Jack Manassas and Company

Coming of Age with Harry Potter I am really getting tired of reading about the Witchcraft/Wizardry angle of the Harry Potter stories.   Witchcraft and Wizardry is certainly the setting in which the story is told, but the books are not at all about that.   Harry Potter is a coming of age story, and it is very cleverly done. In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, we get to know Harry first as a non-magical Muggle.   He is an orphan, bumping along through life and being bullied by relatives who resent having to take care of him.   Strange things sometimes happen to him, but he has no plans, no insights into who he is and the significance of his life.   No one expects a child to have such fully-formed insights, but Harry’s relatives are no help to him at all in this respect.   Harry receives letters, delivered magically, that invite him to be a student at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.   This is symbolic of destiny, follow...

20181212-All is Number I have been hacking my way through an entire volume of   a Chemistry Journal, abbreviated “Struct Bond.”   The volume is 148, published in 2013 with the general title, “Chemistry By Number Theory.” It is truly an amazing and revolutionary journal!   I might understand about half of it, but it has been well worth the read.   The final paper in the journal is entitled, “All is Number.” (1).   It is a review and summary of the rest of the papers in that volume.   Among the other wonders described by the authors, there is one particularly mysterious item;   About   4,000 years ago, a pattern of numbers was delivered to the Emperor of China “on the back of a dragon horse.”   These are known as the ‘Ho Tu Numbers.’   The peculiar patterning of the dots and the grouping of different areas provides some rather astonishing information.    The dots provide a map of the structure of DNA base pair...

20181025-Salmon in the Adams River We went down to the Adams River to take in the very end of the Salmon Run this year.  It was amazing, beautiful, and poignant to see the bright red Coho Salmon, after swimming hundreds of miles inland, struggling further up streams that are increasingly shallow to reach the place of their birth.  Once there, they fertilize eggs, and die. The salmon swam upstream, past the rotting corpses of other salmon that had completed their journeys. Canadian Parks took pains to let visitors know to stay on the pathways, to not walk on the river or get too close to the Salmon.  It disrupts egg fertilization.  They even posted signs in Chinese for tourists. Which were sometimes ignored... My wife scolded the tourists who were walking around on the river rocks.  One of their daughters said, “We’re sorry,” in English, and they got back on the path. “I’m so mad at them!” she told me.  “Don’t they know the Salmon populatio...

I've been collecting quotes that I'd like to see on a T-shirt someday--\ Here's my list so far, mostly from the commentariat of www.ecosophia.net and its gracious host, J.M. Greer.  I plan to update it periodically.  Got any T-shirt sayings of your own?? GREAT T-SHIRT SAYINGS You are not your opinions You are not their opinions either - JM Greer The [Pharmacy] Business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good people die like dogs. There’s also a negative side... –Hunter Thompson God, Grant me the serenity to know that I can’t change others, the courage to change the only one I can change, and the wisdom to know its me “The real world is just a special case of the Theoretical and can be considered trivial and ignored” –Jaz Nights How I found Jesus, lost weight and improved my sex life through Witchcraft –display as a book cover The plural of anecdotes really IS data Front of T-shirt; All g...

I saw these messages on the local message board: Two cats and a coyote. Hmmm.... We live in an area where it really isn't safe to let the cats out. Interesting arrangement of signs....

This happened in the early 1960’s, when I was 5 years old. My older brother was 8, and used to run around the woods near our home with a group of boys that called themselves ‘The Snipers Club.’   I doubt that any of them knew what a sniper was, or actually did.   I am pretty sure they got it from an episode of Combat on TV (“Starring Vic Morrow and Rick Jason…”).   It was a mysterious and powerful name, so it suited them just fine.   I wanted to follow them everywhere they went, but was mostly not allowed access to the important matters of 8-year-olds roaming the primeval forests near our suburb of Northern Virginia .   This Summer day, however, was different. My big brother actually came looking for ME.   “Ya gotta help us!” he said, near panic.   “The Eagles have challenged us to a tree-climbing contest.   We want you to climb the tree for the Snipers!”    It was well known that I was the best tree-climber in the...

Lord of the Rings Trump Knock Knock Jokes Today in his blog, ‘Clusterfuck Nation,’ James Kunstler mentioned (in comments about US Political gyrations) that “… . This melodrama will make  The Lord of the Rings   look like a knock-knock joke.” http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/whirling-whirling/ Since this is an I dea W hose T ime H as C ome, it falls to me to make the first few of them and start this giant ball of s…. -ahem- snow- rolling down hill; Knock Knock Who’s there? Sauron Sauron who? If you’re ‘Sour-on’ Trump, wait till you see what P resident Chthulhu does in 2020 ! KK WT Bilbo Bilbo who? Bill bo’ got away with Monica, why are you complaining about Trump so much? KK WT Mount Doom Mount Doom who? ‘ Doom’ is about the only thing our politicians HAVEN’T mounted in the last 40 years… KK WT Gollum Gollum who? The District of GOLLUMbia does Precious little to help any of us t...

Running HR Block 2017 Tax Software in Ubuntu Linux  Using CodeWeavers Crossover 2017 US taxes are due to be filed by midnight on April 18, 2018. It will surprise no one that a lot of people have waited to the last minute to start filing. At 9:30 PM, I got a call from a young relative who needed to do his taxes for the first time ever. He is a Linux enthusiast, and does not have a Windows or Apple/Mac computer. I thought I would try installing HR Block 2017 Tax Software on the Linux side of my laptop. 1) Obtain and install Codeweavers Crossover for Linux This software allows you to run many Windows apps in Linux-- https://www.codeweavers.com/ 2) Download the HR Block Windows tax software package. This year, its available from www.hrblock.com/2017/DELUXEWIN You will need an activation code, which should be provided when you buy the package. The default download location is /home/yourname/Downloads/ The app’s ...

Installing FreeMind to Ubuntu Linux I wanted to install mind-mapping software to my Ubuntu Linux laptop.  I used to use FreeMind a couple of years ago, and liked it.  “No problem,” I thought.  “I will just fire up Ubuntu Software and install it from there.”  But FreeMind was not on the Ubuntu Software list. “OK, I will get it through Synaptic Package Manager (SPaM),” I said to myself, feeling smug because A) SPaM has every Linux program under the sun (and quite a few from other star systems too), and B) I know that SPaM exists, AND I had already installed it.  However, FreeMind did not appear, even in SPaM. It had become a mystery. I was able to install the .deb package from SourceForge for FreeMind 0.8.1.  This is not the most recent version;  V 10 is available for Windows… In Terminal CLI, I tried switching to the Downloads directory, then installing with dpkg;  ~$  cd Downloads ~$  sudo dpkg –i freemind_0.8.1-2_all.deb ...

How to get AAX files into Audible Manager – 20180121 My System; Lenovo ThinkPad E440 running Windows 7 64-bit running Audible Manager 5.5.0.8 My MP3 player – Sansa Fuze THE PROBLEM I can download .AAX files from my Audible account to my windows PC, but cannot get them into the Audible Manager. For several years, I have had to manually import audiobook files into the Audible Manager after downloading them from Audible. The usual process was to download the new Audiobook to the default location, C:\Users\Public\Public Documents\Audible\Downloads I would then start up the Audible Manager's army green box. Clicking [File] and selecting [Add Audio Files] in the upper right corner would take me directly to the default file location, where all of the previous downloads reside. I would then left click on the file, and click the [Import] tab at the bottom of the page to import my new AAX Audio file into Audible Manager. Once it was there, I could l...

Projections A story by Emmanuel Goldstein “ Mopsy?” Sara called sweetly over the garden wall. “Your sister's bunnies have gotten into the main garden again. They are in the cabbage rows. Could you bring them back to their own garden?? “ Of course, dear,” I called back to her, and began the task of herding the bunnies back through the hole they had dug under the fence. There was no reason for them to dig to the field next to us. Nelson and Volodimir had planted us a garden of our own, more than adequate for our needs. But young rabbits do like to explore. It took a great deal of searching for me to find this place. It is a beautiful little displaced English farm, next to a displaced English village. There is a farm house, and two lovely cottages on either side of the fields. Oh! And a lovely garden with stone walls and brick arches between its sections. When I first visited, I had a nice chat with the lady of the house. While she seemed not to be surpr...