I moved it around a bit; as each part of my head cooled off the headache receded. Finally it went away almost completely and I tried to sleep, but couldn't--too restless--so I gave up and got out of bed.
* * *
On my way back from picking up tonight's dinner I had another gander at that car I was talking about, at the used car lot from which I bought the Cherokee.
This time, instead of eyeing the price tag I looked at the front end and realized my error: that thing was a BMW M3, not a Miata.
"Psh. Junk," I scoffed.
I know, I know, it's fine German engineering, "ultimate driving machine", blah blah blah, etcetera.
Then you buy it. And let me know how much the parts cost. Because the bits for that thing that are not wear parts like brake pads and such are going to cost a small fortune. I learned that much from having a VW that didn't share the same engine and suspension as the Beetle.
...but I wouldn't wipe my nose on a BMW because the people who drive them are such asshats I want nothing to do with the brand.
* * *
Anyway, having survived that epic headache I had thought to watch some more Haruhi tonight, but I just don't feel like it. The headache left me feeling drained. I mostly sat around fiddling a bit with WoW and watching some mechanical-related YouTube, but after putting Mrs. Fungus to bed I spent maybe an hour trying to psych myself up enough to wash the dishes. That's done now, but I'm left without the motivation to do anything else.
* * *
There was a quiz on facceboob challenging people to answer trivia questions about 1984--the year, not the novel--and it claimed no one could get them all right.
I got them all right. Mainly because if you were a teenager in 1984, as I was, every last damned one of those questions had an obviously correct, and a decidedly wrong, answer.
Presenting a photo of a band, for example, the quiz would then ask which of two songs the band had done. It varied as to whether the correct answer was A or B, but the incorrect answer was always a song that was a hit in the 90s rather than 1984. Movies were much the same: correct movie title, or movie title from another decade. A couple of them were almost challenging, naming two songs from the same album by the same band, but--again--if you were 17 years old in 1984 you can still remember which songs were popular and which were not.
The summer of 1984 was the last time I really listened to the radio, habitually, and that was almost entirely while driving. After that, I had my own car, and I had a cobbled-together cassette stereo in the thing, so I was no longer given the choice of either silence or whatever was on the radio.
There ended up being one question for which I had to guess the answer. One. I guessed correctly.
"You'll never get them all right!" Well, you're wrong.
* * *
I'm seeing a bunch of real dumbassitude about the fire in the Amazon jungle, as if this kind of thing wasn't an annual phenomenon.
As a bonus there was a thing put up by a "scientific" clickbait site saying gee, if only trees gave off WiFi signals we'd plant them everywhere! It's just too bad that they only give off the oxygen we breathe.
That's probably one of the most pathetically inane sentiments I've seen in a while. The implication that we humans, as a species, don't care about trees is almost totally incorrect. In the United States, there are more trees living now, per capita, than there were at the time of the Revolutionary War. Do you know why?
Because we no longer cut them down for fuel. For one thing. For another, we don't need nearly as much farmland to feed the country, per capita, as we did in 1790, because farming technology has improved greatly. Areas that were cleared of trees to grow crops went fallow and trees began growing again. For a third, people planted trees all over the place because they like them. For a fourth--
The Amazon jungle is huge, so big that there still are not complete maps of it that didn't come from aerial photographs. Every year during the dry season there is a forest fire somewhere in it. There is no way to fight the fire, even if we wanted to, and no one particularly wants to since there is no real development there. And even if someone clears a piece of land, if he does not keep clearing it, it will revert to jungle in a couple of years.
That's the thing: even if someone were to clearcut a section of jungle, harvesting wood to make paper, if he doesn't go back and keep clearcutting it, the thing fills in behind him. Two, three, four years after it's clearcut you can barely tell anything happened--and in all probability if you were to drop a "rainforest" biologist in a section that was five years recovered from clearcutting, and then drop him in a section that was five years recovered from a fire, he'd have a hard time telling the difference, at least without taking samples of everything back to the lab and spending six months analyzing them.
* * *
Not sure how much longer the pool will be up; and further I've no idea if we'll get to use it again this year. The daily high temps are forecast in the 70s for the next ten days, and once that's up we're in September. We're getting our September weather in August, FFS.
There should be one or two good warm spells remaining in the year, though, before we're done with warm weather and autumn really sets in.
We had a week with really hot weather. A week.
*sigh*
* * *
One of the YouTube videos I watched was...well, I'm just going to have to say it: this guy is building a drift car from one of those wedge-shaped electric cars from the late 1970s.
The engine? Oh, the 1800CC engine from a Honda Gold Wing. 6 cylinders, 117 horsepower. To which he is adding a supercharger.
Absent the batteries, the car is pretty much light enough for one person to lift one end. The electric motor is pretty heavy but that will be coming out; the Gold Wing engine will be in front of the driver. It won't have a reverse gear (the Gold Wing transmission won't be included and anyway the starter is what provides "reverse" on that motorcycle) but instead it looks as if he's going to hook the driveshaft directly to the rear axle.
The term "deathtrap" comes to mind. Jeeze.
* * *
Looks like it's raining tomorrow. Hopefully I can get the grass cut on Tuesday.