Hug an Oak Today

Posted on 14 April 2018 by Larry Russwurm

You don’t have to be one of those environmentalist tree huggers to want to hug an oak tree. Just as you would hug a soldier before they go off to war, you should also hug that oak for it might wage its own type of war.

It’s dangerous out there for North American trees. In my youth there would be dead trees all about in various places. They were stripped bare of bark and just had a light wood look to them. I was assured that all these trees were former elm trees. They had lost their lives to dutch elm disease. All across North America, these once mighty elms had died.

Then a few years ago in my city, the local government had to lay out a lot of cash to cut down all the ash trees. The emerald ash borer was killing all the ash trees and there was no hope for any of them. As a retardant we were cutting down ash trees ahead of the advance. Now I forget if the spread was coming from the east or going toward the east but North American ash trees are disappearing as the emerald ash borer spreads to the seas.

The next tree apocalypse species could be any of a number of species that makes its home in North America. Next could be the ironwood tree, the aspen tree or the oak. It could be the yew tree, the fir tree or the oak tree.

Only the oak tree fits in both sets. It’s name both starts with a vowel and it is three letters long. So, by using pattern recognition skills alone, I have managed to predict the future. I am going to go out on a limb here (see what I did there) and say oak trees are in dire circumstances. So hug that oak tree you have largely been ignoring and thinking will always be around.

Pattern recognition skills: is there anything that they can’t predict? Just please don’t look at all the failed science fiction predictions.

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Permapout

Posted on 7 April 2018 by Larry Russwurm

What is a poor, spoiled, rich kid supposed to do when they don’t get their way? The answer is: they eventually learn is to pout. Maybe Mommy or Daddy would be inflexible enough to stop this dead in its tracks. But Mommy and Daddy don’t raise rich babies – their servants do.

So in that pout the servants see their future with the family. Of course they strive to please the pouter at almost any cost. If it were in their control to give they would likely give the pouter intercontinental ballistic missiles. We’re lucky that this is not in the power of these servants to give.

Donald Trump has a permanent pout on his face. Growing up his servants must have given him almost anything he wanted. Maybe Donald had a bully problem. But he just pouted at his largest male servant.

“Fine, what do you want Donald?”

“I want you to let me beat you up and then you can beat up my bully. After you beat up my bully tell him that you’re saving him because Donald can beat you up. Which of course is the truth.”

The problem would thus be diverted. At least enough that Mommy and Daddy won’t have to hear about it.

Then Donald grew up? And began hanging around his fellow pouters at the Miss Universe and Miss America pageants. All these women were told that pouting made them more beautiful so they believed this about anybody. Thus they accepted the Donald as a beautiful man. To this day, beautiful women like Melania and Stormy Daniels find the Donald to be acceptable. Of course both women have made a lot of money off of him, too, so it’s possible it’s not the pout.

Now there are a number of theories as to why the Donald won the presidency. Some think it was Russian dealings, others think that it was his racism. I think that it was his pout. Most voters are parents as well and seeing Donald act like a little boy got to them when he pouted. Of course little baby must get his way.

So we have someone with a permapout that had gotten control of intercontinental ballistic missiles. This might have gone away with no problems in a couple more years. But there is another man who wields a permapout that also has gotten his hands on intercontinental ballistic missiles. That man is Kim Jong Un.

I’m not going to bore you with how Kim Jong Un pouted his way to power but it parallels the Donald’s experience. The pair of them have talked about getting together and talking ICBMs and nuclear weapons. In some circles this will be known as the Great Pout Off.

Let’s just hope that the servants that surround this pair somehow come up with a way that they both can look like they’ve won.

In the meantime, I suggest that the American voting public make themselves immune to pouters. Remember when you’re oldest kids pouted and so did your littler kids? You probably picked the side of the younger kids. And just like that, pouting isn’t always a winning position.

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Password Progression

Posted on 31 March 2018 by Larry Russwurm

For many years now, having a password hasn’t been enough security for anything. Instead, many of us started using passphrases such a long, long time ago.

And you know, I have been told for years that this just isn’t good enough. To protect yourself better, you need at least 50 characters or what is a complete sentence. And I bet that this is no longer secure enough, that in fact your passsentence needs now to be passsentences. 2 or three of these sentences strung together ought to be fine for the time being.

But you know where this is progressing. Secure passsentences are just going to become longer until they are up to the longest thing that a person can memorize easily. Soon passpassages then passmonologues will be needed for the sake of security. Then it will be a passchapter. Then it will be a whole passbook.

So like it or not, to be able to use these things with no mistakes, we’re all going to have to rely on computers themselves to be able to enter our long, long, passchapters and later still our passbooks.

Only a computer will be able to enter such monstrosities without a mistake for access to all the sites we need to use. So I think, today, we are at that juncture where we will have to learn yet another skill on our computers. That is using programs that will be able to enter our passbooks on sites and gain us access to certain goodies on the world wide web.

But still to use these programs, it will be necessary to have them password protected.

To me that just sounds like the whole progression just starts over again. And maybe, just maybe we’ll need a computer program to access our computer program that contains our passbooks. Which will, again, have to be enabled by a password.

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The Statutory Rape Generation

Posted on 24 March 2018 by Larry Russwurm

I was angered after hearing that the Millennial generation’s new cut off was being born in 1995 and not 2000. The whole point to being called Millennials is that certain important dates like graduation and schooling and of course births would be over the millennium. That is why this generation was called Millennials. And it’s an easy boundary to remember unlike 1995.

Well I found this offending site by The Center for Generational Kinetics that puts this new 1995 end date on Millennials. They say such enraging things about proponents of other generational boundaries – “frankly, a lot of people don’t do actual research, so they’re just guessing”.

Well I’m not going to do research and get sucked into their little trap. Instead I’m going to harp about the definition of “generation”. A generation is separated from another generation by the child/parent relationship. Of course there is no guaranteed age to be a parent. And this is going to have to ignore the fact that men can have children at age 60 – so we’ll focus on the women.

The average generation is about 25 to 30 years. All the social scientists wishing to define a generation err on the young side for parents. Presumably they mean by generation the difference between the first born’s age and the parents. You can see it quite clearly when we go through the generations given by The Center for Generational Kinetics.

The Baby Boomers were born in the years 1946 to 1964 or about 19 years, Millennials were born in the years 1977 to 1995 or about 19 years and Gen Xers were born in the years 1965 to 1976 or 12 years. WTF?! 12 years? That means the mother of this generation was 12 years old when she had her first baby. Which means she was likely impregnated at 11 years old.

Shame on you would-be-definers-of-generation! How could you? Maybe you were actually searching for a name for Gen X at long last. How about “The Statutory Rape Generation”? Is that your new idea?

Another simplification of generations would be the idea that the male parent is about the same age as the female parent. Which would mean that the new generation would have an 11 year old father as well.

For both sexes 11 years old is just barely into puberty. To be fertile it is unlikely that a mating between two 11 year olds would result in a baby.

Maybe Gen X ought to be called “The Unlikely Generation”. Or how about “The Improbable Generation”.

Thank you The Center for Generational Kinetics. You have introduced the idea of statutory rape in the generations. Even though I like a couple of the new names for Gen X, I am still ashamed of you.

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The Flatulator

Posted on 17 March 2018 by Larry Russwurm

Are you tired of your present love interest and wish to drive her away? The answer might be the flatulator. Are you immune to beans but want to keep up with your friends in the inevitable fart off? The flatulator can help. Do you wish to clear a crowded area? The flatulator might help you there as well.

The first thing about the flatulator is that it must be much smaller than a whoopie cushion because you don’t want others to know that you are faking flatulence. Yes, you will have to put it in your underwear to not allow people to know that you are faking it.

It should have a hose up to your hand where the squishable bulb that powers it can be triggered. You will have to hide this device from onlookers and most especially your intended victims.

And most importantly it should give off a vile scent – but not always. The spray that can be used should go off randomly but you should be able to select the randomness. It should be triggered between 1 out of 10 times and 9 out of 10 times. Thus you, the person who dealt it, won’t know if it has released it’s noxious scent or not. Farting just isn’t fun unless there is some form of Russian roulette with it.

Now that you have almost full control you can amuse your friends by farting in Morse code. Give people food that makes their faces scrunch up – like hot peppers or pickled anything. Then, when their faces are at maximum scrunch, release the “fart”. Sure some people might realize it’s you but most will blame the face scruncher.

Do you feel lucky? Set the randomness to 9 out of 10 smelly farts. I bet that spray is flammable. Just make sure the spray isn’t under pressure before doing this. Then, try to burn your farts with a lighter. It’ll look like a fart burn because everything flammable with that much surface area via atomizing is going to burn very quickly.

What if the top three reasons for getting the flatulator don’t work? What if your ongoing farts fail to drive away that annoying love interest. Well, if they can accept you with your farts then that means they will accept more annoying traits. Perhaps your relationship just needed to give you space to be yourself. Maybe she will accept you with all your other bad qualities, too.

You should now be the champion of bean night. No one will be able to fart as frequently as you do. If your friends deem stinky farts as somehow more manly, a 9 out of 10 success rate might work for you. Or if your friends prefer their atonal music without a scent, a 1 out of 10 stinky fart rate might be more in order.

And if your flatulator does not clear out a crowded area then I must remind you not to use it in an elevator.

The flatulator. Sold where all fine high tech whoopie cushions are available.

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You Have Rights But Maybe Not Car Driver Rights

Posted on 10 March 2018 by Larry Russwurm

Myself and a group of partiers were walking home after drinking one night. There was no place to eat on the way that was still open. Except a Wendy’s drive thru.

We knew that there was a hose that the cars drove over that alerted the staff that they could take an order. We found that black hose and stomped on it but nothing happened. We weren’t heavy enough.

But my sister had heels on and knew that they could make a lot of pressure on what they stamped on. She stomped on the cord with her heel.

“Welcome to Wendy’s. May I take your order.”

We all ordered. Then the Wendy’s voice said “Drive up to the window.”

We were drunk enough to make “Vroom, vroom,” sounds.

They didn’t initially notice us standing beside the window. They were busy making our order. Finally the one girl noticed us and asked us if it was we who had ordered.

We said, “Yes,” but the girl began to get irate.

“You’re not allowed to use the drive thru without a car!” she went on but finally we asked if we were going to get served. She said, “Just this once. Never come back without a car.”

I don’t know if any of us tried this trick again, just that I didn’t. Of course I’m not near a drive thru with heels most of the time.

I’ve heard of the Toronto police carding pedestrians if they felt they were not in the right area. This has been used as an example of racial profiling and I don’t blame the complainants. You see when I used to live in Toronto, sometimes I would walk miles from one section of town to another. I’m white and never got asked for ID or even got stopped by the police.

Oh I can see where the rationale comes from. NIMBYs would complain that, “I pay good money to be in a good area of town. I’m not going to sit idly by while ruffians from the bad side of town simply walk into my area.

But they’re ignoring the fact that there are cars in the poorer side of town, too. Any ruffian with a car can spend two minutes driving far out of their originating area.

And know, too, that the racially profiled aren’t all from bad parts of town.

In my present city of Kitchener, there is a proposal to build a pedestrian walkway over the expressway near Chandler Ave. Businesses want this because the Laurentian Power Centre is hard to get to from the one side. Some of the people definitely want access to this retail complex.

But Chandler Ave. is known as a lower class area with more drugs around. So NIMBYs are against this obvious improvement for the area. Again, cars make this NIMBYism moot because it only takes a few minutes to drive from one side of the expressway to the other.

Do people with cars not steal? Do people with cars not do drugs (and sometimes before driving)? Do people with cars not cause trouble?

A car is already a nice asset. There is no reason to give people with cars extra rights on top of everything. Drive thrus shouldn’t discriminate and neighbourhoods shouldn’t either. Down with extra rights for car drivers.

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Irrational Bias in the Guardian

Posted on 3 March 2018 by Larry Russwurm

This recent Guardian article whines about today’s children not being able to use a pencil properly because all they do with their hands is press buttons and screens. But of course they had to make a large point of holding your pencil properly. Their is no proof there are any advantages to holding your pencil properly.

They show 4 ways to hold your pencil in a diagram and only the “dynamic tripod” grip is considered correct. To make it abundantly clear they mark the other three methods with an x and the dynamic tripod method with a check.

I personally use the five fingered grasp when I draw or write. I can write as neatly as people with the dynamic tripod grip. I can write as quickly as them. I can write for just as long without my hand cramping up. What, may I ask, is the advantage? You know besides the fact that most people use it.

They try to tie it to “fine motor skills” while never saying how the dynamic tripod grip is better for this. This is pure bull$#!+. The dynamic tripod grip only uses two fingers and a thumb whereas my grip uses 4 fingers and a thumb. Obviously my way is superior because it exercises more fingers.

I can even prove that my handwriting is just as neat. Every teacher from grade 1 to grade 8 that I had took it upon themselves to force me to write the proper way. After noticing they would then show me the dynamic tripod method. And every time for the next two days they would make sure I only wrote in this way. So I know how to write with the dynamic tripod method. It’s just that I automatically pick up the pencil or pen in the five finger grasp. So how can I prove that my handwriting is just as neat? Why it’s the same in the five fingered grasp as it is with the dynamic tripod grip. Handwriting might very well be a product of the wrist.

And who picked out these names? Dynamic tripod? It sounds like you are getting ready for more action. And they made sure the other three ended in “grasp” while not using this end term for the dynamic tripod. They’re not a way to grip the pencil, just a grasp.

Did I mention that I can draw well? I’ve been paid for coming up with political cartoons that I draw. I can do this because I’m a talented enough artist to get a likeness of most people. Here is my Escher inspired drawing of hands drawing hands with my five fingered grip.

So maybe art doesn’t need the precision that musicians and others need.

I can play guitar fairly well and know a smattering of bass and keyboards that I also can play. I’m a very good crokinole player (which involves flicking buttons with precision across a board with obstacles).

I have never felt even slightly cheated because of the way I hold my pencil. Others have tried to make me feel this way. They are ignorant. To me today’s pencil holding is yesterday’s left handedness. Get a grip, the Guardian, and no I don’t care which one you use.

More on the Proper Way to Hold a Pencil

I take pride in the idea that my blog site contains as much truth as other sites that don’t call their writings “rants”. So when I was called out about my rant about the Guardian being wrong I at first ignored it but eventually decided to write this piece which corrects my mistakes and makes a clearer case against the Guardian.

I did overstate my side of the argument with the Guardian when I said, “Their is no proof there are any advantages to holding your pencil properly.” My sister pointed out to me that she holds her pencil improperly in a different way than I do and she gets hand cramps earlier than other people do from writing for too long. So with some pencil grips there is not as much stamina for the user. This is not true for my grip.

I have been trying to find the science behind pencil grips on the internet. I have found one occupational therapy post with a broken link that is supposed to tell us that different grips do not lead to less legible writing. So neatness will not become better if you force a student to write the proper way.

Then I tried looking up speed effects and came up with I think the same study that was discussed at 4 different sites. It involves testing grade 4 students with different pencil grips including the dynamic tripod. The study shows that none of the pencil grips was faster or neater than the others.

The only studies I found out about said that pencil grip doesn’t affect neatness or speed. In some cases it might affect stamina.

But why am I so sure that the Guardian was wrong to begin with?

It’s because I had the one anecdote of myself where my odd pencil grip was just as effective as the dynamic tripod. You may have heard that single anecdotes don’t help prove a theory. But for disproof a single anecdote is good enough. A single datum or replicable point on a graph is also good enough to take down a theory. It’s a lot harder to build up a theory than to take one down.

Of course the new theory may simply be the old theory with one new exception. That’s where the Guardian got it wrong. They might have said the dynamic tripod method of holding a pencil is sometimes better than other methods. But they didn’t. They just mark the dynamic tripod as being right which one assumes is in all cases. So the Guardian is blatantly wrong on this subject, because of the way they reported it.

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The Good Cop – Bad Cop of Rainforest Preservation

Posted on 24 February 2018 by Larry Russwurm

So far the rainforest preservation arguments have all been given by good cops. You know at least some of the arguments for preservation:

Don’t cut down the rainforest because it produces a large percentage of the world’s oxygen supply. This is something that all animals need – including humans.

Don’t cut down the rainforest because it is habitat for as much as 50% of the Earth’s animal and plant species. If biodiversity is important (and it is) cutting down the rainforest is a slap in the face for all people that have argued for biodiversity.

Don’t cut down the rainforest because it hastens climate change. All those trees take out some of the carbon dioxide in the air. Without them global warming is hastened. Especially if you burn those trees down instead of using the wood for other purposes.

Don’t cut down the rainforest because all the possible medicinal plants in the rainforest haven’t been studied well enough yet. This is another cry to keep the biodiversity of the rainforest because we don’t know all the future uses of this rich vegetation.

Don’t cut down the rainforest and expect to farm the underlying land. Without the rainforest, the land readily erodes and is only good for a few years of farming.

Well those are all good cop reasons to leave the rainforest alone. The bad cop reasons can be summed up by naming one country: The United States of America.

The US likes to fight in deserts. It is here where they can use all of their machinery and seemingly on a whim their military can take down whole countries. But really the American military is good anywhere there is farmland or at least no trees. Think how easily tanks can roll without trees. Think how easy it is to bomb targets without the coverage of trees. Think how well all their equipment can move as long as the terrain can support the movement of large wheeled vehicles.

Mountains and rainforests are the nemesis of the American military muscle. Look how tough a time the Americans had in Afghanistan with its mountains. But mostly, realize that the US lost the war in Vietnam because of the rainforest.

Oh, the Americans knew why they were losing. They even developed and used agent orange to defoliate large sections of Vietnam. It wasn’t enough.

So, Columbia, it might be wise to leave the Amazon rainforest alone. You know, in case the United States decides to double down on the war against drugs. Or perhaps the Americans would want to steal some of Brazil’s wealth. The parts where the rainforest has been cut down will be easy for the Americans to take and hold. As for the deforested parts of the African rainforest, don’t give the Americans an excuse like with a genocide. You’ll lose that war.

So the good cops say “Keep your rainforest intact. It’s in the best interests of the world.”

The bad cops are the Americans. And they will do whatever Americans do. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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KO Wynne for Wind?

Posted on 17 February 2018 by Larry Russwurm

People are attracted to their own names. Many Dennises become dentists and many Lawrences become lawyers. I think Ontario’s premier, Kathleen Wynne is no different.

Wynne went into politics which contains clear winners and losers. It’s no surprise that she thought she could Wynne. Oh, but it gets worse. Her parents named her Kathleen O’day Wynne. Or K. O. Wynne. Is it that huge of a surprise in an election that looked like it was going to be a three way tie for the Liberals, Progressive Conservatives and New Democratic Party, that she pulled off a majority government win in our first-past-the-post system? Alright she got her KO win, now perhaps she can pull us further.

Electricity generation falls to the provinces of Canada. As such Wynne is in charge of our electricity. Perhaps she hasn’t been keeping her head stuck in the sand and has noticed that wind generation and to a lesser extent, solar generation has been becoming a better and better proposition. Whereas once the renewables were least cost efficient of all our power generation methods they are now some of the best.

Add a “d” to your name, Kathleen. Become the wind candidate (Wynnd?). Perhaps this will alter the shape of the next election contest coming up soon. We vote again this spring. Trail blaze and actually lead. That’s something this province could really get behind.

Are you worried about being called a Wynnd bag? That ship has already sailed. You became a politician and let’s be honest, the public already considers all politicians to be wynndbags. That’s the other reason you became a politician.

You don’t have to follow my advice. Just don’t whyne when you end up as the opposition party. Or worse. You could be leading the third biggest party. Then maybe you would resign and retire so you could drink wyne. But you would not be living up to your name of K. O. Wynne then.

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The Chinese Revolt

Posted on 10 February 2018 by Larry Russwurm

Capitalism and communism make strange bedfellows. In China at its present state, with the communist party in charge of the government and capitalist businesses driving the economy, strange bedfellows is the norm. That such a contradiction in systems could make such a powerful economy was never obvious before China.

Still I suspect there is anger amongst the government that capitalism has produced the next most powerful people outside of the communist party. And surely the successful capitalists would just like to get rid of communism once and for all. Indeed I think that the capitalists are trying to slowly overthrow the government.

Beijing, the capital of China, is polluted. Very polluted. This has all come about by capitalism’s factories spewing out premature death. It is no different in the capital as attested by the Beijing summer Olympics a few years ago.

Many of the powerful arms of government are in polluted Beijing, including the National People’s Congress. And, I think, almost all are going to die prematurely because of the pollution. This is the plan of the capitalists.

It might only be deaths that are premature by a couple months. Or maybe a couple years. But death it will be and it will be caused by the engines of capitalism – the factories.

Sure the capitalists are going to kill themselves prematurely, too. That just shows you how serious a struggle it is. They are so locked in their death struggle that they can’t even save themselves.

So when the communists’ top posts change personnel many years from now, you will know that it was the capitalists that did it. Maybe one of those new leaders will step away from communism and the death struggle will finally be at an end.

Maybe this will happen before Beijing is powered by windmills and solar panels. Because that, too, might end the death struggle.

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