James H. “Red” Duke, Jr., M.D. (1928-2015)

Dr. Red Duke died from natural causes last week at Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston. He was 86.

It's Officially Football Time!

One of the sure signs of Fall besides the mercury dropping below 100 is the annual College Football Preview from the world's greatest MS Paint artist with a love for his Texas Longhorns and a serious penis fixation.

Ladies and Gents, I give you the greatness of THujone.

I'm not joking about the penis fixation.

Speaking of things that made me laugh...

I got an email from MeTV:

Good News!!! Carol Burnett and Friends will start airing in your area on 8/31/16 at 10p central - thanks for your patience and tell your friends.

No more torture of having to watch promos for The Carol Burnett Show on 21.2 only to find The Twilight Zone in it's place. Seems there was contractual red tape with the previous rights holder in the DFW market preventing 21.2 from airing the classic variety show. That's all cleared up now and we, the viewers, are the winner.

Just because it made me laugh

My Baby's Gone

No more spreken ze deutsch around the South 40. My Mercedes is history.

Traded my C300 for a CTS. Pretty much a lateral move, vehicle wise. The Mercedes did have a few more bells and whistles, but from now on we're an All American outfit.

Deals on Wheels

Car shopping sucks. Especially when the car I drove an hour to look at isn't here.

Herrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrre's Johnny!

From Variety:

Johnny Carson Returns: Antenna TV to Air Full ‘Tonight Show’ Episodes

Just when it seemed the late-night landscape couldn’t get more competitive, here comes Johnny Carson.

Tribune Media’s Antenna TV, the multicast digital channel devoted to vintage television shows, will run full-length episodes of “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” nightly at 11 p.m. ET/8 p.m. PT starting Jan. 1.

Antenna TV has struck a multi-year deal with Carson Entertainment Group to license hundreds of hours of the NBC late-night institution. Antenna will run episodes that aired from 1972 through the end of Carson’s 30-year reign in in 1992. Because NBC owns the rights to “The Tonight Show” moniker, Antenna TV’s episodes will be billed simply as “Johnny Carson.”

“This is not a clip show. This is full episodes of Johnny Carson, the man that everyone in late-night agrees was the greatest host of all time, airing in real time as he did back in the day,” Sean Compton, Tribune’s president of strategic programming and acquisitions, told Variety.

Antenna’s showcase will mark the first time Carson-era “Tonight Show” episodes have aired on a nightly basis since the host signed off in May 1992. Carson stayed out of the spotlight after his retirement until his death at age 79 on Jan. 23, 2005.

“The Tonight Show” ran in a 90-minute format from the start of Carson’s run in 1962 until 1980, when it was trimmed to an hour. Antenna will air hourlong episodes on weeknights and 90-minute installments on Saturday and Sunday at 10 p.m. ET/7 p.m. PT.

Read the full story at Variety.com

Personally, I can't wait! I just hope the shows aren't too dated for new viewers to understand the pop culture references. Johnny was all about current events.

From the "Fair and Balanced" Dept.

I said I wasn't wanting to slant the coverage on cop shootings and this certainly could have had a completely different outcome. But the Deputy showed restraint and common sense in his response.

Personally when the guy bailed out and did the finger gun routine I would have had a hard time scoring the shoot/don't shoot. Charging the officer after that was just a big ol' green neon sign.

I say the Deputy showed an admirable amount of restraint in using deadly force.

Hippity Huz, Hippity Huz; What in the hell is the matter with us?

And Another...

2 things real quick. First this is obviously a stolen bit from Liberally Lean that has been repurposed. All copyrights are clearly infringing.

Second, I really don't intend to turn this into a cop bashing forum or some sort of witch hunt, but this happened right after I posted yesterday and it makes me ragey.  Holy shee-it!

From CBS San Francisco:

A Rohnert Park policeman was captured on video pulling his gun on the man who was recording him on his cellphone in a residential neighborhood court.
The officer appears in a YouTube video approaching the man, identified in the YouTube caption as Don McComas, first in his patrol vehicle and after a couple minutes on foot after stepping out of the vehicle.
The unnamed officer is heard ordering the man to take his hand out of his pocket, and when the man refuses the officer pulls his gun out of his holster.
During the confrontation, McComas tells the officer, “Put your gun away!” and “you don’t touch me,” as he backs away from the officer.
When McComas asks what he has done wrong, the officer said “you take a picture of me, I take a picture of you.”
McComas also told the officer “you guys have done enough to my family.” When asked by the officer what was wrong, he responded, “Your station is corrupt,” to which the officer replies, “Are you some kind of a constitutionalist crazy guy, or something like that?”
On his Facebook page, McComas refers to “lies and distrust I’ve encountered from the Rohnert Park & Petaluma Police over the last 15 months is something I wouldn’t ever believe if I heard it from someone else.”
On the City of Rohnert Park Police & Fire Facebook page, a statement attributed to Mayor Amy Ahanotu and City Manager Darring Jenkins said the department would conduct an internal review of the confrontation.

Recording a Cop = Terrorism

As crazy as that sounds, it's exactly what a Senior Austin Police Officer thinks and wants other officers to follow. This is from almost a year ago, but I just ran across it following the recent arrest of 'Peaceful Streets' founder Antonio Buehler. It seems they are going forward with that.

An activist is a terrorist, at least according to Senior Police Officer Justin Berry of the Austin Police Dept. While the terms aren't mutually exclusive, a person can be one without being the other. In Berry's mind, they're both, and he feeds off the FBI's paranoia to reach his conclusion. 

It basically says that Berry has come across some information on a "national domestic extremism trend" that is echoed by local activist groups. He claims to have found "mirror warning signs" in "FBI intel." From there, his own report follows, naming such unlikely domestic extremists as CopBlock, CopWatch and Peaceful Streets. Also included are sovereign citizens groups and government accountability activists.

You can read the entire article including the ***Confidential Law Enforcement Only*** report over at TechDirt.com .

An inspirational message from Coach Taylor

They're (BELLLLCH) Baaaaack!

Season 2 of Rick and Morty kicked off last night on Adult Swim. Ain't no party like a Rick and Morty party. Because a Rick and Morty party is multidimensional!

Hacker Remote Control

Own a late model vehicle? You want to pay close attention to this story from Wired. Especially if it's a Chrysler product.

Here's a few interesting bits from the story:

I WAS DRIVING 70 mph on the edge of downtown St. Louis when the exploit began to take hold.
Though I hadn’t touched the dashboard, the vents in the Jeep Cherokee started blasting cold air at the maximum setting, chilling the sweat on my back through the in-seat climate control system. Next the radio switched to the local hip hop station and began blaring Skee-lo at full volume. I spun the control knob left and hit the power button, to no avail. Then the windshield wipers turned on, and wiper fluid blurred the glass.
As I tried to cope with all this, a picture of the two hackers performing these stunts appeared on the car’s digital display: Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, wearing their trademark track suits. A nice touch, I thought.
The Jeep’s strange behavior wasn’t entirely unexpected. I’d come to St. Louis to be Miller and Valasek’s digital crash-test dummy, a willing subject on whom they could test the car-hacking research they’d been doing over the past year. The result of their work was a hacking technique—what the security industry calls a zero-day exploit—that can target Jeep Cherokees and give the attacker wireless control, via the Internet, to any of thousands of vehicles. Their code is an automaker’s nightmare: software that lets hackers send commands through the Jeep’s entertainment system to its dashboard functions, steering, brakes, and transmission, all from a laptop that may be across the country.
Miller and Valasek’s full arsenal includes functions that at lower speeds fully kill the engine, abruptly engage the brakes, or disable them altogether. The most disturbing maneuver came when they cut the Jeep’s brakes, leaving me frantically pumping the pedal as the 2-ton SUV slid uncontrollably into a ditch. The researchers say they’re working on perfecting their steering control—for now they can only hijack the wheel when the Jeep is in reverse. Their hack enables surveillance too: They can track a targeted Jeep’s GPS coordinates, measure its speed, and even drop pins on a map to trace its route.
Miller and Valasek say the attack on the entertainment system seems to work on any Chrysler vehicle with Uconnect from late 2013, all of 2014, and early 2015. They’ve only tested their full set of physical hacks, including ones targeting transmission and braking systems, on a Jeep Cherokee, though they believe that most of their attacks could be tweaked to work on any Chrysler vehicle with the vulnerable Uconnect head unit. They have yet to try remotely hacking into other makes and models of cars.
So Miller has a cheap Kyocera Android phone connected to his battered MacBook. He’s using the burner phone as a Wi-Fi hot spot, scouring for targets using its thin 3G bandwidth.
A set of GPS coordinates, along with a vehicle identification number, make, model, and IP address, appears on the laptop screen. It’s a Dodge Ram. Miller plugs its GPS coordinates into Google Maps to reveal that it’s cruising down a highway in Texarkana, Texas. He keeps scanning, and the next vehicle to appear on his screen is a Jeep Cherokee driving around a highway cloverleaf between San Diego and Anaheim, California. Then he locates a Dodge Durango, moving along a rural road somewhere in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

This is pretty spooky stuff when you realise everything with an IP address is vulnerable and everything that's connected to the internet has an IP address. What if North Korea hackers send out a full throttle/no brakes command? Millions of people could be killed or seriously injured instantly.

Amazon Prime Day Recap

Just because it made me laugh

Holy S#*t!

Scary wreck at the finish of the Firecracker 400 at Daytona. Stunned to see Austin dillon walk away.

Happy Birthday, America!

Wait, whaaaaat?

What a day for a mow, eh?

It finally dried up enough for me to cut hay. And it was damn beautiful hay if I do say so myself!

Not much to use for a visual reference, but it was over knee high and so thick I clogged the swather a couple of times. Had to pull the wads of grass out of the conditioner rollers to get it going again.

Other than that it was relatively event/breakdown free. I did have to retighten the new wobblearm bolt when I stopped for lunch, but that took about 5 minutes. The a/c worked like a champ as did the A-C.

Should start baling Thursday or Friday.

And they (OK, I) said it couldn't be done...

I promised you we'd be dealing with the Gehl (pronounced Gale) swather today and I did. The last time I ran it after installing new belts, it sounded like a rock crusher/auto wrecker and was making more metal shavings than hay. No bueno.

Today I broke out my tools and started taking things apart. I have to say I wasn't enthusiastic about being able to fix it, metal shavings are usually a sure sign of death around old equipment. Disassembling everything went relatively quick thanks to my air tools. If you don't have any, get some. Even cheap air tools are better than box wrenches and ratchets.

It didn't take long to see what the problem was. The large bolt that acts as an axle for the wobble arm (appropriately named) was stripped and flopping around. The loose bolt led to the bearings disintegrating. The cotter pin holding the stripped nut in place was grinding away as the bolt flopped around and leaving the metal shavings I saw.

I called the salvage yard I bought some parts from before and I guess they were going to make up for the bargain I got before. The guy wanted $80 + shipping for the bolt. F that.

Instead I took a trip to Bridgeport Automotive and rummaged through their stock. Lo and behold, not only did they have the right bolt, they had several hardness grades for me to choose from. I picked a Grade 10 and several other assorted nuts, carriage bolts and washers I needed. I was batting .1000!

Then came the stumbling block, the bearings. We measured with calipers but the bearings wouldn't slide past the threads. I bought the nuts and bolts then tried Purvis for the bearings. I hate going there because they are high as heck and I call the counter guy Marlboro Man. When I walked in the door it smelled like he'd smoked at least a pack today. (I know, Ex-smokers are the worst about complaining about smokers.) They had the same result, wouldn't slide past the threads, but Marlboro Man had already billed me for the bearings before he got them out. I took them anyway, went to B&R Machine Shop and had the bolt run on a lathe to smooth out any ridges. VOILA! The bearing slid right on!

Back to the South 40, a few sweat soaked minutes knocking out the old bearing races and installing new ones then reassembling the wobble arm and I was done. I cranked up the tractor and gave it a test run. It was MUCH quieter and no longer sounded and felt like it was going to fly apart at any second. I think the old girl has at least one more season of hay cutting left in her. I guess we'll find out tomorrow if it's dry enough, because I'm seriously behind schedule on cutting hay.

Next up, getting the round baler field ready!