Jack Manassas and Company

It's time for another break from the usual boring contents--This is a campfire story I told in 2009 at a Webelos-A-Ree campout in October--This is an annual campout that allows Webelos to visit a number of scout troops in the district, and see if they can find a scout troop that they would like to join.  We planned to have a campfire with skits and stories at our own campsite, but a hard, cold rain began in the afternoon.  We tied tarps to two sides of a camping shelter, and were gathered inside it, listening to the rain drumming on the tin roof.  Thunder and lightning echoed through the valley.  A campfire looked unlikely.  "Who has a story?" someone asked. "I do," I said.  "But I'm not entirely sure I _should_ tell this story." Just then, lightning hit close to the campsite, and a very heavy burst of rain drummed on the tin roof.  I looked around the shelter slowly. "Now I really don't know if this is a good idea.   But maybe i...

October 23, 2015, Friday We went to Mount Rushmore this morning-an awesome sight!   The cost was $11 per car for admission, and the Golden Eagle yearly Park Pass does not apply to that fee. It was much more developed than Anne remembered, to her great disappointment. I didn't remember being there at all, until we took the pathway to the old viewing platform. I remember the stones of the old walkway, so this must be one of the places that I visited when I was five years old.      We accidentally went to the Crazy Horse Memorial, just down the road. The cost was $11 per person, or $28 per car. It was well worth the price! This site has a Museum of the American Indian, the great restaurant, information on the stone carving project (the 30 foot face of crazy horses complete, and his hand is almost complete), and much historical information.   The museum even has some of the actual beads that were used to trade for Manhattan Island, back when...

October 22, 2015, Thursday We saw the Corn Palace. It was being redecorated on the outside.  We took pictures on the inside and the outside of all the corn art. Even though it was the off-season, and the eerily quiet, there were still quite a few visitors.   We passed through the Badlands, now a National Park.  Anne says it is very different from when she last visited, 30 years ago--But the Badlands are constantly washing into the White River on the plains below the Badlands Wall.  In 20 more years, what we see now will be washed away to reveal new stripes in the sediments.   Wall, South Dakota was just a little further.  We visited Wall Drug. They have really cleaned up the kitschiness from 20 years ago.  Many of the shops had impressive goods for sale, especially boots and other leatherwork.   We drove through Rapid City, South Dakota, and over the mountain to Keystone, a former gold-mining town. The Holiday In...

Here, I take a break from the most boring blog on the face of the earth to post a campfire story, first told around a campfire to the members of BSA Troop 649.... Or WAS it just a campfire story?  You can be the judge.  And if you have the courage,  tell this story aloud, around a campfire some night when the sparks ascend straight up to the starry heavens.  If you are bold, act out the dance steps at the end--but without the knives!  And you may just learn some eternal truth that (you will see!) was hidden in plain sight all along... The Butcher Dance You have probably seen documentaries on public television stations.   They are certainly educational, even interesting, but I doubt they are your favorite programs.   Nevertheless, somebody has to make them.   There are people who spend a career doing nothing but making documentaries.   Some of these people specialize in a particular kind of documentary. Once upon a time, and n...

October 21, 2015 Wednesday Westward Ho! We repacked the car this morning in the parking lot. Thunderstorms threatened. We bought Rollin a takeout omelette from the Griddle Restaurant, and two dozen pastries for the dorm mates at 10th Ave., Rollin was still typing away in the living room. His final writings were due Wednesday morning, and he was up against a hard deadline. We dropped off food, said goodbye with hugs, and got on the road. Crossed the South Dakota Border into Minihaha County, then on to Mitchell, South Dakota, home of the Corn Palace, and stayed at the Quality Inn.  

October 19-20, 2015, Mount Vernon, Iowa We arrived at the Sleep Inn in  Mt. Vernon, Iowa without difficulty. We were unable to reach our son Rollin by phone--but he was in his dormitory at 10th Ave. Rollin looked terrible, the effects of weeks of intense study and a looming final exam. He was typing away the paper for creative writing.  He was two days away from his final exam when this picture was taken.  We stayed an extra day to cheer him up, got him some clothes, and had dinner with him a couple of times. He seemed much happier by the time we left. We usually don't travel further west than Iowa in a car. Tomorrow we take the plunge into the unknown. I have not taken car trip cross-country since I was five years old, and Anne has not taken such car trip in over 20 years. Trip was uneventful, except for the burning farmhouse we passed on the way out of town;

Turning the Chromalox Heater On and Off There is a space heater mounted on the garage ceiling over the workbench. It was installed by Anne's Grandfather, probably when the house was built in the 1970's. No instructions were available. I was able to turn the heater on, but could not immediately figure out how to turn it off again. We eventually found the fuses that controlled the heater and turned it off at the fuse box. Fortunately no important parts of the house were affected by this. After a week, I finally got it to turn off. I could find nothing online about this space heater or its controller, so here's my solution-- Here are the markings on the equipment; Heater element and case: Canadian Chromalox Company R: 73 240 Volts, 2000 Watts Cat No. CRT-4320 Controller/Switch Probably a “VCF Percentage Timing Input Controller.” If it is, the timer controller energizes the heating element for a certain perce...

October 18, 2015, Sunday We stopped at the I hotel in Champaign Illinois. This is a great hotel stay in! It was the first good night sleep we have had since the trip began. While in town, we took pictures of the alumni statue, as requested by uncle Rollin, and Miriam’s childhood home on W. Washington St. in Urbana-also Jim Bray's childhood home, the blue house right next to it.

October 17, 2015, Saturday After breakfast, we printed route and made hotel reservations in Cincinnati Ohio, Champaign Illinois, and Cedar Rapids Iowa. We got on the road at 10:30 AM. We must drive seven hours today. We stopped for lunch at the Princess Diner in Frostburg Maryland, where we ate lunch at the halfway point of our scenic train ride from Cumberland last year. We stopped at the first rest stop in West Virginia.  You can see their state prison from the parking lot-- and it is snowing! I took a photo of a huge truck with a yellow container marked "radioactive." I got out the radiation meter. At 150 feet, the count was 45 to 60 microrems per hour, and the meter was beeping from some of the radiation bursts. Since the background levels here are 9 to 13 microrems per hour, the truck is definitely putting out some radiation. I sure hope the driver has a film badge! :-( We stopped in Harrison, Ohio, near Cincinnati. We had lunch with uncle Rolli...

October 16 2015, Friday, 4:03 PM, Columbia Maryland We said goodbye to our house and Columbia Maryland today. Goodbye to everything, and off to start a new adventure. What a terrible ordeal, moving at age 58 in half! It was four days of work for the professional packers to pack everything up -- and we worked round-the-clock to sort through what we needed to keep, and toss everything else. Brown's movers packed it all, hired by Rainier. That was October 5 to October 8.  We spent last night at the Hampton Inn, 2 miles from our house, just to sleep in a bed!   Everything else was packed, and the house was empty.  So today, we will head for Morgantown. Don and Sandy will ship the rest of our stuff on the pallet to the pickup dropbox in a week or so. Very helpful, and so appreciated! We drove until 7 PM, started getting sleepy, and stopped at a Comfort Inn in Hagerstown.

Ubuntu 14.04 Upgrade problems – System freezes at login after upgrade. UPDATE - JAN 2017 In my system, this may be also be a combination of problems-- "Kernel Panic"  and the lack of a "Shadow Frame Buffer." Fixes described in my post on Jan 28 2017 solved a similar problem when it recurred. Here's a link; https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4962012626403702567#editor/target=post;postID=7770906987401668553;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=4;src=postname Background: I have been running 32-bit Ubuntu 12.04 for several years. I was experiencing occasional system freezes and errors, so decided to upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04 32-bit to see if that would resolve the issues. The installation went smoothly, without apparent problems-- Until I went to log in. Reproducible Problem: I entered my password and hit [return]. The mouse pointer froze on the screen. I could not get to the Command Line Interface (CLI) in...