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RDCanecutter

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by RDCanecutter

  1. The Wet Leprosy.
  2. Way outside my pay-grade. I suspect the move west was due to people having eight extra kids who survived to adulthood, as well as a culture of asking for forgiveness instead of permission. Didn't hurt that the Crown had settled the back-country with Johnny Cash types. I wonder if those different currencies even bothered anybody. We walk around with handfuls of apps, still can use checks, cards, or cash, and in a pinch I'd spin up the exchange rates in Euros if I needed to. Only time it's been simple in my life was back when I was a kid. I do think a lack of usable currencies would stunt trade. There is a book by Harry Franck who walked across most of South America in 1912(?) (with gold Sovereigns sewed into his belt.) He crossed areas outside government control where it must have been mostly barter, hardly any coins, paper money was typically worth a penny on the dollar, small change was pins and buttons. Then once when he tried to cash a gold coin, they for some reason didn't trust the word of a strange hobo.
  3. When the US decided to make 1 cent coins, they were worth about a quarter dollar compared to now. As in other incredibly poor countries, they probably went farther than that. But back then we barely had any coins compared to what we needed. Once you got a couple of days inland, trade would have died if not for IOUs, with all the chances of cascading failures if big creditors went under. Back to the question, I have no idea why we use pennies anymore. If we were designing our currency now, we wouldn't invent them. They've inflated away. For more fun: https://foundinphiladelphia.com/money-its-not-what-you-think/
  4. Got stabbed in the kidney yesterday for a biopsy. No problems there, zero bleeding or pain. What zinged me is they paused my Lenvima for a week so as not to jack up the blood pressure on the wound. Fair enough. This morning I'm looking at my 4 bp medicines so I decide to take just one, the Coregs. I'm lazing around, feel a little loopy, check BP. Like 70 over 50. There are corpses with higher BP than that. I somehow get down to the kitchen, can barely see or think, get hold of salt or something just in time. Gradually increase pressure. Dayyum. Text wife specifically asking her to bring a supply of shitty food like frozen burritos, pot pies, whatever is simple and full of salt. She is appalled but eventually does so. I need salty crap food as a "break glass in case of plummeting blood pressure" emergency supply. I saw where she put it in the freezer in case I have to grab it out of there blind. In the meantime I strategically ate some canned chow mein that we bought ironically. Did the trick. BP is still at levels not seen since high school. Maybe I'll drag some Ritz crackers to bed.
  5. You think you know her but you don't.
  6. It's all gibberish if you are trying to pin down that you're Charlemagne's saddler's 83rd cousin. It's just ballpark probabilities. If you've got the right R1B male haplogroup, and an English family name, you might be English. Or [fill in blank] with an Anglicised name. You might be Moroccan or Latvian or Turkish with a lower but still possible chance of that haplogroup, maybe dating back 10,000 years. It's all odds but never 100% certainty. The ones that really make me groan are ads I see for "finding out your ancient tribe" where you're part Gaul or Frank or whatever. Usually people that existed in the same area and may have changed names and languages but one group is probably the ancestor of the others who came later. But yeah, you're 7% of one and 8% of the other. tldr/everybody learn the banjo because YES you fucked your distant cousin, and will continue to do so.
  7. Apparently the casta paintings were very popular with Spanish civil servants about to finish up their tours of duty in the Indies. If you're a local artist, you tune in really fast to what sells, probably knock out a few extra ready for a buyer, maybe leave the Efpañol slot blank so you can paint an actual person if asked. In the Scruffy Parrot (first Mexican novel) the author throws in a few of these terms on occasion, even if I doubt they ever got used systematically.
  8. The whole "pure blood anything" doubles as "I never picked up a history book." Unless that person is a Hapsburg, maybe. Honorary pure Spaniard, durr hurr...
  9. The former. Though I do get 100 bucks a month from a unicorn pension where I once worked for the blink of an eye. So technically both.
  10. Well, I just ate a cheese sandwich and backed into the thread, but my first thought is "Why is it talking about Hades, but doesn't mention Pluto or Persephone?"
  11. This has raised the expected level of rant. I blame it all on parents who count before walloping that ass. First time I heard a parent counting (I was probably eight) it was like witnessing the fall of the Roman Republic.
  12. Somewhere next to a lake is a bait shop with a drunk guy selling worms, and that guy was supposed to be a senator, except somebody crossed the streams and Tuberville got the job instead.
  13. Well, when you put it that way, keep the sticky dirty public away, and let's eat some oysters.
  14. Give em hell, Dad.
  15. It occurs to me that for a proper Gold Bug thread, we don't have nearly enough whackadoodle subject matter, so instead of cursing the darkness, I will step up and light an eccentric candle. Silver's high. Gold's way high. I don't really want to sell, and I definitely don't want to buy. But I had an idea: I am repricing new art that I sell to take in inflation. Plus, I am odd. So why not have fun, and peg the price of original art to gold and silver? Drawings priced to silver, paintings to gold. (Photoprints are outside of this because I price them based on what the printer charges.) I sell lots of quick drawings for 15 each. That's my 1/2oz silver. If it goes up to 40/oz, make em 20. For paintings, it's a matter of fiddle-faddle to set some rates. I figured out what percentage of $1800 I used to charge, basically up that 50% per painting size category. Old stuff stays on sale, clean it out. I will probably lag in price changes-- no need to change a ton of price tags. Anyway, it's a gold-silver bimetallic standard for a micro-economy. We'll see what happens.
  16. After months without Keytruda, and taking half-doses of Lenvima, got scans. Good Clean Boring Scans. Meanwhile the Let's-See-How-Much-Water-Weight-We-Can-Load-Onto-RD science project is winding down. A week ago I sorta went Bolshevik and told them what I wanted to happen, and dang if they didn't add some drugs that work. Legs are at maybe 75% strength instead of 50, each day a little more of the Swollen Horrors become a memory. Just in time. Two art shows this weekend and I'm gonna find out how low my low gear will go when heaving boxes and tables. Upper body strength is a study in atrophy, but with my freakish pre-cancer-unknown lizardlike powers of regeneration, I expect to harden the fuck up Australia. Plus Mrs. Canecutter has agreed to sacrifice her free time and will be there to keep selling art, should I collapse and start thrashing on the pavement. And it's warm again. Fuck all the bullshit, prepare to counterattack.
  17. At that age my friends and I had all made up fake countries and would do battle Risk-style on a map. A few of us designed coats-of-arms, play money (I tried to spend mine at the mini-mart on a dare,) and who knows what else. Totally would have designed some imaginary ID papers if I were 10 right now. 50% chance would pretend to speak an imaginary language when questioned.
  18. I am holding out for "moral turpitude," pronounced by a judge with an 1835 accent preserved in amber.
  19. Way to get on the wrong side of the Baron's men-at-arms.
  20. It's SW-transplant always-online drunken mumble, slightly emphasizing unvoiced final stops as he attempts to control one testicle intermittently firing off traces of testosterone. tldr/I remember my first beer
  21. Hell, do all that except leave out the family. Just me preaching, with various guests whose job is the STFU and just nod.
  22. Not just that, but I let the dog lick the plate. A dog!
  23. With my Bama tribe, it's always been like that engineering problem where you have to choose two good things and one bad thing. Myself included for the others. On the up side, hardly ever boring, and people at least do what they say they'll do. As far as cutting out people, officially did that once, when a well-educated cousin morphed into a holy-roller horse-paster and was making plans to go visit and breathe all over my elderly mother mid-pandemic. (There is also an aunt and her brood who have taken it upon themselves to be shits to a cousin who came out, but choosing not to talk to them anymore is something I'd do whether we had Trump, Harris, or King Charles.) Winner of the Out-There Award is an elderly cousin who is convinced that any violence at the Edmund Pettus Bridge is due to those people not getting a proper parade permit. When she winds up for a rant, her husband kinda pats her knee and she settles down. Family in Texas went more typically cosplay-cowboy MAGA. Throw in some dubious disability checks, crushing debt from monster trucks, never a peep of thanks for us kicking in on back taxes SO THEY WOULDN'T LOSE THE FUCKING HOUSE, and yeah, we don't build our schedule around get-togethers. There were some really cool ones, but they're mostly dead.
  24. About to eat two eggs over easy, thanks to contacts with Hippies and Sicilians. Maybe I'll just sensuously smear them all over my nekkit body.
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