The Okie in Isolation: Blood

By Bobby Neal Winters


I went to give blood today at Countryside Christian Church.  The Red Cross will be there again on Thursday, as the blood drive at the University has been moved there. 
The experience was not unpleasant.  When I walked through the door they took my temperature: 98.0 in case you are interested.  All of the staff were wearing gloves and masks.  They sat us in chairs that were spaced apart in accordance with social distancing.  My appointment was at 9:45am so I got to the gurney about 11am and was eating raisins at 11:20.  
It was, in other words, about par for a blood drive. 
I took advantage of my freedom to get a prescription filled.  They have the drive through open at Lindberg Pharmacy.  
This afternoon I’ve been fighting the email war.  I think I will mow sometime tomorrow.

The Okie in Isolation: The Dark 4am of the Soul

The Okie in Isolation: The Dark 4am of the Soul
By Bobby Neal Winters
There is a quote by someone--I want to say Winston Churchill--about waking up in the middle of the night with your thoughts when all of your old wounds begin to ache. That was me this morning.  Spurred by some dreams that I don’t remember about graduate school, I got to thinking about a thing that had happened.  I won’t be specific--some of my OSU friends will remember--but it concerned an incident of faculty impropriety. It’d been swept under the rug.  I’d filed it away, but last night my unconscious found it and brought it out to play with.  Thirty years have passed and I have a different perspective now.
My new perspective caused me to reinterpret the events.  Reinterpreting is like eating peanuts: you can’t stop until the bag is gone and the floor is covered with shells. I strayed from my grad school days to the current shutdown of the country. In the darkness, my mind ventured into dark thoughts that daylight banishes.   By the time I made myself get up, I had convinced myself that I would have to start living on pinto beans and get things to barter by scouring the curbs and allies, pushing a shopping cart with a broken wheel just ahead of me.
Getting up, making a pot of tea, and eating a bowl of oatmeal turned out to be a cure for this.
Taking care not to spread COVID 19 is important.  That has been made clear.  But taking care not to spread gloom and panic is also important.  It is a tight-rope we walk: We must be vigilant; but we mustn’t despair.  We must fight the good fight and keep the faith.  We must share Hope:

The Okie in Isolation: Sunday, Sunday

The Okie in Isolation: Sunday, Sunday
By Bobby Neal Winters
It has been a long time since I’ve seen such fine weather.  It’s been like a hot summer day in England: It’s almost 70 outside.  The sun is great.

The "weeping angel" over on Euclid and College

I hosted Bible Study on Zoom this morning.  Seven followers of Christ turned up to talk about the last chapter of the Book of First Corinthians.  Not all shall sleep, but all shall be changed. I did seene of us nodding off, but I don’t think anyone else noticed.
We were all grateful to see our fellow human beings, other friendly faces.
Did Chili’s via DoorDash for lunch.  It’s not the same experience as dining out, but it is a change.  We will have nice leftovers tomorrow.
The town is quiet.  It is a college town and all of the students have been sent home.  This is like Christmas or Summer Break, but with better weather.

Old Glory over the Pittsburg City Police Parking lot.

The Okie in Isolation: A Walk on Saturday Morning

This is the Jock's Niche.

The Pitt is open for Carry-out only

You can worship online with the Presbyterians.

It looks lonely in front of the FUMC

Xanadu has been postponed.

Looks like an episode of the Twilight Zone

The Library had the most helpful information.

The Hazards of Battery-Powered Mowing

The Hazards of Battery-Powered Mowing

By Bobby Neal Winters
We are in the time of year when we will soon begin mowing.  Indeed, my neighbor has started already.  He re-seeds his yard every year and it just explodes in the spring.  This is in contrast to my yard which just looks like something has exploded.
But I try.  Or I try to try. Anyway.
NALM, the National Association of Lawn Mowers, has started an initiative about sustainable mowing.  They are a very “woke” organization.  Not long after COVID 19 got loose upon us they started promoting the fact that while you were mowing you were engaged in the act of social distancing.  Everyone should be much more than six feet away from you.  
I wish I’d taken that more seriously.  Let me explain.
I bought myself a battery-powered mower.  I should say that I had my son-in-law buy me a battery-powered mower.  Well, that’s not exactly right either.  My children are terrified that my wife and I are going to get COVID 19 and die in a paroxysm of agony because we are so old; and they are afraid we are going to give it to their grandmother and take her along with us; as a result of this they won’t let us go to the store.  Therefore, my son-in-law bought me the mower from Home Despot (uh, Depot) and brought it to me.  I then gave him money.
It is a 20-inch Ryobi.  I got a Ryobi because my battery-powered hand tools are Ryobi. It uses the 40 volt 6 Ah lithium batteries.  The 40 volt is how strong it is; the 6 Ah is how long it will last.  It came with one battery and I have since bought another online.  Let me say that most of the cost is in the battery.
Before I go any further, let me say I’d been thinking about this for a couple of years now, and the tipping point was the fact you don’t have to jerk on them to start.  Press a button and mow.
Anyway, I’d gotten this and I was pretty anxious to try it out, but my lawn is not tall enough yet.  Then I saw that the boundary between my yard and my neighbor’s was kind of tall.  Well, I said to myself, let’s give this a little five-minute tryout.
That, I maintain, was a good idea.  It was the next thing that was a mistake.
I invited my wife along so she could see it too.  
I pressed the button and started it up. I made a run along the edge of my driveway.  I then mowed the edge of my garage.  In that one sentence lay the problem.  Along the edge of my garage I’ve been...storing...some leftover fencing material.  I’ve been storing it there for the last twenty years. You never know when you might need it.  Lest any of you are afraid that I mowed over it and destroyed my mower, put those thoughts out of your head right now.  The mower is still safe.  
But...
My wife saw the pile of fencing material.  
“You know,” she said, “I’m making a pile of scrap metal for the parquet scavengers.  Why don’t we move that there?”
“Sure,” I said.  I suddenly found myself in a rendition of “If you give a mouse a cookie.”
As I mentioned, that pile had been there for twenty years.  It was chain-link fence and small trees had grown up through it. It took pliers, hacksaws, shovels, adzes, angle-grinders, and two hours to move that pile. During the course of doing this, we were attacked by a very aggressive and possibly venomous snake.
That was yesterday morning.  It rained in the night, and you can’t even tell I mowed that strip of grass.
I’ll be needing to recharge my battery.
Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )

The Okie in Isolation: Mowing the Edge

By Bobby Neal Winters
You will all understand the rest of this if you know that our children are terrified that Jean and I will get COVID 19.  They are isolating us from themselves and our grandchildren who are filthy little vectors. They’ve gone as far as parking one of their cars in our driveway and not moving it to let us out.  They run errands for us and bring us stuff so that we won’t get exposed.
This may be the best thing that has ever happened to Jean and me.

Saturday I decided that it was time to buy a battery-powered lawn mower. (I will tell about this at greater length in my weekly column in the Morning Sun.) This week has been wet and most of my grass--as there is such variety within my lawn--is not ready to mow yet.  But along the edge with the neighbor it is quite a bit taller as he does take a lot better care of his lawn.
I decided that I would mow the edge and I used the opportunity to show the new mower off to my better half.  The rest, as they say, is history.
While I was mowing, Jean got a look at a pile of old fence posts and chain link fence wire that I have been mowing around (had been mowing around) for about 20 years. 
Jean has been cleaning up the yard over the course of the Great Isolation and is throwing away some stuff.  She saw my pile, and said, “Let’s put that in my metal pile.”
Over the years we’ve noted that if we leave metal on the parquet that it doesn’t sit there long.  It will soon be picked up by enterprising young men who will sell it at scrap.
I said, “Sure.”
It has been 20 years.  There were small trees that had grown up through the wire.  It took two hours with various implements of destruction to get this out.
Moral: Don’t let your wife watch you mow!

The Okie in Isolation: Thursday

By Bobby Neal Winters

It is a beautiful day.
I did my walk and took a picture of the Cross which has been dressed for Lent. There is a nice (in the sense of being strong) breeze and bright sunshine.

I have lost one pound over the last seven days.  And this is a real one pound.  I have a FitBit and scale that synchronizes with the FitBit.  It keeps a weekly average for me, and I have lost one pound from the seven-day average.
My back has not hurt on any of the walks I’ve taken this week.  This is why I’ve set my sights on losing the weight.  There is cause and effect going on here. My weight goes down, ergo my back hurts less. Less weight = less pain. Sometimes doing the obvious thing works.

The Okie in Isolation: Disease Modeling

The Okie in Isolation: Disease Modeling
By Bobby Neal Winters

Another beautiful day has dawned. I’ve made it successfully to Wednesday of Spring break.  My day consists of getting up; stretching; showering; breakfast; doing my languages on Duolingo; and then my email.  While I have been instructed to get some rest during this period--and I am as having an electronic wall between me and everyone else reduces stress--the emails do come through because the university is still working.  We are working in isolation, but we are working.
The emails trickle into my inbox, and the rate is small, but if I don’t take care of them they will turn into a lake by the time next Monday rolls around.
For entertainment while I work, I turn to YouTube.  It provides some soothing background noise.  An interesting video that came out today was on Flattening the Curve by Numberphile. They discuss the SIR mathematical model of disease transmission.  The SIR is an acronym where S stands for the number susceptible, I stands for the number infected, and R stands for the number recovered.  Recovered is something of a euphemism because it includes the number of the dead.  The mathematics of this only cares about those who aren’t capable of getting it again. A special case can be modeled by the equations below:

N = S + I + R.
Geeks like me know what those fractions on the left are.  The rest of you should think of them as rates of change with time. On the right side, we’ve thrown in the Greek letters beta and gamma to assert our superiority over you.  It is like when chimps toss poop, but not requiring soap to wash with afterwards.  
The first equation says that the number of susceptible individuals will decrease as more people get it; you’ll either gain immunity or die. So beta is how quick you succumb.
The second equation says that the rate of infection will increase as a higher proportion of the population gets it, but once you’ve got it you're no longer at risk of getting it. (Oh boy!)
The third equation says that the rate of the number recovering is proportional to the number who have it.  So gamma is how fast you get well/die.
The number beta is what we are fiddling with by urging people to stay at home.  The folks on Numberphile have this animated and explain it in more detail for those of you who are interested.
So stay home and decrease beta.

The Okie in Isolation: DoorDash and the Johns Hopkins Map

By Bobby Neal Winters


We did Mexican last night.  I discovered DoorDash.  It is an app that lets you order food from local restaurants and have it delivered.  You put in your credit card; select your restaurant; choose your order from their menu; and order it. You will have put in your credit card and your address when you set up the app.
They bring it to your door and leave it there.  You don’t have to meet them.  Just pick up the sack with tongs, dressed in your hazmat gear and you are good to go.
We had a nice meal and felt better out ourselves for supporting one of my favorite restaurants in town.
In addition to El Caballo de Oro, they deliver for Wendy’s, Sonic, and a number of others.
I’ve been thinking about how this disease (or any disease) is transmitted.  I’ve been looking at the Johns Hopkins map. It shows the number of those infected and the number dead.  Zooming in on the Kansas map, I was stricken by how the cases were distributed in Kansas.  Highway 69 is a straight Euclidean line coming directly out of Johnson and is clearly delimited by the little red dots of contagion.
Johnson county as of this writing has 32 confirmed cases. Highway 69 is the way we get there from this part of the state.  I suppose that if anyone wanted to use this it would help make a case about how important Highway 69 is to this part of the world.  There would be those who would say, yeah, it brought us disease; I can’t argue with that: It brings us everything.
The map does provide a good illustration of how disease spreads. You get first in the hubs, the places where the roads cross.  From there it spreads to the secondary hubs.  From Chicago to Kansas City; from Kansas City to Pittsburg; from Pittsburg to Girard; from Girard to Hepler.
These transitions take time.  Lowering the bump means increasing the length of time in these transitions.
Take this same model and move it to a town.  Say a Rotarian comes back from Johnson County with the disease.  She gives it to people in the club.  They go to church the next Sunday, not know they have it.  They give it to Catholics, Methodists, Presbytereans, and Baptists.  They send their kids to school and day care and bam, it is everywhere.
So we shut down the local hubs.  We watch some more TV. We order in.  Some DoorDash from Sonic sounds good.  Maybe tomorrow.

The Okie in Isolation: Spring Break Begins

By Bobby Neal Winters
I am at home.  This is the seventh day in a row that I’ve been at home.
It’s not too bad so far.
Though you can’t tell it, since I’ve written those first three sentences
I’ve set up a telephone appointment with my bank;
Walked around the block;
Called Bubba on the phone (this was done simultaneously with number 2 above);
Used a battery-powered angle-grinder to turn a Tea-tin into a piggy bank for my youngest grandson.
Let’s expand on those in reverse order.
(4) My wife has taken it as a quarantine challenge to potty-train my youngest grandson.  As an aid to doing this, she is giving him coins as a reward.  She first attempted using pennies.  To this my grandson replied: “No grandma, big pennies.”  He’s not yet potty-trained but he can negotiate. I think this needs to be rewarded, so he’s going to get a home-made piggy bank for his “big pennies.”
Pig pennies, by the way, are quarters, and my wife is taking them from my change flowerpots.  That’s fine.
(3) Bubba is trapped in his house as well. He isn’t dealing with the quarantine stoically.  He has a good imagination and has never used it to imagine anything good.  I suspect this is because he’s had too much pain and disappointment in his life.  So I talked with him and it did us both a world of good.
(2) I talked while I was walking because I am a Fitbit slave.  I’ve decided this isn’t a bad thing during the Great Isolation.  We need to have structure; we need to keep moving.  Walking around outside is a good reminder that there is a lot of good in the world.  There are no unburied bodies in the street yet.  Everyday that happens is a good day.
(1) My wife and I began the process of estate planning.  Having put together a revocable trust, the attorney gave us a letter of things we needed to do.  I immediately put that aside for “later.”  That was about 4 months ago.  It is now later.  It turns out there are only a few things we need to do because--and I cannot stress this too much--we don’t have anything.  Having said that, we need to move our meager savings into the trust. Therefore, I set up a phone call.
Happy first day of Spring Break

Hello from the Churn

By Bobby Neal Winters
I learned how to do a Microsoft Teams meeting this week. So did a lot of other people. If you have Microsoft 365, it is an easy thing to do. I got a google phone number this week. Changed my message at work so that it will tell people to call my google number and get me at home.  It’ll either forward to my cell phone or to voicemail. It also lets me use my computer as a phone.
With the inevitable exception here and there--to small to mention but I will because otherwise you’ll think I am lying--everyone has pulled together like troopers.  We’ve switched to problem solving mode.  Things which would have labored through the system at a snail’s pace (actually snails talk about how slow universities are) have simply happened: “So let it be written; so let it be done!”
We can do this!
I am a fan of the Expanse Novels written by James S.A. Corey.  As various points, these books refer to something called “the churn.” The churn is a generic term for a time of rapid changes.  There is a “before” and an “after” and in between there is the churn.  During the churn the world is reordered. The first shall be last and the last shall be first.
There will be more online meetings from now on germs or no germs. It is just too danged easy to do.
I consider myself to be tech-savvy, but I discovered that I’d been doing things the hard way for a long time with some of my software.  Having discovered these new ways, it is like scales have fallen from my eyes.  I want to go out into the world and preach the best practices of software use.
Halleluyah! Do I have an Amen on Sharepoint?
And our children, the much maligned Millennials, they were born to this.  My 21-year-old daughter was watching some of my compatriots and I struggle through the process of learning some of the things that she just knows.  She said, “This is painful to watch.”
None of these things is hard to learn.  We just put off learning them because we didn’t have to.  The system was working the way things were so we put off the five minutes that it took to learn to change our phone messages; to set up a Teams meeting; to do Zoom; to do VigGrid; to get Google Voice; to use Microsoft 365. 
Then there simply was not a choice and we did it.  There is no going back.  Even if you didn’t learn, enough people know how easy it is that you won’t be let off the hook now.  You will have to learn to do this or you will be left behind and laughed at.
Not everybody has Microsoft 365. However, if you have Facebook and a webcam, you can have face to face conversations with anyone else who is similarly equipped.  I bet your grandchildren are. There are videos on Youtube for how to do this.
This is the churn. This is the year you learn how to use all of the technology that you’ve been ignoring. You are trapped inside with your computer. Figure out what it's all about. We will be doing many things a different way from now on.
Restaurants are going to have to be nimble.  Sure, there will come a day when we all start eating out again.  In the meantime, a lot of restaurants have switched to serving take out.  Some of them by phone; some with online ordering and payment; some will do all of that and deliver on top of it all. 
Here’s a hint guys: The easier you make it, the more business you will get.  When this is all over, you will still know how to do this, and you will still get business this way. If you don’t you won’t.
It is a time of change.  It is the churn.
Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )

I like my Pangolin Well-Done

I like my Pangolin Well-Done

By Bobby Neal Winters

You’ve heard, no doubt, about the Butterfly Effect: A butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing causes a hurricane in Florida.  Well, please bear with me. There is one theory that the Corona Virus, aka COVID 19, first entered the human world when someone bought some wild meat in a market in the Wuhan Province of China, didn’t cook it thoroughly enough, and ate it, becoming infected.

Not quite as pretty as a butterfly, but, hey, it does capture the metaphor: A tiny--a personal--action having global consequences.  As I write this, the university where I work started spring break a week early.  When spring break is done, we will be starting classes back using methods of instruction that do not require bringing large masses of students into the same room with each other.

Here is the math of it.  Suppose that, in the general population, only 5 percent have the disease.  That means a given individual has a 95 percent chance of not being infected.  If you bring 20 of these into the same room, however, there is only a 35 percent chance that no one is infected, i.e. a 65 percent chance that someone is.  You have just exposed the whole room.  They go to classes of 20 other uninfected students, and it spreads like fire.

This isn’t a zombie apocalypse.  A zombie apocalypse wouldn’t really spread because you can tell what a zombie looks like. If you are zombie, you know it because you’re gnawing on someone’s skull.

In terms of contagion, this is much more subtle.  Most people won’t know they have it; they might not know they are sick.  I’ve read the symptoms and for the most part it looks more like being in your fifties than anything else, but there is a nontrivial part of the population that is more susceptible.
For those with the co-morbidity conditions, it is much more serious.  One table I looked at, for those over 80 there is about a 15 percent chance of dying once you get it.  On one hand, that is an 85 percent chance that you won’t die; that’s good. On the other hand, I wouldn’t get on a bus that advertised that I only had 15 percent chance of dying once I got on.

Okay, then, how do you not get on the bus?

Here we look to simple, common sense things: Wash your hands and stay in.  Yes, you love your children and grandchildren.  You want them to know that.  Well, they do. They might feel sad if they don’t get a hug now, but how sad will they be knowing that they killed Mimaw or Pawpaw?  Don’t you want for them to be around you a few years longer so they know you better?  You’ve still got some things to teach them.

Okay, young people, you very likely won’t feel sick at all if you’ve gotten this.  I know you think you have to go to the beach or wherever to do what you young people like to do.  I was young once and I can almost remember how it feels, so if you can’t keep yourself home, do you think you can limit your talks with Mimaw and Pawpaw to telephone conversations until you can get tested. Surely there will be some tests sometime.

I’ve seen estimates that eventually 70 percent of the population is going to get this.  That is statistics.  We can try to manipulate this in various ways.  We can slow it down through old-fashioned, God-fearing cleanliness; that will keep our medical infrastructure from being overloaded if it works.  We can protect those who are vulnerable by being careful.

Until this passes over, wash your hands, keep your distance, and eat your pangolin well-done.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )

Yesterday: A Review

Yesterday

By Bobby Neal Winters
You'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs
I look around me and I see it isn't so
Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs
And what's wrong with that
I'd like to know
--Paul McCartney 

One hazard of writing is using too many cliches.  This is difficult because cliches are overused because they are so darned good.  The well-known tropes are known so well because they work so well.  Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy wins girl back.
I like that plot even though I know how it is going to end the minute I see it begin. The art is in seeing how it is used with other tools of the writer’s trade in order to produce the story.  We don’t criticise painters because they only use colors made from yellow, blue, and red, so we shouldn’t criticise a storyteller for using his pallette either.
I went to see the movie Yesterday, starring Himesh Patel and Lilly James.  Patel is new, but you may have seen Lilly James before if you are a Downton Abbey fan like I am.  She played Lady Rose who was always getting herself into mischief.  We know from the moment we see these two on the screen together what will happen; it is a fait accompli, a done deal.  But we want to see it again.  That is the magic.  How that is done is the art.
I will not be revealing too much about Yesterday by saying it is a fantasy, but one with a fairly small willing suspension of disbelief: What if the Beatles never were? What if none of their music was ever written, but you--alone in all the world--remembered?
Yesterday is based upon this premise.
Himesh Patel is on his way home one night after a disappointing reception of his music when--as if an act of God--the lights go out all over the world; he is seriously injured in an accident; and when he recovers he slowly discovers that all knowledge of the Beatles has been erased.
And all the world is exactly as it has been before, except that whenever he plays one of their hits it is as if water has been sprinkled on a thirsty land.
Given this premise, one might believe it would be followed by a movie that showcases all of your favorite Beatles songs, and one might be right, but there is in fact more.  We do get the love story just as I described; and you know how it will end from the moment you see the two of them on the screen together.  But there is more going on here.
We also get an examination of the Hollywood Machine.  Here in enters the well-named character Debra Hammer, played by Kate McKinnon whom I loathe.  But that is okay as here she plays an entirely loathsome character.  At one point, talking to our hero, she asks, “Do you want to drink poison from the chalice of fame and fortune?”  Yes is the only answer she will accept; it is the only one ever given.
There have been many movies cataloguing the excesses of fame but no time is wasted on that here.  It is about making a choice about whether or not to lose one’s soul.  The answer given is the one we want, but the art is in the telling.
There is artistry here.  Someone who actually knows something about movies would be able to put it better, but there are two instances where the audience is told something with just a picture and a facial expression.  A picture is worth a thousand words? In the hands of an artist sometimes more.
There is one surprising scene near the end of the movie that alone would be worth the price of the whole ticket.
This is a movie that teenagers and parents can see together without any embarrassment, and everyone will like it.
If you are not careful, you might wind up singing along with the closing credits.  I encourage it, by the way.

The Basics of Solar Power

The Basics of Solar Power

By Bobby Neal Winters

Last September, I started playing with solar power above the level of the single solar cell. I’d played with solar cells which only generate a little current--it doesn’t hurt to think of them as a single AA battery--but there was just not much that I could do with one. I wanted to go bigger, to produce more power, so I invested in a solar panel.

Here I want to make sure that I am talking to readers who know as little as I did when I started. A solar cell is the basic unit that can produce electricity from the sun and I suppose is a solar panel technically, but when I use the word solar panel, I am thinking of something that has multiple solar cells connected within it. It is something with more oomph. I am thinking of something like what you see here. This is something that can produce 12 volts and can be used to charge a car battery. And in the approach I’ve been following, that is the point of it: charging a battery.

I started out buying the kit you see here along with the power inverter you see here. Let me explain how this works.

You may have gotten to this page by searching solar power, and that’s great, but in thinking about how it all works it helps to think about battery power. In my applications, I will not be thinking about generation power and selling it back to the power company to lower my bill. I don’t have enough money to invest in that. I am interested in having power in places that aren’t hooked up to the electric company. This means that I need to work from stored energy; hence, I need battery.

You may recall that batteries produce direct current (DC) and that many of the appliances that you want to use require alternating current (AC). The inverter is a device that converts DC to AC. You can buy a car battery, hook it to a power inverter, and it will run a box fan or an electric light, or just about [more later on just about] anything that uses AC until the battery is discharged too much. Car batteries are made to be discharged and then recharged. This is where the solar panel comes in.

Solar panels use sunlight to generate a current. That current can be used to charge a battery. Here is where we get a little fancy. I suppose you could use a solar panel to charge a battery directly, but in doing so you risk overcharging which I am told could damage the battery or cause a fire or make something else unpleasant happen. Therefore, you put a controller in the circuit to keep your battery from overcharging.

So the basic idea is to hook the solar panel to the controller, hook the controller to the battery, and hook the battery to the inverter. Then you can plug your appliances into the inverter which will be equipped with outlets.

I got this all set up and it worked great. It worked great until I plugged something into the inverter that was beyond its rating (400w) and fried it. You might think that fuses are supposed to stop that, and they are, but they didn’t. I had to buy a new inverter.

This being experimental, I didn’t proceed in the most orderly way. When you go to Youtube, you can see some very inspiring, very organized, very professional, and sometimes very anal-retentive makers. That is not the way I roll during the learning phase. I basically just strung the stuff together with most of the parts laying on the ground.

Just a hint: you really shouldn’t do that. Sometime during the winter, something got into my controller and messed up the LCD display. Evidently it kept on running because the night light I’d plugged into it kept going, but I became worried that it might catch on fire and burn my wife’s greenhouse down. To prevent this, I bought a replacement controller. Instead of getting the exact same controller, I bought this one because Amazon recommended it.

After it arrived, I made the discovery that the inputs and outputs are smaller than on my original controller. I couldn’t just plug them in. This was frustrating, but as I was going to mount the controller on a board and put the board on a wall, I used this as an opportunity to Okie-engineer a way to

1. Go from a larger size of wire to a smaller size of wire;
2. Keep the strain off the cables and the controller; and
3. Make it easier to remove and add pieces.

The result is pictured below:

I believe my Okie ancestors would be proud of this.

My next step will be to work a second battery into the circuit in order to increase my storage capacity.  Then I will get a better inverter to handle higher loads. 

This is all being done at the house next door which was a gift from my father-in-law to my wife.  We use it mainly for storage, but we do have it hooked to the electric grid.  Our use never exceeds the base cost of $15/month.  My goal is to ultimately have the house be entirely solar, and save that $15/month cost.

It’s Okay I’m Alive: The Hazards of Writing

By Bobby Winters

This begins on Sunday afternoon when I went to the España Supermercado to get pencils.  I’m doing some mathematical writing and for that I like to use pencils for the first few drafts so I bought a pack of two HBs that had a free sharpener in it.  

The sharpener broke upon its first  use.   

To make a long story just a little bit shorter, let me say that I decided to buy a pen knife without knowing the word for pen knife.  After numerous attempts at that from stores and street venders--one street vendor didn’t have a knife but he was good enough to sell me a pair of reading glasses I didn’t want--I managed to get a Swiss Army Knife.  I felt a thrill of victory upon succeeding.  I can sharpen pencils now, after all.  A whole world is opened to me, just like when Adam ate the apple.

I walk to teach each day and over the course of my first week I’ve put together a kit to make it seamless. I had brought a brown file packet from my office to organize papers in.  I bought a shopping bag from España Supermercado to carry that in; useful and a souvenir when all is done.  I got an umbrella because it’s rained every day I’ve been here.  I carry it in the bag too.  

My one problem, a first world problem in every sense, was that my usb drive that I have my powerpoints on was just lying around loose. I had found a keyring to attach to the usb drive, but I didn’t have anyplace to attach the other end.

Then I got a great idea: I would take my Swiss Army knife and poke a hole in the brown file packet.

Someone just played a minor chord in the background.

The tiny Swiss Army knife pushed through the cardboard and went into my left index finger.  My first thought was it didn’t hurt much.  My second thought was, “Gee, that’s a lot of blood.” My third thought was, “That is really a lot of blood.”

It was getting on my papers; it was getting on one of the two pair of khakis that I brought.

I somehow took myself into the bathroom which began to look like one of the Hound’s scenes from Game of Thrones.  I will need to clean it before tomorrow or the cleaning lady might call the cops.

Once I got the flow staunched and my finger wrapped in the Hotel Chaco’s finest toilet paper, I did what any man in my position would do. I messaged my wife and asked her how to get blood out of pants.  It is “flowing cold water” if this ever happens to you, by the way.  

Then I went to the farmcia a few blocks away to get a band-aid; it is a fancy place with two armed guards. I discovered something.  Even though you can get (almost?) any sort of medicine without a prescription here, they keep the band-aids behind the counter.

After a brief reconnoiter, I saw a girl at the counter who was doing nothing. NOTHING.  I said, “Lo siento. No hablo mucho español. Yo me corto.  Necesito, como dice, bandaids.”

She very sweetly took me too a reel of take and gave me a number,  It was E89.  After waiting no more than one minute, a much more experienced-looking woman waved me over and took my number.  Then she made me give her my hand and washed the blood off.  She put an antibiotic powder on it, and then a band-aid.  The price of that and a pack of band-aids was 5000 guaranis.  The exchange rate is currently 5400 guaranis to the dollar.  

So, long story short. I am alive, but it is hell to type with a bandaged index finger.

Primer Lunes

By Bobby Neal Winters

Today was my first Monday.  Yesterday, I kicked around a little and got my bearings. I went to the España grocery store and got some pop.  I can walk there through neighborhoods than have people in them so it is not scary.  The people are good here, so it is the lack of them that becomes scary.  

In the late afternoon, I went to Mujer Maravilla aka Wonder Woman over in Shopping Villa Morra.  It was in English with Spanish subtitles.  The fight scenes with the Amazons were beautiful.  It was like a dance.  

The theater itself was very classy.  It had ushers.  Real, honest to God ushers like back in the Fifties and Sixties.  There wasn’t 20 minutes worth of commercials before the movie either.  I will be going to the movies here again.  Just saying.

Sat down to breakfast with a guy that turned out to be Portuguese.  Tried out some of my Brazilian portuguese on him.  Kind of basic communication, but encouraging.

Today I walked to España again.  There is a little shopping complex there.  I got some toenail clippers without having to act it out or take off my shoes.  That is what we call a win, my friends.

For lunch I ordered someone for lunch that I didn’t recognize the name of.  It looked like abogado but wasn’t.  Abodago is Spanish for lawyer, but it wasn’t.  It wasn’t tough enough to be lawyer anyway.

Class was great this afternoon.   Like to begin the class with this video to show them about engagement.  They settled down, got quiet, and paid attention.  Truly and awesome teaching experience.

Journey into Darkness: Pitch Black revisited

Journey into Darkness: Pitch Black revisited

By Bobby Neal Winters

Last year about this time, I wrote a review for the Pittsburg Morning Sun of the movie Pitch Black.  It can be found here.  I’ve rewatched it one more time and would like to revisit it. There will be spoilers ahead, but as I’ve seen this movie six times and have liked it better each time, I am not too worried about spoiling it.

This movie is a journey.  It is a journey in a couple of different ways.  We begin in a spaceship, cocooned in  cryogenic sleep chambers.  We are as far from nature as technology can take us.  A meteor hits the ship disabling it and killing its captain.  Carolyn, the docking pilot, is forced from her cryo-chamber into the pilot’s chair.  In a frenzy she is trying to land the spaceship safely because this accident has happened closed to a large satellite of a gas giant.

The computer tells her the ship is too heavy to land safely so she responds by getting rid of cargo.  She does this until the only section she can get rid of is full of passengers.  She says that she is not going to die for these people.  She then pulls the lever to jettison them but it will not work, and she manages to crash land the spaceship.

The survivors include an Imam on hajj, a bounty hunter (Johns) and his prisoner (Riddick played by Vin Diesel) and an epicurean among others. They are now on the satellite of the gas giant.  It current language we would call it a hot Jupiter.  It is in a system where there are two yellow suns closely orbiting each other and another star that is farther out than the gas giant.  For all initial appearances, the sun never sets.  It appears to be eternally light.

In this land of eternal light, the survivors fear the prisoner Riddick who is a murderer. Some would kill him; others would keep him tied up; others would be happy if he were as far away as possible.

Riddick is not well-suited either to the polite society of the civilized travelers or to the world of eternal light.  The journey leads away from civilization and away from light.

As they seek life-giving water, they discover things are not what they seem.  There is something dangerous living on the world that keeps to the darkness. They are not afraid of it as they are protected by the eternal light. They also discover they are not the first humans to have been here.  There were others before.

Riddick, being more suited to Nature than to Man’s protecting mantle of civilization, notices things the others do not.  The previous visitors never left.  They were killed by the things in the dark.  This becomes worrisome because it is discovered that the light is not eternal. There is an interval every 22 years wherein the central suns, the gas giant, the satellite, and the outer sun line up in such a way to bring darkness.

Near the mining camp, an escape ship is discovered that can take them to safety, but they need parts from the crashed ship.  The survivors start this just as the central suns are eclipsed by the gas giant.

It is here that the journey away from civilization and into darkness begins in earnest. The creatures swarm from the caves in which they have been trapped.  Riddick, who is uniquely qualified to see this as he has had a operation in prison to enable him to see in the dark, observes that it is beautiful.  

The group has determined that the creatures will stay away from light as it hurts them.  They begin the journey with electrical lights, which are lost.  They replace these with the lighted whiskey brought by the epicurean.  Members of the group are picked off one by one by the creatures.  In the darkness, the same people who wanted nothing to do with Riddick in the eternal light now hover close to him for protection.

As it looks like they might be able to make one last run for the escape ship, it begins to rain, putting out their whiskey bottle torches, forcing them to seek safety inside a cave, where Riddick leaves them.  In the cave, with even the light of their torches gone, they notice the bioluminescent larvae of the creatures that have been killing them.  They find just enough to fill one whiskey bottle and this creates enough light to keep the creatures at bay.

Riddick, in the meantime, has made it back to the ship. He prepares to leave and to all appearances, is planning to leave the rest behind.  

Carolyn finds him at this point, and entreats him to come back with her to bring the other two survivors with them.  He refuses.  They have an argument which climaxes in a question from Riddick: Would you die for them?  This is, of course a question Carolyn had answered at the beginning of the journey in the negative.  Now she answers differently, “Yes, I would die for them.”

Riddick simply replies, “Interesting.”  But he does go back with her.  They get the other two survivors, but on the return, Riddick is forced to fight one of the creatures again.

Carolyn gets the other survivors to the escape ship, and this time, they are suggesting that Riddick should be left, but Carolyn goes back to find Riddick exhausted having just vanquished a few creatures.  She chides at him to get up and come along, saying in order to shame him that she would die for the others, but “not for you.”  

At that point, she is captured from behind by one of the creatures and taken off into the darkness.  Riddick is left there with an look on his face that almost defies description into words. (Vin Diesel is an actor, not just a set of muscles.)  He is utterly amazed. Someone has given their life for him. He tries to cover this unaccustomed emotion by saying, “But not for me.”  And yet something has happened to him.  He has been saved through her blood.  

This journey from the light into the darkness has brought both Carolyn and Riddick into a different sort of light.  She has found that she could give her life even for someone who appeared irredeemable and the one who thought himself totally self-sufficient has been saved by another.

When Riddick is leaving with the two other survivors, he is asked what will they tell the police when they are found.  He says, “Tell them Riddick died there.”

Pitch Black

By Bobby Neal Winters
(This appeared in the Pittsburg Morning Sun in August of 2015)

Movies have layers.  Good ones, that is.  A movie can have action, which is good. They are called movies after all. These are better if they have good characters.  A bit of mystery is good. Then add an element of horror if you are into that sort of thing.  To me, if they make you think a bit, that is good too.  The trouble is that that we are not used to that in so many of our action/adventure/horror movies and it might take you several viewings before you realize there is something else going on.  This is the case with Pitch Black, starring Vin Diesel.

There are some who look askance at Vin Diesel as an actor. This is an easy thing to do. Nature has equipped him physically to be an action hero.  So well, in fact, that it would be difficult to believe him in any other roll.  The only time I’ve seen him even put in a slightly different direction was in The Pacifier, which is Walt Disney.  Yet even for Walt Disney he was an action hero.

Those of you who know his work also know that action hero is not a perfectly precise description.  The role that suits him best is that of anti-hero.  And the anti-hero for which he has been perfectly cast is that of Riddick, who is the central character in Pitch Black..

Riddick was introduced in Pitch Black, released in the year 2000 and now available to stream on Amazon Prime.  The character was so good there had to be sequels, of course, and, of course, the sequels are not as good as the original.  This is not to denigrate the sequels. Quite frankly Pitch Black was a perfect blend of Sci-Fi and horror.  Indeed it is difficult to decide whether Pitch Black is horror movie that uses elements of science fiction or a science fiction movie that veers into horror.  Alien would be an example of the first and Predator of the second.  Like the middle choice in The Three Bears (also a horror story if you think about it), Pitch Black is just right.  It is pitch perfect.

It is a story of sin, redemption, faith, and spirituality in the future. The movie begins as the spaceship has been hit by a meteor shower and is crashing. The captain is dead. The surviving pilot decides to jettison the passengers who are sleeping through their interstellar flight so that she might have a better chance to live, but she is unable to do so.  She says, “I am not going to die for them.” Remember that line.

Riddick is among the survivors.  He is an escaped convict who has been recaptured.  Also surviving are his captor; a muslim cleric and his entourage who are on hadj; an adolescent girl traveling in the guise of a boy; and various others who will be killed in horrendously grisly ways as the movie marches to its climax.

Light is, an ancient symbol of God’s wisdom imparted to Man. We see by His divine light.  The spaceship crashes on a planet (actually a large moon of  a gas giant, but lets not get picky) that has multiple suns. There is every indication that there is never night because of this.

Yet, pulling a device from the Isaac Asimov short story Nightfall, our luckless travellers have crashed just before an eclipse of one of the suns. The configuration is such that they will be sent into total darkness.

This would not be so bad, but they are not alone.  There are some particularly nasty creatures which, in horror movie fashion, begin to reduce the number of our luckless survivors, one by one.

Other things begin to happen which one by one removes their technological advantages.  Soon they have been reduced from the god’s of technology which Man to considers himself to be to prey.

Riddick, who was viewed as pariah at the beginning, has become someone they need, but someone who they dare not trust. He makes no bones about the fact that his primary, perhaps solitary, interest is his own survival.

In one of my favorite parts of the movie, Riddick and the cleric have a conversation in which the cleric says, “Just because you do not believe in God does not mean he doesn’t believe in you.” Riddick replies with words to the effect that he absolutely believes in God and absolutely hates him.

But there are moments to make the viewer question whether this is his final state.  Riddick who is of the opinion that everyone is out for himself sees something which might cause him to question this view, as the pilot, who had been on the point of killing all of the passengers to save herself, finds her redemption.

Only after seeing the movie four or five times, do I realize that, regardless of how interesting a character Riddick is, the move is about her.

(Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. )

Lomitolandia

By Bobby Neal Winters

I write this as I am just half past my second full day of my current Paraguayan trip.  My second full day but only now am I truly in Paraguay.  Why do I only now consider myself to be truly arrived?  Did I just pass through passport check?  Did I just clear customs?

No, I am only now fully in Paraguay because I’ve just had my first lomito.  

What ask ye is a lomito?  Can I explain color to the blind or music to the deaf?  I might as well try as to explain to the uninitiated the joy of the lomito.  I will try to lay out the rough design of the thing, but this cannot capture the reality.  Take a hamburger and remove the patty.  Now replace the patty with a very thin (very, very thin) piece of fried beef.  Now put a fried egg on it.  There is the physical description of the lomito but one might as well describe a horse as a big dog.  The thing is simply the thing itself and our words are but our poor means to try to capture it.

It is the audacity of the fried egg that makes the thing.  The United States as a whole is no longer capable of this level of genius.  

The Paraguayans do not end their genius with the lomito.  No they do not.  There are other dishes such as the Milanesa a caballo. To those who know a little Spanish, this dish is an opportunity for misplaced culture shock because caballo, of course, means horse.  Milanesa describes a manner of breading a frying a selection of meat.  You can have Milanesa de carne which can be described as chicken fried steak.  They are not exactly the same but if you would eat one you would eat the other.  Milanesa de pollo would correspond to chicken fried chicken breast.  Milanesa a caballo is not chicken fried horse.  It is a Milanesa de carne smothered with fried onions and topped with two fried eggs.

Why a caballo?

I’d thought it was perhaps because the fried eggs looked like the saddle on top of a horse.  Others believe that because this is enough food for a horse.  A hungry and presumably carnivorous horse.  Perhaps that is more frightening than the concept of chicken fried horse.  I leave it to the noble reader to decide.

It is more important, however, that I make the gentle culinary genius of the Paraguayan people better known to the rest of the world.  If everyone like this, I am convinced world peace would follow.  I world peace among carnivores no less.  (Hitler was a vegetarian, you know.)  Even if the urge to kill one’s neighbor survived the joy of the lomito, the armies of the world would be too busy napping to fight.

One finds the best lomitos on street carts, scary looking street carts.   The scarier the street cart, the better the lomito.  Today, however, I was forced to forgo the street cart and ate a lomito made by a chain: Lomitolandia.  (This makes me think of the series Portlandia and wonder what such a Paraguayan series would be like, but I digress.)  It was a serviceable lomito, enough to get me into the country, but I must at some point seek out a truly terrifying street cart to be satisfied.