QOTD

Taking a break from "Garage Reconstruction 101" and thought I'd share this with my friends here.

It was written sixty years ago, but is more relevant now than ever..... 

 

Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government, or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.” 

 

From "Revolt in 2100" by Robert A. Heinlein, written in 1954

Been Hot and Muggy All Week Here.....

And I haven't felt like doing much besdies some benchwork on a couple of radios I'm getting ready to sell on eBay.

95* and 50% humidity does not make for good yard work days, or even "Clean Out The Garage" days!

Yard Work Weekend

Not exactly my favorite thing to do, but it needed to get done.

Bought some sand and topsoil, and filled in all the new "dog holes" that one of the two has been digging.

I also dumped some Cayenne Pepper on the areas hoping that if "The Digger" gets a snoot full, he/she won't do it again.

As of the discovery of any new holes gets a random Paw Check when they come in the house, and with no likely perps found, I hope the pepper works.

Trimmed back our lemon tree, which actually started from some dropped seeds years ago. It's not very big, but grows like a weed.

And like the video somebody had posted a week or so ago, watching a dog play with a lemon is pretty funny. Pebbles loves to play ball, and since the lemons are fairly round, and roll nicely, she has a lot of fun until she chomps down on one.

Did the pooper-scooper routine as it was my week to do it.

Push broomed the driveway inside the gate and the side walks, as these guys go blasting around the back yard at about Mach 2.5, tearing out any weak grass, and scattering it everywhere in their vortex.

I went to water the back yard the other day and found my new $12 garden hose nozzle chewed up beyond belief, so got another one of those.

NOTE TO SELF: Pick up the nozzle off the ground when done using, and don't let it dangle on the hose end where they can get at it!

And did a few more sundry things like blasted all the front driveway and walkway cracks with RoundUp to kill the grass starting to grow out of them. One of these days I suppose I should patch the big cracks in the driveway. The problem with that is that whoever poured our driveway didn't use any metal mesh/rebar in it....it's just a slab of concrete about 2" think, and as it settled, it cracked.

I don't even want to think about the cost of busting it up, hauling it away, and having it done properly. I have better thing to spend $5000 on than a new driveway!

meh....Got Nuthin' Today

Went to my friend's internment with my wife, and then crawled around on the Battleship Iowa helping to inventory all the radio gear still in the racks.

Drank FOUR bottles of water, and didn't go to the restroom once.

It's HOT down on the third deck where the transmitter room is!

"Never Was So Much Owed By So Many To So Few"

Winston Churchill made his famous speech thanking the RAF on this date in 1940.

Very Clever Honda Commercial

Really neat!

The Blow That Killed America 100 Years Ago

I've always hated that elitist snob Woodrow Wilson, at least as much as I detest FDR.

WELL...a lot of Really Bad Stuff happened on his watch, and you can read about it over at Free-Man's Perspective.

Cruise on over and RTWT.

It'll really let you understand how far back the planned destruction of our United States goes.
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30-06 Reloading Project

The brass, bullets, and primers arrived Thursday, and my IMR-4895 arrived Friday.

Now I get to fondle the brass, measure it, and resize it. The case mouths are DEFINITELY banged up from being shipped in a bag, and even I, a rank beginner, wouldn't attempt to force a bullet into one of these cases.

And to top it off.....the day after the brass and stuff arrived, I received a shipping notice from the CMP for my 400 rounds of specially loaded Hornady ammo!

Look like I won't have any excuses to not take Duke out to the range Real Soon Now!

I'll post some pix of the brass later today......

Hey....extexavwannabe!

I keep trying to leave a reply for your new movie trivia, and none of the 5 I left will show up.

The answer is Red Planet with Val Kilmer.

On This Day....

In 1960 Joe Kittinger made his famous balloon jump.

Amazing!

I'll bet he clanks when he walks, too.....

On The Passing of a Friend.....

I just received an email that one of my dear friends passed away last night.

I'd known him since 1995 when I got back into Amateur Radio, and immediately "clicked" with him, both of us having been involved in the Aerospace business here in SoCal.

We'd both worked on many Things We Can't Talk About, but from little snippets of conversations, and inside jokes over the years, we both had a pretty good idea of what programs we each worked on.

I looked upon him as one of the many mentors I was blessed to have over the years, and through our interaction, I was able to help him with some of the new fangled computer stuff we all take for granted these days.

He was 87 years old, from Montana, and served in WWII during the Battle Of The Bulge as a "green kid from nowhere". He went on to college after the war, and into Electronics and radio.

He was also an avid sailor, and was my go-to-guy for any obscure questions I had about ships, sails, and rigging.

Every year my radio club has a "White Elephant" auction to raise funds for our Field Day activities, and there was a floating "Booby Prize" that passed among the club members from year to year.

It was a long running joke that somebody would place a bid like "I'll bid $10 if Dale takes that home!", promptly followed by "I'll bid $25 if JIM takes it home".

One of us always got "stuck" with it, and we always brought it back the next year so the game could continue.

It was my turn to "win" the item last year, and since we weren't able to have the White Elephant Sale this year, it's still sitting out in the garage, wrapped in plastic.


It's an HP 200AB Audio Oscillator, a direct descendant of the model 200A that launched Hewlett-Packard.

  

I'm going to get it out of the garage and restore it to it's former glory and keep it, as it's really a very nice piece of test equipment, and other than the decaying leather carrying handle on top, and an unsafe cracked and split AC power cord, the case, front panel, main dial, and all the knobs are in very good condition.

I think my friend would approve.