raining last night, but this morning it still annoyingly looks like Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting, “Hunters in the Snow” outside. The alarmist weather people are threatening us all with another “snow bomb” next week, but hopefully that won’t happen. I have to go to lunch today down south. I will take advantage of the cheap gas prices and the welcome service that New Jersey offers.
It’s always good to welcome service of this kind…
I’ve got all this new video footage now that I have to do something with, so I’ll probably be busy with that in the foreseeable future. This place is a mess, well this room is a mess anyway. There are boxes of cds, cables and computer and video equipment everywhere. In the past I guess you would have books and papers everywhere. That would be the sign of a learned person. Somebody like me who doesn’t read books or papers, wouldn’t have had that in the first place. In the second place I’ve always been surrounded by a periphery of technical equipment like cassette decks, cheap handy cams and even more cables and wires.
I know this is going nowhere today, mostly because I’m thinking about what I have to do when I get back from Jersey. It might be better to continue with today’s journal after I get back, something interesting might have happened between now and then. I was just looking at a Grateful Dead Youtube video that one of the news website had posted of them playing at Mardi Gras in 1987.
I never have understood the appeal of this dreary band, and this instance it has closed captions enabled. If this is what Ai can do, it’s not very good. Try it yourself sometimes. We’ve all seen these fakakta Tiktok, X and Instagram posts where what the person is saying has been completely mangled by the captioning software. Clearly it’s shit tier programming. Clearly you have to be on drugs to appreciate the Grateful Dead as well.
I almost posted a political meme there but I stopped myself. Did you know that there was a town called Ballarat in the Mojave Desert? It’s in the Panamint Valley, at the western edge of Death Valley National Park. Ballarat rose at the tail end of the 19th-century mining rush of 1896. It was a mining supply station and a source for whisky and water, both being in scarce supply in this very dry desert.
At its peak in 1897, the town was home to 500 people and had a post office, morgue, and a jail. As the lodes dried up, the post office shut down in 1917, ending the town’s heyday. This Ballarat came a half a century after the one in Victoria, and this one is now a ghost town, while Ballarat the original, still flourishes to this day.
This is the Eureka flag. It has an interesting history in relation to Australia’s Ballarat
Archibald Yuille who with his cousins arrived in 1838 and took up a 10,000-acre sheep run, named his property “Ballaarat”, supposedly from the local Wathaurong Aboriginal words ‘balla’ and ‘rat’, meaning camping or resting place.
Gold was first discovered locally in August 1851.
It was twice the size of this
As news of the Victorian gold rush reached the world, Ballarat gained an international reputation as a particularly rich goldfield, which is probably why somebody named this little Death Valley town after it, although there was no gold there. It seems to have been a supply depot on the way to the silver and later gold mines of the time. There, we’ve all learned something even if we didn’t want to.
Just got back from lunch. Nothing special happened. They gave me a gigantic bowl of Pho which I couldn’t possibly eat. That’s about it.
Happy Friday
8 minutes of somebody making the same delicious dish again and again