Okay.

I have long junked on air-conditioned seats in a car as a frippery. Neat to have, but kinda meh.

But after spending a couple late summer days on a range in the bottomlands near the Wabash where the swampass is so bad you’ve nearly got beads of sweat trickling down your ass crack, I’m a believer.

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Nope.

It's September 11th.

Entirely coincidentally, I'll be in a class this weekend again, as I have been so many years before.

Like I said fifteen years ago, I won't be participating in the performative hair-rending and sackcloth-donning celebrating the tactical victory of our foes. Instead, I'll be getting harder to kill.

You can go virtue signal to your friends how mad you still are, if that's what makes you feel cool.

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Legends of the Fall

Meteorological autumn starts on the first of September. Even though the "dog days of summer" extend into September... and with a streak of 90°-plus days stretching from August 31st to the day before yesterday its been a record stretch of heat this late in the season here in Indianapolis ...the ninth month is also the first of the "brrrrr months".

You know, "Septembrr, Octobrr, Novembrr, Decembrr". On average, by the time the month closes out, overnight temps here will be in the forties.

Actual astronomical autumn begins later in the month, with the autumnal equinox on the 22nd.

But today is Labor Day, the traditional Last Day of Summer here in 'Murrica.

When I was a kid, summer vacation generally ran from Memorial Day to Labor Day, a stretch of time that spread out as an endless vista of lightning bugs and camping trips, sleepovers and pool parties, and now it goes by in the blink of an eye.

Happy Lebber's Day!

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Oops...

Two days ago this blog turned twenty-one and I forgot to even buy it a card.

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20,000

Apparently this is the 20,000th post on View From The Porch, which will turn twenty-one in... hang on, lemme check ...a bit over three weeks from now.

Neat!

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Happy Independence Day!

A Glorious Fourth by Mort Künstler

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Expired...

So after nine years one of the two batteries (the smaller of the two) on the cordless lawnmower gave up the ghost.

The label said "Poulan" but it wasn't. It was a relabeled... well, WORX and Greenworks are the electric lawn appliances still in circulation from those days.

I think we definitely got our money's worth out of it (and it still works, it's just the smaller of the two battery packs crapped out) so we're taking advantage of Prime Day and buying a replacement. The old one can stay as a backup unit.

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The Longest Day...

Happy summer solstice!

Sunset in Indianapolis today is at 9:17 and some seconds. While it will be a little later tomorrow, sunrise will too, as the days begin contracting again.

Back at it...

After a lengthy hiatus, I decided it's time to get back to morning walks around the block.

I'm not getting any younger and I'm sure my cardiovascular fitness will thank me later.

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To all who celebrate...

Happy Beltane!

Hooray, hooray! The first of May!

Outdoor fucking starts today!

(But as usual it do rain
So we fucks off indoors again.)

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Piercing the Veil

Way back in the mists of time, in the autumn of 2005 when this blog was still in diapers, there was a minor kerfuffle about the virtues and vices of blogging anonymously.

Since the sort of people who start blogs do so because they tend to have opinions on frickin' everything, it was no surprise that lots of people had opinions on the topic.

It's popped up here and there since then in various online spaces where I participate, like forums and certain corners of social media.

I'm pretty ambivalent on the topic. I don't blog anonymously because for me there's hardly any point in it. I've gone by my government name all over the web since the days of dialup but I respect that other people may not want to and, to rifle through Thomas Jefferson's desk drawers for an appropriate aphorism, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. You want to blog anonymously, knock yourself out.

But I do think it's chilling that one thing LLMs seem to be good at is sussing out anonymous posters and tying them to their wallet name via language use analysis.

Anonymity ain't what it used to be.

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Yet another one...

I got another punch on my Getting Older Card today. I feel pretty much the same as I did yesterday, though.

I presume it beats the alternative.

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Oh. Duh.

I am embarrassed to say that I was today years old when the etymology of "iglesia" suddenly popped into view, like staring at the same picture of a candlestick your whole life and all of a sudden realizing it was two faces in profile.

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Bullying myself.

I hate having to do a big load of laundry around this time of year. Specifically I hate having to dry it.

Throw two to four pairs of jeans, four or five long-sleeved shirts, and a couple pairs of long johns in the dryer and...

Well, there was a type of prank when I was a kid, see? Actually, let's not call it a prank, but rather what it was: bullying. Anyway, it would occur any time you were at the lake or the swimmin' hole or the pool and the victim of the bullying left their street clothes unattended. The perpetrators would grab said clothes, get them good and soaked, and tie them in a bundle of knots. This practice was known, for reasons lost to time, as "chaw raw beef-ing" the clothes.

...Anyway throw all those clothes in the dryer and they manage to chaw raw beef themselves. Go to empty it and tug at a pair of jeans and watch as it drags a ball of shirts and socks and unmentionables, around which the trouser legs have become entwined, out of the dryer and tries to deposit them on the floor.

It's a parade of frustrations.

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That was weird...

Yesterday I noticed I was running low on soda and, not feeling like dealing with the crowds at Meijer, I figured I'd get a couple twelve packs of Mountain Dew Zero and one of diet ginger ale from Amazon.

When you hit the groceries tab at Amazon, you get a drop-down menu giving you three choices, of which only two are relevant if what you want is diet soda, since the third is Whole Foods.

I normally select Amazon Fresh rather than Amazon Prime Same Day. I have no idea what the difference is, so it's just habit at this point.

Yesterday morning there were no available same-day delivery windows at Amazon Fresh. Sad face. So I emptied my cart and figured I'd have to drive over to Meijer and deal with the seething mass of aberrant humanity doing their last minute frantic shopping.

On a whim, though, I decided to check Amazon Prime Same Day. They did have delivery slots available. No idea what the difference is, but there you go.

So I got my soda and avoided the scrum. Hooray!

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Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to all my blog readers who do the Christmas thing... although here in the USA, like in most of the Western world, we've managed to make Christmas a sufficiently multilayered holiday that it's possible to participate with any amount of religious content or none at all. 

If you want to do the full midnight Mass experience, we got you covered. If you just want a wintertime holiday about seeing family and exchanging gifts with friends and pretty lights on neighborhood houses, well, we got that too.

(And miss me with your annual "War on Christmas" gripes about how the Woke made it illegal or frowned on to say anything but "Happy Holidays". I realize that's a standard play in the wintertime culture war playbook, the "off tackle left on three" of the Right, and it gets the rubes reliably riled every December, but it is sooooo tired.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

To all y'all who visit VFTP, I'm thankful for you. May you have the splendidest of all possible Turkey Days.

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Synthetic South

There's a good article here on "Hillbilly TV", the synthetic South that ruled prime time television in the Sixties, and the subsequent "Rural Purge" that CBS did in 1973, and then the resurrection of the synthetic South around the turn of the Millennium.

The Southernification is real.

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Lebber's Day

Yesterday being Lebber's Day, I got some writing done and mowed the lawn.

It was a pretty good day for car-spotting, too...

A newer Ford GT

An older Mini

We've seen this 1939 Olds hot rod before

A nice Hampton Blue 1965 Coupe de Ville ragtop

Happy Birthday to VFTP!

On this day twenty years ago I posted the first post here at View From The Porch and I’ve kept it up on a near-daily basis for two whole decades now.

Thank you for reading, each and every one of you!

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