News about CF specifically, or about Mike or Joe. Another catchall category, really
GIVE TIL IT HURTS!
No posting yesterday, due mainly to extreme lethargy and ennui, and probably none tonight either. What with the daily rush of one damned thing after another which seems to constitute life here at stately Totleigh Towers Hendrix Manor, I gots me some serious recharging of the batteries I need to be doing. Free ice cream delivery will resume tomorrow. Thanks for your patience and consideration, y’all…
2
1The previous Eyrie hit record, set but a cpl-three weeks ago by the “Dumping Trump” installment, has been blown right up and left spinning in the dust like Wile E Coyote (Supergenius!) by this past Friday’s edition (“Secession tour de force”), driven by the selfsame force of Nature: a most gracious endorsement from our good friend Concerned American over at WRSA, which I didn’t know had even happened until just now. Dig it!
Note that, as confirmed in the above screen-cap, this was as of 7:45 on Friday evening, so the view tally is sure to have vaulted even higher since. In fact, here’s what the Eyrie overall stats look like for the month of June, with the tremendous impact of dat sweet, sweet WRSA linky-love more than evident.
Says so much, wouldn’t you say? Once more, my sincerest and most humble thanks go to CA, as well as all you readers—for the stat-boost as well as, y’know, all the fish.
1The debate earlier this week about the proper use, intentional misuse, and abuse of the English language got me thinking about another fun aspect of this: phrases people use all the time that actually mean the exact opposite of, negate, or otherwise contradict the sentiment expressed by the words. Examples:
CF linguistic scholars should feel free to add more in the comments as and when they occur to you. I look forward to seeing what y’all reprobates come up with.
1DANG! 73 comments so far in our DD feature, with a few days left to go still? You folks are rocking it for sure! Mostly Barry and kenny, as always, with a few other of our CF Lifers weighing in as well, all of whom I am most gratified and grateful to have along for the ride. Keep up the fine work, everyone!
1In the comments to the “Punisher” post below, Old Grandpa says:
I guess I need to purchase a shit ton of Punisher skull stickers and cover every “rainbow” sticker I see… adding “BFYTW” to them.
To which I responded:
You just gave me the idea for my next Gimp project, OG. 😉 I’ma get cracking on that toot sweet; results will of course be posted here when I’m done. Thanks!
And that’s just what I did, whipping this up in nothing flat:
It’s possible I may think of something more to add to it later, but for now this will do. You can snag a plus-size, higher-res version suitable for printing, making into stickers, wrapping fish, puppy-training, whatever your black and scheming little heart desires, by clicking here.
Update! Ahem. Just sayin’, that’s all.
21No posting yesterday here or at Substack, obviously, and likely won’t be a whole lot through the rest of the weekend either, excepting possibly tomorrow night. I had decided last Sunday to more or less take Monday off, at least from Substack, for a Memorial Day grill out with my cousin. Then on Thursday began working on the Friday edition of the Eyrie as usual, getting a bit less than half of it done before learning that night that I’d be having the young ‘un down for the weekend, for the first time in more than a month.
So yeah, today was spent going to pick her up, bringing her back, getting some vittles in her (repeatedly; land sakes, that kid is growing like a weed!), and just generally lying around at our ease together, chit-chatting about this and that, laughing at the cats and their antics, sharing funny and/or remarkable animal memes on our phones, and so forth. In other words, a simply fantastic day all ‘round, one not to be spoiled mucking about with grubby Amerikan politics: Biden’s latest fall, Pelosi’s latest lie, the latest empty threat from Congressional RepubliCONS to get to the bottom of something or other, &c.
I needed this little vacay more than I even knew, I think. Leave it to a young child to remind me of that, eh?
On deck for tomorrow (later today, technically): showing her how to fire, disassemble, and clean what I refer to as my little pocket rocket, the S&W Bodyguard .380, in which I just installed a great new trigger that did much to smooth out the absurdly overlong-throw, squishy, and heavy-pull old plastic one. Big fun, big fun!
Update! Oh yeah, definitely gonna be a little posting tonight; I already found two (2) great vids that absolutely MUST be posted here, so there’ll be that to look forward to if nothing else. Time for our backyard shooting lesson now, back later on tonight, y’all…
1As the more attentive of you may have already noted, I made a cpl of minor changes to the “Allied territory” section over in the right sidebar. To wit: I added a few folks who you might consider worth following on Gab, people who don’t have other permanent links of their own here. No biggie; just wanted to call y’all’s attention to it, and more importantly to them.
The list is by no means all-inclusive—isn’t intended to be, really—so I’ll probably be adding to it as and when. If there’s someone any of you CF Lifers feel I unjustly overlooked, feel free to hip me to ‘em in the comments or via e-mail.
Been out running around like the proverbial chicken with his proverbial head cut proverbially off all day, only just now getting back home again. So the Friday Eyrie post, while about half-done from working on it some yesterday, is probably gonna be postponed until tomorrow night, I’m thinking—in part because I have a sad, sad duty to perform for a close friend who’s had a bit of a setback. A BIT of…? A good, hard sucker-punch right to the goddamned ‘nads thrown by a MMA champeen in peak form, more like.
Billy, a/k/a Big Country Expat, has asked me to put the word out as best I can that, after a trip most arduous from FLA, he was greeted in the sorry-ass shithole state of Tennessee with some horribly bad tidings, which have rocked him back on his heels considerably. Yes, I know the details. No, I won’t be going into them here; that’s for Billy to do or not do at his own discretion, in his own good time. But take my word for it, it’s bad. About as bad as bad gets, in fact. Trust me, there’s a reason his latest post announcing a two-week hiatus from blogging prominently features an image of a large, green, pear-shaped object, and not Word One else.
More as and when, but in the meantime, your heartfelt prayers for my brother-from-another-mother Billy and the sweet and lovely Gretchen in their time of direst need would surely not go amiss.
Update! Presented without comment; far as I’m concerned, none is necessary.
GREAT song, GREAT arrangement, GREAT vocal performance, no matter the context.
Last night, I made mention of going through and clearing out all the spambot attempts at registering manifestly bogus user names ( such as alan23x858932, email addy starr@b.roofvent.xyz, just to name a fairly typical one), which I’d lately been seeing an uptick in. So I did that, slamming about twenty or so of the wormy little bastards with the “Deny” hammer.
Which seems to have acted as something of a tonic on them, because as of right now, there’s been well over 200 of these midges today, with more coming in about every five or ten minutes. I get “User Approval” notification emails in my CF inbox as and when, so here’s a screengrab of what my Thunderbird trash bin looks like at the moment:
Remember, that ain’t even a tithe of ‘em. I’ve installed another WP plugin, Shield Security, to hopefully help put an end to this unwelcome deluge of pure shite being dumped over my head from the high heavens by these excrescences. Problem is, it also blocks me from posting with MarsEdit; I’m sure there’s a fix for that somewhere in the plugin settings, I just gotta poke around under the hood some and find it.
I swear, some days it just never seems to end.
Update! Christ Almighty, just had to force-delete the fucking Shield Security plugin via FTP after it locked ME out because of, and I quote, “too many access attempts from this IP.” Sometimes, one can only wonder why one even bothers getting out of bed at all.
On the bright side, though, I guess that could be taken as a pretty good indicator that SS is working, no?
Updated update! Calls for a rerun of this venerable classic, I think.
1Albeit unrelated to the earlier one: there’s been a sudden YUUUGE influx of bogus attempts at user-registrations, God only knows why. I am about to begin the process of clearing the mess o’ spammage out by denying most if not all of said requests, a process which, while by no means arduous, nonetheless requires no inconsiderable amount of time and hassle to get ‘er done. Just a necessary if annoying part of blog-maintenance nowadays, that’s all.
So anyhoo, if you are in fact a legit hooman bean desirous of registering yourself a CF user name so as to be able to comment only to be caught up as collateral damage in the imminent sweep, please shoot me a kite at the email addy over in the right sidebar and let me know so’s I can get ya fixed up manually.
Update! Y’know, it occurs to me that I should maybe put up some kind of permanent notice restating the above, more or less. Maybe append it to the CF Comments Policy, something like that. We’ll see what I can figger out along those lines, whilst I’m throwing spam-registrants out on their ear, updating plugins, and such-like.
Updated update! Jeez O Pete: no sooner do I finish culling the spam-bots than four more of the lousy bastards pop up in the “New User Approve” plugin’s interface. As the proctologist famously asked of his nurse, is there no end to these assholes?
1Just by way of explanation, the reason posting was so sparse yesterday and the Friday Eyrie went up a day early was an absolutely relentless bout of phantom pains intense enough to rip a shrill, girlish scream from me every 30-45 seconds or so all last night, until the horrible things finally let up around 5:30 this AM.
My GOD, but those pains ain’t no joke. Never have been run through with a K-Bar knife before, but I swear that’s EXACTLY what it felt like was happening to the foot I no longer have. Weird, weird stuff; the sensation feels just as real as it gets, but…you know intellectually that it isn’t, that it couldn’t possibly be. It’s all in your head, but your head is powerless to stop or control it just the same. Ain’t no there there, in a manner of speaking—nothing more than a self-perpetuating feedback loop composed entirely of mental vapor, and nothing whatsoever else.
And yet. Screaming, I remind you, which has never been something I was known for doing a whole lot of, except maybe in boisterous glee. Very, very strange.
So yeah, knowing the chances of getting much of anything done in the condition I was suddenly in, and the Eyrie post having been mostly finished anyway the previous evening, I went ahead and got what I could up there, while I still could. Dragged myself out of bed about noon today, and so far so good. Got a fair-ish bit of stupid deck-clearing crap to get done today, so we’ll see how things go this evening, posting-wise. If I don’t show up, don’t y’all assume it’s because I’m having just too much fun to bother, mmkay?
Evel Knievel shows us the way.
Perfect balance F1-F2=0
Evel Knievel #wheelie #1 #harleydavidson #bikelife #wheeliwednesday #og #legendary#daredevil #whodiditfirst pic.twitter.com/p2qd5yQCxr— Evel Knievel (@evelknievel)
A Sportster, of course, the model he did all those crazy-ass jumps on. Harleys are notoriously difficult to wheelie on, but it’s by no means impossible, as my own Fakebook profile pic demonstrates:
Taken by my then-girlfriend Evelyn, on a visit to her mom; that’s the street one row back from Ocean Blvd where her Myrtle Beach crib was, a mere couple of blocks from the grand old Myrtle Beach Pavilion, long since tragically defunct.
The trouble with wheelies and older, factory H-Ds is multifaceted: excessive weight, lack of power, and a low center of gravity all add up to make the crucial balance-point quite high in comparison with the rice-grinders. The exception to that rule would be the also-long-defunct Buells; as with my extremely-modified 06 Sporty above, with those you actually had to go out of your way to keep the front wheel DOWN. Picking it up and carrying it a ways was almost the default..
Which, with the 06, was definitely the case, to my continual delight. When I romped down hard on the throttle in 1st gear, the front wheel would start to dance lightly as the motor “came on the pipe” and really started making horsepower; hit 2nd, and it would lift off the ground, daring you to keep it up as long as you could. Same in 3rd, incredibly enough.
Even my old boss Goose, who hated all Sportsters with a blazing passion, would jump on mine to give it a good, vigorous flogging now and then, eventually bringing my baby back to the shop not merely “rode hard and put up wet,” but “drenched in sweat, with its tongue hanging out,” as he liked to say.
I swear, it was the most fun bike I ever did build, no foolin’.
So yeah, for a bone-stock Harley, the wheelies can be a real trick. But as this guy shows, it’s always best not to make any assumptions when you’re out on the street.
Yep, that fella definitely knows what he’s about.
Update! Well, how about that: turns out Buell is NOT defunct after all. They’re still available, hand-built bikes orderable directly from the Buell factory.
Yes, yes, I know that Luke 2:14 quote is typically associated with Christmas. But seems to me it’s perfectly appropriate for Easter as well—or any other time, really. Be that as it may, whether you be a believing Christian or no, I do hope yours is a happy one anyhow. Here, enjoy yourselves a little Beethoven, from the old Charlie Brown Easter special.
The music in the above vid is adapted from dear old Ludwig Von B’s Symphony No 7 in A, Op 92, for those who might not’ve known.
No posting today, either here or at the Eyrie, thanks to one of the worst toothaches I ever have had in my life—and believe me, that’s saying something. I swear, the left side of my jaw is so badly swollen I even took a selfie of it for the historical record—one of I think, like, two or perhaps three of the cursed things I’ve bothered to take. It looks as if Mike Tyson had reached all the way down to the bottom of his shoes to land one of his heyday haymakers right square on the button, no foolin’.
My troubles began shortly after I’d arrived back home yesterday from spending the afternoon working on my beloved Focus with some friends of mine, work which will hopefully be completed, to include a happy ending, towards the end of the week. The pain pounced on me all of a sudden-like, speedily escalating until last night became just a brass-plated bitch, wherein mass quantities of Orajel, ibuprofen, warm salt-water rinses, and anything else I could think of were applied, all to little or no avail.
I sure hope somebody got the number of that bus that ran me over, I’ll tell ya that much.
On the brighter side, though, after a couple of touch-and-go weeks in the hospital, my mom was released yesterday and came home. She’s a long way from being all better, of course, but her attitude has improved greatly, she’s responding to treatment again, and the outlook is one hell of a lot better than it was. Heartfelt thanks to all who kindly expressed their concern and offered prayers for the ol’ gal, either here or via personal email.
Up now at the AoSHQ Pet Thread: a pic of my beloved cat Precious curled up in my small Revereware saucepan, something she used to do a lot of when she was a kitten but has way outgrown now. Many thanks to KT for posting it.
You ate WHAT update! As I expected (and hoped, admittedly), it didn’t take long before the Chinese-restaurant references started popping up in the comments over at yon Ace Place. Funny as hell, although Precious probably wouldn’t agree.
1NOTE: In order to comment, you must be registered and approved as a CF user. Since so many user-registrations are attempted by spam-bots for their own nefarious purposes, YOUR REGISTRATION MAY BE ERRONEOUSLY DENIED.
If you are in fact a legit hooman bean desirous of registering yourself a CF user name so as to be able to comment only to find yourself caught up as collateral damage in one of my irregularly (un)scheduled sweeps for hinky registration attempts, please shoot me a kite at the email addy over in the right sidebar and let me know so’s I can get ya fixed up manually.
ALSO NOTE: You MUST use a valid, legit email address in order to successfully register, the new anti-spam software I installed last night requires it. My thanks to Barry for all his help sorting this mess out last night.
Comments appear entirely at the whim of the guy who pays the bills for this site and may be deleted, ridiculed, maliciously edited for purposes of mockery, or otherwise pissed over as he in his capricious fancy sees fit. The CF comments section is pretty free-form and rough and tumble; tolerance level for rowdiness and misbehavior is fairly high here, but is NOT without limit.
Management is under no obligation whatever to allow the comments section to be taken over and ruined by trolls, Leftists, and/or other oxygen thieves, and will take any measures deemed necessary to prevent such. Conduct yourself with the merest modicum of decorum, courtesy, and respect and you'll be fine. Pick pointless squabbles with other commenters, fling provocative personal insults, issue threats, or annoy the host (me) and...you won't.
Should you find yourself sanctioned after running afoul of the CF comments policy as stated and feel you have been wronged, please download and complete the Butthurt Report form below in quadruplicate; retain one copy for your personal records and send the others to the email address posted in the right sidebar.
Please refrain from whining, sniveling, and/or bursting into tears and waving your chubby fists around in frustrated rage, lest you suffer an aneurysm or stroke unnecessarily. Your completed form will be reviewed and your complaint addressed whenever management feels like getting around to it. Thank you.
"Mike Hendrix is, without a doubt, the greatest one-legged blogger in the world." ‐Henry Chinaski
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"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."
—Claire Wolfe, 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution
Claire's Cabal—The Freedom Forums
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—Daniel Webster
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—Charles Bukowski
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—Ezra Pound
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
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—John Adams
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—Bertrand de Jouvenel
"It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged."
—GK Chesterton
"I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free."
—Donald Surber
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—Etienne de la Boiete
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—Skeptic
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—John Adams
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