Well the last couple of weeks have been rough here…

… at grouchyfarmer.com’s palatial headquarters. I somehow managed to entirely mess up my right hip and only now am I getting back to normal. I could stand or sit, but transitioning between those two situations caused such excruciating pain I could hardly stand it. The consensus was I severely strained or perhaps even tore some muscles in there somehow. Going to the bathroom was pure torture because sitting down on the commode or standing up after sent a pain through my hip that made me want to weep. And I could forget completely about getting out on the bike.

So even though it’s now early summer and absolutely beautiful out there and the gardens are thriving, I’ve been more or less cooped up in the house being more grouchy than usual and not having enough ambition to do much of anything.

Anyway I’m about 80% back to normal now. I’m at the point where I might try taking the bike out for a run around the block in the next day or two just to see how it goes.

Another thing that had me grumpy is that except for the first night I had the new Sestar 30 Pro telescope, every single freaking night we’ve had has been overcast. Do you have any idea how incredibly frustrating it is to have a brand new telescope and having cloudy weather every single night? Arrggghh!

But now, finally! We had clear skies early last evening and I was able to get the scope out…

Well I say able to get the scope out. And it was out, but I was sitting inside comfortably at the kitchen table having a snack while running the scope from my iPad. If you’ve ever had to endure dealing with clouds of mosquitoes, freezing temperatures and the other inconveniences of using a visual telescope, you can imagine just how amazing it felt to be running the scope comfortably from inside the house. It almost felt like, well, cheating, somehow. And I suppose some amateur astronomers will claim that it is. Spending hours outside in the dark, having your blood sucked dry by mosquitoes in the summer, or trying to keep your fingers and toes from freezing in the fall and winter, is, according to some of them, part of the “joys” of amateur astronomy.

Yeah, sure it is…

I got some neat images despite the fact that it wasn’t even fully dark yet when I started this. Last night was the shortest night of the year so at about 10 PM or so when I started it wasn’t even completely fully dark yet.

Let’s start off with this.

M 13

That’s a globular star cluster designated as M 13. It’s the great globular star cluster in the Hercules constellation and it is an astonishing thing when you discover what it actually is. Globular clusters are groups of hundreds, even tens of thousands of stars tightly packed into a tiny, spherical group. In this case several hundreds of thousands of stars packed into an area less than 145 light years across. Exactly how many stars are in there isn’t known but it could be as many as a half million.

M 51

Above is M 51, the Whirlpool galaxy and its companion. That this one turned out this good surprised me a bit because even though it was high in the sky, near the zenith, my conditions here at the house are horrible with light pollution so bad you can almost read a large print book sitting in the backyard at midnight, plus it wasn’t fully dark yet. All things considered I’m pleased that it turned out this good.

The one that really surprised me was this one, though:

NGC 6888

That’s NGC 6888, the Crescent Nebula in Cygnus. Nebulas like this can be a pain in the neck to image in light polluted locations like mine so I was surprised I was able to capture anything at all. That this not only showed up but even shows some color was a bit amazing to me.

Now let’s do a little experiment. I’m going to take that same image of M51 up there and run it through some AI filtering and see what happens. I’m not entirely sure how this is going to turn out because this is the first time I’ve tried this.

The same image as above but “enhanced” with AI

Hmm… I’m not entirely sure what to make of this. I don’t believe for a moment that there was enough information in that original image of mine for the AI to come up with what looks suspiciously like an image that was taken with the Hubble from NASA. I’m suspecting that instead of enhancing the image it’s sucking up data from NASA’s telescope database and adding it in.

Let’s see what it does with that nebula

NGC 6888

Hmm, again, I’m not sure where it’s getting the data from to do this because I don’t believe there was enough information in the original image to get these kinds of results.

Anway, that’s it for now. Just wanted to share the new images from the scope.

A One Paragraph Record Review. You Too Can Experience the Horror that is The Smurfs All Star Show!


OMG the horror… Every single person involved in the production of this abomination should be locked up before they can commit further atrocities. It is difficult to describe the experience of listening to this — this thing. It sort of resembles, well, the nearest comparison I can come up with is Alvin and the Chipmunks on a particularly bad batch of acid singing lyrics written by someone with a smaller vocabulary that my cat and who was told by a cynical marketing agency to “Just write whatever crap you can come up with” and was about 3 martinis into a 4 martini lunch. About halfway through the first track I wanted to wash my ears out with bleach.

Yes, you too can experience the horror of the Smurf’s All Star Show for just $1 at the Hilbert St. Vincent de Paul thrift store.

Laster Upgrade, Backpack Upgrade, First Rose of Summer

If you’ve been following this blog for a while you know I mess around with laser engravers/cutters and my two machines are both from a company called Wecreat, the Vision Pro and the Lumos. Wecreat recently came out with some very significant new galvo style lasers under the Lumos model name, the Lumos Flex and the Lumos Ultra. The Ultra is way outside my price range, about $3,500. But considering it’s a UV and MOPA laser all included in one package, that’s an extremely good price.

The Lumos. Both my standard unit and the Flex use this same chassis. The only difference is the laser head itself.

It was the Flex I was interested in. It’s a significant upgrade from my mine. I had a 3W infrared laser and a 10W blue diode laser in mine. The Flex looked like it was exactly the same as mine but with a new laser head that replaces the IR laser with a 15W fiber laser and upgrades the blue laser to 15W.

The blue laser upgrade is significant, but it’s not so much more powerful that I’d really be tempted by that. It was the fiber laser that made things interesting. Fiber lasers generally produce enough energy to cut metal. And they’re capable of doing some very interesting tricks like 3D embossing. They’re pretty slick stuff. And yes, I wanted one but fiber lasers have always been way outside of a price I was comfortable with. Wecreat wants about $2,000 for the thing and I’d already dropped way too much money this year on laser equipment.

This is the laser head, the unit that includes the lasers. Just undo a single bolt, pull it out, and pop the Flex laser head in, tighten the bolt, and away you go.

But then I was reading the fine print at the end of the hype/advertising for the Flex and noticed a brief mention of the fact that my original Lumos could be upgraded to the Flex by simply replacing the laser head module, and for half the cost of the complete Flex. Now I was interested again.

I sent an email to the company and said “Hey, how can I get one of these upgrade modules?” And they wrote back and said “send us some money and give us about 2 weeks to build one and we’ll get it to you in about 3 weeks.”

And well here we are, 3 weeks later and it is now in my hot little hands. It took all of about 3 minutes to replace the old laser head with the new one, download a new version of their Makeit software, and away we go.

I haven’t had much of a chance to do more than fiddle with it a bit because I’ve been busy with the old unit making a batch of humorous drinks coasters that need to get finished up. But I’m going to have time to put it through its paces this weekend and I’ll let you know how it goes. The bit of fiddling I’ve had a chance to do indicates that it has a heck of a lot of potential. I entertained myself for some time cutting holes in thin sheet metal and engraving things on various bits of metal I had laying around before I had to get back to work. Long enough to see this thing is going to be a hoot to play with.

It’s going to take some time to figure out the exact setting I’ll need in order to get it to do what I want. But once I figure that out this thing is going to be very useful indeed.

Roses

Every year we think this dopey rose bush in the front yard by the sidewalk has finally died, and every year it surprises us and somehow manages to come back. This year I was sure it was dead. When MrsGF pulled on one of the branches something like 3/4 ths of the rootball came out, completely rotted away. I was sure it was dead. Only no, it isn’t, somehow.

I have no idea how this thing manages to survive. Amazing plant. Just saw the first flower of the season and it’s absolutely loaded with buds.

Cats and Backpacks

MrsGF got me a new backpack to carry stuff when I’m out on the bike, but the cat seems to have fallen in love with it. If I put it anywhere where she can get at it, she’s immediately sitting on it. Cats are weird.

We Got Photos! First Images with the SeeStar S30 Pro

I had a chance to get outside with the SeeStar last night shortly after dark and got some surprisingly good images. Here are three.

M81, also called Bode’s Nebula or Bode’s Galaxy, on the left, with M82 on the right.

That’s M81 up there, that fuzzy blob just left of center. The more slender cigar shaped blob to the right of center is M82, another galaxy. The long streak you see to the right of M82 is from a satellite that streaked across the frame while the scope was making the image.

But a bit about the “M” designation first. It is the abbreviation of the name Messier, an 18th century astronomer from France. He published an astronomical catalog of about 110 objects that are now known as Messier objects, abbreviated as just M. Messier’s obsession was comets. He was fascinated by these fuzzy, blob like “visitors” and hunted for them whenever he had the chance. But he kept finding a lot of things that, with his primitive observing equipment of the time, looked like fuzzy blobs just like comets, but weren’t. Unlike comets, these objects did not appear to move, therefore they weren’t comets. So he started to chart these comet-like objects so he and other astronomers wouldn’t waste their time thinking these things were comets. The final catalog he published had 103 such objects listed, and eventually researchers discovered he’d found several more so now we have some 110 Messier objects. The objects in the catalog were not ones he studied scientifically, he thought they were annoyances, really.

The Messier object catalog and the “M” designation of these objects is still used even by scientists today because they are some of the brightest and most easily found deep space objects out there, and they are among the most popular targets for amateur astronomers.

Messier had absolutely no idea that when he was looking at M81 he was looking at a massive galaxy about 12 million light years away. In fact M81 and M82 are actually part of a whole group of galaxies known collectively as the M81 group.

M81 is a large, grand spiral type galaxy and is the home to a massive central black hole. It is relatively bright at my location this time of year and it is almost directly overhead, making it an ideal target at my extremely light polluted home.

It is called Bode’s galaxy (or sometimes Bode’s Nebula) because it was first discovered in 1794 by an astronomer named Johann Bode, not Messier, and was later included by Messier in his catalog.

If you can see M81, you can almost certainly spot M82 as well right away. It is also about 12 million light years from us and is part of the same group of galaxies. M82 is seen edge on and is sometimes called the Cigar galaxy. It is an extremely interesting one too because it is what astronomers call a starburst galaxy. It is generating new stars at a rate that’s 10 times that of the Milky Way. It is believed that the reason why is that M82 had a close encounter with M81 in the past, and gas it sucked up from M81 along with the gravitational disturbances the encounter caused are responsible for this.

Both M81 and M82 are relatively easy to see. A decent pair of binoculars will let you see at least a couple of small, fuzzy blobs at a dark site. A good telescope will show them in much more detail, of course.

Now we come to M97

M97, the Owl Nebula

That’s M97, also called the Owl Nebula. Not a very impressive image, I know, but that I could get an image of it at all from this location is a bit astonishing.

M97 is an entirely different kind of object. It’s a planetary nebula about 2,000 light years away. It’s called the Owl Nebula because some people who observe it under high magnification and large telescopes claim that it looks like it has two dark “eyes”. Personally I think they knocked back a few too many Schlitz (real astronomers drink Schlitz, of course. Or Grain Belt. But now that Schlitz is shut down they’re going to be stuck with Grain Belt.) before they started observing but, there you go.

That I was able to get an image this good with just a 4 minute exposure with this tiny telescope astonished me, frankly. When I computer enhance the images I can even see the two dark “eyes”.

The last object I imaged is M57, the Ring Nebula.

M57 the Ring Nebula

This is another planetary nebula and I was amazed the image turned out at all because the scope was aimed just off to one side of a street light that really should have ruined the image completely. It’s about 2,000 light years from Earth and while relatively bright and easy to see in even a fairly small scope, trying to get an image of it with the conditions I have here was a bit astonishing.

I am extremely pleased with the Seestar so far. After working with the 11″ Celestron for so long, getting results like this from a scope not much bigger than a hard cover book seems almost like magic to me. If I’m getting results this good from my terribly light polluted location here, what will the results be like when I get it out to a relatively dark site like my sister in law’s farm? I can’t wait to try that.

We Have Telescope, Folks

Sun

Very first photo with the Seestar s30 Pro telescope taken literally 15 minutes after unboxing the scope and setting it up on the driveway in the backyard, using the included solar filter. Showing the currently visible sunspot groups.

That’s the ‘scope itself over there in the photo on the left charging up on the kitchen table. Yes it’s tiny, about the size of a thick hard cover book, and weighs about the same.

I have to admit that I’m a bit in awe of this little beast. A telescope this small, this cheap, with that small of an aperture, should not be this good.

You can be darn sure you’re going to be seeing more images from this thing in the near future.

Solar Update, Garden Update,mRandom Thoughts

Solar Update: Well it’s almost 7 days now of running the house completely off grid and I’m still a bit surprised that this is all working so well. For the first couple of days I was very anxious, kept checking the system all the time, worrying about the numbers, waiting for something, anything to go wrong. But it didn’t. The EG4 12000XP has been just loafing along, easily handling everything we’ve been running. It’s internal cooling fans never even had to ramp up above a whisper. We’re only using about 20% – 25% of our battery capacity over night and we’re making enough solar power to not just run the house during the day but to recharge the battery bank by noon at the latest.

I’ll probably switch back to grid this evening before we start to use the battery because we’re supposed to be looking at rainy weather now for a couple of days. I hope it comes soon. We need rain very badly.

And to add to an already very pleasant day, I managed to snag a photo of this little guy just a short time ago when I was out on the front deck. There were actually two of them coming to the feeder in the space of just a few minutes.

Garden update

The gardens are all looking good after a slow start. Some of the stuff looks like it got hit by frost judging from some of the leaf damage I’m seeing, but all of our plants made it through and are looking pretty good.

The garlic we planted last fall is looking amazing. My only regret is that we didn’t plant two or three times as much. We’re going to correct that this fall. We’re going to massively expand the area for garlic. The bulbs keep very well, too. Just let them “cure” in the garage on a screen for a week or so, then put in net bags and hang them up in the basement where it’s cool, dark and relatively dry. They keep for months that way, as do our onions. As we’ve discovered with just about every vegetable we’ve ever grown, the home grown garlic always has a much richer, more intense flavor than the grocery store stuff
In this bed we have cilantro on the left and carrots on the right. The cilantro re-seeded itself from last year. We didn’t have to plant anything. We harvest some of the seeds in the fall to use as coriander and just let the rest drop to the ground to grow back the following spring.
Lettuce, beets and onions here. Lots of beets and lots of onions. We love our beets: roasted, fried, sweet sour, pickled… Yum. And we go through a lot of onions here too. We’ve had good luck with planting onions all around the outside of the beds with other veggies planted in the central areas.
Three tomato plants in this one. They’ll almost completely take over the entire bed once they reach full size. And, of course, more onions. We were only going to put in 3 tomato plants this year because we have quite a bit of canned pasta sauce left from last year but somehow we’ve ended up with 6 in total.
This bed is all celery. We didn’t plant any last year and regretted that. Home grown celery is so different from the stuff you get in the grocery store it’s almost like they aren’t even the same species of plant. The flavor of the home grown stuff is just so much more intense that you’ll never be satisfied with grocery store stuff again once you try growing your own.

You’ve no doubt noticed the liberal use of #10 cans around some of the plants. That’s a trick MrsGF has been using for decades now. The cans help protect the young plants from light frost, being battered by high winds, and especially from those stupid rabbits. Once the plants are strong enough and well established enough, we pull the cans off. By that time they’re usually too mature to be tempting for the rabbits.

The lupins look exceptionally vivid in color this year for some reason. Delightful plant but we’ve found them to be very invasive if you let the seeds just drop.
The purple irises are starting to come to an end but the white irises are now coming into full bloom to make up for it

And to finish things up for this time, how about a cat holding her favorite carrot?

The Moon Landing Fiasco

{Fiasco: A complete, often ridiculous, embarrassing failure or disaster. It typically refers to an event or ambitious project that goes horribly wrong and completely fails to meet expectations.}

Yes, I said fiasco, because that is what this is. Look, I’ve been reading science fiction almost my entire life. I actually pretended to be sick so I could skip school to watch the original moon landings. I would dearly love to see people back on the moon. But even considering all of that I am also a realist and this whole moon landing scam that NASA is pushing is… Well let’s take a look at it in detail, shall we?

There’s been a lot of hype and, frankly, a lot of 100% pure bullshit being spouted by NASA’s proposed landing of human beings on the moon again. NASA is now claiming that the much delayed moon landing is going to take place in early 2028.

Yeah. Sure it is. The chances of that happening are about the same as me winning one of those billion dollar lotteries which I would never buy a ticket for in the first place.

This whole moon landing fiasco is now years past it’s original launch date and of billions of dollars over budget and while the SLS and Orion ship have flown, we’re probably at least 5 years away from NASA actually being able to pull off a moon landing. They sure as hell aren’t going to be able to do it in something like 18 months. Especially after Blue Origin’s “New Glenn” rocket lit up the whole space coast in Florida with one of the most spectacular explosions seen in decades, taking out not only the rocket itself but its transporter and most of the launch facility. And the New Glenn rocket is (or was) an essential part of this plan to put people back on the moon.

And as for plan itself, it is so bizarrely, hilariously complicated it would have made Rube Goldberg proud. A plan that’s so ridiculously nonsensical that one might even claim, with some justification, that it was more about finding a way to flood private companies with taxpayer money than it ever was about actually landing on the moon.

This plan depends on SpaceX to get specially designed variants of its Starship developed, including a human rated lander. Maybe. It depends on Blue Origin (and SpaceX too, maybe?) to develop landing craft. Maybe. It depends on in orbit refueling of ships. Maybe. It depends on dozens of other private vendors being able to deliver promised equipment, almost none of which is actually in existence except as computer models.

Did you see all of those “maybes” up there? That’s part of the problem. Nobody seems to know for sure who is going to do what or how or why. Both Blue Origin and SpaceX are supposed to be developing some kind of lander either to carry humans down to the surface or at least cargo. Maybe. SpaceX is maybe going to be using Starship to deliver cargo to the lunar surface. Maybe. SpaceX is maybe going to be using another variant of Starship as a tanker to do in-flight refueling of other space vehicles. Maybe.

SpaceX? It hasn’t even managed to pull off a completely successful test of it’s basic Starship. It doesn’t even have one that’s done a full orbit, for heaven’s sake. The last launch looked promising with the new Type 3 ship and booster, but that had issues so serious that the FAA has put a hold on any new launches. And even if that particular ship is successful, it’s not the one that would be used for the lunar program. That would require an entirely different variant of the starship. The variant of Starship that is currently being built and is in testing has nothing to do with the lunar mission. It is one that has a single, specific purpose, to deliver huge numbers of Starlink satellites into orbit.

But at least we know that SpaceX can move fast. And once it’s new Gigabay production facility is up and running in Texas it can crank out its heavy lift booster and Starships in a fraction of the time it can now. But even so, to come up with an entirely new variant of the Starship, put it through testing and several launches to make sure it actually works? Build one rated to carry human beings? In less than 18 months? Sorry. No. Isn’t going to happen.

Then there’s Blue Origin. SpaceX has the infrastructure to crank out boosters and starships in an astonishingly short period of time at least. Blue Origin doesn’t.

It’s New Glenn rocket was supposed to be the launch platform for the Blue Moon Mark I and Mark II landers which were supposed to deliver cargo and eventually also land humans on the moon. (Maybe) And while the New Glenn launch platform has worked, you have ot remember that one out of the three previous flights failed to deliver its payload to orbit and now this one blew up on the pad taking most of the launch site with it.

Then there’s NASA’s SLS, made out of cobbled together parts left over from the shuttle program, including 40 year old space shuttle engines they found in a warehouse somewhere, and that has been plagued with hydrogen leaks, and a Orion space craft which has a highly questionable and potentially dangerous heat shield, thruster problems and non-working interior plumbing.

And then there’s the cost. I don’t really know what the dollar amounts are going to be to cover the costs of SpaceX and Blue Origin for their part in all of this but you can be damn sure it isn’t going to be cheap. But I do know what the SLS is going to cost and it is going to be mind bogglingly expensive. You ready for this? Hold onto your shorts.

NASA’s own inspector general is stating that the first four Artemis missions are going to cost $4.1 billion per launch.

That is not a typo. Four point one billion dollars per launch.

And as I said that number doesn’t include the costs from the required equipment and launches from SpaceX and/or Blue Origin according to the information I have.

Then there is the one question that no one seems to be asking for some reason.

Why?

Seriously. Why? Why do we want to put people on the moon again? Ignore all of that bullshit about somehow mining ice to create rocket fuel to launch Mars missions and all of that guff because it is exactly what I said it was, bullshit. It is not going to happen. Period.

Ignore the bullshit about mining the moon for exotic minerals or other nonsense like that. That is also exactly what I called it. Bullshit. There are no exceedingly rare, exotic minerals on the moon to be mined in the first place. None. Zilch. Zero. If you believe there are, please tell me what rare minerals are worth about $20,000,000 per pound? Because that’s about how much it would cost to retrieve material from the moon, about twenty million dollars per pound.

NASA is planning on an eventual 25 missions to the moon. At current prices, that would work out to about $100 billion.

Let’s look at this a bit differently, shall we? $100 billion would be enough money to build a basic house for every single homeless person in the entire country. Seriously. Run the numbers yourself if you don’t believe me.

There are about 770,000 homeless persons in the US according to the most reliable numbers I can find. A basic, small, 1 bedroom house can be built for about $100,000. We could literally build a basic 1 bedroom home for every single homeless person in the country for less than the total cost of NASA’s moon landing program.

So someone please explain this to me?

It’s Iris Time! Plus Assorted Stuff!

Yes, it’s iris time again. If you’ve been following this blog for a while you must know by now that I absolutely love irises. We have a whole garden devoted almost excolusively to irises. And they’re just coming into full flower now. Here are a few photos from earlier today.

And for no reason at all, here’s a silly cat image I stole borrowed from Pete over at https://beetleypete.com/ If you enjoy posts from a retired English gentleman who occasionally puts up very silly images, posts some delightful fiction and chats about life in general in the small town of Beetley, in Norfolk, go check it out. He is a lovely, gentle soul, with a wry sense of humor.

Other stuff:

Meanwhile I’ve been working on this…

It is, heaven help me, a cat riding a T-Rex through the deserts of Utah. Thats going to be engraved on a 37cm X 25cm panel inlaid into a gift box MrsGF is making. Sometimes the stuff I come up with when I sit down with Photoshop makes me wonder what’s wrong with my brain. But never mind.

BTW: If any of you out there would be interested in that image up there let me know and I could make it available for downloading here. I think. Maybe. It would be as a standard .PNG file that would be suitable for importing into a laser engraver. If you’re interested let me know at theoldgrouch@grouchyfarmer.com. I never really intended to set this up to download files but if people are interested in stuff like this I’d probably set up a separate page here with just a listing of downloadable files for laser cutting/engraving.

If you have comments or questions you can reach me at that email address as well.

Weather

The weather has been, well, odd, to say the least. Over in Two Rivers about 20 or s0 miles from here where friends of ours live, they had an intense and highly localized storm that leveled half the trees in the city the other day. Parts of the town were without power for three days. They estimate they had straight line winds up to 80 mph. Meanwhile just a few miles away they got nothing but some rain.

Temperatures have been highly erratic here. One day we have a high in the 50s, the next it can be well over 80. Yesterday it hit 92 here. Now it’s getting cooler and we might struggle to hit 65 by the end of the week. They were predicting thunderstorms last night but those fizzled out before they even really got started. We got about a tenth of inch of rain and that was it.

It’s very, very dry out there. We’re going to have to start watering the gardens already tomorrow.

Weather patterns are changing drastically all around the world. I have friends and family scattered around the globe and what I hear from them is often downright frightening. In India where my niece’s husband’s family is from, this May has been one of the warmest on record with temperatures pushing 113F in Delhi. One of my best friends lives in Barcelona half the year and they’re seeing temperatures pushing up to 100F or beyond. Even in the UK temperatures have been pushing up into the 90s.

Farming

With a name like grouchyfarmer I suppose I should talk about the ag industry at least briefly. Even though I’ve wandered far away from farming long ago and have dabbled in everything from writing to electronics to arts and crafts, I’m still a farmer at heart and what I see going on out there in the ag world is heartbreaking. Especially since all of the problems farmers are having right now are due entirely to decisions being made by power mad, greedy politicians who only care about enriching themselves and clinging desperately to their little bits of power and influence.

Farm bankruptcy rates are up by 50% or more in the last year, and look like they’re going to get even worse as time goes on.

Diesel, the fuel farmers use in their equipment, has gone up more than 60%, from about $3.47 to $5.60. Even as high as $7.50 in some places like California.

Fertilizer prices have spiked up 61% as well, and exactly at the wrong time when planting season is here and young plants need to be fertilized to get strong growth.

Meanwhile prices farmers get for two of their primary crops, corn and soybeans, have plummeted to the point where it looks like most farmers around here aren’t even going to be able to break even.

Dairy farmers are doing a bit better, but they have problems too. I know some farmers around here who are working 18 hour days because all of their hired help basically packed up and fled, even if they were in the country legally. Word is out that if you’re Hispanic, even if you’re in the country legally, you’re going to be swept up, detained for weeks if not months, and probably end up deported even if you have a green card. We used to have a fairly large number of Hispanic families here in town. Wonderful people who were hard working, honest, friendly and becoming part of the community. They’re all gone. All of them.

It’s going to be a hard year for farmers around here. A very hard year. And the tragic part of it is that this is 100% the fault of that bunch of sniveling, greedy, power mad politicians in DC. And I mean both political parties are at fault here. Democrats and Republicans both are more concerned with maintaining their little bits of power, trying to suck up ever more money from corporations and oligarchs through this system of legalized bribery we call a campaign financing system, that they’ve entire forgotten that they are supposed to be the representatives of the people in their home districts.

Okay, rant over. I swore I was not going to get political here in this blog and for the most part I’ve kept that promise. But when I see the sheer crap that is going on in Washington and here in Madison in the state legislature… Never mind. Enough.

Astronomy

It’s been so long since I talked about it here that you’ve probably forgotten that I’m also an amateur astronomer. That’s one of my telescopes down there, my 11″ Celestron.

I’ve reached a point in my life where I just have too many interests and hobbies and I’ve started to do a bit of triage. I’ve pushed aside some things like tinkering with electronics and a few other things to have more time to devote to the things I enjoy the most. So I’m able to spend more time with photography, art, the whole engraving thing and yes, astronomy.

My interests have changed a bit over the years. I’ve become more interested in astrophotography than in direct visual observation, especially photography of deep sky objects. The Celestron is a fantastic telescope but there are “issues”. It’s size and weight are one. That sucker is big and it is heavy. The optical tube assembly weighs in at around 60+ pounds and I’m not exactly a spring chicken any more. Trying to maneuver that thing up and down the stairs, getting it set up on its mount, etc, well I’m just not physically capable of wrestling with that thing without risking dropping $5,000 telescop down the back stairs. So it’s gone to live with my eldest son who is planning on using it as the core for a fixed observatory set up in his back garden with a small building with a roll off roof, concrete pier, power, internet, etc.

Meanwhile I have a new telescope on order that should be here by June 7, they tell me.

And as you can see, it is something entirely different from the Celestron. It doesn’t even look like a telescope to be honest. For one thing it is exclusively an astrograph telescope, it does photography only. It doesn’t permit visual observation at all. In fact I don’t even have to be near it to operate it. It is controlled by a tablet computer or app on a cell phone via WiFi or bluetooth so I no longer have to endure the clouds of mosquitoes that we get around here. Just set it up after dark, turn it on, and then sit in my nice, air conditioned house controlling it entirely by computer from the kitchen table. Or if I take it out to my sister in law’s farm to get away from the light pollution, from inside of my car.

I admit that I’m taking a bit of a chance here. I find it hard to believe that a scope this small and this cheap can get the results I see in the reviews of this thing. Supposedly this thing can get good images of even difficult deep sky objects like the Horse Head nebula in just a few minutes, even in relatively poor conditions. And it’s only about $600 compared to around $5,000 for something like my Celestron. It sounds too good to be true.

After I’ve had a chance to get it set up and have figured out how to use it, I’ll talk about it more.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Time for me to get out of here!

If I Have to Suffer Through This, So Do You

They dumped boxes and boxes full of records on me a couple of days ago so I can sort, clean, grade and price them. So if I have to suffer through this, why should I do it alone? Misery loves company, as the old saying goes. And I’m more than willing to share.

I know someone is going to ask why so many of these reviews are of records that are so bad. The reason is simple. Let me explain.

Theodore Sturgeon was a writer from the Golden Age of science fiction and he is claimed to have developed Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap. I suspect he came up with that when he was a magazine editor having to sort through the slush pile. Having been an editor myself, I can sympathize. And nowhere is Sturgeon’s Law more appropriate than when it comes to music. Frankly, judging from the stuff that comes through here, it’s closer to 99% than 90%. A lot of the music produced both now and in the past is, frankly, mediocre at best and pure crap at the worst.

What makes things worse is that we’re a charity thrift shop. We don’t exactly get primo merch dumped in our donation boxes. All too often what we get is, well… “Hey, I know, instead of going to the expense of getting a dumpster and landfilling this stuff, let’s dump it on St. Vincent de Paul for free!” Seriously. That’s what we have to deal with . We actually had to install security cameras and literally call the sheriff’s department on people for trying to use as a free garbage disposal service.

What that means is very rarely do we get the “good stuff”. We don’t get pristine Beatles or Fleetwood Mac records. We don’t get beautiful old gems of recordings by Goodman or Elvis. What we get, all too often, is whatever was leftover that didn’t sell at the garage sale, even with a “FREE!” tag on it. Things like, oh “The Latin Mass for Nostalgic Catholics”. And yes, there really is such an album. It’s in the stack with the others.

Anyway, I’m going to do this a bit differently than the last time I put you through this. I’m just going to put up a pic of the album cover and the caption will be my review.

So here we go. Oh, I should warn you there may be sarcasm. In fact I can pretty much guarantee that there will be sarcasm.

Time for Another by ACE.
Tone deaf man with a sinus condition attempts to sing country. Badly. Fortunately the studio mixing is so horrid and over produced it renders the vocals almost unintelligible.
Land of Money by Hydra.
AC/DC wannabes make a great deal of noise and almost, but not quite, manage to produce something that can be listened to without actual physical pain. Almost.
The Nights by, well, The Nights? Maybe?
I read the notes twice and never did figure out what the hell the name of the group is. Not that it matters. Wow this one was good. I mean genuinely, seriously good. Solid 1970s era genuinely good funk. If this album doesn’t make you want to get up and move you’re probably dead.
Benny Rides Again by Francis Bay and his Orchestra.
This is a genuine rip off. They plaster the name Benny Goodman all over this thing to try to push sales. Has nothing to do with Goodman. At all. All they do is cover some songs the Goodman band did back during their heyday. And it was recorded at “The Brussels World’s Fair”. Ooo, the excitement. I perhaps shouldn’t be this harsh. The actual music isn’t horrible. They’re an average orchestra that manages to at least not butcher the music. But trying to gin up sales by plastering Benny Goodman’s name all over the record irritates me enormously.
How the hell have I been alive all this time and not heard of Don Nix before? Sort of a funky country vibe to it that I wouldn’t have expected to come out of Apple Studios. Some of the guitar work is absolutely excellent. Vocals are pretty good as well. This is the only one out of this whole crate of albums so far that I would have actually bought myself. Black Cat Moan, the 3rd track on side one is deliciously earthy and funky with a wonderful harmonica coming in. 
“Kyle” by, well, Kyle. I guess?
The horror that is this album will haunt my dreams for years to come. The guitar and bass aren’t tuned. They’re both ever so slightly off key. Kyle is off key. To the point where you wonder if the musicians (if you can call them that) are playing the same song he’s singing. I’ve had a lot of really bad albums come through here but only once or twice before have I come across one so bad that I wanted to take it out back, burn it, bury the ashes in an unmarked grave and then have it declared a crime against humanity. Half way through the first track the cats ran and hid under the sofa and didn’t come out until dark. I would have joined them if I could have. And then there’s that cover photo. OMG do I really need to go into detail about that cover photo? What, you couldn’t afford to pay for a stock photo of a woman in a swimsuit or something to try to jazz up this abomination?

The New Andre Kostelanetz “wonderland of sound”
Well, a “wonderland of sound” it isn’t. This is the sort of album that almost immediately begins to grate on your nerves. It is the epitome of “elevator music”. It takes popular tunes and genuinely good music of the day like Volare and Unchained Melody and turns them into generic, insipid pap that is utterly without emotion or meaning. I could actually feel my IQ dropping with every song I listened to from this album.

D-I-V-O-R-C-E by Tammy Wynette  
I know Tammy is supposed to be one of the queens of country western music. I know there are people out there who love the title song of this album. Don’t care. This album is probably one of the leading reasons for calls to suicide prevention hotlines. It isn’t that it’s done badly. It isn’t. It’s that the songs are so utterly and totally depressing that about 10 minutes into it you start to kinda wish that asteroid up there would just hit us and get it all over with. There simply is no joy in this album. None.


Ballet Folkloric de Mexico, Amalia Hernandez
While I’m not a huge fan of dance, I am a firm believer that the dance and the music are intimately intertwined with one another, and they should not, cannot, be separated. At least not without losing a great deal of the meaning. This album is a good example of that. Even worse, when they try to cram the music from a ballet or opera into a form like a vinyl LP where you only have about 20 minutes of recording time per side, they are forced to edit, truncate, to make it fit so you lose not only the context provided by the dance itself but also a great deal of the music as well.
Los Dioses, the first track on this album, is a good example. Look it up on Youtube and see the actual ballet and you’ll see what I mean. It isn’t that this album is bad. It’s actually pretty good. The problem is that you can’t take a ballet/opera that runs an hour and a half and which is intimately married with the dancers and acting on stage to provide it meaning, and cram it into two 20 minute LP sides.

I can’t seem to put a link in a caption, so here’s what Los Dioses is supposed to look and sound like. Yes, the quality of the recording is terrible but it’s good enough to give you an idea of what is missing from an album like this.

Frankie Yankovic Favorite Waltz and Polkas The Blue Skirt Waltz.
I love polka. I grew up with it. It originated in Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic. The name comes from the Czech word pulka, meaning half step or little step from the short, quick steps that were used in the dance that was done with the music. It’s supposed to be quick, light, fun, exciting. And somehow Yankovic in this album manages to suck every bit of joy and fun and excitement out of all of it. Dull? OMG it’s so dull. And so slick and over produced and lacking of any enthusiasm at all that he’s turned it into the polka equivalent of elevator music. They’ve even introduced a — Oh lord I don’t believe I have to say this, a crappy organ. Yes. An organ. In polka music. Will the horror never cease?

Ooo, ooo, it’s almost over at last! Just one more to go!


Christmas with the Vienna Boys Choir
Even though this record was from 1967 it looks like it was never played. After listening to the first side, I know why. One of the cats is still hiding under the bed and refuses to come out. But at least the neighbors’ dogs stopped barking now.

There! Finally! I’ve tortured you long enough.