Kung Fu Exorcists

There's a place in Mesa close to the border with Chandler that has killer tacos and local beers on tap. Put your laundry in, gorge on Mexican food and beer, put laundry in, more tacos and beer, stumble out to the car with your laundry all wadded up, and sleep it off on a bed of freshly cleaned shirts.

Like we have got to make laundromats aesthetic. In my entire life I have only ever been in one laundromat that didn’t have the grungiest, nastiest, most meth-core vibe I’ve ever seen.

If I’m going to have to drag my laundry somewhere and pay to wash it I at least want my surroundings to be clean and pretty.

Gojira at the Olympics put up the Bat Signal for culture vultures that forgot metal music exists. Well, that'll because they have the retention of a goldfish, but that's beside the point. Happened recently before that with Stranger Things and Master of Puppets. This irks me as apparently it's enough to attract their attention, and they're stirring as evidenced by their objections to Gojira's lyrical content and then the subsequent turn onto Cannibal Corpse.

First off, lemme say "get bent tourist" and get that out of the way.

Secondly, Cannibal Corpse has been around since 1988. They're a horror movie with growled vocals and blast beats. They were in Ace Ventura:Pet Detective with the original vocalist. They're not just going to up and go away because some noob wieners start flinging words like problematic around.

That's the wonderful thing about metal, all the weird little sub genres. If bands like Cannibal Corpse, Ghoul, Circle of Dead Children or Dying Fetus are worrisome to you, you can go bugger off and listen to DragonForce elsewhere. Don't harsh another metalhead's mellow, maaaaaan.

They went with something even more groovy...the Guns-a-gogo project ACH-47. It was a conversion from the regular cargo model where they stripped out all but 5 seats and the lifting winch, added over a ton of armor, fire suppression system, cross engine fuel transfer/cutoff, an intercom system and all the guns. Intended to clear LZs, they worked in pairs with rockets, 20mm cannons and 40mm automatic grenade launchers.

Weapons engineers were better when they dropped acid and did coke. Behold the 105mm Huey. In the 60’s Rock Island Arsenal wanted to modify UH1s to carry a 105mm howitzer with a box magazine.

Reading through "manliness" discourse and websites, and I'm wound up dumbstruck.

So the takeaway from more left leaning wisdom givers seems to be the Alan Alda style of manhood, and is definitely geared towards the mythical Millennial tech worker. Bits of advice like "don't learn to fix things, learn to code" or "don't learn to defend yourself, learn to meditate" along with the assumption that you can always hire someone with these "outmoded" skills to do stuff for you. Not only is that classist as fuck, but why would you want to purposefully helpless in a good portion of your life? Sure, cars are getting more complicated all the time. Doesn't mean that you couldn't do basic repairs and maintenance with a basic tool set and some five minutes of YouTube. I personally saved us around $5k in repairs on the Vic with basic tools and videos. I changed out the whole cooling system-new radiator, new water pump, new hoses, new serpentine belt, even changed out the oil cooler with aftermarket because it was leaking into the coolant. I certainly couldn't have afforded that paying someone to do it for me. But I've got a running car that I only paid for parts on.

The flip side of this is the right leaning adviser that basically want to turn you into Heinlein. "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects". I'm perversely proud that I can do almost all of that, but I've led a weird life and I'm almost 50. Mix that mentality with the prevailing streak of neo-Victorian thought, toss in a soupçon of anti-intellectualism, and yearn for the magical time of the imaginary 50s that has no basis in reality.

I'm kind of the mind that all knowledge is good, and you never stop learning. Over the years, I've taught myself stuff that runs the gamut from picking locks to sewing, to formal table manners. Because I found them useful and interesting, not because of what manly men do.

Ch😁

Watterson pulled no punches

Wind is fierce tonight. Expecting more heavy winds and torrential rains tomorrow. Hopefully no tornado this time, as the county is still cleaning up after the last one.

Though I cannot fathom as to why there's still no designated storm shelters? Gonna be messy, I guess.