Category: Rev. Joe Dirt’s Ramblings

The unsolicited, unreasoned, uninformed, unapologetic opinions of Rev. Joe Dirt

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A Small Delight

I received a text this fine a.m. from someone purporting to be Trump.  It might well have been some sort of political garbage from him, who knows these days.

It started out:

THIS IS PRESIDENT TRUMP

I need to ask David something personal.

Will you stand with me if…

Then it had a link.

Well, obviously I did not click the link.  Instead I went to the menu and selected “Report as Spam and Block”.

Doing so gave me much more pleasure than any effect my reporting and blocking the Enshittificator-in-chief might have on this out-of-whack universe.  However, a wise bear once told me, “take your pleasures where you can.”

Then, lo and behold, I receive a second text from someone purporting to be Don Jr.  It starts out:

It’s Don Jr. My father and I need you to do one thing: update your voter verification record. David — then it gave a link.

Another report and block, but this second action did not give near the same pleasure as the first.

If only I could report and block them in real life… whatever that is.

And so it should not be.

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #7,683

yeah I know you did not ask!

You should so be blessed – well cursed at times actually – with a mind such as mine, making all these weird connections between my rumored neurons. Just be thankful that I do not share all of my random thoughts.

Okay, this is not so much a random thought, but more of an interesting/strange fact that I came across while watching a Great Courses offerings,  How the Earth Works. The earth oscillates much like a struck bell. And the earth is continuing being struck by earth quakes, the movement of tectonic plates, the movement of magma, etc. which causes this oscillation.

The fact that I found interesting is that it oscillates at a note of E, 20 octaves below middle E on a piano.  Much too low to be heard by human ears, and, most likely, any biological ear.  Now you know, the note of the earth is an E.  So, if you are lost in space, just set your craft to hone in on this E, and you will be home before you know it… okay that was a random thought.

And that, my friends, is my two bits for the this day, the 273rd day of 2026.

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Pulp Fiction Wisdom

The quote below is from a Travis McGee novel by John D. MacDonald, The Green Ripper. It occurs towards the end of the novel after a series of devastating events left the protagonist questioning the very meaning of existence. For some of us a daily occurrence, but for our knight errant, it was a much deeper hole that he had fallen into much too often.

It had taken most of the five months to finish the job of sorting
myself out. Meyer had put me on the right track. I didn’t know
what he had meant when he said to me, “Not one of us ever
grows up to be what he intended to be. Not one of us fulfills his
own expectations, Travis. We are all our own children, in that
sense. At some point, somewhere, we have to stop making
demands.”

On initially encountering this philosophy in a pulp fiction novel, it was a bit surprising as the Travis McGee novels are aimed at the 16 year old boy in most men.  I suppose women might enjoy these novels also, but I cannot see a lot of women reading them.  Much like it is a bit of a rarity to find a man reading pulp romance novels.

I am still debating whether the quote is particularly profound or not, but it does make one pause for a moment to consider what it means.  MacDonald spins a good action mystery novel that keeps you turning the pages, but they are not destined to become classics. Nor is MacDonald particularly original, but he does has a tendency to have these long, preachy asides which is where the quote came into play.

It seemed to me I had heard the phrase “we are all own children” before, but a quick internet search did not turn up any sources.  As I mentioned previously, MacDonald was good at channeling the milieu of the time he was writing one of pulp fiction novels.

Make of it what you will, my friend.

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Synopsis of My Love Life

Not exactly, but a close synopsis over several of my “love affairs”… for lack of a better phrase.  Of course, you would need to leave out the part, “going to become one hell of a man.”

The quote below is from a Travis McGee novel by John D. MacDonald, The Green Ripper. It was an older Travis McGee remembering a 16 year old Travis and his summer with an older woman of 24, perfectly acceptable in the 50s and 60s as long as they were discreet.  It is hard to pin down a time line for Travis McGee as MacDonald wrote the 21 books in the series over a 20 year span, and MacDonald was always trying to stay topical for the time the book was to be published.

“…I was in love with her, of course. I could not stand the thought of the summer ending. I told her I loved her, and I was going to come to New York to be close to her.

I will always remember the way she cupped both hands on my
face and looked deeply into my eyes. “Travis, you are a very very
sweet boy, and you are going to become one hell of a man. But if
I ever find you outside my apartment door, I am going to have
the doorman throw you out on your ass. We can end it right now
or next week, whichever you choose. But end it we will, boyo,
with no loose ends. No letters, no phone calls, no visits. Ever.”

And that’s how it was.”

Just saying!

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Paul Krugman and I – Buds?

Well, not really.

We run in much different circles, and Paul Krugman is intellectually light-years beyond me. However, we seem to share some common interests.  Did I mention that I took two economics classes in college? A lot of the music he posts as a coda to his newsletter is my type music.  And now I discover that he reads science fiction, and has an ambivalent position on reading it.  I only slightly blush when I confess that my guilty pleasure is reading pulp detective and science fiction novels.  Krugman’s comment on this predilection  at an economic conference in Europe was, “And the answer is, well, I don’t know if I’m ashamed or not, but I do read science fiction.”

He then went on give a brief synopsis of one my  favorite novels of any genre, Dune:

“But the premise of the novel is that there’s this planet, Arrakis, which is the sole source of something called spice, which is essential to the galactic economy. And so everything relies upon it. And so basically Arrakis is the Strait of Hormuz with giant sandworms. It is really very much relevant to current issues. By the way, the struggle for control of the spice leads initially to weaponized interdependence and eventually to outright war, which is kind of where we want to probably end today’s talk.”

Followed by a quote by one of the characters in the novel Paul Atreides:

“He who can destroy a thing, controls the thing.”

I will confess that I did not read the whole talk as it is very long.  The parts relating to Dune are only a few paragraphs into transcript.

But having said that, here is a link to the transcript of his talk at the conference: Economic Size and Economic Power

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Mahatma Gandhi’s Seven Deadly Sins

Here is a little something for you to ruminate on this 262nd day of 2026 with 45 days to go until the most momentous election of our life…

Seven Deadly Sins per Mahatma Gandhi:

    1. Wealth Without Work
    2. Pleasure Without Conscience
    3. Knowledge Without Character
    4. Commerce (Business) Without Morality (Ethics)
    5. Science Without Humanity
    6. Religion Without Sacrifice
    7. Politics Without Principle

If only…

Just the list itself is plenty to ruminate on, and I will not bore you with my puerile (this seems to be my word of late) commentary.

However, here is a link to an article on mkgandhi.org/ that does a bang up job: SEVEN DEADLY SINS As per Mahatma Gandhi

This particular commentary is based on Stephen Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People which is more a business management book than a philosophical work. I remember going through a Stephen Covey corporate training on the seven habits.  I cannot say a lot stuck, but I will take good information where I find it.

Thinking about it a little more I can see some overlap between Gandhi’s proscriptions and Buddha’s 8 Fold Path, advice on how to live:

    1. Right view
    2. Right thought
    3. Right speech
    4. Right boundary of actions
    5. Right livelihood
    6. Right effort
    7. Right mindfulness
    8. Right absorbed concentration

The trouble with humanity is that at one level we all know the way to act that is best for us  and for our fellow man, but we let greed, fear and lust – for many things – dominate.

If only…

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Quote of the Day – Hubert Reeves

Quote of the Day… not actually daily, but whenever I encounter one I think worth sharing and there are not too many in sequence.  I like quotes as they frequently distill a piece of wisdom into a brief passage, or make other points very succinctly – such as the witticisms of Oscar Wilde.

“Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping.” ~~ Hubert Reeves

To see more Quotes for Day, visit this link: Quotes for the Day

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #5,004

yeah I know you did not ask!

You should so be blessed – well cursed at times actually – with a mind such as mine, making all these weird connections between my rumored neurons. Just be thankful that I do not share all of my random thoughts.

Okay, here is something I find vaguely ironic.

I was downstairs in the basement exercising in our little gym (treadmill, stationary bike, weights, room for floor exercises).  Before I started, I selected an album from my music server. For this particular day, it was Mr. Boogie Man by John Lee Hooker.  Just in case you are not familiar with Hooker, this is a blues album. The thing about the blues and reason for the blues is that the songs frequently have very depressive themes.  A little bit like the iconic country song, You Never Even Called Me By My Name (The Perfect Country & Western Song):

Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison
And I went to pick her up in the rain
But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck
She got run over by a damned old train

As I sat in a chair doing some stretching-type exercises recommended by a physical therapist, I found myself tapping my foot as mama got run over by that damned old train.

But then again, that may be a bit of the point of the blues, take a situation that normally has you crying in your beer and getting you tapping your toes until you drive the blues away.  Of course, sometimes it just nice to wallow in your blues as long as you do not stay down there too long.

And that, my friends, is my two bits for the this day, the 257th day of 2026.

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Quadrillion versus trillion

Sorry.

When I originally posted my article The Three Biggest Lies, I was rushing out the door. I mixed up trillion and quadrillion.  A trillion has 12 places (1,000,000,000,000) while a quadrillion has 15 places (1,000,000,000,000,000) after the first set of numbers.

C’est la vie.

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The Three Biggest Lies

  1. Sure, I will respect you in the morning (clean version)
  2. The check is in the mail
  3. I will give every American $5,000 if the Republicans win the mid-terms, or so sayeth El puta pendajo

Let’s see…  the current population of the United States is 342,620,143.  Multiple that by $5,000 and you have an amount of this blatant bribe of $1,713,100,715,000. To put it another way, 1.7 trillion dollars.  Even if he is just talking about taxpayers in the United States of which there are 153,800,000 that number is $769,000,000,000 or 7.69 billion dollars.

Yeah, right!

That, my friends, is the definition of inflation, when the government starts printing money wildly like would be needed for that give away.

To give you some perspective, the first number is roughly what the United States spent on social security in 2025, a program that the Republicans are trying to eliminate as they say it is too costly.

Sorry.  When I originally posted this as I was rushing out the door, I mixed up trillion and quadrillion.  A trillion has 12 places (1,000,000,000,000) while a quadrillion has 15 places (1,000,000,000,000,000) after the first set of numbers.

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