Shamelessly stolen from… er, thanks to Stargazermc for dropping all of these in #memes.
March 14 is considered “Pi Day” (3-14). That is interesting by itself. But there is also this…
Considering how ANTI-USEFUL his evil ideas were (and ARE)… GOOD RIDDANCE!
Some considerable time ago (years now) someone at work screwed up and didn’t stop a power pallet jack when something caught and made moving things harder. This wore a flat spot on the caught roller, as well leaving a long streak along a stretch of the recently re-waxed floor. The roller, with the flat spot, thumped. And it was left to be, unrepaired for several weeks. Figuring to get it more attention than the ignored e-mails and other communications, I made a “nametag” for the machine, using a coloring book outline: Hello, My name is Thumper.
Since there was a Thumper, should there not also be a Bambi, especially if another power pallet jack of the same make? And thus another “nametag” was made, complete with coloring book outline: Hello, My name is Bambi.
Thumper was eventually repaired, and someone made the very same mistake with Bambi, right down to the streak on a newly waxed floor. I swapped the nametags. The machines have had the same names for a few years. Then sometime late last year… or was it early this year… Bambi’s quirk manifested too often and too severely. Bambi would sometimes Just Quit. Sometimes simply pulling the battery connection and re-connecting it was enough to get things going again. Sometimes the power off state had to last longer. Several seconds. More rarely several minutes. There were a couple times Bambi was out of commission for a day or so.. but came right back up after a few un-powered hours. And this state was not predictable. Bambi might work for weeks. Or days. But the faults grew frequent and severity ever greater. And so, oh joy (NOT!) the dreaded Intermittent Fault. A difficult thing to properly diagnose, and thus treatment is problematic.
And the severity got to the point of “Send Bambi to Central for repair.” And Bambi sat, waiting. And then Central seemed to take forever. And then Bambi was back… and lasted a day or maybe two before a different fault manifested. “Send Bambi to Central for repair.” And Bambi sat, waiting. And then Central seemed to take forever. And then Bambi was back… and lasted a day, maybe. This has been the cycle for a while now. This past Tuesday morning Bambi was returned again, in seeming working order. Seeming. I didn’t work Tuesday night, but I was sent a photo of Bambi perched on a wooden pallet (yet again) with the text “Do we not know how to fix pallet jacks anymore?” Yep, didn’t even last the day. Delivered at 5 AM and on a pallet sometime before 10 PM. Makes me wonder if any diagnosis was attempted at all or if it was “We plugged it in and it seems to work. Ship it.” instead of running/using it for while to experience the problem. Or it’s continually mis-diagnosed and the wrong part replaced[1].
We really do need Bambi back working reliably. If nothing else, so we can ship Thumper for a much-need battery swap. Thumper is usable – if you charge the batteries at nearly every idle moment. Guess what doesn’t happen?
ADDENDUM: And this past night Thumper started acting up. Not just the rapidly depleting batteries, but occasionally forgetting what up and down were. This passed after a bit, but it’s worrisome that another, different, intermittent fault is manifesting.
[1] Years ago, a coworker at another job had the misfortune of dealing with the local Ford dealer for his car. His car was something they should know, a Ford. He kept getting it back with the same problem. I don’t know if he finally took it somewhere else or if a different person finally looked at it. Pure Murphy. A part could be put in correctly, or installed backwards. The correct orientation was eventually realized – and it still didn’t fully solve the problem. Someone looked really close. The part was for another model and was only almost interchangeable. Which is to say, NOT interchangeable. Coworker stopped going to the Ford dealer.
“And I can’t speak to the state of the world, either, given that Release the Minotaur of Nukes would be a plausible aftereffect.”
“Children’s television of the 1990s and early aughts did not simply age out. What happened instead was that it got legislated out of existence.”
When Congress Killed Saturday Morning: Power and the Illusion of Cultural Autonomy
It started earlier, of course. The wokescolds of the day (1990’s? maybe 1980’s?) managed to gut classic WB cartoons. Think of the one “Duck Season!” “Rabbit Season!” but with every gunshot edited out. It turned the cartoon into incomprehensible sterile nonsense — not even surreal, just without reason. One of the great things about the original Animaniacs run was not just all the nods to the Golden Age of WB cartoons, but the deliberate and delightful and deserved sending up of the wokescolds and the enshittification they cause.
Not a big meme post, but a couple standouts.
“Back in my day, we flew through flak. No stealth tech, just my bombs on the rack!”
Way back when, the Penguicon convention committee (ConCom) had a leader or at least Obvious Fellow who was…. well… known for frequent use of a particular less than polite word that starts with the letter ‘F’. And said fellow was once absent – for whatever reason – from a ConCom meeting. Those present had an Idea. They Conspired. They decided that ACME (thus me…) should deliver unto said fellow a literal F-bomb. This, of course, couldn’t NOT be done.
This item was built (I was/am so glad to have oblivious neighbors…). The body is a mostly hollow tube. The protrusion is the end of a dowel as an impact detonator. If dropped, the dowel hits, the tube (etc.) keeps going and a few foil or suchlike “F”s emerge(d) from the tail section. I was (much) later told the fellow had “far too much fun” dropping his literal F-bomb at meetings and such.
At the same time, a gal (or gals?) had a Cookie Project. A non-trivial number of cookies had been baked ahead of the convention. Cookies were given out for various reasons, including interesting requests (example: “I ask please for TWO cookies.” “And what will you give me in return?” “I will give you one cookie back.” He got the cookies, and did return one.[1])
After the bomb delivery, and after changing out of the delivery outfit, the gal with the Cookie Project found me… and gave me a cookie for that. And, thus, I said a seldom said (in fact, was it EVER said beyond this?) line, “I got a cookie for making a bomb!”
[1] It was exactly this sort of amusing whimsy the the WokeScolds of 2017, 2016, and earlier killed, thus ruining the once-great convention.
I can not tell you what you need for whatever Sh[ee]t Hits The Fan situation you face. Only YOU know that. I can tell you a few things for getting by without external electrical power, and to deal with Old Man Winter. I have **NO** experience with floods or hurricanes or earthquakes. At best I can GUESS.
For cold… insulation is your friend. ANYTHING that generates heat (without making poisons – NO CHARCOAL! It *smolders*… that’s CO – ***POISON!!!***) There is a reason that floor buffers used indoors are run on propane. It’s one of the LEAST DANGEROUS (**NOT** the same as SAFE!!) fuels. If you have anything ALCOHOL powered, use that. There is a reason that marine items are often alcohol powered – it’s even safer than propane! Simple kerosene lamps or even mere candles can at least warm soup… cook? No. But warm beats cold. And even cold beats starving.
Sealed items are great. Sealed food is safe(r) food. If you are in the NORTH and power fails in Winter… you might have snow to put into coolers and save food. If it’s cold enough, even outdoor “storage” might work. MIGHT!
I have read (I do NOT know the Truth Coefficient) that when hurricanes are forecast the most common purchases are beer and Pop-Tarts (or the like). Folks understand the beer. Wrongly, perhaps, but “bread in a bottle” is a sound thing to acquire. Pop-tarts? Poor man’s MRE’s: They do NOT require refrigeration. They do NOT require heating/cooking. They are in FOIL packets – waterproof! AND (this is the BIG ONE!)… kids will eat them! Good food? NO, not at all! Good enough for a day or three? HELL YEAH!
Survive today. Get healthy tomorrow. Health is a luxury of the LIVING.
This is the CAMPLUX FoldGo Camping Stove and there are others that are about identical, save in color and text, and some that have a different shape for the butane/storage housing.
There is a butane canister in the red housing during use. The two pan support arms at the left (one not visible in the photo) fold toward/alongside the rightmost, and the whole assembly folds inside the housing (the red part flips up) for storage. Thus it takes less space than the “briefcase” style butane (and propane) stove. The trade off is that it is butane only. The butane canister is held magnetically rather than mechanically.
The smaller than “briefcase” style size is nice, and it can hold bigger, heavier pans than the backpacking stoves which are as small and light as they can practically be. For what it’s worth, this was NOT a Vine item. I went and bought it outright.
The Elegant Ungulate 
