Mundaz Wandering Thoughts
We were once again facing the eternal question: where should we sit?
My wife and I agree upon many things. We also disagree on many things. She’s much more probable to violently curse when something goes wrong than I am. She’s better at remembering birthdays, faces, names, and gifts. I am really good at untying knots and finding things. None of that is really related to today’s topic. In essence, she’s an indo and I’m an endo.
I generally give her to her when the challenge arises. That means that we’ll sit in the middle. “Let’s move to the middle. We’ll have a better view.” That’s typical indo logic.
As an endo, though, I prefer the row’s endcap. Let’s face it, being on the end has multiple obvious advantages. If you’re leaving, you can stand up, turn, and walk away fast, without the bother of waiting others to stand, stretch, grunt, wake up, and realize where they are. As an endo, bathroom breaks are more easily possible. In an emergency, of course, being on the end is the place to be, preferably by the emergency exit. That’s how endos think.
I started as an end in school, though. I just preferred a little separation from the other young animals who’d been brought together to be taught. Being on the end offers more perspective to me. Easier to turn around and stare at someone. In the middle, you’re part of the end. On the edge, you’re, well…the edge.
It’s amusing when a group comes together and they’ll all one group or another. This come up at the beer group last week. Most of the initial joiners were endo. We ended to corner seats, leaving the middle free. But latter people were like, “Guess I’ll sit in the middle here.” Then they tried making it positive. “Hey, I can hear and see more from here.”
That’s an endo, trying to be an indo.
Not that it’s really important, but where do you fall on the seating spectrum? Are you an endo, or do you enjoy the middle?
Satyrdaz Theme Music
It’s Satyrda, Oct 18, 2025, also known as No Kings II. This is a day when We the People come together to remind Trump, Project 2025, the GOP, and the rest of the world that the United States rejected kings ruling them twice before, in 1776, and then again when the idea was floated before G. Washington. We didn’t want kings then; we don’t want them in 2025.
My spouse and I spent time last night constructing our signs and finalizing our plans. This morning, my wife came to me. “I screwed up,” she said. “My doctor appointment isn’t 1:30, it’s 11:30.”
Oh. That changed things. Originally, we would hit the rally from 11 to 1, leave at 1 and go to her appointment. Now we’ll go to her appointment and then head to the rally when it’s over.
It’s a brisk fall morning out there. Plentyo sunshine, clear, blue sky, but just 39 F at our place. 75 F will be ours before the night pulls in.
For the record, the Epstein Shutdown continues along on cruise control. Republicans are mostly content to let things slide and refuse to fix healthcare issues for millions of Americans. That’s just how they roll.
Today’s song comes from a convo with my wife last night. I was doing a load of delicates. Did she want to put anything in? Sure. She zipped around doing her collection, then came to me and said, “I can’t find my sports bra.” I found it in the laundry basket. She’d just overlooked it. But meanwhile, The Neurons projected a song variation in my head. They had me singing, “Looking for my bra in all the wrong places,” to the tune of “Lookin’ for Love”. “Lookin’ for Love” by Johnny Lee was a 1980 hit associated with the movie, Urban Cowboy. We were livin’ in San Antonio, Texas, at the time, and you could not escape the song. Anyway, The Neurons kept it going in the morning mental music stream. That’s how it came to be here.
Coffee is flirting with The Neurons. Time to get up and at them. Hope grace and peace find us all today and maybe stick around long enough for us to get to know them. Hope to see you at the protests. Cheers
Ghostly Thoughts
Ghost are all around, inhabiting the land.
Offices.
Factories.
Houses.
They’re sometimes noticed.
Most are forgotten.
Except by other ghosts.
The ghosts did many things for us.
Served in the military.
Protected us.
Gave their lives.
Raised food for us. Fed us.
Kept us safe.
Wrote laws with the best intentions.
And tried to lift us up and lead us forward.
They gave us light and security.
Running water.
Safe water.
Safe homes.
Electricity.
Bridges and roads.
Books and paintings, music and rock.
Humor.
Raised us up with hands and ideas.
And now wait.
Until we’re ghosts.
And join them.
To be forgotten.
Remembered only by other ghosts.
A Friend’s Tale
One of my co-vacationers is a retired schoolteacher. While his specialty and favorite were teaching six-graders, he taught a kindergarten class one year. One of the young students brought in his pet rat for show and tell. As the littles gathered around to ogle the rat, the teacher did a James Cagney impression, saying, “You dirty rat.” A child instantly leaned in and continued the Cagney impression, “You shot my mother.”
The teacher was flabbergasted. He asked the child, “Where did you learn that?”
The child replied, “That was in a Jim Carney movie.”
Of course, the Cagney quote never happened, except in the Jim Carney movie.
Munda’s Theme Music
It’s Munda again! July 14, 2025. I don’t know about you, but we’re just ripping through July in Ashlandia. The days and hours whisk by like they’re passing on a blink of light. Some clouds slashed with grays and whites have braved our blue skies. It’s cooler today, peaking at 97 F, and should drop into the sixties at night. Yesterday saw 102.8 F at our place at 5 PM. We’d been doing well without running the A/C but my wife requested it at ten last night. She said that she had to apply something to her face but her face had to be dry, and it wasn’t dry. Nope, because it’s a humid heat. So we ran the air for about thirty minutes.
Our local fire, the Neil Creek, is 20% contained. Smoke is almost non-existent in the taste of today’s air. I’m grateful for that on behalf of my sinuses.
There are six birthays in July in my extended family. Two of those people, though younger than me, have already passed away. Cancer in both cases. Don’t know the specific cancers. A cousin’s birthday is today, my sister’s birthday is tomorrow, and my wife’s birthday is Wenzda.
Some Florida lawmakers visited Trump Concentration Camp Florida. Democrats, of course, found the conditions appalling. Republicans thought them okay, on a par with other ‘detention centers’. “Nothing to see here,” Republicans said after going on the guided tours. Just like there’s nothing to see in the Epstein files, right?
I was awakened (names and causes will be omitted) at four AM. Although I felt quite ready to return to sleep after jumping back in bed, my mind began playing a 1987 song, “Night Train”, in my mental music stream. It stayed through for the morning. I’m pretty sure of the cause and effect behind this one. The cat is a night train. And someone (hi, Ark) mentioned “Night Train” in the comments the other day. I’d not heard the song in yonks so I hunted down a video and watched and listened and thought and remembered. And, as it’s night, I suppose all this made sense to The Neurons and they brought the song up. The lyrics also played into it as I tried ‘guess the time’ and looked for signs of daybreak. “Down on the night train, I feel the starlight steal away, use up a lifetime looking for the break of day.”
Coffee has been introduced into my body once again. Time to get out there and rock the day away. Hope your day rocks you in a good way. Cheers
Thirstda’s Wandering Thoughts
TL/DR: AI is fucking up. And that’s fucking us up.
One of my childhood passions were cars. From that grew an intense interest in auto racing. It wasn’t something that I shed as an adult. Passions aren’t easily surrendered. Yeah, as an adult, auto racing, with its environmental impacts, ridiculously increasing costs, and inherent dangers, lacked substantial commonalities with the human condition and the challenges Earth and humanity face. I excused myself for decades with the subterfuge that we don’t want a vanilla existence. Year after year I followed sports car and Formula 1 racing. For a while, I also hunted NASCAR, IMSA, and IndyCar news. But sports car and Formula 1 was it for me. As I aged, the passion became muted and dulled. Part of that was that the sport just wasn’t as competitive. Aspects of its relevance to real existence also troubled me, though, and that grew.
One of the Internet’s commercial strengths is that it notices what you look at, and then baits you with more of the same. The net noticed I checked out LeMans this year. It came up with reminders about Ford’s victories at LeMans in the 1960s via the Ford GT. That effort was highlighted not long ago in a movie called Ford v Ferrari.
A story about Ford’s 1967 LeMans victory grabbed my eye. Driving a red Ford GT Mark IV, American drivers Dan Gurney and A.J. Foyt took LeMans in record form. I built a model of the car within a year. It sat on my dresser among my other models until I moved out of Mom’s house four years later. Eagerly, I read the story. Then I wondered: how many drivers have won both the 24 Hours of LeMans and the Indy 500?
I put it to AI; how many drivers have won both the 24 Hours of LeMans and the Indy 500?
AI responded, slightly paraphrasing, Lewis Hamilton won it in 2011 and Max Verstappen has won it four times recently.
WTF?
I know that Lewis Hamilton has never raced at Indy or LeMans. Nor has Max V. Both are Formula 1 champions.
The entire AI answer was fantastically fucking wrong. Now, if I didn’t know the sport, I may have been fooled by the answer. Which pushes the wonderment in me, how many people consult the Internet for truthful and factual information and are being fed wrong answers? How many lack the resources or awareness to challenge the veracity of what they’re being fed?
For shits and grins, I asked AI again. This time, one source said, “…while only Foyt has won both the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Indianapolis 500.” Another told me, “Only one driver has won both the Indianapolis 500 and the 24 Hours of Le Mans: Graham Hill.”
So, both answers are wrong, because I knew before asking that Foyt and Hill were the only drivers who accomplished this.
Wrong info on the net is not new. We’ve joked for years, “It was on the Internet so it must be true, ha, ha.”
But the shit is getting deep. The way that wrong information is advancing and spreading with AI’s gentle assistance, the joke is now on us.
Munda’s Theme Music
Hot, I say, hot. Munda, June 9, 2025, will be anywhere from 99 to 103 F in Ashlandia. Where would we be as a civilized society without electricity and A/C?
It’s already a helluva week and it’s just Munda. Wildfires still burn in Canada. We have protestors in Los Angeles facing off against National Guard. Gov. Newsom of California is asking the guard to be removed. Trump, of course, will thumb his nose at that. There’s a more general feeling that Trump is eager for this situation and unmindful of law or violence. There’s also a question of legality. From what we’ve seen of TACO, doing illegal acts bothers him less than lying. So the whole question is probably destined for the Roberts Court. I won’t guess about how they’ll respond. Besides that, there have been several fatal aircraft accidents, part of a disturbing trend for 2025. On the weather side, Hurricane Barbara has emerged. Fortunately for the U.S., it’s not expected to nail our nation, but unfortunately for Mexico, the same can’t be said.
Still disturbing the political horizon is the ridiculously named “One Big Beautiful Bill”. The longer it storms, the worse the bill seems to be. Many are angry about its impact on Medicaid. Others, like former First Bro. Elon Reeve Musk, complains that it will add to the deficit and is loaded with pork. The Congressional Budget Office say it will add trillions to the national debt. More people are angry that there’s a stipulation in the bill that will keep Trump administration officials from being declared in contempt of court. Others, like Marjorie Taylor-Green, voted for the bill but is now upset that it strips states from the ability to regulate Artificial Intelligence. Bitcoin marketeers are excited about the bill because many of them believe it’ll led to hyperinflation and the potential to rebase the US economy from the dollar to crypto.
As they say, time will tell.
Moreover, against these events, June 14 is Saturday, a perfect storm of TACO celebrating himself with a military parade for his birthday. It’s all about his ego. TACO has never served in the military but he feels that he should be honored with a military parade. This, from a man who frequently insults military veterans. He’s planning this parade while complaining about fraud, waste, and abuse, using that as a reason to chop up government agencies, don’t you know. That parade is expected to cost anywhere from 25 million to over 100 million dollars. Depends on what’s included, and who’s doing the addition. Either way, a penny over a dollar is too much and runs wholly and rudely counter to Republican squeaking about ‘the deficit’. That’s the way they always are.
Countering the TACO parade, several organizations are coming together in mass protests against TACO and his positioning via strongarm tactics and lawlessness as either a king, dictator, or PINO for life. Besides that, it’s Father’s Day on Sunday.
Watching events in Los Angeles, I ended up with Led Zeppelin and “Immigrant Song” in the morning mental music stream. The song’s been used in several movies, like School of Rock, Thor: Ragnorak, and Shrek the Third, so people who wouldn’t regularly know it are familiar with its driving staccato beat and Robert Plant’s wailing. Immigration, of course, has always been about trying to find a better place, and so it is the case with this song. On the issue’s converse side, the inhabitants of existing places often had something to say about immigrants coming into ‘their’ land.
Coffee is at hand again. I’m getting out of reality and slipping into story-telling and writing mood, somewhere were greed and evil is successfully countered, unlike the shitshow that we call reality. Y’all have a good one. Cheers
Frida’s Wandering Thoughts
Out walking on break today, a Honda Civic passed.
1983, and silver, I saw. As sis had.
Sis’s Honda suffered from cancer rust. This one was in good shape. A Sarah Lawrence College decal was on the back window.
I was taken back. I’ve never been to Sarah Lawrence College, but it’s been in pop culture in sufficient settings that I knew it’s located in New York city. How did that car with that decal end up almost all the way across the nation, in Ashland, Oregon?
I wondered about the car’s history. Was it a gift to a student freshman attending Sarah Lawrence College? Conversely, maybe they bought it for themselves after graduating and beginning a new job. Maybe, though, the car was located here, and a Sarah Lawrence grad bought the car and put their alma mater on the window.
So many questions. When I returned to the coffee shop, I did a distance check between here and Sara Lawrence College: 2901 miles via I80. Take note, though: there’s a lot of construction enroute between here and there, and toll roads. But traffic is light. It’ll take just under 42 hours if you drive straight there.
I wonder if the car would make it. I imagined it returning to its home, like salmon returning to their spawning waters. Then it all veered along science fiction lines and became a tale about cars gaining intelligence and becoming homesick for their first owners, and then seeking them out.
Guess I’ll call it “Tires & Wheels”. That’s the name of the two main characters: a red and white 1985 Chevy K10 pickup called Tires and a 1983 silver Honda Civic named Wheels.
You know what? I think it’s a love story as much as an adventure.
Do You Want to Connect
Life before the net. Do I remember those dark, soulless days? Oh, yeah. I remember those days, just as I recall life without the world wide web, life without cable and DVDs, life without CDs, eight-track and cassette tapes, life without microwaves, and life without cell phones and more than three networks. I remember life without remote controls, which my wife calls, the clicker.
Yes, I remember buying my first personal computer. I remember using the first one at home. Then I recall signing us up for Compuserve and Mindnet. I remember getting my first email address and having no one to email. That soon changed. Viagra offers quickly found my inbox. With it came an understanding of something non-meaty called ‘Spam’ and wealthy Nigerians in need of money.
Yes, I remember pre-net life. Primarily because our TV schedule was fixed according to the cable schedule. Cheers on Thursday, for example. But when the net came into its full flowering, I was able to find a huge variety of things to stream from around the world, watching them when I wanted, instead of waiting for their schedule. Long as I was willing to pay for it.
With the net, the days of going to the front door and looking for the daily newspaper disappeared. There was no need for all that inked paper to stack up and get put out for the trash. Now the news was right there online. I didn’t need to wait until 6 PM to check to see what was happening. Of course, information about what was happening locally soon began fading. We could no longer just pick up the paper and turn to the police log to see what the hell the sirens were all about the other day. No, that faded. Now, there are sometimes stories on Facebook or Nextdoor. Some others are struggling to bring the local news back to us. It’s a challenge. Many efforts arise and fall.
Freedom came with online ordering, too. I no longer needed to prowl through brick and mortar stores, making comparisons, trying to figure out what to buy. Boom, the net was heavy with choices. It was still onerous in the early days to compare things but then came Amazon… Suddenly, whoa. It was a desperate consumer’s dream.
Do you know what it was like to travel in pre-net days? Calling the airlines to get price checks, listening to them look up schedules for you, explaining options? Same with hotels. Expedia and the like made it easier…for a while. But wherever money and humans are involved with money transactions and information, others are there to scam us for their share of the pie.
Yes, I remember life before the net. It was simpler and harder, easier, and more problematic. That’s how it always is with progress. Each step unfolds with new and surprising insights, and the things we used to do begin to fade.
Just think: one day, people will be asking, do you remember life before AI?
And someone will reply, I remember the days before cars. And then we’ll all wonder, what was that like, and turn to AI for the answer.
Michael Seidel, writer 