Macro MGB Madness

Macro first. Thanks to Tim's suggestions about using my new 105mm howitzer macro lens on the Nikon Artillery Piece, I ventured away from the auto setting and tried my hand at aperture priority with manual focus. Scary! I sat in my garden with the camera on a tripod and shot bees.

I learned quite a bit. The first thing I learned was that the tripod was terrible for this sort of thing. The handle poked me in the chest and my legs and feet kept colliding with its legs and feet. It was like I was doing the rumba and it was doing the waltz. Not good. I bought a monopod and hope to try it out today.

I learned a bit about focusing and aperture as well. One cool trick I learned was how to take tunnel shots. That is, the bee would be deep in the plants and when I focused on him, it blurred out the surrounding "tunnel" of foliage. Very cool! I didn't manage to get any good pictures of that, but it gave me ideas for the future.

MGBs

I finished my center console yesterday and installed it. The car started up immediately, despite the battery having sat there for months. It was great! I drove the car down the street and the clutch started going all the way to the floor without resistance. Shifting became nearly impossible. I got it into second and limped back home.

The cause was the most MGB failure I've ever had. When you pushed down the clutch, fluid shot out of the filler cap. Amazing! I didn't realize they could do that. At first, I thought a hole had been accidentally poked in the filler cap, but when I examined it more thoroughly, I discovered that there is indeed a pinhole in the cap, probably to allow for pressure relief. The line is so clogged that all of the fluid that's supposed to go down to the clutch slave cylinder is instead escaping through the tiny hole in the cap. Hence the jet of Dot 3.

Today, we'll tear the master cylinder apart and see what's wrong with it.

KT's Theory Of Everything, Madness Edition

Dig this.

A critical race studies and ethnic studies professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder says Americans wondering why Black citizens commit anti-Asian hate crimes have an answer: “White supremacy.” ...

“Anti-Asian racism has the same source as anti-Black racism: White supremacy,” Ms. Ho wrote for The Conversation. “So when a Black person attacks an Asian person, the encounter is fueled perhaps by racism, but very specifically by White supremacy. White supremacy does not require a White person to perpetuate it.”

Ms. Ho isn't an idiot, it's just that she's been driven insane trying to carry out her assigned task of squaring the circle of racial justice. Here are her boundary conditions.

• Everything is about race
• Blacks are oppressed
• Whites are oppressors
• Lately, there have been a lot of blacks attacking Asians

It's not possible to satisfy them all, but she's trying to do it. That's enough to drive anyone crazy. She's not evil, she's just one of those people that struggles with seeing that a task is impossible.

Poor Ms. Ho is trapped in a system that can only produce madness. I don't feel scorn, but pity. We all have our weaknesses and difficulty noticing that her social justice mission can't be done is hers.