Nametags And Gators

Tomorrow is our annual Mardi Gras party held, oddly enough, on Fat Tuesday. We'll have about 50 people, tons of food, 2 mixologists and Pandora's excellent New Orleans music mix on the Sonos.

The guest list is eclectic, so there will be plenty of people who don't know each other. To help them mingle, this year, we're doing name tags. I made a sign for the name tag table, but my wife didn't like it.

Women and gators. They just don't mix well.

The main image for our eVite invitation.
The Queens of Mardi Gras are, of course, our two chihuahua mixes.

The name tags feature the girls.

Wife kitteh did not approve of this sign.

Devouring Mother First Ballot Hall Of Famer

 ... Michelle Wu, Mayor of Boston. Every problem is a baby. Every solution is cuddling. Dig this.

🚨BREAKING: Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is facing mass demands to RESIGN after she claimed every single human on planet earth has a right to be in the United States, rendering citizenship meaningless!!

What's your response to this......??👀

MAKE THIS GO VIRAL ON 𝕏. LET’S GO 👏 pic.twitter.com/TfcBdaFI6A

— Save America 🇺🇲 (@SaveAmericaNew) February 7, 2026

No worries, Michelle, I'm sure Spain won't get all of them. We'll be able to find one or two to send your way. Note all the big-eyed tykes held in the arms of grateful mothers you can see in the video below. It warms the cockles of your heart!

Many boats full of undocumented Muslims have left North Africa to invade Europe through Pedro Sanchez's Spain. We are in a religious war, many have not yet understood this. pic.twitter.com/61qfeQpaxi

— RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) February 12, 2026

Once they get there, Texas state representative Gene Wu has plans...

UBI Is A Mirage

I once read a book by a primate researcher that started with a charming paragraph something like this.

Growing up, I always wanted to become a lowland gorilla. Instead, I became a baboon.

He'd studied and gotten the right degrees, but the wildlife research organization that hired him sent him to study baboons instead of lowland gorillas. He became intimately familiar with them. I might have my sources crossed here, but the gist of it is accurate.

Baboons only need a few hours each day to forage enough to feed themselves. The remaining hours in the day is spent being jerks towards each other.

UBI, Universal Basic Income, is touted by the super-smart set as the solution to the problems that will arise should technology wipe out massive swaths of industry. For example, what happens if all of our trucks become self-driving? No problem, say the people with letters after their names, we will implement UBI and those barely-above-farm-animal humans will be able to eat and maintain their crude dwellings.

Life isn't about subsistence. It's about being needed, genuinely needed. Without that, well, we will  most likely become jerks. What else are we going to do with our time?

On My 20th Blogiversary

 ... a little family wisdom and the last half of the first chapter of my ... novella? book? 

Whatever.

As my regular readers know, I'm currently working full time, about 2 years past when I wanted to retire. I've made this choice because people I love need some help and I have the ability to give it to them.

I had plans for this stage of my life. Writing, working out and living part time in an Alabama river house were chief among them. Some people I love hit hard times and, as I had the ability to help them, I postponed retirement. I also postponed my dreams, knowing that at this age, "postpone" can quickly turn into "jettison."

I can get dark and brooding and found myself gravitating towards that. Serving God by loving your family while nursing resentment is like adding broken glass to a good dinner. Worthless.

I don't have the time to write properly, but I do have the time to write. At the rate I'm going, my first story might be done about the time I contract Alzheimer's, which might actually be a good thing. Each time I read the thing it will seem new to me and in no time at all, I'll be convinced I've written 10 different books. 

Hooray?

Anywho, the moral of the story is that while you may never be able to completely fulfill your dreams, you're not doing anyone any favors by not doing what you can and taking joy from that.

You can find the first part of chapter 1 here.

Here's the end of chapter 1. I'm having a great time with this. I hope it shows.

Thanks for coming along for the ride.

---

The sun was clear of the horizon by the time Robert Edward Lee Bond, 58, stumbled out of his bedroom into the living room towards the kitchen, one hand rubbing his stubbled face, the other clutching an empty plastic water bottle. He had primed the coffee maker before he and Basil had started drinking last night, knowing how the night would end. Right now, he needed the coffee. Something crunched under his cheap sandals as he stumbled into the galley kitchen in the fishing shack, but he paid it no heed, focused on pressing that button.

Bobby Lee had a private scale for hangovers. There were mild ones where the head hurt and the morning was a drag. There were medium ones where the head hurt and sleep had been fitful. Then there were those where the coffee would make him extremely nauseous. Despite their best attempts last night, this one was only in the medium category. His head hurt, he was exhausted and his thoughts were slow.

The coffee maker started. He looked up. This time, the wreckage registered. Furniture was overturned, there was broken glass on the floor, a few pieces of torn black cloth were scattered near the doorway and the screen door was open and hanging off one hinge. General Beauregard was laying on his side and Cat was cleaning the basset hound’s shoulder. The crunching under his sandals had been broken glass.

“Well, it looks like you two did some interior decorating last night. I love what you’ve done with the place. It’s got that lived-in charm although next time, you might want to set the curtains on fire to really finish the job,” he said to them, wincing at the exertion of speaking. Then he muttered to himself, “I guess this is what I get for being late with their breakfasts.”

Bobby Lee held his head in his hands, nursing his hangover until the coffee was done. He poured himself a mug and drank a few sips. It was the act of pouring the coffee more than the caffeine that got him to thinking. The wreckage didn’t make any sense at all. Also, why hadn’t the animals been at him for their food? Usually, if he was this late, they’d be barking and meowing, begging. 

Bobby got up to survey the living room. When he went over to the damaged screen door, he looked down at the dock and saw the bow of an aluminum skiff poking above the water. 

They didn’t own a skiff.

Bobby took another gulp of coffee, walked swiftly to his bedroom and yelled to Basil through Basil’s bedroom door to get up. 

Bobby was nowhere near fighting ready. He pulled his Colt 1911 from the shoulder holster slung over the chair and wished he had something sturdier than Walmart sandals on his feet.

He opened Basil’s door and told him, “Get your gun. Right now. Put some shoes on, there’s glass on the floor.” Basil was sitting up in bed, rubbing his eyes. 

“I don’t need you to tell me to put on my shoes, Robert,” he said as he slipped into his loafers. “I am not decrepit.”

“You’re older than I am.”

“By three weeks.”

“Really? Feels like a lot more than that.”

Basil rolled his eyes and stepped out, Browning 1910 in hand.

“The dock is clear,” said Bobby.

Bobby looked through the front door's spyhole and saw nothing but the empty causeway leading back through the bayou to the road. The boys had chosen this shack to give minimal cover to anyone approaching.

Bobby carefully opened the door that led to the dirt and gravel causeway. Basil, grumbling about his head, covered him. The two took turns on point as they explored around the piers beneath the house until they were satisfied no one was there. 

Bobby shrugged at Basil. “I don’t think we need to report this to our insurance company.”

“However, I must register a complaint with the maid,” replied Basil in his languid upper-crust English accent. “She simply must do a better job tidying up the place. It looks like a tornado tore through it. Ghastly.”

They walked out to the end of the pier where the bow of the skiff was bobbing slowly in the water. It looked like a rental. The ID decal was still on the bow. None of it made sense.

“Not locals. A local would’ve taken our boat,” Bobby said, motioning at the center console sitting in its cradle over the water.

“It couldn’t have been teens, they’d have stolen the car and looted the place,” replied Basil, motioning at the SUV parked underneath the shack. 

Bobby walked out to the end of the pier and then grabbed a gaff hanging in the boathouse. He fished something out of the reeds. It was a torn black t-shirt. There were blood stains.

“Gators,” said Bobby.

The boys went up the stairs and back inside. Basil kneeled by the animals as Bobby picked up the furniture and surveyed the damage. “Robert, old man, these two need the vet. Immediately.” Cat had stopped cleaning the basset hound and looked at Basil curiously as he approached.

“What is it?” asked Bobby Lee.

“Look here,” Basil said and pointed out the injuries on both animals. Cat had a burn of some kind on his left shoulder. General Beauregard’s right shoulder was sliced open, though not badly. The bleeding had stopped, but the wound would need stitches. Both animals bore swollen puncture wounds on their right sides.

“What in the world happened here last night?”

Basil didn’t answer.

By the time the sun was clear of the trees, the SUV was already moving down the causeway toward Lafayette.

The boys' fish camp. It doesn't perfectly match my image of the place, but it's close enough and I have a few more things to do for work before I knock of for the day.

On Peaceful Noise Demonstrations

 It looks like the government officials in Minnesota have finally gotten the message. That message must have been something like, "Knock it off or we'll cut off all your funding." Dig this.

Dozens of protesters were recently arrested at a Minnesota immigration protest, sparking outrage from leftists on campus.

The University of Minnesota arrested 67 protesters demonstrating against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) outside of the Graduate hotel for unlawful assembly, according to KARE, the local NBC affiliate.

The local CBS affiliate also aired footage of the event, reporting that demonstrators were “making noise to make a point” as a way of protesting ICE agents they believed to be staying at the hotel. Videos show protesters banging pots and pans, loudly playing musical instruments, shouting through megaphones, and more...

The group (Students for a Democratic Society) characterized the ordeal as a “peaceful noise demonstration” and took aim at the various law enforcement agencies responsible for the arrests, lamenting that they are “helmed and directed by Democrats or Democrat appointees, who are meant to work with the people of Minnesota against the tyranny and violence of the federal government.”

“We in the anti-ICE movement must recognize that all law enforcement agencies, whether they be campus, state, or federal, share an ideological solidarity with one another, and will defend one another every chance they get - pigs, in essence, are pigs, no matter which specific badge they wear,” the group wrote. “They are all the enemies of the people.”

One cul-de-sac down and at the other end of the cul-de-sac to boot lives a dog. Said dog barks from the moment the sun comes up to the moment the sun goes down. No one in a 2-block radius gets a moment's peace from this dog.

I don't blame the dog. The poor thing is never walked and lives in a tiny side yard the abuts a main street. I'd like to strangle the owners.

I guess the dog is performing a "peaceful noise demonstration."

It's the auditory version of this.

I'm not sure who provided the students at U of M with their civics lessons, but it sure looks like they skipped the parts dealing with the rights of other people. They were taught, "You have the right to protest," but not, "Your neighbors have the right to get some sleep at night, be able to think clearly during the day and not be sound-bombed by you and your moron friends."

I guess it's always considered "peaceful" if no one is being dismembered.

Bonus Commentary

As an affectionate student of the Confederacy, it's wonderful to see the South rise again even if it's rising in Minnesota. The protestors are practically clones of the Antebellum boneheads that demanded secession and war. Here's a quick and incomplete list of what I'm seeing in the Land of 10,000 Mistakes.

1. State and local laws should supersede Federal laws.
2. State and local troops should resist Federal troops.
3. The Federal government is tyrannical.
4. "All we ask is to be let alone."
5. The resistance is being done to preserve the status of the powerful, in this case the Democrats in office and the Somali ringleaders.
6. The motivations are racial.
7. Proponents of secession have a sickeningly maternal attitude towards the colored folk (Somalis) who they consider to be childlike innocents.
8. The state and local insurrectionists are mindlessly escalating the confrontation against a vastly superior Federal force.

I'm sure I could add more, but that's good enough for now. History doesn't repeat, but it echoes. All they need now is to resurrect John C. Calhoun so he can go on MSNBC and say things like, "The Federals have no right to come here and tell us what we can and cannot do with our negroes."

Art In Aspic

If AI comes to dominate the artistic fields as it seems to be doing, from whence will come new styles?

AI does nothing but regurgitate existing content. It forms a word and image salad from piles of harvested content and then spits out replies synthesized from that content. As far as I can tell, it seems to suggest that our current art will be preserved in aspic if the artists turn to AI as their content creator.

My old, Southern man and his cat series are essentially all the same. Here's today's rendering.

I could request it as an oil painting or line drawing or even anime, but it would all be drawn from existing content. How would a new style arise?

Further, if what you want isn't represented in sufficient quantities in it training data, you're out of luck. The frogmouth helmet was a style of helmet used in 15th and 16th century tournament jousting. It looked like this.

Because the frogmouth helmet was so niche, there aren't many of them represented in artwork. Here's what Gemini thought was a frogmouth helmet.

The dude looks like a duck. Ridiculous.

If I can't teach it how to render a frogmouth helmet, for which pictures exist, how am I going to get it to help me develop a new style? If independent, non-AI artists get priced out of the market, isn't art, whether it's prose or poetry or music or images or video, going to be fixed for all time?

Aiming At Whites, Hitting Blacks

Coming home from Mobile recently, I got routed through Charlotte. Charlotte is about 34% black. In cities with that kind of demographics, the airport employees are typically black. In Mobile, which is 50% black, all of the employees of both the airport proper and the tenant businesses are black. I could be off by one or two, but I can't recall more than a handful of non-blacks.

At CLT, it was 50-50 black and Hispanic. I didn't have time for a full statistical data collection walk, but I saw a good amount of two concourses and noted something interesting. There was very little racial mingling in the tenant businesses. The employees were either Hispanic or black.

In the businesses where the employees were Hispanic, behind the counter they mostly spoke Spanish to each other.

Of the more than 50% of American, black high school graduates who are not proficient at English, about 0.1% of them speak Spanish. That's close enough to zero to be zero.

All of those young black adults are effectively locked out of the airport jobs where the other employees are Hispanic.

Here are the demographics of Charlotte over time.

The Democrats are on the record as having opened the border in order to make whites a minority in the US. They are only incommoding whites politically. In terms of job opportunities, they are hitting blacks square in the chest.