Digital Chum - Virtual fish guts and other nonsense

Presented without additional comment

Irony? Hypocrisy? Not sure.

From the Washington Post…

5 GOP-led states extend unemployment aid to workers who lose jobs over vaccine mandates

So… the party that touts independence and personal responsibility is giving free money to people who show no personal responsibility.

Cats Chillin’ on the Deck

Saturday morning hanging out on the deck with coffee and cats…

Cats Chillin' on the Deck

Milo is comfortable.

A “quick” table…

Lori needed a table to go beside the utility sink in the basement so that she’d have a place to put her drying paintbrushes (and related stuff). The current precarious locations (balanced on the back of the sink or on the narrow edge of the furnace) weren’t cutting it anymore. There was just enough space to fit something between the furnace and the sink, so I gathered up some scraps and cutoffs and knocked out this little rolling Frankenstein table in the hour between having dinner and playing Overwatch with friends.

It has a lot more stuff on it now than it does in the picture… and there’s not as much junk on the back of the sink. Problem solved!

Utility sink side table

Deplorable

“We should not be surprised by any of this.” – Stephen Colbert

Seriously, not only could this be predicted, but it was predicted… by lots of people when Trump was a candidate in 2016. It was made worse by all the politicians who coddled his worse instincts for the past four years: supporting his despicable nonsense, explaining away all his abhorrent behavior, normalizing actions that should be considered disgustingly abnormal by any decent person. Throughout his presidency, Trump continued to demonstrate, time and time again, that he was not only unfit to be president in a myriad of ways, but that he was also a foul, childish, and pathetic excuse for a human being. Still, Republican politicians and other high-level government officials didn’t just look the other way. They actively supported him. They encouraged him. They bear responsibility for Wednesday’s riot just as Trump does.

Some of them hypocritically went from vehemently denouncing him in the early 2016 primaries to endorsing him with full-throated enthusiasm once he became president. This wasn’t a case of “I campaigned against you but now we have to be united” which is fairly normal in politics. These were people (like Lindsey Graham, for example) who despised Trump and knew that he would be a dumpster fire of a president. But then they decided that morals, ethics, and honor weren’t things they cared about, so they did an about face and defended him with red-faced righteousness and holy anger against anyone who would dare call attention to Trump’s self-serving and dangerous actions or to his repeated (and repeated and repeated and repeated) lies. Hypocrites.

His supporters have wholeheartedly joined what can easily and accurately be termed a cult. It’s the Cult of Trump. They believe his lies. They cheer his xenophobia. They laugh at his sexism. They dismiss and mock his critics. Trump, aided and abetted by Republican politicians who have shamelessly fawned over him during his term, has created a cult of personality that he keeps alive by peppering it with lies, absurd promises, and conspiracy theories.

This man is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a “law and order” president. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves… and was from the beginning.

If you’ve supported this man in 2016, supported him throughout his clusterfuck of a presidency, or continue to support him now, your moral compass isn’t just broken, it’s gone.

The Library

(tl;dr… the finished library pics are at the end)

Bookshelves

When we had our house remodel done back in 2015, there was a room added that was specifically designated as a library… my room. Until January of 2020, that room was basically a big storage room while we finished other rooms and got organized from the chaos of a huge, full-house remodeling project. Then, finally, I started working on it sporadically as time permitted. I had been drawing various plans for months, waffling between building them from scratch and using Ikea Billy Bookcases and tricking them out to look like custom built-ins. I went for the “build them from scratch” option.

Here’s an idea of what the room has looked like for the past few years. The liquor boxes are full of books, not liquor… and no, I did not drink the liquor that WAS in the boxes!

The goal was to have an “old world traditional” look mixed in with a bit of a “Lord of the Rings” fantasy vibe and maybe just a tiny pinch of Steampunk… so when you walked in, you felt like you were walking into a different world.

So after a lot of measurements and bookcase design and figuring out how wide to make the bookcases on each wall, I got to it with a few sheets of red oak plywood from Home Depot. The bookcases were all 11-1/2 inches deep, but the widths varied a lot. The widest one is 31 inches.

Bookcase sides

I had nineteen bookcases to build, which seemed overwhelming, but I figured “baby steps,” right? I started with enough plywood for the first three bookcases. It was a lot of cutting, an absurd amount of drilling (for the adjustable shelves – 2,052 shelf-pin holes), and a lot of gluing and clamping. I made various jigs to help with streamlining the repetitive process, but I won’t bore you with those here.

Unfinished bookcases

Eventually, I figured I should get them out of the garage and into the library to make sure I’d measured correctly. I put them in more-or-less the correct spots and was mildly surprised that I hadn’t borked that up. Unfortunately, I found the exterior walls were kicked out a bit at the bottom, so the bookcases on those walls wouldn’t be able to get attached flush to the wall, but that was something to deal with later. La! La! La! La!

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Black Lives Matter

I’m not even sure where to begin or what to say or how to feel right now. I’m at a loss about the brutality happening in this country. It’s at once heartbreaking and horrifying. I’m angered and outraged and disgusted, but I’m also feeling sadness, sympathy, and helplessness… wondering what I can do and feeling like I can’t do anything… thinking that I don’t have the words to express my own feelings or to adequately represent those who are being oppressed, beaten, and brutalized… fearing that whatever I say will be too understated, too privileged, or just trite.

That said, I just want to add that I acknowledge my own privilege in this situation. Not only from a “I’m a white, upper middle class male living in the suburbs” standpoint, but also from a pandemic standpoint (financially). While I’m not in a position/class that allows me to fully understand and empathize with people of color or people in less fortunate financial situations, I want to understand and I certainly feel a wide range of sympathetic emotions about it.

Now that the caveats are out of the way…

Black lives matter. White privilege exists in abundance. White supremacists are not “good people.” Nazis are not “good people.” Black people have always been oppressed in this country and continue to be oppressed. These are just facts.

When I see police in full riot gear… helmets, shields, batons, pepper spray… literally marching against protesters, beating them, chasing them down, spraying them wantonly with pepper spray, shoving them to the ground, running over them with vehicles, enveloping them in tear gas, and shooting them with rubber bullets (why is that even a thing?!), I’m horrified. I’m disgusted. I was brought to tears watching some of the videos. I’m also filled with rage at these police who perpetrate these things. Are they the new “just following orders” Nazis? Are they drunk with power? Are they just excited to play with their new riot gear? Are they all racists?

How has it come to this? It’s because of so many factors, it would be impossible for me to list them all, not to mention I don’t know them all. I know it has to stop. It’s outrageous. It’s horrific. It’s inflammatory. These police are exacerbating the situation with the exact behavior that is being protested. They’re not trying to diffuse the situation. They’re making it worse.

Then I choke up when I see videos and photos of other police officers walking with the protesters… kneeling with them… talking to them… helping them. I’m really hoping they’re in the majority among police. They help. They are the ones who let us know that not all the police are vile.

I do know a few reasons why this situation has gotten so drastically worse in the past few years (not that it hasn’t been bad for years and years before this). One neutral reason is the pandemic. Some people are already stressed out over being cooped up (to avoid dying). I think that’s a minor reason, though.

(Here’s where the polemic starts.)

I think the number one main reason is Donald Trump and his administration. Trump is a despicable human being. Putting aside his gross incompetence with running the country, he’s a racist, a liar, a misogynist, a xenophobe, a con-man, a serial sexual assaulter, a cheat, and a pathetic businessman. He’s also a terrible deal-maker.

This isn’t new. This was well known before he ever ran for president, and yet he was voted into office because enough people from the right places decided that it was better to have a man who was an unqualified, racist, sexist asshole in the White House than it was to have an eminently qualified woman there.

Trump has normalized racism and xenophobia. From his comments about Mexico sending rapists to his immigration policies to his border wall, he has constantly hammered home the idea that if you’re not white and you’re not Republican, you’re a danger to this country… unless you can somehow personally benefit him, of course. He glorifies violence (in many cases, promotes it). He belittles women. He demonstrates racism constantly (and has for decades).

When the “leader” of the country exemplifies those traits, it emboldens people with similar reprehensible views to amplify their voices and actions. There is a strong correlation between increases in racial violence and areas where Trump won the election by a large margin.

He has turned off the lights of human decency and emboldened the cockroaches to come out into the open.

Unfortunately, due to the “cockroach effect” and to various policies, the rot has spread more aggressively to certain police departments and now we have squads of police decked out in over-armored Batman costumes, wielding weapons (physical, mental, and chemical) against protesters who are protesting just such treatment.

I had a conversation with someone a couple years ago who felt that “white privilege” isn’t a real thing because he said it never helped him get a job when he was struggling to raise a new family. It was a frustrating conversation because I don’t think he really understood what “white privilege” meant. It’s just the flip side of the coin that has “black oppression” on the other side (well… it’s more than that, but that’s not a totally bad analogy).

Get Trump out of office. Get people in government who will work to eliminate this blight that is infesting our country. Call out racism when you see it. Love your neighbor. Be kind. Be gentle.

Black Lives Matter.

www.obama.org/anguish-and-action/

Table saw under-wing storage

Table saw under-wing storage with pull-out shelf

I’ve been trying to do a lot of organizing and streamlining of my shop the past few weeks. I’m currently using our garage as my workshop, so I need to be able to move everything aside so I can park in there when I’m not working. One issue that I always have is storage, so I decided to use some empty space under the wing of my table saw to hold a storage drawer, pull-out shelf, and a catch-all bin for push blocks and the like.

Sketchy Plans

I took some measurements and sketched a plan… of dubious usefulness. For the record, I stuck with almost none of those original measurements because I was making this unit out of scrap wood I had in my shop and I didn’t have pieces big enough to make it as designed. With some creative shenanigans, I was able to make it work, though.

Panels with dadoes

I cut (most of) the pieces to size and cut some dados to hold the horizontal pieces. I also cut the pieces for the pull-out shelf and the drawer. Everything was assembled using glue… and a mallet… and a bunch of clamps. Time for a clamping montage!

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Melody!

I so rarely get a good picture of Melody that I figured I’d post this one.

(Also a shout-out to Katris for the Katris Nest that she’s lying in. All the cats actually frequent it, so it was definitely a good buy.)

Melody in the Katris Nest