At best, a thermometer is an *indicator* of temperature, in ideal circumstances, it’s fairly accurately calibrated, but either way, it’s the temperature of the fluid *inside* the thermometer that is being indicated.
Nevertheless, if you have a thermometer, you’ll glance at it now and again, and reassure yourself that it hasn’t moved, or moved much at least.
We monitor everything, current bank balance, how many miles to home, phone battery level, it’s what we do as humans, we monitor.
Bitch has been online practically all day today, bitch hasn’t messaged *me* for a fucking week though, we monitor…. bitch is talking to *some* fucker, just not me.
Depending on our predilection and the subject in question and various other factors, we will tend to go either glass full or glass empty imaginary scenarios, based on the monitoring… I heard a funny story about someone, a keen aquarist, so he got the gadget that would report the tank temperature to his mobile phone via sms every hour or so, and more frequently if the temperature strayed outside a couple of degrees range, so his girlfriend feeds the fish or something, end up removing the thermometer and laying it on top of the tank, under the halogen light, he thought the house was burning down, no other way to explain the tank being at 70 degrees Celsius.
In short, we monitor, and we mainly monitor to reassure ourselves that that thing hasn’t changed much, with a side order of it is does change, we caught the winds of change early.
The morning ritual, coffee, smoke, check zerohedge, check baltic dry index, check price of gold, check brent crude, check google news, check emails, check facebook, and so on… I just described an amazing quantity and variety of people.
And yet, it’s the thermometer conundrum, the thermometer is indicating the temperature of the fluid inside the thermometer itself, cue hilarity about tropical fish guy who thought his house was burning down, but every other day when the temperatures indicated were normal any number of things could have happened, that the thermometer would not have noted… neighbours house burning down, being robbed, water leak in the attic flooding the house…
These things we monitor, they are not just indicators, rather than the real thing, they are by definition lagging indicators, there is no advance warning… and yet we still monitor them, because it is our nature, and each individual glance at a thing such as latest zerohedge headlines only takes a moment.
When I was a small boy there was a “sold everything” shop down in the village by the beach, one of the things it sold was a small wooden donkey, it was sold as a weather predictor, donkey’s tail is wet = it’s raining, donkey’s tail is out sideways = it’s blowing a gale, donkey’s tail has fallen off = earthquake.. I found it funny at the time and still do.
The donkey was also a lagging indicator, the problem is, we want leading indicators, and the problem with that, is there are none, as such…
Sure, birds and wild animals bugger off prior to a seismic event, but here’s the rub, we aren’t that sure why, and it isn’t *much* prior, it’s a matter or minutes or hours, not days or weeks or months or years… they are just picking up subtle cues that we are missing… they are monitoring different indicators…
I was in a place that had a 6.9 quake once, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, everyone got a bit tetchy and short tempered the day before, but then again, they were here a couple of days ago before the weather broke and the storm rolled in.. tough getting the right things to monitor.
I myself have been predicting a house price crash as *inevitable*, I’ve been saying it every year since 1995, when our seaside extended end of terrace 7 bedroom house sold for an insane 70k, and the more normal 3 bed family home opposite sold for 45k, and it has gone up every year, that 45k house just sold for 225k.. 19 years in a row prices have been going up, and no sign of the crash I was, and still am, saying is inevitable.
I was monitoring the ratio between the price of the house, and the true local average working man’s annual salary…. which by 1995 had gotten to the point that the traditional house price, or to be more specific, house mortgage upper limit = 3.5 times annual salary, had been significantly exceeded…… sure, wages have doubled since 1995, big deal, 225k / 45k = 5… so 5/2 = 2.5, houses are 2.5 times as UN-affordable now as they were back in ’95 when I started predicting the end.
Hey, a stopped clock is right twice a day, and as someone who has been making the same UN-fulfilled prediction for 19 years now…
But then again, for all it’s faults, the humble thermometer is at least reading / indicating something, but the alleged reading matey gets via SMS, well, that’s no longer a direct reading is it, it’s just electronic hearsay.
Boots on the ground yourself in Mosul / Donetsk / Gaza, that’s a direct reading, here is a photo of putin shooping down an airplane, no here is a photo of the alleged downed by putin airplane, but the number don’t match, who knows, it’s all just electronic hearsay, and electronic hearsay is only one byte away from electronic heresy.
If you do a literal translation of photo-grafia it comes out as painting with light, a beautiful and apt description, especially in this digital age.
Even with JUST using my Canon digital camera, and JUST using the RAW image processing features in ACDSee Pro 7, nota bene, this specifically *excludes* everything you know as “editing” or “retouching” or “airbrushing”, I can transform what the camera saw, which was itself an analog of the real scene, into something that looks quite quite different…. but hey, I personally was there, I personally took the photo and experienced that act, and I personally do the RAW editing and experience that act, and I attempt to make the whole process relevant to the experience I had initially with my eyes, thinking, that will make a nice pic…
I then put that photo on the internet, and all that is lost, you can only see the pixels you can see.
I use my work smartphone camera all day every day at work, I’ll take 20 or 30 snaps a day, once a week I’ll get a horribly blurry and out of focus one, and being digital, all these photos are taken with zero effort and zero cost, go on OKC, every single photo says uploaded with iphone or android OKC app, and yet, 50% of them are as blurred or out of focus or low quality as the one bad one a week I take, and yet, *this* is the photo that person chooses to upload.
Sure, I get the whole I don’t wanna upload pics of myself because I always look fucking ugly in every pic I take of myself scene, which is why when I have to upload a mugshot of myself for such purposes, I always use the same one, a pic I took maybe 3 years ago now, on a nice summer’s day on the farm, me in a shirt and tie, head and shoulders selfie from the side, in focus, well lit, well composed.
I don’t *like* it as a pic of myself, but then I don’t like any pics of myself, I got a lot of sympathy for the whole photo-steals-my-soul thing, but nevertheless it is *fair* and *representative* pic of me…. frankly I think it is a thousand times better than the “just got out of 3 years in Belsen with severe jaundice” photo booth pics on my driving licence and suchlike, they could be anybody, except me..lol
But to use any of these photos, as many people do, as something to watch, to monitor their life and progress….. we’re back to the tropical fish guy.
Speaking personally, my daily ritual includes ZH, and a quick skim of the DM website, to see which millionaire just got convicted of historical sex crimes today (funny how nobody remembers historical sex crimes by people who don’t have a pot to piss in and can’t be sued) and to see which wimminz got a slap on the wrist for “having sex” with a minor when if it had been a man it would have been a sick paedo jailed for rape, and to watch the latest house price hype, buy now, while you still can, roll up, roll up… and I check the fucking sites, and I check goog video and news.
Speaking of which, google the “uniengine valley benchmark”, 350 mb free download, impressive…
But these checks and monitoring, I tire of them increasingly daily, it’s an echo chamber, not an AEWS, hell, even the birds fleeing from an earthquake are fleeing for some cue that already happened, it’s just they picked up on it, you didn’t.
I’ve talked elsewhere about the camera guy and the sound guy filming the lions (use the site search if you like) and that is the essence of it, not being tail end charlie when the pack is in pursuit on the hunt, but being realistic, none of these checks and monitoring helps.
In fact, quite the opposite, I’m so busy watching *these* remote thermometer readings, I’m not out there seeing all the others.
Now, an intermission.
I want to talk about libido, the sex drive.
I’m in my fifties, so obviously mine is far lower than it was when I was 16, I have also come to observe that genetically and hereditary wise, I appear to be following the norm for my line, mid fifties and my sex drive falls off a cliff, sure, my head still runs in certain ruts, but we are talking spontaneous throbbing hardons here, and I have no real reason to suspect it is all down to some as yet undiagnosed health or dietary or environmental issue, I think I’m just getting past it.
I used that last phrase deliberately, “getting past it”, because again, it is something we monitor, and the phrase is derogatory, something wrong with you old man.
Hey, plop a 16 year old virgin with a hot body in my bed and I will fuck that bitch senseless six times a night, no viagra, I just can’t be assed chasing after that bitch any more.
And why should I, I’m in my mid fifties, the reproductive urge *should* be tailing off, or it is going to take away from energies used to keep me alive and sane and safe and healthy in my last years on the planet.
If you’re in your thirties, this is an anathema, but then again, if you are in your thirties, you’re high on drugs, just because your own body is producing them doesn’t change that.
Testosterone, or whatever it is that is responsible for the male sex urge, is like fucking beer googles, exactly like beer goggles, even leaving aside the differential in sexual attractiveness of a given wimminz X, depending on whether you have fucked her in the past or not, I can verify my feeling when I look at skanks on the fucking sites or OKC today, with looking at pics and home porno video I took of ex’s…
I can tell you in all honesty, I can look today at naked pics I took in 2005 of skanks who were in their early twenties then, and slim, and it is like looking at a pic of a classic E-type, yeah, I can see the attraction in the lines and all that, I can see how others might like it and all that, but it doesn’t *move* ME the way it once did.
As a monitoring system, it’s interesting, the aquarium thermometer isn’t sending me an SMS saying “23.7 degrees Celsius” any more, it’s sending me an SMS that says “Meh…”
To be clear, two early 20’s students just walked past my window, skimpy summer dresses, wind blowing their hair, I’m alert to it, yeah, I’d fuck both of them in all their holes in a threesome in a fucking heartbeat, but… but only if it is handed to me on a plate, I am not making any effort… that particular aspect of the sex drug in me has worn off.
In some strange way, the monitoring of house prices waiting for the inevitable crash, (LRFH) or monitoring ZH or the baltic dry index or the situation in Donetsk / Gaza / Mosul, it’s all gone the same way, I can remember giving a shit, you know, but I am at the point where the effort of clicking the mouse to go look at a bookmark is greater than the reward I get from reading that page 0.09 seconds later when it loads.
Meh
Maybe that “meh” attitude is in itself a cue, one that I am missing, that I should be heading south for the winter, or away from the coming quake, or whatever.
Meanwhile around me in real life, for values of real life that include the consideration that one definition of modern civilisation is that stupidity and sloth is no longer punished with death, as a side function of my own advancing years, more and more of those people who I know, or knew, as individual human beings are dying, or suffering serious health issues, or are seeing their lives go to hell in a handcart.
And I am all Meh to that too.
So “Don” is dying, and I can remember his girls being born, and now they are skanks, hmm, possibly worth a fuck, I dunno, ain’t seen em in years, hell it’s warm and wet, but then again they are old enough to have daughter that must be coming up on puberty, LRFH… I don’t care any more.
And I have said that before too, people talk about love and hate being powerful things, like a drug user talking about acid and speed being powerful things, mind expanding man, hey, I’ve done em all, and since experienced shit that made acid and speed seem like a nice cup of tea, and the realisation that the implacability of Nature, as regards to you as an individual, is such a huge thing, comparing merely human emotions/drugs like love and hate to them is like comparing sitting in your room watching the rain to being out on the ocean on a small boat, seriously wondering not so much if you will live to see the dawn, as whether the next wave rushing out of the darkness (no, not like a freight train, nothing so puny and timid and weak) is going to do for you.
And that’s what Meh is, it’s the implacability of nature in human form, snake eyes, watching you watching the remote thermometer readings, wonder if I’ll have time to fuck your grand-daughter up the ass before the big one hits, or more likely, wondering if when actually presented with the opportunity, I just go Meh, I got other fish to fry.
Monitoring the lowering levels of “need to fuck some hawt skank” drug in my system, or rather the apparent effect of an apparent downturn in dosage, I don’t feel the need to go out and buy some and skin up and have to toke and get my levels back up to “normal”
I don’t “miss” that drug, the highs were great, but fuck me it was expensive in so many other ways…. story of my life man… lol
————————————
No names and no pack drill.
Got at least one (three I can think of, lol) readers some of this may resonate with, hey, back in the day I used to drink too, fuck me I was good at it, handled it like a motherfucker, I did everything everyone else did, better than them too, worked drove fucked ran a business made money, I just did it while drinking like a Russian who just ate his own dog.
Hey, even at the time, I knew what I was doing, Dave would drink a litre of Smirnoff blue a day, and then go out drinking, me and Dave understood each other, it was a fucking anaesthetic.
The fucking anaesthetic was just as useless a drug as the fucking pain that led to it, just as useless as the need to fuck some hawt skank drug and all the rest.
Put it all side, let the pain work its natural course instead of going down that road that is not a million miles from the “erectile dysfunction, must take viagra” because you know, there is something *wrong* with you, no there isn’t, it’s supposed to hurt, it’s supposed to change you, it’s supposed to fuck you up, and ONLY IF YOU LET IT, while retaining your faculties, do you get through the other side.
The other side is Meh, it’s a vast tranquil sea, and us Meh types are bobbing around on it on our inflatable sun loungers just chilling, there is a monster tsunami coming, see me surf that fucker on my lilo motherfucker.. oh no, you won’t, ya”ll will already be dead, monitoring your fucking fish tank temperatures.
watch the whole video, it gets better and better as time passes
I have reading of home price / salary ratios since the early 2000s. Can’t say its helped me at all. The two diverge more every year. Maybe we should do more wimminz and less zerohedge.
Comment by Joe — August 11, 2014 @ 7:32 am