Lazy Sunday

Two old gas tanks, one fabricated tube


Gas exit nozzle


Ma, Pa and baby Dalek (sorry)
Notch for easy assembly, a welded collar will cover the gap


A hillbilly Faberge egg
Approx' 10mm gaps all around, closer to 15mm behind exit pipe


Mark and drill main nozzle holes


Support ring for grate and brick lining


Angle iron spacers, weld to ring only to allow for expansion


Threaded inserts, welded and ground flush on the outside





Stainless steel air inlet tube

we the people

Some wise words from Bruce -

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"Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens."
George Carlin

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Bruce: A co-worker of mine is forever saying "of course".The government will screw this up - of course. Our section is understaffed again - of course. Of course this won't be done on time.Of course. "Of course" is a kind of cynicism, of course.It sounds wise and worldly, and that's the intent in using the phrase, but it's cynical. It says, not that there's no choice in the matter, but that no choice will be made when one was needed.

We like to complain about politicians, and about anyone who has the power to make decisions that affect our lives. Yet as Carlin observed, we create and support politicians through our institutions and at the ballot box. Our democracies - and I'm thinking of America, Canada, the European Union, and anywhere else that observes the ritual of pulling levers or marking X on a piece of paper - only function because a core fan-base thinks that their particular candidate will at least be less deplorable than the people running against him or her.

In our democracies we vote, when we vote at all, in favour of a name on a ballot or screen that is associated with a set of ideas and proposals that are called a platform - a sort of expedient world-view deemed appropriate by the candidate and his or her advisors. We can't pick and choose individual issues in those platforms.We select the name that represents the platform we can best live with, in our own lives. If our candidate wins, we delight in having our particular issues dealt with in the way we see as "obvious" and "necessary", and put up with the rest of the platform without thinking about it much - but since it's "our man" or "our woman" in office, we're sure they will deal with those things in a similarly resolute and inspired manner.

But I wonder about these allegiances. Why do we advocate and adhere to a worldview designed and expressed by someone else?What is it we believe about the way the world works that lets us rest satisfied, while someone else runs our world?You and I don't have our hands on the levers of power - we don't directly preserve the good and change the bad -so how does it happen that we endorse someone else acting as our proxy? I mean this in the widest sense.Not simply elected politicians - we the people (one of the great phrases and concepts in the history of the world) may at least take some measure to decide what personalities occupy those offices - but also those appointed by the elected. By what means do we trust them?

As a private citizen who was, until the present crisis, oblivious to the machinery of the financial system, I assumed that the persons set in those controlling offices knew what was best, not only in applying my contribution to the tax pool, but with that of the wider population and of industry. I assumed that the greatest good of the greatest number was being seen to, even if I was not aware of the means by which this was being done. When children used to attend a class called "Civics" in school, this was the governing assumption - that our system works: see how well, in our science, our industry, our arts, and in the dignity of hearth and home.

This has now vanished.

The trust is broken. Broken because the basis of that trust has been shown to be false. The image from the 1950's of a wife in a pretty print dress who tends to her breadwinner's every need is found ludicrous and predatory. A suburban home with white bread and television is a picture of imprisonment. The son who rises to soldierhood to die in some foreigner's land is not democracy's hero but a victim of a bad education and poor civilian prospects.

What of us now?The substance of those civics lessons that children used to receive no longer pertain.The fabric of the society that taught those optimistic lessons is torn apart. The American Way - and not merely the American Way, but the way of all industrial societies - is shown to be one of impunity, indifference to suffering, callousness toward the victims of business decisions, and obsessions with contemporary fashion and of lucrative trends.

Just the worst outcome of all the current cash injections and bailouts to banks and factories would be that they succeed brilliantly in restoring the status quo. That they allow the comfortably numb to stay that way. That they allow the true believer in capitalist industrialism to go on believing with their very essence that they are the pinnacle of human civilization. That our fathers were right all along, and that we should proceed on their course again.

Would that we do endure a decade of retreat and reconsideration. And that out of that we emerge a more patient, more tolerant, and wiser people.

http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2008/12/debt-rattle-december-16-2008-trillions.html
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End of Empire

Some readers would be familiar with Jeremy Clarkson, host of the BBC show Top Gear, here's his surprising take on the current economic situation.

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I was in Dublin last weekend, and had a very real sense I'd been invited to the last days of the Roman empire. As far as I could work out, everyone had a Rolls-Royce Phantom and a coat made from something that's now extinct. And then there were the women. Wow. Not that long ago every girl on the Emerald Isle had a face the colour of straw and orange hair. Now it's the other way around.

Everyone appeared to be drunk on naked hedonism. I've never seen so much jus being drizzled onto so many improbable things, none of which was potted herring. It was like Barcelona but with beer. And as I careered from bar to bar all I could think was: "Jesus. Can't they see what's coming?"

Ireland is tiny. Its population is smaller than New Zealand's, so how could the Irish ever have generated the cash for so many trips to the hairdressers, so many lobsters and so many Rollers? And how, now, as they become the first country in Europe to go officially into recession, can they not see the financial meteorite coming? Why are they not all at home, singing mournful songs?

It's the same story on this side of the Irish Sea, of course. We're all still plunging hither and thither, guzzling wine and wondering what preposterously expensive electronic toys the children will want to smash on Christmas morning this year. We can't see the meteorite coming either.

I think mainly this is because the government is not telling us the truth. It's painting Gordon Brown as a global economic messiah and fiddling about with Vat, pretending that the coming recession will be bad. But that it can deal with it.

I don't think it can. I have spoken to a couple of pretty senior bankers in the past couple of weeks and their story is rather different. They don't refer to the looming problems as being like 1992 or even 1929. They talk about a total financial meltdown. They talk about the End of Days.

Already we are seeing household names disappearing from the high street and with them will go the suppliers whose names have only ever been visible behind the grime on motorway vans. The job losses will mount. And mount. And mount. And as they climb, the bad debt will put even more pressure on the banks until every single one of them stutters and fails.

The European banks took one hell of a battering when things went wrong in America. Imagine, then, how life will be when the crisis arrives on this side of the Atlantic. Small wonder one City figure of my acquaintance ordered three safes for his London house just last week.

Of course, you may imagine the government will simply step in and nationalise everything, but to do that, it will have to borrow. And when every government is doing the same thing, there simply won't be enough cash in the global pot. You can forget Iceland. From what I gather, Spain has had it. Along with Italy, Ireland and very possibly the UK.

It is impossible for someone who scored a U in his economics A-level to grapple with the consequences of all this but I'm told that in simple terms money will cease to function as a meaningful commodity. The binary dots and dashes that fuel the entire system will flicker and die. And without money there will be no business. No means of
selling goods. No means of transporting them. No means of making them in the first place even. That's why another friend of mine has recently sold his London house and bought somewhere in the country . . . with a kitchen garden.

These, as I see them, are the facts. Planet Earth thought it had £10. But it turns out we had only £2. Which means everyone must lose 80% of their wealth. And that's going to be a problem if you were living on the breadline beforehand.

Eventually, of course, the system will reboot itself, but for a while there will be absolute chaos: riots, lynchings, starvation. It'll be a world without power or fuel, and with no fuel there's no way the modern agricultural system can be maintained. Which means there will be no food either. You might like to stop and think about that for a while.

I have, and as a result I can see the day when I will have to shoot some of my neighbours - maybe even David Cameron - as we fight for the last bar of Fry's Turkish Delight in the smoking ruin that was Chipping Norton's post office.

I believe the government knows this is a distinct possibility and that it might happen next year, and there is absolutely nothing it can do to stop Cameron getting both barrels from my Beretta. But instead of telling us straight, it calls the crisis the "credit crunch" to make it sound like a breakfast cereal and asks Alistair Darling to smile and big up Gordon when he's being interviewed.

I can't say I blame it, really. If an enormous meteorite was heading our way and the authorities knew it couldn't be stopped or diverted, why bother telling anyone? Best to let us soldier on in the dark until it all goes dark for real.

On a more cheery note, Vauxhall has stopped making the Vectra, that dreary, designed-in-a-coffee-break Eurobox that no one wanted. In its place stands the new Insignia, which has been voted European car of the year for 2009

Five Short Chapters

Autobiography In Five Short Chapters
by Portia Nelson


Chapter 1

I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost... I am hopeless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.


Chapter II

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don't see it.
I fall in again.
I can't believe I am in this same place.
But it isn't my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.


Chapter III

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it there.
I still fall in... it's a habit... but,
my eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.


Chapter IV

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the street.
I walk around it.


Chapter V

I walk down another street.

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Hat tip to Kit at http://keepittrill.blogspot.com/