Our RV Adventures

First up, I want to thank everyone for the your kind words about yesterday’s blog on Statistics, Lying with Statistics, and Damned Statistics. I really appreciate it.

I had originally planned to power wash the rig this morning, but it just didn’t work out. I guess my get-up-and-go just didn’t get up.

I’ll try again Saturday morning.

I want to get it done before we leave on our upcoming trip on the 21st. Besides the normal grime, I want to get all the oil off the rear of the coach and also the Blue Ox tow bar that was left over from our hydraulic fluid fan motor leak.

I also want to get some more Busch Aluminum Wheel Wash to clean up our rig’s wheels like I did last March. The front wheels went from this

to this.

And the rear wheels went from this

to this.

And the stuff is really easy to use. No scrubbing or polishing. Just spray it on, let it sit, and then rinse it off. It did take a couple of spray, sit, rinse iterations because the wheels were pretty dirty, but they came out great.

Jan and I headed up to Webster to have lunch at our now-favorite Chinese buffet, East Star. Then after our usual delicious meal, we made a stop at my client’s office to pick the Learning Remote for our new TV SoundBar that came in yesterday.

Then it was on over the El Dorado WalMart to drop off a prescription and getting some groceries. After that it was home about 5pm.

After we got settled in, I unwrapped our new Learning Remote and got it set up. And that only took a couple of minutes. I had ordered it so both of us would have remote to control the volume of the SoundBar that we got to increase the volume from our TV.

All it takes to program it is to just press the SET button until the red light comes on and then point the two remotes at each other about an inch apart. Then press and hold the function button you want to copy, and press the corresponding button on the new remote. Easy Peezy.

I programmed the Mute and Volume buttons for the SoundBar, the Power button for the TV, and the A/V button for the TV Input to switch between the DVR and the Computer. As of yet I haven’t decided what if anything I’m going to do with the CH Up and CH Down buttons, since they won’t really work with our DirecTV DVR.

I think the real problem with it is going to be keeping track of it.

I’ve got another new toy coming in either tomorrow or Saturday. It’s a new Wyze Cam, but this is the new Pan Cam.

Not only can it be set to automatically pan back and forth, and tilt, it can be programmed with multiple detection hotspots. Even better it will pan to track any action that enters its field of vision. And all this at 1080p and for only $30.

You can check out the video here.

I mentioned before that I’ve not real happy with Godaddy’s Website Builder programs, both the old one and the new one. So I’ve started looking at other programs.

I started this afternoon with WIX’s version, and so far I like it. It’s easy, intuitive, and pretty powerful. But before I switch anything over, I want to look at a couple of other programs first.

Thought for the Day: 

I saw a guy at Starbucks today.
No iPhone, no tablet, no laptop.
He just sat there.
Drinking coffee.
Like a psychopath.

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D-Day June 6, 1944.

Looks Like I Stepped In It Again.

Wouldn’t Be The First Time, And Certainly Won’t Be The Last.

I got more comments on last night’s blog than I haven on anything else in a while. Apparently some people thought my Miss America post was too ‘political’. Others had comments, both pro and con, on my ‘Thought for the Day’ graphic.

You can find statistics online that will support this. and others that lean the other way.

Some questioned the actual figures listed in the graphic. The problem is who is allowed to ‘torture’ the statistics. Note I said ‘statistics’, not facts. And they’re usually not the same.

In fact, according to the FBI, the most dangerous city in the US is St. Louis, MO. But its 188 murders in 2017 were less than a third of Chicago’s 650+. But on a per capita basis, St. Louis is much more dangerous. It all depends on how far you want to ‘twist’ things.

For example, how is ‘murder’ defined? Sounds like that would be straight forward, wouldn’t it. But not so fast. There’s ‘murder’, and then there’s ‘murder.’

Was it ‘deliberate’, ‘accidental’, or ‘justified’? Or was it even ‘suicide’? Some stats have them all included. Yes, even suicide. Hey, the person ‘killed’ themselves, right?

As another example of this, remember right after the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting back on February 14th? Well, in literally just minutes after the shooting, an Internet meme was circulating, saying that in just the six weeks since the beginning of the year, there had been 18 School Shootings.

WOW!  18!

At least until you start looking at the ‘facts’. According to ‘Everytown For Gun Safety’, the organization that came up with this, the first shooting of the year took place on Jan 3rd. And was a suicide.

Yes, a guy sitting in the parking lot of a school killed himself. But there were no students and no teachers anywhere near. That’s because the school had been closed for seven months.

Two more were accidental discharges by licensed peace officers, with no one injured. And another was when a gun accidentally discharged in the glove compartment of a car parked in a school parking, before any students were even around. Apparently it too was a ‘school shooting’

That ‘18’ number is shrinking fast. In fact event the Washington Post gave Everytown Four Pinocchio’s, their highest (worse) rating for the article.

Another example is the one about how many ‘children’ are killed by guns every day, week, month, or year. Take your pick. One says that 19 ‘children’ are killed every day. That’s almost 1300 a year.

The problem is how you define a ‘child’. Some places have the age as high as 19, or even 24. And of course, now you’re in the ‘gang member’ range.

It all goes back to Mark Twain, channeling English Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli who said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

On the Miss America front, a number of past contestants have come out lambasting the changes, saying this was a big mistake. And others have come out in favor of the changes. So I guess it’s a toss-up. But I still don’t think it will last much past this next year or so.

Several people, both on radio and one of our blog readers, John Brown, said with no swim suit competition and no evening gown competition, the whole thing might as well just be on the radio.

Sounds about right to me.

Thought for the Day: 

The most dangerous thing in the world is a smiling women . . . sitting in silence.

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