...for just under five bucks:

Also, when I was slumming in the forums (was up at night & bored) I came upon a thread about blocked users... Of course it was locked before I got there, but I wouldn't have posted anything in it in any case. Right now I don't have too many people on mine....as my time here piles up, however, I suspect the list will too.

Father Time is not a gentleman...to put it mildly.

If he were, then we would retain our abilities (even if not our looks) until shortly before our passing. But we don't...no lifeform with any complexity ever does, when it lives that long. Time & entropy DGAF.

Been looking at the last few canes I built, & how I plan to slightly alter a couple of 'em...

For years I've known about the Krenov School. I never went there, not even for any of its short courses offered in the summer. Something I didn't previously mention here: my first woodworking teacher was my mother's 2nd husband. Under him (it was an apprenticeship, basically) I built a Shaker-style desk out of big box-store pine. Other than my not making any drawers for it, it turned out pretty good for a mid-sized project. This was in the early 1990's.

I can't go to the Krenov School now, mainly because of chronic issues & the commitment I made this year. (Eventually gonna put a house on a place I bought, but it'll take a while to do. My health issues are a major reason for that) So learning the craft in a structured curriculum, especially in a great place like that, is not possible for me now...

Jesus in an Edsel, how I wish it were. I'd just love to enroll, & be out there for weeks or months & soak up all the knowledge & build something better than anything else I've made in my life. But that six-day-per-week daytime schedule is impossible. (Also, it's pretty expensive now)

There's no point in feeling this way about it, but emotions have nothing to do with reason.

...the older you get, the more conscious you can become of roads not taken. The young artists I see on here don't know anything about it...yet. Some of them will, in a few years. They'll know soon enough.

"The thing is to become a master and in

your old age to acquire the courage to do

what children did when they knew nothing."

- Ernest Hemingway

Some new names have been showing up on the follower list in the last few days. To those of you who recently found me, welcome...feel free to hang out for a while. You can call me Shade.

If you need something to pass the time, you can always browse through my art here. As of now there are 49 pieces in the gallery. I'm especially proud of the Mixed Media section; most of my best work on NG is in there. I do fancy writing & text-based art sometimes...you can find it in Lettering/Calligraphy. If you want to know more about me apart from my creative work, read a few previous entries in my blog here. My interests involve history, finance & investing, geopolitics, & not taking life any more seriously than I have to.

Edit: With all that out of the way, here are some interesting pictures:

from my weather app, 0330 hrs

same but with IR mode layered on it, at 45%

Hmmm...am still not that worried but Milton might cut a bit close. I should get more canned food. Gotta do laundry, too. I still have plenty of H2O. And vino. We'll see what happens.

In foreign affairs I mostly look eastward...been doing so for a few years now. The Far East (China, India, SE Asia) is most important with the Near East (the Arab nation-states, Israel, Iran) running a close 2nd place. The following clip describes an instance of why:

For geopolitical analysis, Peter Zeihan is okay. He tends to be overconfident in his predictions but that's par for the course--I've made that mistake myself. His knowledge of the Near ("Middle") East is rather weak, whereas in the West he's on firmer ground. He has a sense of history, which is more than can be said for some well-known members of the commentariat today. Zeihan is definitely correct in that western Europe is even more in decline than the US...I'd say he underestimates conditions in France. It's true that their demography is not as desperate as Germany's (or Britain's). However, look at the overall situation:

• their political scene is tribalized like ours, with right-wing parties racking up small victories here & there.
• Macron doesn't command the respect he had when he first won the throne.
• France did not vet migrant flows for a few vital years--the government tightened things up afterward, but it's too late. The bombings in Paris & attacks in Nice & other locales in the 2000's are evidence of the jihadist networks inside the country, which the North African & Middle Eastern communities there support to varying degrees.
• Related point: Islam commands allegiance in France whereas its Catholicism is moribund...the percentages of French who practice it mainly do so out of habit. Their churches are museum pieces for tourists while the mosques are full. The word is Marseille is practically another Morocco now.

All of the foregoing is evidence that as a great power, France is hollowing out from the inside.

A couple nights ago I slummed around in comment threads again, out of boredom & insomnia:

1. I am another year older. I hate it. Growing old stinks. It rained all day, which suited my mood perfectly.
2. This:

It's a piece of steel, heavy for its size...maybe 25 lbs. Flat & bent in two places, with a few holes in it. Gotta be 3/4" thick. The plate would do well once it's fastened to a tree stump at the right height.

I will need a platform to work metal on, in years to come.

In other unimportant news, a few nights ago I couldn't sleep & was bored shitless (which isn't news at all)...because of that, I found this:

Also, I added to my sketchy art thread. Check it out when you're sufficiently bored, gentle reader.

Edit: The steel plate is not in fact bent in two places. It is level on one side. That'll be the top side.

"You know there's a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you're going to have some accountability on facts, etc. But look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda, and they're putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.

Democracies around the world now are struggling with the absence of a sort of truth arbiter, and there’s no one who defines what facts really are."

- John Kerry, on disinformation & climate change

Got through the storm okay...it wasn't much worse than what I expected. The power went off at O-dark-hundred, then came back on at about four in the morning. That was a nice surprise, as I have a plan for if the power ever goes out for 24+ hrs. Didn't have to use it, obviously. I feel for the poor souls in GA, TN & the Carolinas.

It occurred to me that in my discussions on here with @TheMiamiDeSantos, not all of you may know what we were talking about. If you'd like to learn more about modern finance, great. You should know it as an inhabitant of this modern world. Everyone should have basic knowledge about how to invest their money. However, you must be cautious about who you listen to/read & what you learn. The Internet has made learning about finance way easier than it has ever been, but it's also increased the amount of erroneous info, lies, & plain old bullshit by several orders of magnitude. In any field the easiest people to fool are the noobs. There are a thousand & one YT channels about finance & investing; not all of them are of equal value--or are of any value at all. Be careful who you listen to & believe. If someone has a quick smile & is trying to sell you some kind of "online course" then most likely it's a scam.

Now with that out of the way, here are a couple clips for "Stock Market Indices 101". The first one is a bit lengthier for the more scholarly among you whereas the second one is more recent:

The above clips are American-centric but don't let that throw you off. Most modern countries have at least one index; the more developed ones have two or more indices to choose from. This is undoubtedly true if you live in Europe, Latin America or anywhere in Asia. Japan has the Nikkei 225, Hong Kong has the Hang Seng Index (HSI), Saudi Arabia has the Tadawul All Share, etc.

Also, my take on it: Ignore the Dow Jones. As an index it isn't representative of the stock market today. 30 companies cannot serve as a reliable indicator for a market with stocks in > 4,000 firms in it, no matter how successful those 30 companies may be. I pay attention to the S&P & the NASDAQ. There are also more focused indices--mid-cap, tech, mining/metals, consumer staple goods, a whole bunch--that not only give you a more well-rounded impression of the market as a whole, but can also provide good investment opportunities as well.