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Monthly Archives: November 2018

Lookin’ good, Skwurlikins …

Monday, November 26, 2018

This squirrel is such a regular visitor to the house that I ought to give him or her a name. Sometimes he gets on the roof. Sometimes he peeks in an upstairs dormer window. And sometimes he tries to break through the screen of an attic vent, in which case I go out to chase […]

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The global rot of billionaires

Monday, November 26, 2018

The list of things that make American deplorables so deplorable is very long — racism, vile religion, anti-intellectualism, appalling ignorance, love of propaganda, and tolerance for violence, to name a few. But one of the worst vices — taught by their sorry politics as well as their sorry religion — is the glorification of the […]

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Kirby vacuum cleaners

Monday, November 19, 2018

A Kirby Avalir vacuum cleaner Sorry again, non-nerds. This is another nerd post. Though we’ll also talk about Kirby’s business practices. I had not been inside a pawn shop in probably 50 years. Nice people don’t go into pawn shops. But I was waiting for the oil to be changed in my car, with a […]

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Using the Apple watch in fringe areas

Friday, November 16, 2018

Sorry, non-nerds. This is a nerd post. Technology companies these days assume that everyone, everywhere, has fast Internet and good cell phone coverage. In rural America, that is not the case. Millions of us have been left behind. In the 10 years that I have lived here in the woods, things have gotten better. But […]

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All too short a lease

Sunday, November 11, 2018

Here in the foothills, some of the leaves are hanging on. But not far north in the Blue Ridge mountains, it’s all over for the summer of 2018. It was a good growing season, though, with more than 60 inches of rain so far this year in many areas of the mountains.

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1953 lunch counter deliciousness

Monday, November 5, 2018

Egg and bacon sandwich. Photo with iPhone XR. I have written here before about the Red Rooster, a drug store lunch counter in Walnut Cove, North Carolina, which not only is thriving but is beating the fast food competition. The Red Rooster happens to be only about 200 steps from the county headquarters of the […]

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Apple Pay? Yes, you should …

Monday, November 5, 2018

When I first heard about Apple Pay a few years ago, I assumed that it was nothing more than a play by Apple to insert itself into the lucrative credit card transaction business and extract a cut. To some degree, that’s true. But, as far as I can tell, Apple gets only a meager 0.15 […]

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