If you are a life-long movie buff, as I am, the book is a fascinating look into Hollywood life styles.  Chateau Marmont was built in 1929 as an apartment house, but by the early 1950s it had turned into a hotel.  It was a place where movie stars stayed when they wanted to avoid the scrutiny and media attention paid at the more famous hotels, like the Roosevelt and the Beverly Hills.  The book is sprinkled with stories about famous Hollywood personalities, everyone from Jean Harlow and Clark Gable to Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, from Natalie Wood and Dennis Hopper to Scarlett Johansson and Benecio Del Toro. 



It's where John Belushi died of a drug overdose in 1982, after partying with Robin Williams and Robert Di Nero. It's where Tab Hunter and Anthony Perkins began their love affair.  Director Nicholas Ray retreated to the Chateau Marmont after walking in on his wife, actress Gloria Grahame, having sex with his son from a previous marriage.

And on and on and on.  The place was recently renovated and you can rent one of the penthouses for $5,000 a night.  A suite costs $1,290 per night, and an ordinary room costs just under $500 a night.

Castle on Sunset was probably a good book to listen to on CDs during occasional 10-minute drives I took over the course of the past two months during the Covid-19 pandemic.  There was something interesting in every 10-minute segment, and there was no problem if I couldn't remember what happened in the previous 10-minute segment I listened to a couple days prior.  Hopefully, the next book on CDs that I started today will also not require paying close attention.

Ed:

Looks like none of these regressive mathematicians ever had to measure anything. Of course, the velocity of any wave in any medium is solely dependent on the properties of the medium.

Huh?  What paper was he talking about?  I sent an equally short response, thanking him, informing him that I didn't know what paper he was talking about, and explaining that I had 15 papers on line at  https://vixra.org/author/edward_g_lake

Then I proceeded to research him on the Internet.  He's definitely well-known on the Internet, or he knows how to use the Internet to promote himself.  In some ways, his ideas match mine, we both have problems with mathematicians, but in other ways we are in total disagreement.  He hasn't yet replied to my email, so I won't mention his name.  I read part of one of his books using Amazon's "Look Inside" feature.  His arguments against mathematicians are mostly philosophical.

I don't know if he'll ever reply to my reply, but his email caused me to think about a possible title for a book: "Logical vs Mathematical Relativity," which would put all of my papers about relativity into book form.

Meanwhile, this morning when I checked how my papers were doing, I found that yesterday I had 9 new readers of my latest paper, "Radar guns and Relativity," the largest one-day number since October 21, when I had 19 new reads in one day.  It seems to indicate that people are talking about the paper.  Is it just a coincidence, or does it have something to do with how that scientist/philosopher learned about my paper?  Who knows?  Maybe time will tell.

While all that was going on, I looked through my collection of LP records.  I've got a hundred and twenty of them tucked away in a cabinet. 



My record player stopped working about ten years ago or more, and I may not have listened to any of them for 20 years or more.  I was somewhat surprised by what I had.  I didn't recall that I had so many classical albums.  The stack on the right seems to be mostly classical stuff, but it also includes a copy of "Victory at Sea."  That album is currently selling for $25 on EBay.

 

  So, that discussion is ended.

Meanwhile, on the RDForum, I've run out of ways to explain how radar guns work, and so I just stopped posting.  But "Barry" and "Deacon" are still arguing and posting.  "Barry" posted message #296, and "Deacon" posted message #297, which might be some kind of record for that forum.  "Barry" posted a list of 12 changes he thinks I should make to the latest version of my "Relativity and Radar Guns" paper.  Most are just changes in wording, which means they are just personal preferences, but some are the same arguments he's been making since I began the thread back on September 26.  The post by "Deacon" is just a rant about how I still do not accept his belief that my proposed truck experiment won't work. 

If I respond, it will just cause them to say the same things over and over and over and over again.  So, I'm not going to respond.  I'm ending the discussion.

When I went for a brisk walk yesterday, after deciding I was going to end the RDForum discussion, all I could think about, for some reason, was my "music problem." 

Back in August of 2019, the stereo system in my office/library suddenly stopped working.  At the time, I was just beginning the arguments over radar guns, and I was contemplating spending $300 to buy a used radar gun that the manufacturer was saying would show the truck speed if I was in a car directly behind the truck with the gun pointed at the back of the truck.  That is basically the truck experiment mentioned in my latest paper, but done with only one radar gun.  I didn't buy the gun, and I eventually learned that there is no gun that works the way that manufacturer said his gun worked.

Anyway, my point is that I was too busy with other things, and I just couldn't focus on solving my "music problem."  So, instead of fixing the stereo system, I spent about $70 to buy a second MP3 player (the other one was being used for podcasts) and a BlueTooth speaker to work with it.  Then I proceeded to load music from my CD collection onto the new MP3 player.  That's what I've been listening to ever since, for more than a year, whenever I'm on my computer.

Yesterday, while out for a walk, I must have decided I was tired of listening to the music from my CD collection.  It was mostly modern stuff, with some Swing and Rock and Roll.  I wanted to listen to solid jazz.  That is what I have on my cassette collection and what I played on my stereo system.



In the image above, you can see some of my cassette collection on the shelf under the stereo system.  (The cassettes are all recordings I made from a local jazz station years ago, when there was such a thing as a jazz radio station.)  My MP3 player and BlueTooth speaker are atop the stereo receiver.  I couldn't figure out what was wrong with the 27" by 14" speakers for the stereo system, which are on the other side of the room, so I connected another set of smaller speakers I have to the cassette player.  I got them to work, but there was no way to adjust the sound level.  The cassette player is supposed to be connected to the stereo system which has the volume control and is connected to the big speakers.  Fortunately, the sound was just a little too soft instead of too loud, so the setup was workable.

I had also decided it was time to convert my cassettes to MP3 files.  It should take only about 400 or 500 hours.  Doing it with my computer is just too complicated, so I searched the Internet and found I could buy a $30 cassette player that does it, putting the resulting MP3 files on a flash drive.  I ordered the device from Amazon and should have it Monday.

Then, this morning, I took the time to carefully examine the large speakers for my stereo system and their connections.  I must have jiggled something, because the large speakers suddenly started working once again, and at this moment I'm listing to solid jazz on the big speakers once again.  When I get the cassette to MP3 converter I'll still going to convert the cassettes to MP3 files.  That way I can listen to jazz for as long as I want without having to change cassettes.  I'll just have to charge the battery in the MP3 player every night, and I'll have to charge the battery in the BlueTooth speaker once a week, which is what I've been doing for the past year.

And it seems I now need to start thinking about my "weather problem."  There was a hard frost yesterday morning, and snow flurries.  It is time to start winterizing my apartment.  I just need to focus and muster some will power.

sci.physics.relativity UseNet forum and the RDForum seem to have come to an end.  I had hoped there might be some inexpensive way to do the experiment described in my latest paper, but the RDForum discussions seem to rule that out. 

It occurred to me that even if radar guns cannot be fine-tuned enough to measure the exact speed of a truck from inside the truck, the experiment might still work even if there was a minor error of some kind.  If the guns were pointed at each other while stationary on the ground and showed some erroneous speed because they weren't identically tuned, that wouldn't prevent the experiment from working.  The experiment would be validated if the guns showed 15 mph while on the ground and then showed higher and higher speeds if the guns were inside a moving truck that was gaining speed, showing 55 mph mph when the truck was actually going only 40 mph.  The guys on the RDForum who have considerable experience with radar guns, however, insist that the errors might be well outside of the 10 to 200 mph range that guns display, plus they say that if the guns show 15 mph while stationary, the speed will change as you continue to hold the trigger, and they may not show 15 mph the next time to pull the trigger.

I'm not willing to spend $200 to find out by buying two of the least expensive radar guns at WalMart. So, everything is "on hold" until someone reads my paper and decides he knows how to make the experiment work.

Meanwhile, everything is settling down and the most important question in the world right now is clearly: Who will win the election next week?  In some ways it is difficult to think about anything else.  I spent a couple hours this morning looking for podcasts that I haven't yet heard.  I downloaded a couple dozen into my computer.  I'll transfer them to my MP3 player when I finish listening to the ones in the player I still haven't listened to.  It's work that doesn't require much thinking.  And now that I'm done (for now), I'll probably listen to an audio book instead of some podcasts.  Or maybe I'll just go for a walk.  There were some snow flurries outside my window this morning.  But there doesn't seem to be much wind, so a brisk walk is still worthwhile.  Maybe while walking I'll think of something to do instead of just sitting around and waiting for election day. 

October 25, 2020 - I think I spent time every day last week arguing on the sci.physics.relativity UseNet forum and the RDForum.  And the arguments are still raging on the RDForum.  They have been unusually productive arguments.  People on the RDForum pointed out to me four relatively minor errors in my latest paper, Relativity and Radar Guns, and I made the corrections, posting a new version which got uploaded at 8:05 p.m. on Friday evening.  

Most of the arguments were with mathematicians who cannot accept that radar guns measure speeds relative to the speed of light and not relative to the radar gun or the point on the ground where the radar gun is located.  In "normal" situations, the results are basically the same either way, but a radar gun definitely has the capability to measure speeds relative to the speed of light, and they definitely have no capability to measure speeds relative to the gun or to the ground.  That would require measuring distances, and police radar guns definitely do not measure distances.  Lidar guns measure distances - and so do normal radars used in aviation and weather forecasting.

During one argument late yesterday afternoon, someone named "Token" wrote: "For the record, I am a radar systems engineer, I have about 40 years professional experience in radar and radar related fields."  And he ranted about how radar guns measure speeds relative to the radar's location, even though his experience was entirely with military radars.  I used this illustration to respond to him:



The illustration shows how regular radars work, including military radars.  They measure distances and directions.  In the illustration, the radar beam is moving around the center and is currently at the 55 degree mark.  If 0 is north, then the beam is currently pointing northeast as it sweeps around the entire circle.

As you can see, there are four targets on the radar.  The scale for the circles on the screen is not known, but if they represent 5 miles, then the closest target is 15 miles away, and another is at about 18 miles, while the two others are at about 28 miles away.

"Token's" response to me would take about 3 pages in a book, but it began with this:

At this point you are making a pretty classic mistake. You have done a little research and think you understand a little how radars work, specifically the ones you have researched. You assume that you and you alone are correct and that others do not know how they work.

I rather doubt you have any idea how many different ways the Doppler shift of a target is used in radar beyond just to determine radial velocity in a police radar gun. Or how similar the processing techniques are for a variety of different radars and radar functions.

With the formulation of the special theory of relativity by Albert Einstein in 1905 and its acceptance by scientists generally, the ether hypothesis was abandoned as being unnecessary in terms of Einstein’s assumption that the speed of light, or any electromagnetic wave, is a universal constant.

A universal constant is what you can measure all speeds against. And that is what radar guns do, using the speed of light as a "universal constant" in full agreement with Einstein's 1905 paper.

The only thing that’s measured is the return frequency. That return frequency only changes if the target is moving relative to the radar gun, as far as the radar gun is concerned.

If you continue to refuse to acknowledge this simple and fundamental fact, there’s no point in pretending you’re actually seeking any understanding. 

It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are.  If it doesn't agree with experiment, it is wrong.

Here's how my post appears on the RDForum where I post as "Investigator":



If you click on the image you can see it full size.  My post suggests a way to end the argument.  The response from "Deacon" is a bit garbled, but it says:

There’s no argument. There is extremely well established true TJ theofh thousands of experiments and millions of radar units produced, and then there’s your failure of understanding.

Stupid Ed lake sure reads a lot...but it dos not register in his mushy brain

 

It's a humorous book about physics, with lots of illustrations which mostly just turn problems into puns.



The cartoons weren't particularly "hilarious" or helpful, but the book was very thought provoking and worthwhile.   I've got 10 pages of notes from it.  Here's an example that fits right into what my most recent paper is about:

When Einstein introduced the idea that there is a maximum speed in the universe, it was not very intuitive. After all, why should there be a speed limit in the universe? Why shouldn’t you be able to hop on a rocket, blast off, press the accelerator pedal all the way down, and build up speed forever until you are zooming past galaxies left and right at ludicrous speed? If space is empty, what is actually preventing you from going as fast as you like?

How does it make sense for a particle to have zero mass? For example, the photon has exactly zero mass. If it has no mass, then it’s a particle of what? If you demand that mass is equal to stuff, then you have to conclude that a massless particle literally has nothing to it. Instead of thinking about a particle’s mass as how much stuff is crammed into a supertiny little ball, just think of it as a label that we apply to an infinitesimal quantum object.

Why does the universe respect cause and effect? We can’t expect that the universe was designed to be sensible to our particular minds. Why do we have this particular maximum speed and not another? The question of why the universe is causal is very difficult even to discuss, not to mention answer in a satisfactory way. Causality is built so deeply into our pattern of thinking that we can’t just step outside of it and consider a universe without it. We can’t use logic and reasoning to consider a universe without logic and where reasoning is impossible or inappropriate.

It’s possible that there are questions for which we will never find the answers, but there are also questions that have moved from philosophy to science. As we expand our ability to look far into the universe and deep within particles, we also expand the number of things we can test with science. This grows what we call the testable universe.

Similarly, the testable universe is the fraction of the universe that we can confirm and know about using science. It doesn’t include just the outward bounds of our vision (how far away into space we can see). It also includes the inward bounds (the smallest bits of space and matter that we can see). It includes the limits of how finely and how accurately we can discern things at the smallest and largest scales, and it includes the limits of our theories, mathematics, and capacity for understanding.

Look around you and you might be overwhelmed by the variety and complexity of our beautiful universe, but find the patterns and you can begin to make sense of it.

Ed Lake states that RELATIVE MOTION is a stupid idea

Ed Lake is very ignorant because he does not know that RELATIVE MOTION is a PRECEPT of Relativity [hence the name=Relativity]

Ed Lake is very stupid because he does not understand that he is completely dismissing RELATIVITY by claiming that one of it's fundamental precepts is stupid AND at the same time he states that he understands relativity

This time he's right.  I do think that "relative motion" is a "stupid idea" when talking about physics and objects. It implies that you cannot definitively say whether a speeding car hit a wall or whether a speeding wall hit the car.



Or, perhaps more absurdly, we cannot tell if we sent the Voyager 1 spacecraft off to explore beyond our solar system, or if Voyager 1 is still where it was at launch time when we somehow caused the solar system (and the entire universe) to move away from it.

The second and third comments are totally wrong, of course.  I merely claim that "relative motion" as defined in Einstein's theories is not between objects, it is the motion of an object relative to the speed of light, which is a "universal constant."  Unfortunately, as I stated in last Sunday's comment, "

Ed Lake is still a moron because he does not understand that Relativity only relates motion to 'observers'

Ed Lake is still a moron because he introduces a third frame [a tree-a planet-a star-a pulsar] and does not realize that he is contradicting the axioms of Relativity

Ed Lake is still a moron because he does not understand that Relativity completely dispenses with Causality

Ed lake is still stupid because he does not understand that Time Dilation has been confirmed MATHEMATICALLY in a mathematical model called Relativity

Ed lake is still stupid because does not understand that Time Dialtion [sic] is a mathematical construct

Ed lake is still stupid because does not understand that Time is a mental construct and it does not exist in the Universe

Ed lake is still stupid because he does not understand that if Time Dilation has been confirmed so has Length Contraction been confirmed

Dear Ed,
I agree with you. You are not the right person. You repeat what you have been told, which is nothing but a fairy tail.
Just look at my page in the [xxxxxx] and see what I was able to achieve with my wrong theory.

the twin paradox is unsolvable within the framework of special relativity, unless we make the assumption of a preferred frame of reference, which stands in diametrical opposition to the mere principle of relativity.

With the formulation of the special theory of relativity by Albert Einstein in 1905 and its acceptance by scientists generally, the ether hypothesis was abandoned as being unnecessary in terms of Einstein’s assumption that the speed of light, or any electromagnetic wave, is a universal constant.

The audio book is 9 hours and 59 minutes long.  I finished listening to it last night at about 10:40 p.m.  I was a fan of the TV show "Seinfeld" from when it first aired in 1989 through its final season in 1998, and I have the entire series on DVDs. 



It was a very interesting, funny and enjoyable audio book.  It definitely made me want to view the entire series again. Did the final episode end with Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer in jail?  I don't remember that at all, probably because the last time I watched that episode from a DVD was in August 2008.  According to the book, reviewers also considered it to be their worst episode.  Nevertheless, I'm going to have to find the time to watch the entire series again.

Meanwhile, there were three more personal attacks on my web site log when I checked it this morning.  The attacks make it pretty clear that I was wrong in believing the previous attack came from someone on the RDForum.  Everything now indicates that they are from the same idiot who posted attacks to my web site logs in the past, some mathematician from the sci.physics.relativity UseNet forum. It's clear he's a mathematician because of what he posted yesterday.  There were ten copies of three different messages in my log file.  Here are the three messages:

51.75.64.23 - - [11/Oct/2020:10:12:39 -0500] "GET /Imbecile_Ed_
Lake_does_not_understand_that_if_Spacetime_is_a_mathematical_
construct..._so_is_Time_Dilation HTTP/1.1" 404 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0"

51.75.64.23 - - [11/Oct/2020:10:13:08 -0500] "GET /Idiot_Ed_lake_
does_not_understand_that_Time_Dialtion_is_to_Relativity_what_
Epicycles_are_to_Geocentrism_[mathematical_constructs] HTTP/1.1  404 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0"

51.75.64.23 - - [11/Oct/2020:10:13:51 -0500] "GET /Moron_Ed_Lake_does_not_understand_that_when_he_
advocates_Relativity_he_is_advocating_a_mathematical_
model..._yet_he_calls_mathematicians_idiots HTTP/1.1" 404
- "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0"

What this mathematician doesn't seem to understand is that even though Time Dilation was just a "mathematical construct" when Einstein first proposed it in 1905, it has since been confirmed by many experiments.  That means Time Dilation is no longer just a "mathematical construct" like Spacetime, it is something many different experiments have shown to be real, even though mathematicians will endlessly argue that it is not.

Also, I don't think I've ever called all mathematicians idiots.  I've only called the ones "idiots" who call me names and attack me when I challenge their beliefs, like the idiot who posted those 30 attacks.  I can't just call him a "mathematician," since that would imply an attack on all mathematicians.  There are mathematicians who know that their math is just a pattern they have created. It is not a "discovery."  A mathematical explanation without experimentation is just an interesting pattern.

I made a mistake in writing about the guy's previous post in my Oct. 10 comment.  That just encouraged him to post more personal attacks.  So, I won't be writing about any more of them ... unless he posts something truly interesting.
 
October 11, 2020 - The arguments and discussions I've been having on the RDForum have been very productive and very interesting.   Yesterday I actually got a mathematician/engineer to discuss something instead of just declaring his beliefs.  It turned out we were saying the same thing, we just computed it in a different way.  I produced a spreadsheet showing how I think radar guns measure target speeds.   The spreadsheet looked like this:



And I explained it this way:

1. The gun has the Hertz frequency and the speed of light programmed into it.
2. It develops the beat frequency by comparing the transmitted Hertz frequency to the returned Hertz frequency.
3. It then develops a percentage by finding the percentage that beat frequency is of the transmitted Hertz frequency times 2.
4. It then uses that percentage against the speed of light to find the speed of the target.
5. It then somehow rounds off the speed of the target to the nearest whole number and displays it.

1. The gun develops the beat frequency by comparing the transmitted Hertz frequency to the returned Hertz frequency.

2. It divides the beat frequency of the target return by the K factor [from the table below:]

@35.5 GHz 1 MPH = K of ~105.873 Hz
@34.7 GHz 1 MPH = K of ~103.487 Hz
@33.8 GHz 1 MPH = K of ~100.803 Hz
@24.15 GHz 1 MPH = K of ~72.023 Hz
@24.125 GHz 1 MPH = K of ~71.949 Hz
@10.525 GHz 1 MPH = K of ~31.389 Hz

3. It then somehow rounds off the speed of the target to the nearest whole number (actually nearest lower whole number) and displays it.

A radar gun is operating on a designed center frequency of 35.5 GHz and receives back target Doppler of 6000 Hz.

6000/105.873= ~56.67 MPH

Round down to 56 MPH and display.

"Mathematics is simply the catalogue of all possible patterns."

He used one pattern and I used another pattern to get the same answer.  But, more importantly both of us used mathematical "patterns" which measure speeds relative to the speed of light.  That confirmed what I had written to start the debate: Radar guns measure speeds relative to the speed of light, they do not measure speeds relative to some object.

So, we have a solid basis for our next discussion.  Does he agree to what I highlighted in red above?

In another discussion on Friday, I suddenly realized there was a different way to argue about waves versus photons.  Instead of arguing about radar guns, we could argue about telescopes.  Do telescopes receive photons or waves?  How would a telescope work if it received waves?

51.81.84.168 - - [09/Oct/2020:12:59:52 -0500] "GET /All_your_
mentally_deficient_RAMBLINGS_will_be_lost_FOREVER___
the_day_you_die_and_payments_to_your_webhost_provider_
stop_and_your_domain_expires____THE_BIGGEST_LOSS_
OF_HUMANITY_[sarcasm HTTP/1.1" 404 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0
(Windows NT 10.0; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0"

You need radar guns to be based on and measure c as part of their operations to support your paper here:
https://vixra.org/pdf/2009.0124v1.pdf

And your blog post here: My Thoughts on the Changing World.

October 6, 2020 - It used to annoy the hell out of me that Trump would always hold his Corona virus updates at the same time as the evening news shows were on.  So, instead of watching the world news, everyone would end up watching Trump rambling and blathering for an hour or more.  After a couple minutes, I usually just switched to watching something else. 

The networks finally caught onto Trump's game, and they would cut away from his ramblings after about ten minutes and go back to presenting the world news.  Soon after, Trump stopped doing daily briefings.

Does anyone think it is just a coincidence that Trump went to the hospital while the evening new shows were on?  Or that he left the hospital while the evening news shows were on?

The only question is: Does he do that to mess with what he considers to be "fake news" shows, or does he do it because he knows that is when he'll get the best TV coverage?  Either way, he is just demonstrating his creepy narcissism.

Last night I finally watched some of the Trump-Biden debate.  I decided that I'd never be able to sit through it in its entirety, so I burned it onto a DVD.  When watching it from my DVR I had the ability to fast-forward past boring stuff, of course, but when it's on a DVD you can instantly jump forward by 10 minutes, watch a sample, and if it's unbearable, you can instantly jump forward another 10 minutes.  I did that and watched maybe a half hour of Trump's rants and ravings.  If I can stomach it, I can do more of it sometime in the future.  And I erased it from my DVR so that it isn't always there as a reminder when I look to see what I've got waiting to watch on my DVR.  (The only thing I watch while it is being broadcast is the evening news.)

Meanwhile, I'm once again feeling a little overwhelmed.  I'm working on a paper about the physics of radar guns, while at the same time my library seems to be buying more books and providing them to me faster.  Books that were said to have a 6-month wait when I first reserved them turn out to be available in just a few weeks.  I borrowed two books yesterday that I thought I'd have to wait another 5 months or more for, one audio book and one Kindle book.  I started on the audio book right away, but the Kindle book will have to wait.   

And, for some reason, the people on the RDForum suddenly restarted arguments with me.   They are interesting arguments, since explaining things to people causes me to think about those things in different ways, plus the topics are the same topics I'm covering in my new paper.  Also, when you are arguing with someone who refuses to understand, you end up explaining the same things in a dozen different ways, while the other person just argues the same things over and over.  It can be very interesting, but it can also get tedious very fast.  One benefit is that the others on the forum seem to be catching on.  They don't usually join in the arguments.  No one wants to argue with someone who refuses to understand.  But when they write something new you can see they are trying to understand something new.

October 4, 2020 - Yes, we are definitely living in interesting times.  Watching the news about President Trump contracting Covid-19 and having to go to the hospital, and others around him also being tested positive, like Hope Hicks, Kellyanne Conway, Chris Christie, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, and my idiot Senator Ron Johnson, plus two other Republican senators, it's like watching some comedy show where the idiots all finally get their comeuppance.  I wanted to create a cartoon about it, but the best I could come up with is the one below.   

October 2, 2020 - Hmm.  The news this morning is all about how President Trump and his wife Melania have contracted the Covid-19 virus.  And his senior aide, Hope Hicks, has been infected, too.  The only question seems to be, given how careless Trump has been, why did it take so long for him to get it?

What worries me most about Trump getting Covid-19 is that if he gets really sick, Mike Pence will have to take over some or all of the President's duties.  And that situation was confronted a couple years ago when there was a risk of Trump being removed from office by being impeached.  That's when I created this banner:

And what happens if Trump gets so sick he cannot continue his campaign for a second term?  Does Pence automatically become the Republican candidate - maybe with Rush Limbaugh or Steve Bannon as Vice President?

I hope you get better soon, Mr. President! 

October 1, 2020 - On Tuesday evening I really wanted to watch the Presidential Debate.  I set my DVR to record it, and also I sat down to watch it.  But as soon as Donald Trump started ranting I felt like I was watching a movie I didn't like and I was watching it for the hundredth time.  I figured I'd wait until Wednesday evening and watch it from the DVR, allowing me to skip over things if it got too annoying and depressing.  So, I turned it off and listened to an audio book instead.  It was supposed to be a 90 minute debate, and at 9:30 I turned it on again to see what the news commentators had to say, but Trump was still talking, so I turned it off again and listened to more from the audio book.

Then after supper on Wednesday evening, I sat down to watch it on my DVR, but I just couldn't get myself to turn it on.  I had watched what the evening news shows had to say about it, including all the clips, and from my DVR I watched what talk show hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert had to say about it, including all their clips, but I just couldn't watch the actual debate. So, I spent the whole evening listening to more from the audio book.  At about 10:20 p.m., I finished listening to "A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906" by Simon Winchester.

It's a history book, of course, but it's also a travel book.  It isn't just about the San Francisco earthquake and fire of April 18, 1906, it is also about a lot of other earthquakes the preceded it and followed it.  And it's about Simon Winchester's travels to visit the locations of some of these events.  I found it interesting that it was already a time when everyone owned a camera, so there are countless pictures of the San Francisco destruction on the web.



The picture above was almost certainly taken before the fires really started doing damage.   All the buildings that are still standing in the photo probably ended up in ashes as fires raged through the city, doing far more damage than the quake.



The 1811 earthquake at New Madrid, Missouri, has always fascinated me, maybe because it wasn't just "an earthquake," it was a lot more than that.  Winchester also writes briefly about that quake in the book.  Here's a snippet:

Jared Brooks, of Louisville, Kentucky, counted no fewer than 1,874 separate earth-shaking episodes in and around New Madrid over the next few weeks. Shocks like the first enormous one of 16 December occurred two more times – once on 23 January and again on 7 February, this last being the mightiest of all. And then the world fell quiet again.

He also writes about the Alaska quake of 1964.  That's one I remember, because I was in Japan at the time, and while quakes were common there, they didn't get anything like the Alaska quake while I was there.  I recall staring out at the Pacific while waiting for news of an approaching tsunami, but it never came.

 

Winchester's book was an interesting read.  I enjoyed it, maybe just because it kept my mind off of the disaster that is known as the Donald Trump Presidency and the fact that there are tens of millions of Americans who are cheering the disaster and are ready to vote for four more years of it.