and a hoot of a squawk
at tsunami books
my body gave out
and I caught a cold
which has settled into
a coughing jag in my chest
so I am drugging out
and taking long naps
Wake me on Monday
-- Capn Skyhack
Ah, relief is but a short drive a long nip and a hot breath away.
Capn -- if you have a good health and natural foods place nearby, try to pick up something call oscilococcinum (aus-ill-o-cox-IN-um) I don't know if I spelled it right. But it's nature's flu shot. Every time I start to catch the crud I take it and it keeps me going. Three little vials full of candy-flavored things about the size of pin heads. Take one every six hours when flu symptoms begin and take your vitamins and eat your veggies.
-- MagpyeCapn-- There is some awesome Indian cough medicine formula that works wonders. Planetary Formulas Old Indian cherry bark.
--Jerry
Capn - sorry to hear about the cold. I wanted to pass on an old family treatment that has always done the trick for me:
2 oz. boiling water
3 oz. whisky (preferably Irish)
Lemon
Honey
Stir with a cinnamon stick
Wrap yourself in lots of blankets, comforters, quilts, whatever you have and sip. If one doesn't do the trick, you can try another.
-- Bill
Capn -- If you have any left over oxycodone pills from your dental work take one of those when the cough gets too sore. That will not only kill the pain but will ease the coughing. If that's not available Crown Royale is an excellent stand by. Take lots of pseudoephedrine but take it in pill form. Stay in bed and get as inebriated as possible till this thing blows over..
--This perscription from Dr. Feelgood
Berverly Pills, California.
Capn --as your lawyer I advise you get another doctor...
but I say get some soothing, medicinal herbs.
sincerely,
-- Funster S. Thompson
Pilots -- soothing, medicinal herbs
and sips of the good stuff
do help the sityation greatly
as well as sitting in front of
the hot fire in the wood stove
with the door wide open
breathing in warm air
and falling over backward
--Capn Skyp
First it was the power company, come to say they had to do something about that line between the pole and the house, it was too low to the ground even with the pole I stuck up holding the line up. Says who? I wanted to know. Says the PUC they say. We gotta change the line or it's a ten thousand dollar fine. Who gets fined? I say. We do, they say and made a mark where the new pole will be, another damned pole sticking up in the yard. But I gets a reprieve. Neil Williamson, a good old Hill Billie, comes in saying his trucks are parked out on the road, full of equipment and the new pole but be durned if he'll cross my bridge, too dangerous. Then what we gonna do? I say. He looks at my home made pole holding up the line and says, "We'll just leave it like it is."
Fine with me. Then the other day here come the cable guys saying they have to do something about that cable line hanging too low, PUC gonna fine them ten grand, so they gonna put the cable underground and I'm dubious, know it's gonna make a big mess, but they go ahead and do it and cut through the phone line already underground. Plus the bucket on the top of the guy's truck cuts the overhead power line I got going from the pumphouse across the drive to my storage van parked down by the creek. Did he repair that? No.
Phone guy comes out finds the spot where they cut the phone line and he puts in a temporary line lying on the top of the ground and says their guys will come out and dig another ditch and bury the phone line again.
What I want to know is where's that DSL phone line we been promised for years and where's that cable modem Paul Allen promised when he bought the cable company six years ago and said we'd have cable modem in a year?
And what about all that mud and muck out there next to my driveway getting tracked into the house? All these damned questions. Guess I better call the power company and have them join the party and put the electrc line underground, really screw things up. And to think, everything was working just fine, just fine.
-- Capn Skyp
p.s. Remember that big shower project when I tore out all the rot and replaced it with mortar? Well the mortar pulled away from the wall and left a big gap the water was all going down and insidiously deciding to do more rot.
Oh yeah? I pulled that loose mortar away from the wall and got out the old caulk gun and caulked the hell out of the shower and it ain't purty but it ain't leaking, either. Yet.
Too much weekend, what with the holiday on Thursday extending all the way through massive football and even saw the movie, RAY, which is terrific in the music and the story but blah in the psychological flashbacks, too overdone. Worth seeing though and Jamie Foxx is great. Now back to work.
-- Capn Skyp
The [senior White House] aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
-- Ron Suskind, from Without a Doubt, New York Times, 10/17/04
October's full moon is called the "Hunter's Moon" or sometimes the "Blood Moon." It gets its name from hunters who tracked and killed their prey by autumn moonlight, stockpiling food for the winter ahead. You can picture them: silent figures padding through the forest, the moon overhead, pale as a corpse, its cold light betraying the creatures of the wood.
The Blood Moon rises this year on Wednesday, Oct. 27th. At first it will seem pale and cold, as usual. And then ... blood red.
-- submitted by skypilot Are We Really?
FOR ALL THE INFO
AND SEE IF YOU CAN SEE ITCLICK ON: BLOODMOON FRIDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2004 Two pieces of folk art from the halls of the old Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School building will be displayed in an exhibit at the Revolving Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts.
For the last three years, Bill Schechter wheeled around a pair of audio and visual carts that he transformed in to works of art; one into a psychedelic bus and the other into a train.
Schechter's carts began from necessity and a quirky sense of humor. In the fall of 2001 Schechter, a history teacher at L-S, hurt his shoulder and was told by his doctor to avoid carrying his bags. To transport his books and papers from class to class he got an old AV cart. Unsatisfied with pushing the boring AV cart around the halls Schechter began to dress it up.
"I put a folder with the word 'Further' on the front, that is of course the manifest that Ken Kesey put on what would become the first hippie bus," Schechter explained. "This was followed by a flashing bike light. And I thought, why does a cart have to look like a cart, if it wants to look like a bus?"
Headlights, doors, even a working horn followed until the cart was transformed into a loud, multicolored bus. The bus transported Schechter's supplies through the school year and earned him the reputation as "that history professor with the crazy cart."
"You certainty wouldn't mistake it for a bus, but you would think, 'hey that carts trying to be a bus,'" he said. "It's hard to see and not smile at."
Not wanting to settle with just one cart, Schechter created "Walden a la carte," the following year. Another AV cart creation "Walden" was a tribute to Henry Thoreau and Walden Pond. Both carts are being displayed at the Revolving Museum.
Both carts are collaborations with students helping with the art and some of the technical problems that arose.
Schechter's pieces will be exhibited until Feb. 12, 2005. The Revolving Museum is located at 22 Shattuck Street, Lowell.
-- submitted by skypilot, David Stanford
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2004 MICHAEL MOORE WAS IN EUGENE He was doing his Slackers tour, exhorting everyone to vote. Here's hoping it's the biggest turnout ever, no not the appearance by Moore, but the vote. Here's Michael's reaction when a reporter asked him, "What will you do if Bush wins?"
WORLD KNEWS CNN notes that planets are formed by a process similar to "dust bunnies."
Swirling clouds of dust, brought together and then compacted by static electrical charges / magnetism. In other words, dust bunnies become planets. Look under your bed.Power line workers in Alaska were repairing a line, and had relaxed it so it
came down to the ground. Two miles away, out of view, a moose got its antlers caught in the line. When the power company completed repairs and put tension back in the line, the moose was raised 50 feet into the air. Can you imagine coming alone and seeing a moose with its antlers caught in a power line a full fifty off the ground? "Yea," you say, "when a moose flys." Sadly, they decided
to "put down" the moose (both literally and figuratively...).-- submitted by skypilot Darrin, who did the graphics, too.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2004 MIRACLES STILL HAPPEN My neighbor, Steve, is putting a new roof on his house. He asked me if we could use my pickup to go pick up the metal roofing and I said that would be a real pick up for me for I was down and dirty from rolling in the computer mire all day. We got the load and it was heavy and the truck was wallowing with the rear end down. I tied on the load but not good enough, it seems, for as we were tooling down highway 58, almost home, a lady came alongside and yelled we had lost part of our load. We turned around but didn't see it. I pulled into a gas station to ask if anyone there had seen anything and a guy standing at the counter said, yeah, he saw a new black Nissan pickup stop and pick up the pieces of metal.
We drove home, looking all the way for that black Nissan but no luck. Steve figured out what was missing. Three hundred bucks worth of flashing and edging that was needed before the job could start. Woe was me, berating myself, captain of the ship, responsible for all that happens, but Steve said, "Remember, I said you drive and I'll watch and I wasn't watching, so it's on me, not you."
Nice words but what started out to be a pick me up was a real bring me down. The next day Steve called and said the guy who picked up the roofing had called the place we got it from, for there was a piece of paper on the roofing that identified the place, and the place called Steve to say it was found and gave him the phone number of the guy who found the roofing.
Talk about the weight of the roof off your back. Steve said it was an old blue Toyota pickup and the guy was a real good samaritan, refusing to take the sixty bucks Steve offered, but settled for forty with the deal the guy would give Steve some smoked salmon this winter.
So all's well that ends well, and today when the roofing job is scheduled to begin, it is raining. Wouldn't you know?
-- capn skyp FRIDAY THE 13TH COMES ON WEDNESDAY
THIS MONTHAll quiet on the home front. The gathering season. Firewood, grapes, apples, all the leaves you'd ever want. Across the street the roofing job is zooming along for the weather has been sunny and like humpty dumpty we are having a great fall.
Tonight it is a channel surf battle between debate and beisball, contesto galore. Skyp Tracer, club treasurer, reports requests for I.D. cards are trickling in but so far no new members have applied. Makes me think we need more eyeballs scanning the website so you cumputer maves out there do the thing that puts skypilotclub.com on the major search sites and everybody email millions of other people of our grandeur and modest expectations. Meanwhile I plod away on book writing, a laborious chore when the weather is nice, reminds me of when I went to grad school in sunny california and waited for the winter weather to hit so I would in turn hit the books. Worked for me in Ohio but in California the winter weather neve hit and I never hit the books so I guess things evened out.
-- Capn Skyp
HERE COME DAH BUS! Homecoming game with halftime gala extravaganza of floats and princesses and princes vieing for queen and king. The bus was the entry for the class of 2006 and the theme was the sixties. What could be more appropriate than the bus and as Zane Kesey said, "We've never had the bus at a Pleasant Hill function." It was about time for Pleasant Hill is the home of the bus. We are the billies. Pleasant hill billies. Not your irascable hill billies, but mild mannered, friendly hill billies. Goats, too.
We drove around the track and when we got to the stands the kids poured out and mobbed the edge of the track whistling and screaming and waving. The guitar player on the top of the bus wailed Jimi Hendrix licks through a big amp and flashbulbs were going off like it was a Beatles concert.
Without doubt, the obvious winner of the float contest but in a stunning reversal reminiscent of the Greek Olympics, the gold medal was stripped from the bus because strictly speaking the bus was not a float. Oh yea,h put it in the water and see if is a float. If it isn't then they could call the Further entry legitimaely sunk.
Off at the edge of the parking lot a tow truck was hooking up a pickup to tow it away because the pickup was parked in a fire zone. Where's the fire, I wanted to know, berating the tow truck driver for towing the pickup. Where you from anyway, I asked him. Pleasant Hill was the answer and he was mad because the sheriffs had made him do the towing job when all he wanted to do was watch the football game for his son was on the team. Not only that, he said, his dad was having to work too, down at the other end of the parking lot.
Holy shit, I yelled, he's towing my car, and I took off running and got there in time to halt the tow, save me beaucoup bucks. And the girl who owned the pickup got there in time to save her some money, too, so all was well that ended well a laugh of minute.
