It reminded me of something I’d thought about in the past. I wonder how much impact the advent of photography and, eventually, video has had on our brains and emotional well-being?

Before these things were invented, time was much more abstract. We knew that it was passing, since we saw the things around us changing and witnessed our friends and family growing older, but it was on a continuum, with subtle changes occurring, often with little notice, over a long period of time. With the advent of new technologies, we can now see those changes in stark, jarring detail. There was now a record of our lives as time marched forward. We could see ourselves age and be reminded of the people we once were, and of how our parents and grandparents, whom we always thought of as old, were once just like us. I’ve got to believe that this ability has profoundly changed us.

Going back even further, there was a time when we had no knowledge of what we looked like. Before the mirror was invented, unless you happened upon a still stream and got a glimpse of your distorted reflection, your appearance was a mystery to you. You could have been the most beautiful person to ever grace the planet or a hideous monster, but the only clue you had was given by the way others reacted to you. Just imagine going through life and never knowing what you looked like. Would that be good or bad?

Going forward, things are going to get even stranger. With the advent of AI and its ability to generate realistic images and videos, the reality of our past can now be fully distorted. People who didn’t exist will now exist. Events that didn’t happen will have taken place. Will future generations have any clue what the world was really like, or will their history be a fantasy generated by a computer?

There’s little doubt that all the technologies I’ve mentioned above have changed us and the societies in which we live. Has it been for the better or for the worse? Since we have no way of measuring it, we’ll probably never know.

I brought my car into the dealership on Wednesday for an oil change and tire rotation (I had a coupon), and while I was waiting for the work to be completed, the technician came out and informed me that a mouse had built a large nest in the blower and cabin filter assembly. This was a surprise to me, since I hadn’t heard any of the rattling you usually hear when debris gets into the system, and my rather sensitive nose hadn’t detected any bad smells. The technician told me they could clean it out, but it would take about 2 hours and cost $265. Since I didn’t feel like sitting around for an additional two hours, I had already been there an hour, and $265 dollars seemed like an excessive price for cleaning out a mouse nest, I declined his generous offer.

When I got home, I did a bit of research online and found that this was a pretty common issue in Honda CR-Vs. Part of the problem is that Honda chose to install a five-inch-by-nine-inch inlet in the firewall that allows air to enter the system,, and there is no screening over it to prevent a mouse or chipmunk from entering and setting up residence.

One guy posted a solution that involved putting wire-mesh screening over the inlet, fastened with self-tapping screws, but it required first removing the wiper blades and a plastic cowling that apparently had proprietary retaining hardware that would break during the process and require replacement. To actually remove the nest, he removed a plastic cover from the bottom of the dashboard, disconnected a couple of electrical cables, unscrewed and dropped the blower assembly to get access to the area for cleaning. While all of this seemed like the perfect solution, it was pretty complex, and I really didn’t want to deal with it. I especially didn’t want to pierce the firewall with self-tapping screws, since there was a risk of damaging something and creating an area that could rust out over time.

I was able to dig up some photos and diagrams of the whole assembly and found that it was actually pretty simple. The intake on the firewall leads to a chamber, and at the bottom of the chamber is the cabin filter. Below the cabin filter is the blower assembly. When the mice get into the vent, they can build a nice, comfortable nest on top of the cabin filter. When you slide out the cabin filter to replace it, acorns and debris from the nest fall into the blower assembly and act like a ball spinning on a roulette wheel when you power on the blower. Yet another bad design. If they really wanted to fix the problem, they could put a screen over the inlet as the guy on the Internet did, and as a fallback, put a second panel above the cabin filter, which you could pull off, allowing you to vacuum out the area before taking out the cabin filter, preventing any debris from entering the blower. Unfortunately, I guess the allure of making $265 every time someone had a mouse infestation was just too much for them.

Since I was too cheap to pay to have the mouse nest removed and not ambitious enough to do the process the other guy described, I came up with another method that I figured would be a good compromise.

First, I ignored the open inlet. It sucks and will probably be a problem in the future, but for now, my goal was just to clean out the mouse nest. I got out my wet/dry vac and put on the attachment with the narrow, flat inlet, which was small enough to fit into the cabin filter slot. I then opened the glove box, slid out the filter just a bit to keep debris from falling into the blower, and inserted the wet/dry vac attachment between the filter and the top of the opening. Since the filter is made from corrugated paper, this wasn’t too difficult. I then slowly backed out the filter while leaving the vacuum in place, allowing it to suck out part of the mouse nest. After completely removing the filter, I looked into the chamber with my endoscope and found there was still a decent amount of mouse garbage, so I put the vacuum nozzle in the slot and worked it around until all the stuff was removed. Using the endoscope again, I noticed that a few acorns had fallen into the blower as well as some crunched-up leaves. Since I couldn’t get the vacuum attachment into the blower area, I reinserted it into the cabin filter slot and used my fingers, also in the slot, to rotate the blower while lifting out debris and feeding it into the vacuum. This was probably the slowest part of the operation, but when I checked it with the endoscope, it appeared successful.

As a final test, I started the car and ran the blower at full speed to make sure that it sounded OK. It did. I then put my new cabin filter in ($9.85 on Amazon) and reattached the glove box assembly. Problem solved with a total savings of $255.15.

I know this wasn’t the perfect solution, but it was good enough, and sometimes good enough is good enough. Hopefully, this post will help someone else save some money if they ever run into the problem.

I’ve recently started periodically spraying both my wife’s and my engine compartments with peppermint spray because I’ve heard it keeps rodents away. I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s worth trying. Hopefully, I will not have to go through this again.

The gauge is powered by a CR2032 lithium coin cell battery, a common battery typically used to power TV remote controls. Unfortunately, Deere chose to seal it inside a closed unit and manufacture it in a way that makes it impossible to replace, forcing you to replace the whole unit. It’s hard to believe this isn’t just a money grab on Deere’s part.

The AUC15402 sells for around $60, but I suspect it costs less than $5 to manufacture. So if you do it yourself, you’re out sixty bucks, and Deere is $55 richer. If you pay to have it installed, I’m guessing it costs significantly more. So, if you own a John Deere lawn tractor, expect to be on the hook for at least $60 every 2 to 3 years.

Since I just replaced the unit in my tractor, I thought I would describe the process here in case someone else wants to give it a try. It’s a pretty simple process, and the only hard part is removing the old gauge.

Here’s what you need to do:

• Disconnect the negative battery connection. To do this, use a 10mm wrench or socket wrench. You can place the disconnected cable next to the tractor’s plastic shroud to keep it out of the way. Everyone always tells you to disconnect the negative battery cable first, but they never tell you why. You do this because the negative cable is connected to the tractor or car’s frame. If you were to disconnect the positive cable first and accidentally touch it to the frame, it would short out the battery. Disconnecting the negative cable prevents this from happening.

• Reach up behind the fuel gauge and disconnect the signal cable by pressing on the connector on the top and pulling back on it.

• Now comes the hard part: removing the old fuel gauge. There are four plastic retaining clips holding the fuel gauge in place on the dashboard. Ideally, you could just reach up, press the clips simultaneously, and push up to remove the fuel gauge. Unfortunately, being a mere mortal, I don’t have the finger strength to do that, but maybe you do. If so, go for it. What I ended up doing was pressing in the bottom two clips simultaneously and forcing the bottom of the fuel gauge out. Once I did that, I put a screwdriver on the bottom of the gauge to keep it from slipping back in, and then pressed the top clips and pushed up to force the fuel gauge out.

• Insert the new fuel gauge into the dashboard, making sure that you have the top of the fuel gauge facing upward, or you’ll have to go through the whole removal process again.

• Attach the signal cable, followed by the battery cable, reversing the steps you used when you disconnected them.

• Put the key in the ignition and turn it one stop to the right to the ‘headlight’ position. If all goes well, the fuel level and number of hours should be displayed. Sadly, the hours reset to 0 and can’t be changed,, so the number of hours reflects how many hours have passed since you last changed the fuel gauge, not how many hours you’ve operated the tractor. This isn’t really a problem for me since I keep track of each time I’ve mowed and what maintenance I’ve done in a spreadsheet, but it’s just another indication of Deere’s disregard for its customers.

Recently, John Deere paid $99 million dollars to settle a lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission and the Attorneys General of Illinois and Minnesota. Deere was accused of restricting farmers’ ability to repair their equipment by preventing them from accessing diagnostic software and tools needed for repairs. Because of this, farmers had to rely on John Deere dealers for repairs. Not only was this more expensive, since the dealers essentially had a monopoly on the service, but it also delayed repairs because there were often waiting lists for access to their services. Imagine being a farmer with a crop to harvest, your very expensive Deere tractor is on the fritz, and you find you’ll have to wait a month before you can get a technician out to fix it. Not good.

While it worked out for the farmers in the end, it’s not so good for homeowners and small businesses that use John Deere products. The company has apparently made decisions to maximize profits at the expense of consumers. While they’re allowed to do this, some of the things they’re doing are pretty sleezy and they may pay for their short-term profits with fewer customers in the future. It’s really sad that they’ve chosen this direction.

I’ll give three examples of this, one of which I’m dealing with now.

First is their Easy Change Oil System. The idea is that instead of having to do an oil change, you can just replace the oil filter with one of their special filters, and not only will you have changed the filter, but you’ll also have performed an oil change. Sounds good, but there are multiple problems with this. First is the price. The proprietary oil filter costs more than a standard filter and the oil it uses. The price difference can be small or significant, depending on whether you used OEM parts or third-party parts. Over the life of the tractor, the difference in price can cost you a lot of money.

The even bigger sin, in my opinion, is that the Easy Change Oil System changes less than half the oil. A typical JD tractor takes about 2 quarts of oil, but the Easy Change Oil System only holds 0.8 quarts, so you’re only doing half an oil change. This is bad because you’re always operating with dirty oil, and even if the filter prevents this from becoming an issue, it doesn’t address that the oil is chemically breaking down over time.

The Easy Change Oil System seems like a scam by JD to increase profits by selling expensive filters and causing engines to wear out prematurely, requiring replacement.

John Deere claims to have tested the system and that it isn’t an issue, but common sense tells me otherwise.

The only legitimate reason this might be considered a good feature is that some owners neglect their tractors and never change the oil, and having a system like this might encourage them to do it from time to time. For the rest of us, though, I think it’s a bad idea.

There are ways to fix this problem. You can buy kits that let you switch the Easy Change Oil System for a standard oil filter. It requires you to change the base to which the oil filter attaches and also replace the drain plug. It’s not that big a deal for someone who’s comfortable doing that sort of thing.

Since I typically put less than 20 hours on my tractor per season and John Deere recommends changing the oil at 50 hours, I chose to replace the drain plug with a drain hose and leave the existing filter in place. Once a year, I completely drain the oil, replace the filter, and add additional oil to the system. While it costs me a bit more, I believe I get the best of both worlds: a complete oil change and a better quality oil filter.

The second place where JD cheaped out was using bushings on their front wheels instead of bearings. Even if you’re good about lubricating the bushings, they tend to wear quickly, leading to front-end problems. Again, this can be modified by the user with a bit of work, but it would have been even better if they had just gone with the slightly more expensive bearings in the first place.

I could have avoided both of the above problems by purchasing one of their more expensive tractors, and I would have done so if the dealer had informed me of these issues, but he didn’t, and since I was in a hurry (my existing tractor had died and the grass was out of control) and didn’t do my usual amount of research, I got burned.

The third problem, which I think is really crappy of Deere to have inflicted on their customers, has to do with the fuel level/hours meter. The meter on the dashboard shows how much fuel you have in your gas tank and how many operating hours the tractor has. Both are pretty important things to know. It turns out these fail after 2 to 3 years, not because of a defect but because they use a CR2032 battery. The CR2032 is one of those disk-shaped batteries used in cameras and remote controls, and it costs about seventy-five cents. Deere uses one of the to power the meter, but instead of making it replaceable, they have chosen to seal it in the meter, apparently pot it in with epoxy, and then glue the whole unit shut, making it impossible to replace. The only solution is to purchase a new meter from them, which will cost about $55. What a disgusting thing to do to your customers!

When I started my tractor up for the season yesterday, I noticed an error code on the fuel gauge indicating a dead battery. I have ordered a new meter, which I’ll pick up today. I’m not happy about this.

Overall, John Deere makes a pretty good lawn tractor, but it’s infuriating that they treat their customers the way they do. I really hate dealing with sleazy companies, which, sadly, John Deere appears to be.

Yesterday, while watching Amazon Prime, I came across the Lone Ranger TV series. I originally watched these as Saturday afternoon reruns since the original show aired before I was born, but I remembered really enjoying them when they were on.

So I grabbed a cup of coffee and a couple of Pepperidge Farm Double Chocolate Nantucket’s, plopped my backside on the couch, and watched season 1, episode 1 of The Lone Ranger. It was the origin story, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s a multi-part story, so there’s more to come, but what I saw was even better than what I remember watching when I was a child. While it wasn’t an adult show, it wasn’t really a kids’ show either. I think that anyone of any age could be entertained by it. I’ll probably watch the second episode this afternoon and look forward to watching the whole series over the next few months.

Watching the first episode brought back memories of what happened to Clayton Moore back in the 70’s.

Moore was the actor who played the Lone Ranger on the TV series, which ran from 1949 to 1957. The show had been off for around twenty years, and Moore, who was in his sixties, apparently wasn’t doing well financially. Unlike today, early TV shows did not pay residuals, and actors and actresses were often paid little for their work. To supplement his income, Moore would put on a black mask, a fake six-shooter, and make appearances at rodeos, home shows, and anywhere else he could find work. He had done this for a number of years, and I remember seeing pictures of him at some of the appearances. The pictures were kind of sad. He was a little old man in a costume, looking like a feeble version of the character he once played, but people loved it and got to see the hero they grew up with.

Along the way, the studio, Wrather Corporation, got wind of what was going on and, in 1979, obtained a court order prohibiting Moore from wearing the costume and appearing in public as the Lone Ranger. They claimed they were planning a Lone Ranger movie and feared that Moore in costume would tarnish the brand. To get around this, Moore substituted dark sunglasses for the black mask and, I imagine, the appearances were probably advertised as ‘Meet Clayton Moore, the man who played the Lone Ranger’ rather than just saying it was an appearance by the Lone Ranger. The lawsuit lasted 5 years, and Moore fought it all the way, refusing to give up. Simultaneously, the Wrather Corporation’s movie ‘The Legend of the Lone Ranger’ was released and was a box-office bomb, possibly in part because fans knew how Moore had been treated by them and refused to support it. Anyway, between the movie flopping and negative publicity surrounding Wrather Corporation, they finally decided to drop the lawsuit, and Moore went on to make appearances as the Lone Ranger until his death in 1999.

Good versus evil, and the good guy won, just like in the old TV shows. I like it that way.

One of the weird things that I’ve noticed is that whenever I dig a hole or a trench in the yard, when it comes time to fill it, there is always less dirt than when I started.  I don’t get it. I dig out the dirt, do whatever I need to do, then replace the dirt, and 100% of the time, the area I was working on is an inch or two lower than when I started.  Where did all the damn dirt go?  Anyway, after installing the coax last year, I filled in the trench, topped it off with three bags of topsoil, and let it go for the winter.  Now that it’s spring and the snow is gone, it’s clear I didn’t use enough dirt, which is why I put in more topsoil.  I’m guessing it still won’t be enough, and I’ll be heading back to Lowe’s yet again.

But that’s not what today’s post is about.  I just wanted to start out by showing that I did some heavy lifting and had little problem tossing forty-pound bags of mulch, manure, and topsoil into the car.  Which brings me to Saturday.  On Saturday, I decided there were several garden beds I wanted to edge.  My wife is the main gardener at the house, taking care of most of the ornamental plants, while I have a small vegetable garden and do all the lawn mowing.  Over the years, lawn mowing has been a problem because I don’t want to get too close to the garden beds, or my wife will complain that I’ve run over the flowers, so I actually stay a few inches away.  As a result, a small area never gets mowed, leading to tall grass encroaching into the garden.  This year, I figured I’d fix that by edging the beds.

The edging started easily enough.  I opened the garage, navigated through the piles of stuff that get tossed in for the winter, and located the edging tool.  I grabbed it, walked over to the first bed, decided where the edge would lie, stuck the tool into the ground, and lifted my foot about three inches off the ground.  When I placed my foot on the edging tool, a sharp pain shot through my left hip, and it felt like I had just been hit in the hip with a baseball bat.  All of that just by stepping on the edging tool.

I suspect it was just a pinched nerve, since I didn’t do anything that would have brought it on, but the pain persisted throughout the weekend and prevented me from working outside or doing my usual exercise routine.  Today, while I still have some pain, I thought things had improved enough to resume exercising.  I went into the cellar to do a weight workout, got through my bench press sets with no problem, and then attempted squats.  The first squat I attempted was also the last, since it once again caused sharp hip pain.  I think I’m now back where I was at the time of the original injury.

To make things even tougher.  Since I take blood thinners, the only pain medication I’m allowed to take is Tylenol.  This worked well for years, but in the last year, I seem to have developed an allergy to it.  When I take it, within minutes my skin gets really itchy, and after about four hours, I end up with red welts all over my body.  If that were the extent of the reaction, I would have no problem, but there are all sorts of warnings (and graphic pictures) on the Internet about how severe Tylenol reactions can be, and that if you have any symptoms, you should stop taking it immediately.  So I guess I’m out of luck.  I seldom take any type of medication unless I really need it, but now I have no real options for pain, so I guess I’ll just have to live through it.

Anyway, no exercise, no gardening, and I just ended up paying our outrageous tax bill, so I’m really grumpy.  

Hopefully, tomorrow will be a better day.

The day would typically start with my sister and me hunting for easter eggs. Most of the time, this would take place inside because spring mornings in New England tend to be cold, but occasionally the eggs would be hidden in the backyard. These weren’t real eggs, of course, but plastic eggs filled with chocolate candy (usually Reese’s). Sometimes we also got easter baskets, again filled with things like chocolate bunnies, little stuffed animals, and tiny chocolate eggs. My family wasn’t really into healthy eating back then, but I don’t think many families were.

In the late morning, we would go to church. Since it was the beginning of spring, the women, my mother, grandmother, aunt, and sister, would usually be wearing brand new dresses. Sometimes they were store-bought, but other times they were homemade using the latest Simplicity patterns. My mother was not exactly a talented seamstress, so it was hit-or-miss as to how they turned out. One year, she made my sister this hideous, long, pastel-blue dress with pom-pom-like fur buttons that we still make fun of to this day.

Most of the time, I would be wearing a new suit purchased at either Milton’s or Robert Hall’s, but one year, my mother decided to make me a suit. I’m not sure if it was because she enjoyed the process or because she just didn’t have enough money to purchase one. She allowed me to have some input on what I wanted, and since it was the sixties, I asked for a Nero jacket, a decision probably inspired by my watching The Monkees. As I remember, she did a good job on it, and aside from the stiff collar being uncomfortable, I was really proud to be wearing it.

I also used to get the yearly hat. Back in the day, men wore hats when they dressed up, and my mother, always wanting to make sure I looked dapper and respectable, would see to it that I had one. These weren’t baseball caps or anything like that; they were old men’s hats, the type that you would see Clark Kent wearing in the old Superman TV show. Unfortunately for my mother, being a wise ass kid, I would pull the brim down and attempt to entertain everyone by doing my best Frankie Fontaine impression (he, he he).

In the late morning, we’d make our way to church, which for me was agony. Like most little boys, I had a hard time staying still for a long time. Easter was particularly bad because the Easter mass was much longer than the regular Sunday masses. There was one special year, though. There was a visiting priest performing the mass who was pretty ancient and very thin. During the mass, there’s a point where the priest holds the eucharist high over his head while reciting some incantation. The old priest did this, and as he raised the eucharist up, his pants fell to the floor. He went on as if nothing had happened, and after saying his part, he squatted down and pulled his pants back up without missing a beat. Amazingly, no one laughed or said anything during the mass, but afterward it was the main topic of conversation.

The best part of the day came after church ended. The whole family, my sister, mother, grandmother, and my aunt and uncle would load up into the car and make our way to a restaurant in Plymouth for an Easter meal. This was a big deal for us. We rarely went out to dinner since we were pretty poor (I had no clue how poor we were since the adults shielded us from it), but Easter was the exception. I wish I knew the name of the restaurant that we went to, but sadly, I don’t. I just remember it being paradise. It was a nautical-themed restaurant, with netting in the air, a giant tank of live lobsters at the entrance, and a giant wooden keg of water with a spigot from which patrons could serve themselves. My mother, though usually pretty strict, would let my sister and me go up to the keg by ourselves and get our own water. If that wasn’t enough, they had sugar cubes on the table, which the two of us ate like candy, once again proving we were not into healthy eating back in the day.

When it was time to choose the meal, I would always pick the fried clam plate. I loved fried clams back then, and I still do now, although they’re not half as tasty as they were back in the old days because state health codes require them to go through a purification process that reduces the risk of food poisoning, but at a cost of draining out all the flavor.

And that was our Easter. It probably doesn’t seem like much to anyone reading this, but to my family and me, it was a major event that I now look back on with fond memories.

When I was growing up, I had a good friend, John, who could and would eat just about anything. We’d go to Burger King for lunch, and John would order multiple Whoppers, with fries, onion rings, and a shake, and never put on a pound. I’d eat a single Whopper and a small fry, and every bit of it would turn to fat. I know, I shouldn’t have been eating at Burger King, but my point is that even though he ate more than I did and we probably did about the same amount of exercise, he wouldn’t put on weight, yet I would. The reason for this is body types.

There are three body types: ectomorphs, mesomorphs, and endomorphs. Ectomorphs tend to be thin and slender and struggle to gain weight. The ads in the comic books used to call them 98-pound weaklings. Mesomorphs are athletic and muscular, while endomorphs are rounder and tend to retain fat. Unfortunately, I’m an endomorph. It sucks, but you have to play the game with the cards the Universe deals you, and that’s what it dealt me. It’s no excuse, though; I just have to work harder to keep the weight down.

In the spring, summer, and fall, I do a pretty good job. I get outside, take four to five-mile walks every day, and hike on occasion. In addition, throughout the year, I pretty much get on the elliptical every morning and do at least a half-hour workout at a decent pace. Finally, I do a weight routine once every three days. I hate weightlifting. It’s uncomfortable and boring, but I do it anyway because the more muscle you have, the more calories you’ll burn, and for someone like me, every calorie counts.

During the winter, I keep up with the weightlifting and elliptical, but seldom do anything outside. I don’t like the cold. I never have, and I do my best to avoid it. I’ll go out and use the snowblower on the driveway and dig out the mailbox, but that’s about it. For me, the winters are best spent indoors. So, the calories I typically burn off the rest of the year end up being stored as fat instead.

If the lack of exercise isn’t enough. Being housebound puts me into closer proximity to food, and even though I stay busy throughout the day, it’s just too tempting to grab a handful of Cheez-Its or a cookie from time to time, which once again manifests itself in fat.

So by the time I get to spring, I’m usually packing an extra 10 to 20 pounds and start the uphill battle to lose weight.

I’ve already started doing some lawn work, and the walks will start once again in a week or so. That should really help.

I also know I have to eat healthier, and after doing a bit of research, I determined that an air fryer might help with that. I settled on the Corsori 9-in-1 TurboBlaze Air Fryer, which got overwhelmingly positive reviews. It seems to have a lot of good features, is a decent size that will enable me to cook meals for both my wife and me, and the price was really reasonable.

I haven’t tried it yet, but I’ve been looking at a lot of air fryer recipes, and I look forward to trying some of them. I’ll let you know how it works out.

That was a long time ago, and now I’ve grown old. A lot of the things I read about as a child have happened in my lifetime. Not only do I have multiple computers, I also have conversations with them. When an event happens just about anywhere on Earth, I know about it in minutes and can often watch it unfolding. I’ve put up satellite dishes to receive video from space and have entered into virtual worlds to have experiences that no one ever would have dreamed possible. Machines, able to peer into my body like magic, have saved my life multiple times. I’ve written code to control robots, flown drones, and have a computer in my pocket way beyond anything that was ever imagined. All of these things are wonderful, but sadly, the space thing never really worked out.

After the initial promise, our space program stalled; actually, it was destroyed by liberals who once again used the politics of envy to keep the country from moving forward, and although we’ve had a space station in orbit for many years now, we really haven’t ventured far from our planet.

When I was young, I believed a permanent lunar colony was just a few years away. I also believed that people would be living on Mars in my lifetime, and perhaps I would even be one of them. I also hoped we would someday contact aliens.

Some of these things might still happen in my lifetime. Under the visionary leadership of Elon Musk, our ability to get into space is commonplace and relatively inexpensive. The NASA Artemis mission reignites the promise of a lunar colony that could serve as a stepping stone to the stars beyond. As for the alien thing, well, that’s still unlikely, but a story in today’s New York Post is kind of interesting.

The New York Post story is based on an interview with Rep. Tim Burchett on the Rob Finnerty Show. After reading the article, I went and watched the original video, and here’s what I learned:

Burchett (R-Tenn) says that we’ve already had contact with aliens and that the U.S. government has been covering it up for years.

He first gives a list of a number of higher-ups involved either directly or indirectly in the government’s UFO program that have recently disappeared or been killed. That list includes:

Retired US Air Force General William McCasland, who has been missing from his Albuquerque, New Mexico, home since February 27. McCasland was once the commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson in Ohio, which is believed to be the site where alien bodies are held.

Monica Jacinto Reza, a NASA engineer who worked under McCasland on advanced propulsion engines. Reza disappeared in June while hiking with some friends, who claim she vanished and have no clue what happened.

Nuno Loureiro, an MIT scientist who was assassinated in Brookline, Mass, in December, supposedly by Claudio Valente, a former classmate from Portugal who apparently held a grudge against him from their college days. Loureiro was the director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at MIT, and he was working with technology that some say was obtained from aliens.

Finally, there’s Carl Grillmair, a renowned Caltech astrophysicist known for his work on the search for water on distant planets.

Rep Burchett claims that all the deaths are tied together because all the people involved are working on things related to outer space or nuclear secrets. He also said, “I’ve been briefed by just about every alphabet agency there is. And, I’ll just say this, if they were to release the things that I’ve seen, you’d be up at night, worrying about, thinking about this stuff.”

Not to be outdone, Matt Gaetz, a former United States Representative from Florida, said, ‘I had someone come and brief me who was in a military uniform, worked for the United States Army that was briefing me on the locations of hybrid breeding programs where captured aliens were breeding with humans to create some hybrid race that could engage in intergalactic communication.’

Another interesting turn in the story is that People Magazine reports that the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has registered the domains aliens.gov and alien.gov.

Finally, there are rumors that the soon-to-be-released Steven Spielberg movie, Disclosure Day, about alien contact, is actually part of a government plan to soften up the public before the big reveal.

While I’d like to believe all of the above, I’m skeptical.

First, the missing and dead people that are connected under the common umbrella of the search for extraterrestrial life are not all that closely related. Most worked in different facilities and different programs. If you looked on any given day, I suspect you would find many people who are missing or dead that are connected by some common bond. It doesn’t mean anything; it’s just a coincidence. This is similar to the birthday paradox, often presented in statistics classes, which shows that it only takes 23 people for the probability that two of them have the same birthday to exceed 50%. Intuitively, it doesn’t seem possible, but when you work the numbers, it is.

If there is a connection, it might be between McCasland and Reza, who worked together for many years in the same facility. Could they have run off together? Probably not, most likely just another coincidence.

As for Burchett and Gaetz, while I believe they’re telling the truth about their experiences, it would not surprise me in the least bit if they’re just being played as useful idiots. The establishment is not happy about what’s going on in Washington and views Trump and MAGA as their enemies. To protect their territory, they may have presented these men with false information, hoping they would go public and make themselves look foolish. If that was the plan, it worked.

Finally, the Spielberg movie story seems more like marketing hype than anything else. The studios want a big opening day, and a rumor that the movie was in some way connected to reality would certainly help their box office numbers. If you had some friends working for the government who spent $20 from petty cash to register a couple of UFO-related domains, it would certainly help make things sound legitimate.

Sadly, I don’t believe we’ve yet been in contact with aliens, and I doubt we will in my lifetime. I do think there’s a much greater chance we’ll find microscopic life under the surface of Mars, and although it wouldn’t be as cool as aliens, it would prove we’re not alone in the Universe, and that would make me happy.

I first met Karen at a singles party held at the Dedham Hilton. I would go there most Saturdays, hoping to find someone to spend my life with (or at least get laid). Neither plan ever worked out. I’d start the event very optimistically, but as the night progressed and I came to the realization that this wasn’t going to be the night, I’d descend upon the buffet to get my fill of sausage and onions. I’m still not sure why you would serve sausage and onions at a singles party, since it seemed like a good way to keep people apart, but they did, and it was a decent consolation prize for a night that didn’t end the way it was planned.

Anyway, Saturday came around, and I planned to go to the Dedham Hilton yet again, but I noticed late in the day that one of my car’s headlights had died. Any sensible person would have just written the night off, but for some reason, I really felt the need to attend the night’s party. I raced out to the local auto store, got the headlamp, and, because things are never easy, struggled to install it. It was getting late, I was hot, sweaty, and tired, but I still decided to make the trek to the Hilton. It’s funny how little decisions have big consequences.

It was a pretty typical night. I mostly stood around, drank beer, and occasionally talked to other guys, most of whom seemed angry and unemployed.

That night, there was a woman there who was a regular at every party. She was nice, but she seemed like she came from a different time, maybe the 40’s. She had bleached blonde hair, dressed very nicely, and wore really heavy makeup. She always appeared a little bit awkward, but was nice enough. On this particular evening, it looked like she was having a problem with some guy my wife and I now refer to as ‘the bug-eyed guy.’

‘The bug-eyed guy’ was a young man I had never seen at one of the parties before, who was following women around, staring at them, and never blinking. I suspect he really wasn’t a threat, just a guy who was clueless and had probably read a self-help book about how you’re supposed to make eye contact with a woman. Anyway, his attention seemed focused on the blonde woman, and she appeared distressed by it. Always trying to be a knight in shining armor, I decided to intervene and went over to ask her to dance, hoping to interrupt his pursuit.

My plan worked. He wandered off, probably to harass some other woman, and I danced with the blonde lady, whom I had seen many times before but had never interacted with. She was grateful for my intervention, and although she was nice enough, she was not my type. While dancing with her, I learned that her mother had died when she was young and that she had been brought up by her father, which probably explained her awkwardness. The things you learn when you talk with people. We danced a bit and then parted ways, me making my way back across the room and grabbing a beer along the way.

On the way back to my table, I walked past this rather attractive young lady who smiled at me as I was passing by. She was clearly the prettiest girl in the room, and I decided that I wanted to approach her. Eventually, I worked up the courage to go over and talk to her. She seemed as nice as she looked. I learned that she had come with a friend and had actually planned to spend the night at home until the friend persuaded her to go out. She was there grudgingly, hoping that her friend would find someone and that the night would be over. We talked for a while, and the thing that attracted me to her the most was the way she talked about her family and upbringing. She had a happy childhood, wonderful parents, brothers, and a sister with whom she was really close. So refreshing. I’ve met so many people in my life who obsess about how miserable their childhoods were. While some have the right to complain, others are just finding someone or something to blame for their unhappiness. Anyway, we continued talking, found we had a lot in common, and when her friend returned with her catch for the night, we all headed out to Bickford’s for late-night pancakes. We ended the night by exchanging phone numbers, went on a series of dates, and eventually ended up married.

It’s been a long time. Not every minute was perfect; after all, it takes a bit for people just starting out to adjust to each other and get used to sharing their lives rather than being independent. Still, we got there, and overall, it’s been a wonderful thirty-one years.

It’s interesting how many things had to be in place for us to be where we are today. For example, if I hadn’t fixed my headlight, I wouldn’t have gone to the party. Then, if her friend hadn’t persuaded her to go out, she wouldn’t have been at the party either. Furthermore, if ‘the bug-eyed guy’ hadn’t been there, the blonde woman wouldn’t have been harassed, and I wouldn’t have attempted to ‘rescue’ her. That ‘rescue,’ my wife says, was something she witnessed and was one of the reasons she was receptive to me. In hindsight, everything went the way the Universe had planned.

Some things are meant to be, and I suspect Karen and Al are one of them. After all these years, I still love her; I still think she’s the prettiest girl in the room, and with any luck, we’ll still have many happy years to share together.