Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

Coot’s Lesson 12 – Leave them wondering!

Posted by Ralph at 12:12 Coots Lessons

Feb 022012

: Image via Wikipedia

Don’t waste your time

One of the benefits when you are a cantankerous old coot is the time you save. People can be so demanding – especially friends. They have to know everything. How are you doing. What are you thinking. And, of course, the ever popular How are you feeling? They really don’t care about any of that. What they do care about is being known as the kind of person who cares. They will go to any length and waste any amount of your time just to make sure that you (and everybody else) know that. What a waste of your time and energy. Today’s lesson will teach you how to take control of your time by not answering questions. You have an important mission. It is your life and it isn’t a team project or a collaboration. Anything that is important to share, you will share when and how you think is right. And when is never after someone asks you a question. Don’t pause. Don’t ponder. Just keep moving.

Don’t explain yourself!

You are in charge of your life. You don’t owe anyone a response. You don’t have time to spend explaining yourself or your actions to anybody. We get hung up today because society expects niceties like answering your friends questions and explaining what you are doing and thinking. As a result we end up being pressured into wasting our time. Being a pushover never made anyone like you. Being a Coot lets you drop all the pretense. There is no need to explain yourself. There is no need to respond. Friends will understand. After all you are a Coot. You have your own drummer to march to and your friends will respect that. Sheep love to follow – even over a cliff.

Don’t argue!

Another reason not to respond is that people will argue with you. They either want to change your mind or understand your thinking. Either way you don’t give a rip and besides you don’t have time to waste. When you get a question it is like someone has thrown you a baseball, They gave you the ball. Just keep it. There is no need to throw it back. So long as you keep it you control the game. Take the ball and go home.

Don’t seek their approval.

They don’t have anything you want. You don’t need or want them to give you a thumbs up. Who are they to tell you what to do? You aren’t seeking to be chosen Miss Congeniality. You aren’t needy and you aren’t indecisive. You know what you are doing and even if you don’t, there is nothing gained by sharing that with anyone else. So when your friends, neighbors, coworkers, family want to know what is going on, don’t get sidetracked into explanations or arguments. Just keep on with what you are doing. Tell them what they can do if they want to help then keep moving. Let them make up their own reasons if they decide to help. Otherwise just leave them wondering about what you are doing and what is important. And they will be sure to understand that whatever you are doing is more important than anything in their trivial lives.

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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CNS for January 29, 2012 Light Storm

Posted by Ralph at 04:15 Headline News

Jan 292012

No time to dawdle this week

Show time at the old Coot’s New Service this week and a road trip to Visalia making the schedule tight for the news staff. The news hasn’t cooperated either. This week isn’t like last week with three stories vying for the top spot. It’s just an ordinary week with ordinary news and I don’t have time to keep searching.

The Northern Lights

This week’s story is about the wonders of nature. This week it’s the spectacular show from the northern lights courtesy of the sun. I don’t know how it works but the sun’s radiation does some spectacular things in the northern sky. I’ve never seen them and may never feel inspired to travel north when it’s cold just for the show. With the wonders of electronics we can share the experience of those who do.

THESE ARE THE TOP VIDEOS FROM LAST NIGHT’S STUNNING NORTHERN LIGHTS SHOW

The other great things about this kind of story is that there is no human intervention. What you see is what you get. There is no touchy-feeling explanation, no politically correct bullshit, no environmental craziness and no commercials. All there is is a big glow in the sky. All you need is a hot toddy and a warm parka. But don’t get cocky. Any minute now the government might decide to tax it or regulate it. All that radiation can’t be good.

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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Cantankerous Wednesday:California on my mind.

Posted by Ralph at 10:12 Plain 'ol Cantankerous

Jan 252012

Who hid the road?

The rain has stopped here in the idyllic Sierra foothills. This is the first rain of the rainy season, nearly two months late. In California if it don’t rain during the winter then it just don’t rain at all because it never rains in the Summer. Down in LA, rain is irrelevant or worse, a damn nuisance because it just floods the gutters and runs into the ocean after washing the oil residue off the roads and causing chaos on the freeways. The water is all imported from elsewhere. It’s a convenient arrangement.

California Aqeduct

In the hinterlands of Northern California its different. The rivers run all year round and until recently nobody metered water service. It was all you can use for a flat monthly fee. Folks up here are resentful of Southern California who, they think, want to steal their water. (One of the three SoCal aqueducts takes water from the north to the south). More than anything else, water divides California. Periodically proposals surface to divide California into two more homogenous states but they always founder. Northerners want to cut all ties to the south and stop sending precious water south but unfortunately for them Southerners have more population. There are so many more Southerners that a single California state will always provide water to the south no matter what kind of fuss the north puts up.

Culturally, the north feels superior with San Francisco as their prime argument. San Francisco is the crown jewel of California culture and a world class tourist mecca. Southern California has beaches and amusement parks but despite having better culture and multiple centers of culture isn’t a real cultural focus. Not that the southerners care. SoCal is liveable, diverse and culture-rich if you can avoid rush hour traffic. NoCal is insular and isolated once you leave the city by the bay. In Southern California, cities have no real meaning. You can drive 100 miles without seeing an open space and everybody listens to LA radio and watches LA TV. In Northern California, the SF influence doesn’t reach 50 miles. I don’t know why. Either SF isn’t interested in the hicks from the hinterlands or the hicks can’t take the smug superiority of SF.

Sacramento landmark

When I moved from the south to the north, it was culture shock for me. Sacramento was always just a far away place where the legislature gathered to plot against the electorate. Turns out it’s better than that. There is some culture here and no rush hour but you can still go the SF for the day. Sacramento is always your number two choice.

Not sure the point of these musings today. The rest of the country is probably fed up with California but after 40 years in the golden state I still can’t forget being drawn here from my earliest childhood fantasies. My grandmother subscribed to Sunset back in the 50’s (and it wasn’t easy to do when you live in Missouri). She adopted California when my grandfather worked in a California factory during WWII. I’d read the magazine and dream about the exotic California lifestyle. There wasn’t a chance that I’d end up anywhere else.

By now it seems that California has reached the end of its run and killed the California dream. California may always have been an illusion but 40 years ago, reality didn’t bite so bad. I don’t know that I will ever pull up stakes and relocate to a less-taxing environment but I am over my love-affair with California. It’s full of memories and my sons call it home. It may be time to move on but it is hard. After 40 years making my bed in California, I may just have to spend the rest of my life lying in it.

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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CNS for January 22, 2012 Those crazy Germans

Posted by Ralph at 05:06 Headline News

Jan 222012

This week there is news!

Deutsch: English: Otto Von Bismarck, Chancello...

Image via Wikipedia

The crack Coots News Team uncovered three good stories this week. Go figure! Weeks go by where the news just isn’t worth any attention and then we have three stories that deserve highlighting. I can’t decide if the news mongers are clueless rabble-rousers like the Wall Street protesters or fiendishly intelligent manipulators of public sentiment like our politicians. Anyway I had to make a choice today between Congress, the LA Unified School District and Germany. Any one of the three is abundantly scorn-worthy but I finally made a choice.

The winner is Germany.

Image via Wikipedia

It wasn’t even close. If there is a country that deserves to stand in the corner and wear a dunce cap, it is undeniably Germany. No other country comes close. The twentieth century should be dedicated to Germany, the instigator of our only two World Wars. Let’s just give them full credit. Germany invented World Wars and the two we experienced would never have happened without her. If we spent the first half of the twentieth century stopping those German World Wars, we spent the last half repairing the damage. There is just something terribly wrong about Germany. So much hubris, vanity, self congratulatory snobbery all wrapped up in a nice little package along with cuckoo clocks, strudel and cars you can’t afford. You couldn’t invent Germany.

The European economic crisis had it’s beginning in the welfare state mentality created by Bismark which became the model for the bloated European welfare system collapsing before our very eyes. You would think that Germans would be ashamed of their history and eager to create a new identity. Maybe that is why they support the European Union. Why else would they embrace its endless bureaucracy and limited freedom and rights. It all may be a smokescreen to hide the poisonous impact of the German state on the world under cover of the bland and oppressive European Union, just what Orwell warned us about. Who can say that Germany hasn’t been running a surreptitious World War III exporting German thinking to the rest of Europe? If so, it seems to be failing but that’s not the point of today’s story. Germany may be bad news for the world. German thinking may subvert reason and self interest as it spreads its influence throughout the world but Germany isn’t content with destroying the world. Germany is out to destroy Germany as today’s story demonstrates. Maybe we should all be cheering.

It’s all about purity

Solar energy boondoggle

Today’s story is about Germany’s quest for ideological purity in energy. If there is an energy source that comes close to the purity of the old Nazi notion of the master race, it is energy from the sun. It is so pure, so natural and lets be honest so blond and blue eyed. No nasty combustion producing pollutants. No misbehaving particles from reactors to damage the neighborhood. The sun is the mother’s milk of energy sources. What German wouldn’t love it? And therefore the uber-wise Germans have decided to get rid of nuclear energy and seriously limit producing electricity from those nasty fossil fuels. But like always with Germany, reality trumps German intellect. All powerful as the German state may be and brilliant as the German intellect has proven itself, there is still a small problem with solar energy in Germany. The sun don’t shine in Germany and no amount of intellect or money will change that face. It’s taking Germany to bankruptcy. They have found the solar subsidy sinkhole.

Re-Evaluating Germany’s Blind Faith in the Sun

I wish I could trust our own government to be more practical but that German thinking is quite contagious.

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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CNS-Headline News for January 15, 2012

Posted by Ralph at 11:08 Headline News

Jan 152012

Progress is our most important product!

Two stories today that tell you a lot about where we are going as a society. I know that I’m always saying how things are going to hell in a hand basket but there is still some of the old spirit left in the country. We haven’t all been transformed into self indulgent and selfish egomaniacs who have to experience self-gratification now and don’t care what it does to us or anybody else.

Not every movie is a non-stop explosion of unbelievable and incredibly noisy special effects that have nothing to do with the plot (oh I forgot, movies don’t have plots these days because today nobody can remember anything for more than 20 seconds).

Not every invention is designed to titillate the incredibly self-indulgent egos of the brain-dead products of modern education. At least not yet.

Where are those cities on the Moon?

We’ve come a long way from the optimistic ‘we can do anything’ mindset of the 50’s when I was a kid. You know the one where ‘Progress was our most important product’. We all believed that there would be cities on the moon and outposts on other planets before the 20th century was history. We believed in the American spirit and American ingenuity. We believed in the shining beacon on the hill that would lead the world into a new era of freedom and liberty. And we didn’t have a clue about the train wreck of the 60’s where overindulged baby boomers would steer the country into the rocks just like that Italian cruise ship.

These days we may go bankrupts supporting the plethora of worthless, self-indulgent leeches which our country produces. We subsidize them when we ought to tax them out of existence. No way these days we can afford the great expense of space exploration to free us from the limitations of life on this planet. We’re stuck on this rock. What inspires people now is self-indulgent personal exultation like we can get from personal electronics like the iphone and ipad which even the welfare recipients can afford these days thanks to the ever more indulgent welfare mentality taught in schools and supported by the greedy state bureaucrats that have supplanted government of and by the people. But I digress. We were talking about inventions.

Two stories today contrast the focus of modern technology today. One shows the long term thinking and focus that made America great and the other the mindless self-indulgence that is taking us down the path to chaos. You pick.

Universal Flu Vaccine Could Be Available by 2013

Do Swine love flu?

This one looks good. It seems that those silly yearly flu shots will soon be a thing of the past. For me, I stopped getting the flu shots years ago- about the same time I stopped getting the flu. I don’t know for sure that one is a consequence of the other but I’ve been suspicious ever since I found out that the government plays Russian roulette with the flue strains trying to guess which ones will be coming at you next yeat. How could the government know what flu would be active a year ahead of time anyway? It was more like playing the lottery than buying insurance. Far better to just stay healthy in the first place. Anyway the evidence is on my since since I have not gotten the flu since making that decision.

Still this new vaccine looks like progress even if it will destroy jobs and damage the economy. One shot that lasts for years whatever flu strain shows up. But I can’t help wondering why, if I don’t catch the flu now without the shots, I should worry about getting the new vaccine. It may be progress but do I need it. Food for thought. Still, there is no need to worry now. I have until 2013.

The other story is about an invention that allows you to read emails and text messages no matter what you might be doing

Email in your eye? Next-generation video screen glasses could lay messages or GPS over your field of vision

I’ve probably signaled my position but still the Coots want to know what you think. Is there any American ingenuity left? Or are we in a hopeless downward spiral?

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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