Tuesday January 27, 2015 At Midwest Mountaineering, bought a more comfortable small backpack. (Thanks to Ken Konkol, I have a good large pack: military issue, comes with a user's manual.)

***"Based on the latest evidence and theories our galaxy could be a huge wormhole and, if that were true, it could be 'stable and navigable.' Astrophysicists combined the equations of general relativity with an extremely detailed map of the distribution of dark matter in the Milky Way when proposing this possibility."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150121083648.htm

***From politicalwire.com: "Jimmy McMillan, former gubernatorial candidate of the fringe The Rent Is Too Damn High party, 'has been slapped with an eviction notice ordering him out of his $872-a-month rent stabilized East Village apartment,' the New York Daily News reports.

***comments: al_zorra 1/25 (replying to Don Fitch): "O gads YAH!  Windows 8, Windows 8.1 whatever -- it's hideous rubbish."

[I find Linux considerably easier. I think partly because the free distributions are designed by hobbyists rather than professionals. The professionals are overseen by companies which think the trouble with the US Government is, it's insufficiently bureaucratic.]
 
"I used to be fairly good with computers, even troubleshooting.  By now I've devolved with all their making it easier into incompetency.
 
"O well, I can't even recognize food, or how to get in or out of cars either any longer.
 
"Everything is geared to a smart phone, which doesn't work in either the real world or on a computer that is used for W-O-R-K because one is a working person, even if working from home."

January 23, 2015

***Received comments:

***1/23 al_zorra: "Pretending things are not what they are / were, destroys all sorts of integrits, and makes literature study irrelevant because one is studying phony content."

Further in the NYTimes piece: the word "rigger" was annotated, giving its meaning and other information about riggers.

The text has since been returned to what Faulkner wrote, including use of a similar word which begins with n.

***1/23 don_fitch: "I was a bit vexed by your assertion about non-native-French-speakers in France... until I realized that you'd said "cities". I suppose there are still plenty of villages and towns that have few or no Tunisian, Turkish, British, or other immigrants.

"Mind you, West Covina (here in California, mostly south of Covina) might possibly have a minority of native-English-speakers by now. In the Best Buy computer store, the other day, I was impressed by the child-like Enthusiasm displayed by four stocky Asian guys in their late 20s (I'd guess) as they played with various computer stuff. The were marvelously tattooed (in both area & quality) and each had at least one finger-joint missing. I was tempted to go over and ask them whether they were Yazuka [sic] (Japanese Mafia, approximately) or Seriously Dedicated Actors, but decided against it because actors can get dangerously temperamental."

1/23 thnidu: "Yikes.

"(Yakuza, not Yazuka. Doesn't rhyme with ;bazooka'; closer to "J'accuse".)"

Thursday January 22, 2015 According to the Minnesota Daily (the U's student paper,)the Governor and others want to rebrand Minnesota as part of "the North" rather than "the Midwest." The change would supposedly make Minnesota more attractive to businesses and workers who might be looking for a place to move.

This kind of word magic has a long history. for example, the naming of Greenland.

***Picked up 6 Linux books being held at Southeast Library. One of them turns out to be useful.

***Installed Chromium (non-proprietary variant of Google's Chrome browser.) So far, I like it better than the current version of Mozilla Firefox.

***ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholic and Otherwise Dysfunctional Families) meeting. This was the annual Group Conscience meeting. Mostly discussing and voting on decisions made in the last business meeting (held after a regular meeting); but with a bit of other business.

***Forthcoming book: "Political scientists John Ferejohn and Frances Rosenbluth's TUG OF WAR, tracing the evolution of modern democracy through centuries of warfare, concluding that, even today, democracy might need war to ensure its very existence..."  From Publishers Lunch's daily newsletter.


***comment from al_zorra,:  "O my goodness -- I literally just finished the last edits and revisions to the Faulkner section of my annual essay on the previous year's most significant reading!
  
"I was reading along in what you had quoted and came full stop at 'riggers,' because that isn't Faulkner.  I knew it immediately".
 
[So did I, and I hadn't read Faulkner in years.]

***don_fitch (don_fitch) replied to a comment left by don_fitch (don_fitch) in your LiveJournal post (http://dsgood.livejournal.com/1298773.html). The comment they replied to was:

"'Oooh, I _like_ that bit about statistics of birth re. May Day... and the practical reasons (-"it's too cold to screw in the woods on May Day"-) for them.'

'And yeah, I don't like to consider myself Alien to any or many non-sociopathic groups ...but for some reason a whole lot of the things Computer Geeks consider "helpful" are things I try to turn off as soon as possible. Unfortunately, they also turn off a lot of things _I_ consider helpful.
 
'(I recently bought a new Macintosh computer. It has a big screen, and was ridiculously expensive. It does not have a way to plug into a telephone land-line to connect to the internet (or for highest-speed transmission via Usenet). It does not have a way to read, directly, CDs. It does not allow dropping documents into open windows but requires doing it into Icons, It does not do several other things that it used to do well & conveniently. Despite the presence of a Learning Curve, I expect to move to PCs in the future.)' 

Their reply was: "Oops! I seem to have hit 'Send' before mentioning that, yeah, many, many of the 'helpful' features on computers nowadays are annoying, at best."

[As were "helpful" features on older computers.]