life”. I’m not sure that’s realistic advice. As a young man my passions were surfing and being angry at the world. I’m not sure how successful I would have been focusing solely on that. But who knows? Maybe I would have gone on to launch a surf clothing company that featured anti-establishment slogans that made me a gazillionaire.

The reality for most of us is that through luck and circumstance we stumble into something and end up doing it for long enough that you actually get good at it. Is it a “passion”? Maybe, maybe not. But it pays the bills and gives you an identity and a focus. Maybe these creative outlets should be the same? I stumbled on a couple of things that attracted a few folks willing to read/watch my nonsense. Perhaps I should just embrace it and focus on what works. Really dive in and enjoy the niche I accidently found. I never thought I’d be a software engineer or an RN either, but I got pretty good at both.

But the other adage about creativity is that you should create for you first. Who cares if anyone else likes it? If your creativity comes from passion and happiness, people will recognize it. There are followers for every sort of niche. If you put out good content, those followers will find you. At the end of the day, what’s the point of being creative if it’s not your passion?

Interesting questions. I’m not sure what I’d tell a young person going out into the world today. I’m not sure what to tell myself. That’s some deep stuff to ponder on a Tuesday morning. I think I’ll go get my workout done and think about it…

Uncategorized

The End Of A Blog?

Years ago (2007, 2008?) I stumbled upon a blog. I was heavily into cycling and my never-ending campaign to lose weight and get in shape. The blog was called FatCyclist. It was the first time I’d ever become invested in a total stranger’s life. He wrote about everything – weight loss, riding bikes, cancer, grief, funny stories, race reports, tech, etc… I’d find myself checking every day to see if there was a new post from fatty. He lost his wife to cancer and wrote extensively about the experience, his grieving, and starting up life again as a relatively young guy (30’s at that point I think).

The cancer experience led him to fundraising for causes he believed in and ultimately a minor association with Lance Armstrong and his Livestrong cancer foundation. This was the peak Lance period, so I was all-in. I gobbled up everything he wrote like an excited fan-boy. It was weird. I felt like I was part of a community. I read all the comments on each blog post and started recognizing the frequent commenters.

At one point he had a crazy idea for a fundraiser – a race that went nowhere. For some random reason he’d decided to ride a century (100 miles) on his stationary trainer and then blogged about it. That spawned the idea of the 100 Miles of Nowhere race. You’d sign up, ride 100 miles in the shortest space possible, submit a picture of your trip computer and get a box of prizes. The proceeds went to Livestrong and cancer research. A good cause and the resulting race reports were great reading. Of course, I had to do it. I did my 100 miles riding a mind-numbing quarter mile circle around my block, got my t-shirt and bragging rights. I can’t fathom what my neighbors must have thought watching me ride in circles for an entire day.

I can honestly say that his blog really inspired my early attempts at writing anything. I loved his style and ability to make the mundane aspects of life interesting. He managed to capture a large audience, writing about nothing more than random things like getting lost one day looking for a new bike trail. He was very self-deprecating and downplayed how good a cyclist he probably was for an average 9-5 working tech guy. It just resonated with me.

Eventually the posts started becoming less frequent. They evolved into long, multi-part, complicated race reports from the various events he’d compete in, which didn’t interest me as much. I stopped reading, other than the occasional check-in from time-to-time when I remembered about his blog. And then the posts dried up completely and I forgot all about him.

And then yesterday the FatCyclist sent out a tweet (I’d forgotten I even followed him on Twitter) saying that while it realistically had been done for a long time, he was officially ending the blog. He wrote a final post reminiscing about the experience, thanking everyone who’d helped him raise money for the various fundraisers, and so on. He’s moved on to podcasting. And then the final statement – …besides, blogging is dead.

Gasp! A blow to frustrated blog writers everywhere. He’s probably right. The world has moved on to the 140-character format, Tik Tok, YouTube, and podcasts. There are a few journalistic types who are having some success on substack, but other than that who reads blogs anymore? Especially some random stranger’s blog?

I think it’s time to evaluate my writing. For the most part I write for two main reasons. The first is that I think it’s important to be able to string words together in a semi-coherent way. It’s a perishable skill. The second is that it makes me think about things I watch/read/experience and then try to formulate that collection of random thoughts into something more structured. Forcing myself to try and articulate my thinking is a good thing. Also a perishable skill.

And let’s be honest, who doesn’t secretly want a large audience consuming your writing, photos, videos, tweets, podcasts, or whatever? As a creator, I think you’d be lying if you said you didn’t care. If you scroll back through my stuff, you can clearly see I’ve tried many different approaches. Dry humor, lists, purely political rants, thoughts of the day, running commentary on buying motorcycles… none of it has really resonated. For the most part, I don’t really care. I’m writing for myself more than anything. But when you post something you think is particularly witty and it gets zero views, a small part of you feels like… why do I bother? Yes, I recognize that if I actually wanted to build an “audience” I need to actively promote whatever I write and visit and engage with other blogs. To this point, that’s just not an effort I’ve been interested in committing to. At the moment the only people who read anything I write do so because they were looking for DYI plans on building kitchen spice racks, and some odd post I’d written two years ago came up in a WordPress search.

I need to wander off to the top of a mountain and meditate on this for a while. But my sense is that it’s time to end the blog in its current form. Maybe I’ll change my mind. I don’t think I’ll stop writing completely. I do enjoy it. I suspect it’s more a matter of finding a way to focus whatever writing I do so that it’s more productive.

Maybe I try my hand at a book or screenplay? Perhaps I should put the effort in to create actual opinion pieces and try to get something published somewhere? Or do I take the approach of becoming single topic focused and try to build an audience around that? As in, actually put the effort in to be an “expert” on something and to promote it.

But then again, why? I don’t need a career and I certainly don’t need another “hobby”. It may simply be time to put this out to pasture. We’ll see. Like I said, I need to do me ‘sum think’n on it. Maybe Fatty is right – blogs are dead?

Cool, Government, Health, Motivation

More Power Scotty!
  • I’ve been out of technology for roughly eight years now. When a tech challenge comes along it’s a painful process to try and dredge up past knowledge of how things work. Like trying to start an old lawnmower that sat in the garage for several years. Runs great once it starts, but takes a lot of pulling, fiddling with adjustments, and a few curse words before it gets going. The brand new ginormous TV was delivered and installed in a room we’ve mostly never used before. All is good except the Wi-Fi signal in that room is pitiful, resulting terrible buffering when watching my Real Housewives episodes. No problem, just install a Google Wi-Fi mesh network. And… the Wi-Fi signal is even worse than it was before. Long story short, there were multiple factory resets, some cable changes, changed the router to bridge mode to get rid of the double NAT, a small prayer to the network gods, and we’re back in business with reasonable speeds. All in all, probably still easier than helping grandma set up a Zoom call.
  • To become a politician you have to be a massive, tone-deaf narcissistic asshat. After De Blasio told everyone to stay away from the New York New Years eve ball drop, he and his wife showed up and danced on stage. Sometimes it’s unfortunate we’ve become too civilized to simply run people like this out of town.
  • Continuing with yesterday’s Fed vs state and local thread… New York is sitting on 2/3 of the Covid vaccines they have. It must be Trumps fault.
  • Please look at this chart and tell me where the science is showing that masks are working. Montana implemented a mask mandate and South Dakota didn’t. Can you spot the difference? You can’t even talk about correlation and causation because there’s nothing that points to any sort of correlation. Here’s the chart of California. Please show me where in the data it shows masks are doing anything. Japan was a fanatical mask wearing society before all this and they’re now seeing a spike in Covid. How could this be? Again, this doesn’t “prove” that masks don’t work. I’m simply saying that at this point we should be seeing signals in the data that would give some indication of correlation, and it isn’t there. You know, science and all.
  • Just like last year, the entry date for a big running race is coming up. And just like last year (well, many years if you include the annual Leadville 100 mountain bike race) I spend roughly two weeks wondering if I could do it. It’s beyond a stretch goal and the odds of a disastrous failure and injury would be very high. I think I’m mostly interested in seeing if I’m mentally strong enough to commit to the training and perseverance it would take to accomplish something like that. And bragging rights. And then I come to my senses and back away from the keyboard. But that little voice in the back of my head keeps whispering…
  • It’s day 11 from my Covid vaccine and, according to researchers, I should have roughly 80% protection at this point. Another 10 days until my booster and then I’ll be immortal. Or was it invincible? I get those confused.
  • Speaking of immortal, watched the new Wonder Woman movie last night. I never saw the first one, so it didn’t make much sense to me. Not the strongest script ever produced, that’s for sure. But what really bugged me was the film format. They filmed it in 4K Ultra HD, whatever that is. They must have filmed it in a higher frame rate because it just didn’t look right. It looks like some sort of hyper-realistic video. It didn’t look like film at all. I didn’t care for it.

Song of the day: Spin Doctors – What Time Is It? (live TV 1993)

Daily Life, Government, Lists

The Authentic Voice
  • I don’t have a list of resolutions for the New Year. No goals that probably won’t be met. No platitudes about becoming a better person or striving for world peace. I’m in a unique place in life. I’ve been very blessed. Through a combination of dumb luck, good planning, seizing opportunities, and hard work, Mrs. Troutdog and I find ourselves at a happy crossroads. Retirement is looming around the corner. What is that going to look like? Will I spend my waning years puttering around my workbench in the garage? Will we be taking exotic motorcycle trips across southeast Asia? Maybe I’ll finally become a world famous YouTube star, or figure out what it is I’m actually trying to say with this blog. Perhaps I’ll start taking pictures again or figure out once and for all which of my 27 hobbies I want to focus on? When you were younger the saying was “what do you want to be when you grow up?”. Well, here I am all grown up and I still don’t know. So that’s my plan for the year – to try and get a handle on what I want my remaining time on this planet to look like. To find my authentic voice. What do I want to say, do, and leave behind. It’s not an achievable plan. But I think it’s a good theme for the New Year.
  • I finally made the Machaca. I think it came out pretty damn good. It will certainly be a do-over. There’s so many things you can do with it – tortas, street tacos, breakfast, burritos. Good stuff.
  • I don’t know why I find this so frightening. The engineering is damn impressive. It’s amazing where we are from a technology perspective. I guess I just don’t trust human nature. The sci-fi conspiracy theorist in me envisions getting tased by one of these things as I try to enter a store without my Covid-39 passport.
  • You’re already seeing the media reporting the administration is bungling the rollout of the China virus vaccine. What a disaster, only 3 million doses have been given by the end of the year. We were promised 20 million dammit! Ignoring what an amazing R&D accomplishment this has been, the media conveniently doesn’t report that 14 million doses have been shipped. The bottleneck is at the local level. The same thing happens with every hurricane, wildfire, and flood. Clearly we don’t teach civics any more. We are a republic of independent states. The federal government can supply resources, but it’s up to the individual states and cities to implement those resources. When you saw those rows of empty school buses unused and flooded while people frantically tried to evacuate during Katrina, that was the state and cities fault. The federal government (FEMA) prepositioned those assets and the local authorities didn’t use them. It’s a dangerous road to go down letting people think that a massive, federal big brother is in charge of everything. The framers would be appalled at what their republic has become.
  • This article about the imprisonment of Assange is a bit convoluted, but a good read. What we’ve done to him is a travesty. I really liked this statement: “Whether a society is truly free is determined by how it treats its dissidents, those who live and speak and think outside of permissible lines, those who effectively subvert ruling class aims.”
  • I finished my last shift and last task of the year, New Years eve, in a fitting fashion. Giving a soap suds enema to a confused, combative patient who hadn’t pooped in a week and vomiting up tube feeds every thirty minutes. Thanks 2020 and fuck you. Moving on to 2021!
  • Finishing up with pics of the best dogs on the planet, the mighty Vizsla.

Song of the day: Beck – Loser (Live 2003)

Daily Life, Government, Motivation, Politics, Solving the wrong problem

I Caught A Case Of The Apathy
  • Yesterday I was mad and frustrated. I was fed up with people on Facebook posting virtue-signaling Covid case count memes. Frustration at the lack of media coverage around alleged election fraud. I’ve had it with government lockdowns and killing of the economy and small businesses. I’m pissed that nobody in government is ever held accountable for anything. As a healthcare worker I’m exhausted with the hospital working conditions and no end in sight. I sat down and started writing a long post about all this. About two-thirds of the way through I suddenly felt a huge wave of apathy settle in. Why care about any of this? It feels like the massive engine of the deep state, big tech, and the media empire is an unstoppable force. Nothing will change. There’s too much money, too much power, too much corruption. What’s the point? Why bother writing (venting) for a grand total of about three readers? I deleted my words and walked away. I’m not as apathetic today, but I do wonder if I’d be happier if I stopped paying attention to the news? I suspect this blog would do better if I just focused on one thing… cooking or fly fishing or something.
  • A powerful solar storm is occurring Dec 9/10 that may produce northern lights visible in many northern states. We had cloud cover last night, so no luck. I’ll be looking again tonight.
  • It’s amazing how shameless the media is. They’re now shocked that the Hunter Biden investigation went largely unnoticed prior to the election. WTF. How do these “journalists” look at themselves in the mirror in the morning?
  • My hospital is drowning. Our staffing shortages are dangerous. Despite what the media reports, it’s not entirely due to covid. The city and state are frantically waving their hands in the air and desperate to do something to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed. The solution? Let’s pass more regulations preventing youth sports and further limit restaurant capacity. That’s like when someone says they can’t afford new tires for their car, the government solution is to try and create smoother paved roads to reduce tire wear. How about, oh I don’t know, add resources to the health care system? We have a perfectly capable national guard who could spin up a response within days. I get that there are cost and liability issues when interacting with private entities, but I’m pretty sure we can figure that out. Rather than fix the leaks in the dam, we’re too busy educating people on the importance of wearing Gore-Tex and galoshes.
  • I saw an ad for a bracelet with a little symbol for every national park you’ve visited. Made me look up my list. I’ve been to 13. Not bad. How many have you been to?
  • Watched Hillbilly Elegy. Very good, highly recommend.
  • This is seriously freaky. Don’t watch if home alone at night.
  • Still have not made machaca. Haven’t forgotten, the timing just hasn’t worked out yet. I have a week off coming up and plenty of snow in the forecast. Skiing and cooking sounds like a fine way to spend my time.

Song of the day: The Who “Young man blues – live at Isle of Wight“

Daily Life, Government, Politics

Yogi Bear And Pic-a-nic Baskets
  • We had a bear come visit the other day. Our security cameras caught him in all his glory sauntering around our front door and then making his way over to the garbage cans. He was a big fella with obviously no shortage of pic-a-nic baskets in his diet. It’s always good to be reminded from time to time that we are not the top of the food chain. I know nothing about bears, but clearly it’s not hibernation time yet. I guess I’ll need to take the dogs random barking at seemingly nothing more serious now.
  • Filed under, time get the pitchforks out yet? If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s worth watching this short clip of an LA restaurant owner in tears. She’d spent thousands of dollars trying to comply with the random lockdown rules, creating outdoor dining with tables properly spaced. All so she can stay in business and try and pay her rent. She shows up and what does she see? A catering company for a movie shoot right across from her restaurant, setting up huge tents and tons of tables… not spaced out like she’d been ordered to. Hollywood will have different rules because they’re woke and are big campaign contributors. If that doesn’t make you want to give a big F-you to the government and bust out the tar and feathers, I don’t know what will.
  • Speaking of lockdowns, a bunch of Bay Area counties are rushing to make sure they kill all business just in time for Christmas. I’m not exactly clear on how you can enforce “stay at home except for essential business”? Last I checked, you are under no obligation to tell any government official where you’re going or what you’re doing. I’m pretty sure we don’t require “travel papers” to move about in this country.
  • While on the subject of Third Reich analogies… The city of Pasadena will now have “volunteers” walking the city streets to ensure people are wearing mouth diapers. Snitch on your neighbors! Earn fun prizes!
  • I’m always suspicious of people who seem to like publicity a little too much. Dr Faucci certainly seems to be milking his 15 minutes for all it’s worth. The dude is on any TV show that will have him, multiple times a day. Clearly doing “science” doesn’t take much time out of his day. It was no surprise that he jumped at becoming Biden’s “medical advisor”. Cue the book deal in 5,4,3….
  • On December 5th 1933 the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibition, was repealed. I’ll drink to that!
  • The other day China landed an unmanned vehicle on the moon and planted (another) Chinese flag. It’s unfortunate we don’t have actual news anymore in this country or you would have heard about it. DNI Ratcliffe thinks China is the worlds greatest current threat to freedom. Come on man! China’s our partner.

Song of the day: Junkie XL, Elvis Presley “A Little Less Conversation (Elvis vs JXL)”

Daily Life, Government, Health, Politics

Basic Dude Stuff
  • I’m sure I’ll be accused of perpetuating “toxic masculinity“, but oh well. Pat Mac is clearly on the far end of the masculinity spectrum, but his general message should be shown to the youth of today. He started posting some silly clips to his Instagram titled “Basic dude stuff”. Quick little clips of general stuff most guys of older generations knew. Tying knots, gardening, taking care of your tools, chivalry, cooking, driving skills, exercise, shooting, etc… Things that I took for granted, but seem to be lost on the current generation of youth. I look at my younger nephews and just shake my head. I love ’em to death, but worry for them and their generation. Even though they’re of driving age they have no interest in getting a drivers license. No interest in being active in the outdoors. It’s all about gaming. They’ve never had a job. By the time I was their age I’d had paper routes, mowed lawns, and been getting on a Greyhound bus each summer and traveling across the state to work as a lifeguard for months – alone. No parental supervision, no cell phone, and had to walk across town to the laundromat each week to do laundry. Thirteen years old. I couldn’t wait to turn sixteen, be able to drive and explore. I honestly don’t know how my nephews will survive and what kind of men they’ll grow up to be? Maybe the online gamer, manbun, intellectual is what women want today? And speaking of women… I think “basic dude stuff” should apply equally. Actually I think the young women of today are becoming more badass than the boys. It’s a brave new world.
  • A laundry list of voting infractions in Georgia was presented yesterday. Most shocking was video footage showing suitcases of ballots being revealed from under desks in Georgia vote counting facilities after poll workers were reportedly told to leave the room. Yawn. Nobody cares. Almost zero media coverage. How is this even possible? It’s frightening to think about what sheep we’ve become.
  • Speaking of sheep, the Governor of CA, apparently worried that the LA mayor was upstaging him in the unchecked power department, shut down the entire state. I still don’t understand how one man or woman has the power to unilaterally destroy businesses and livelihoods like this?
  • If you still think the mandatory mouth diapers everyone wears are the magic anti-covid solution, you should read Alex Berenson’s investigation into mask research. He’s busy doing what journalists used to do in a bygone era.
  • Was Covid here much earlier than we have been lead to believe? Eh, who knows. Maybe we’ll find out in 2026 when the Durham report comes out.
  • Sorry if I’m sounding a little cynical today. I was pulling my dogs tail in the shower, tripped over him and broke my foot. Hmm, ok. No, you’re an eighty year old man who tripped getting out of the shower. We’re one broken hip or getting the ‘rona away from President Harris.
  • If you’ve ever worked in a tech company, the Work Chronicles comic will make sense to you. This is why I no longer work in tech.

Song of the day: 311 “All mixed up (live)”

Daily Life, Government, Politics

The Delicate Art Of Zoom Cooking
  • Last night Mrs Troutdog and I participated in an on-line Zoom cooking class. It was sort of a corporate thank you gift. They sent a meal kit with all the ingredients, aprons emblazoned with the corporate logo, and a bottle of wine paired for the meal. Everyone connected on-line at the appointed hour and a celebrity chef walked us through putting our meal together. Or at least that’s how it was supposed to go. To the chef’s credit, this would be a hard forum to work in. He’s got an hour to get this done. It’s not in-person so people can’t really ask questions. Because it was real-time there was no way to go backwards if you missed a step. The chef was high energy and moved quickly. The end result was a frenetic hour of us trying to chop, stir, sauté, and mix while desperately trying to keep up. There were zesting accidents that drew blood. Literally every bowel, pan, and dish in the kitchen got pulled out at some point. We were laughing like maniacs as we just randomly threw ingredients in pans because we’d missed what he did. It ended up being pretty fun, but the kitchen looked like a war zone at the end. Good times, but I sure miss doing things in person with people.
  • Project Veritas dropped another recorded call from CNN. In it they discuss that they are not going to air the Hunter Biden emails. If you’re an honest person and have been a fan of CNN, I’d hope this at least makes you wonder what else they’re choosing not to report.
  • The great shearing event happened yesterday. To my great surprise, Mrs Troutdog said she likes my hair a little long, it just needed to not be so unruly. I feel sorry for the hairdresser trying to interpret my cutting instructions. “We’re trying to cut it today, so it will grow out correctly in a Brad Pitt look. Not Fight Club Brad Pitt, but Legends of the Fall or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Brad Pitt. Can you do that?” She gave me a long look and said, “so do you want it above the ears or over the ears?”. Sadly, I did not come out looking like Brad Pitt.
  • While they haven’t all been Democrats, the vast majority of the “rules for thee, not for me” crowd have been. Why is that? At some point, people are going to have had enough. The randomness of the rules shutting down bars, restaurants, and boutiques, yet the Walmarts and Costcos remain open isn’t going to be tolerated forever. At some point this is going to get ugly and violent. Do these power hungry elites really want to put our police in the position of enforcing arbitrary rules on some poor schmuck who’s going to lose his business? I can’t eat at a restaurant, but I can go to Home Depot and stand in line with hoards of other people to buy tacky inflatable Santas and other Christmas crap? I hope people start pushing back soon.
  • It’s interesting how peoples perception of distance changes. We’ve got friends who just moved to our little town from LA. Previously they would have thought nothing of driving 45 minutes to go 20 miles just to do an errand. I caught him yesterday complaining that there was no easy route to get out of the neighborhood to the store (that’s two miles down the road).
  • The clock is running out for Trump. The electoral college votes on December 14. Seven business days left to make something happen. I don’t see it occurring. Do I think there was pretty significant fraud? Yep. To the level that Powell and Giuliani are claiming? Not so sure about that. Mrs Troutdog gets frustrated at me for being so pessimistic, but I think the swamp, the establishment, the deep state or whatever you want to call it, is just too entrenched. These people don’t want the status quo to change. I honestly don’t think the republican party wants to be in charge – they’d have to actually take a stand on something and that might risk their re-election chances. Much easier to run to the TV cameras and make fiery speeches, then go back and do nothing. Sorry, I’m a little cynical today.

Song of the day: X “More fun in the new world (live 1983)”