The Curmudgeon Speaks

My only connection to the University of Minnesota is through our daughters. Both went to school there and one is back pursuing her Ph.D.. When we retired, left North Dakota, and moved to a Minneapolis suburb, we fell in with some Gopher fans who tailgated and followed football. I still follow the University of North Dakota sports and watch games when available on television, but we decided unless it was hockey it would be acceptable to watch a little football in our new home.

At least for the first few years, Gopher football might be best described as mediocre. A progression of coaches for various reasons and less enthusiastic crowds than had been our experience made an upturn seem uncertain. A new coach has changed things. Last year there was a win against perennial power Wisconsin. The wins came a lot easier this year. A win against highly-ranked Penn State raised hopes, but conference pay ended with losses to both Iowa and Wisconsin. No Rose Bowl this year.

The Gophers did have a record that qualified them for a New Year’s Day game against Auburn in the Outback Bowl. This was expected to be the most challenging game of the season. Auburn has already defeated Alabama and lost to LSU by 3. LSU will soon play the final game for the national championship.

The Auburn game was probably the best college football game I have attended. I suppose Auburn did not anticipate the level of play they encountered. Neither did I. I expected the Auburn lines to dominate giving them an effective run game and make it difficult for Minnesota to pass. This turned out not to be the case. The line play was excellent allowing multiple spectacular catches by receivers and a very effective run game. Auburn only dominated in special teams play with a kickoff runback for a score. It was a great and unexpected win. Great fun.

Retirement makes travel practical for us and a trip to a warm climate for whatever reason is nice. We did spend a little extra time exploring Tampa and I am including a couple of photos I took at the aquarium. A note on my photography. These were both taken with my iPhone and are not post-processed in any way. Double click either for a larger image.

Happy New Year!

I purchased Cindy most of the equipment to make lefse several years ago and she has been practicing ever since. This is the first year the product can be differentiated from potato pancakes. You would think making lefse would be simple. Smash up some potatoes really thin and fry them on a very hot griddle. No way. There are many mysteries to discover. Chill the dough. Roll it out with a rolling pin wrapped in a clean sock. Use just the right amount of flour and then pick up the raw dough with a stick. YouTube provides clues, but it takes years of practice and certain innate abilities. BTW – evidently it is spelled flour and now flower, but I am lucky to have multiple spell checkers in the family who also read my blog and are eager to help.

I ate the piece on the left with butter and sugar. It looks very much like a map of Africa. We are still celebrating our summer trip. Maybe some lefse with a cup of coffee and amarula. In the field of fancy baking, this is called fusion.

Merry Christmas to all.

We have gathered at the lake place to spend time together. There were 15 of us for a while and now some have left to spend time with other parents and grandparents. There were presents, plenty of food, and good times.

The new toy for the family this year was an Oculus Quest. I have had only one turn so far, but it appears to be very impressive technology. It is enough to convince me that the VR thing might be for real. One of the activities we downloaded was for me – a travel application. I am not much of a gamer, but I admit the games are intuitive with this hardware.

We have some of the “old” games going as well. We have a “Wii” that still works and a couple of the grandkids will play it for hours. Sid is a mastery of the bowling game. He sometimes scores over 200.

Then there is the other old/new game that I even remember from my youth. They still make those football games that vibrate to propel the players. It takes as long to set up as it does to run a play and some of the plays go in circles. I even read the directions this year. You are supposed to trim the “runners” under the players for different purposes. Untrimmed is for strength (linemen) and cutting the middle out of the the lateral strips underneath the players adds speed. Make a mistake and the player becomes a pure blocker (or you have to send in for a new base).

Depending on how you understand the curmudgeon personality, it has either been a difficult year or a year in which curmudgeons have plenty to complain about. The leadership of the country has led us all into a very dark time. Fear and hate are never a way to move the country forward or to gain respect from others. When fear and hate compound self-centeredness, we abandon too many people who need help. Label the concern for the less fortunate as socialism if you must, but citizens should not be put off by a label they don’t understand from going the right thing.

Our local paper, the Star Tribune recently offered a recent essay showing the good heart at the core of we curmudgeons.

I like wood fires at our lake home. We added a small wood stove to our three-season porch which also serves as my office. It is a great place to write. The stove adds ambiance and warmth.

We have access to plenty of wood although we have yet to master the challenge of drying it appropriately. I have always wondered about the issue of whether the release of CO2 from wood fires adds to the problem of global warming. I need to heat our cabin, but is wood worse than using propane. I found this analysis from the BBC Science Focus. Burning wood is carbon neutral. I guess this makes sense – whether the wood is burned or rots in the woods, the carbon dioxide is no longer captured in the wood. The article does indicate that burning wood releases particles that can be damaging to lung health. I would think a stove in comparison to a fireplace would eliminate this problem.

I understand that many folks consider Bernie Sanders “out there” and idealistic. However, do folks really think that Bernie is wrong about issues such as climate change, health care, and income inequality? I always find myself agreeing with his descriptions of our most serious problems and his frustrations that politicians seem unable to confront these problems term after term. You have to give Obama credit for finally doing something about health insurance and look how much backlash there has been. What do voters think happens to people unable to pay for insurance or who had conditions insurance companies decided to ignore because of preexisting conditions? Al Gore had it right when he described climate change as an inconvenient truth. So many issues fall into this category and it is easier to ignore and focus on self-interest than face reality. 

Some of the Democratic candidates take a watered-down version of this same position again suggesting that Bernie’s extremism means that a Republican will win the election. They offer approaches that are less idealistic and less likely to do much about the more severe problems. Republicans are different. They offer no pretense of addressing these problems. I have no idea how this lack of acknowledgment appeals to anyone worried about others and I guess that is the key. Republicans worry about themselves in the present and little else – no solutions to inequality, health care, or climate change. 

There are reasons there is such an income and race divide in our politics. 

The President does not make these decisions alone or at least that used to be the case. The President should identify a vision and then work with the legislature to make the case for this vision. We have forgotten this. What is wrong with someone making the effort to identify serious issues and proposing we could address these issues if we wanted to.

So, at least listen to Bernie’s message and be willing to explain how your candidate will address the problems we have that are getting worse and going nowhere.

I came across this article from Reuters describing the drought in Southern Africa focusing on the little water now flowing over Victoria Falls. Take a look at the photos from this article and contrast it with the photo I took just a few months ago.

The falls is typically spectacular and is known for generating so much mist you can locate the site in the distance by just spotting the water cloud.

We visited in what is the dry season (winter) and realized just how serious the drought was at that time. Since leaving, we have read stories on the hardships endured by the wild life and now found the images from Victoria Falls. This should now be the rainy season and to see the Falls at this date does make you realize just how serious our present situation is becoming.

This image has a story. The story begins a week or so ago when we purchased a frozen 19-pound turkey in anticipation of a family Thanksgiving gathering at our lake place. Because the turkey was frozen and we had to be at our other home for a few days, we left the turkey to thaw in the refrigerator. A blizzard canceled our return to the lake and the family gathering and by the time we returned to the lake we had an unfrozen turkey that would have been a danger to eat.

So, what to do with this giant decaying bird. I had this idea that also related to our experiences up north. While riding on the trails through the woods about this time of year, we have come across deer carcasses dumped along the trail. So hunters had killed a deer, harvested the meat, and then dump the remains back in the wood. Yes, it is not a pretty sight. I was concerned with the reason for this behavior and being naive to the ways of the people of the woods I had asked Natural Resource people about this behavior. No, it was not a sign of illegal activity. It was a great way to return what had to be discarded in some way back to nature. The scavengers would take care of the remains and benefit from the food source. Everything including most of the bones would eventually be consumed.

What we often found around such remains were eagles. Often, there would be multiple eagles that would be around at the same time. Some on the carcass and some in the trees. These birds are quite large when you get a chance to see them close up and I have collected quite a few images by coming across this type of setting and focusing on the eagles and not what they are eating.

So, what to with a decaying turkey? I could have discarded it in the garbage and taken it to the dump. Nope. We decided to take it out onto the ice near our cabin and see what happens. We have plenty of eagles, crows, vultures, coyotes, foxes, etc. around and why not offer them a late Thanksgiving feast.

I did take the roasting pan back to the house.

It has become obvious that online services offer benefits, but also liabilities. Many of these services have generated huge profits without charging those who use the services anything. For the most part, what these services have done is to create a model that provides services to users in exchange for the personal information of the users. This information is valuable to ad services that pay the online services money to microtarget ads. The online services also sell this information to other services that find value in what they can learn about those who are active online.

This is capitalism at work, but a form of capitalism that has been accurately described as surveillance capitalism. Perhaps those who use online services find this exchange acceptable. Perhaps they do not. 

Because of the combination of benefits and liabilities available in the online world, each of us must make personal decisions about the present model. Those who want something different need suggestions for how they might proceed. My personal approach is to diversify my use of online services in multiple ways. I use different services for need purposes. What I am proposing here is that users make use of multiple services for the same purposes. The goal in this form of diversification is to reduce the information shared with the most popular services and to encourage competition. I would argue that competition is valuable without even considering the personable privacy issue. Without competition, what incentive is there for the dominant players to invest in improved services for users?

Here are my suggestions for diversification. I offer an alternative to some of the most dominant players. If you are unwilling to simply switch, consider either cross-posting to bolster the amount of content on these alternatives or using comparable services for different activities again as a way to increase the popularity of alternatives.

Brave – I am a fan of Brave as an alternative to other browsers and as a way to reduce the ad dollars benefitting other social media sites. I would encourage users still to view the ads shared through Brave and to spend the reward to you to compensate the content creators and service providers you utilize. At the core of this entire situation is the use of user content to provide the incentive for others to use a given social media site. In my opinion, it is not the ads that are the problem, but the funding of the ads via the collection of personal information.

WT:social is a social sharing site that offers an alternative to both Facebook and Twitter. Encourage your friends to move with you. 

DuckDuckGo – is a reasonable alternative to Google search

Pixelfed – an image sharing site that works as well as Instagram

Thanksgiving should be a time for reflection. The parade is on so the kids at our house are occupied and I can spend a few minutes at the computer. I certainly have plenty to be thankful for. Yesterday, I turned 71. My age and health is certainly something I appreciate and no longer take for granted. My extended family is also doing well and we live close enough in our retirement to see everyone frequently. Life is good for us. I certainly appreciate my life and my lifestyle.

A great life comes with responsibilities. As folks who read my posts understand, I often use this platform to recognize serious issues I feel an obligation to recognize. Lately, I have been so frustrated with our leaders and their self-absorption that I seldom get beyond complaining about them to addressing the issues not holding our attention. Here are the topics we all should spend some time today using our free time to consider.

Inequities abound – a holiday dedicated to giving thanks is a great time to recognize the multiple inequities we allow. Allow is the word I intend. This seems a time of growing self-focus. Our leadership makes the argument we need to block those in great need from entering our land of plenty. Our focus on a winner take all economics has resulted in growing income inequity. The disparities are at such a ridiculous level that those with great wealth have so much the only real benefit of their wealth is to exert power and manipulate. To argue against this widening disparity now labels you as a socialist. What does that descriptor even mean to those who apply it to others? To me, it seems to translate as “we have ours, too bad for you”.

Climate change – folks my age can ignore what the scientists tell us about our deteriorating climate. We will not live to see the decline that faces our children. At least, our leaders should be willing to acknowledge that this is real and they are just willing to be indifferent. Who knows, perhaps being realistic about the future offers the opportunity for innovation, new occupations, and no industries.

Health care – old folks do think a lot about health. Our nation offers the potential for elite health care, but the belief that health care is a business limits the opportunity for many to purchase adequate insurance and adequate care. Of all the areas of life, why is staying alive and healthy not an opportunity that is equally provided? This is something other countries have figured out and it appears a nation that aspires to be great cannot.

Be happy. Be thankful. Don’t be selfish.