50 Years Ago Today

It is hard to believe that it’s been 50 years since the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald sank during a storm on Lake Superior. While it wasn’t big news “back in the day”, Gordon Lightfoot immortalized the sinking and the loss of 29 men in his song “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, telling the story of the ship and the men who manned it.



When Gordon Lightfoot passed away in 2023, “the Mariners' Church in Detroit (the "Maritime Sailors' Cathedral" mentioned in "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald") honored Lightfoot the day after his death by ringing its bell a total of 30 times, 29 for each of the crewmen lost on the Edmund Fitzgerald and the final time for Lightfoot himself.”

There have been a small number of covers of the song, but only one has stood out, at least to me, that being the one performed by Home Free. It was released early this year in commemoration of the 50 years since the Edmund Fitzgerald was lost with all hands.

Thoughts On A Sunday

The Weekend Pundit Computer Follies continue, with efforts to restore both the laptop and desktop having been partially successful. I did manage to backup all the files off of the desktop by booting Linux from a USB key and copying the files onto one of my external 2TB hard disks. That was one of my major concerns, but everything was intact. Restoring the laptop, on the other hand, has been problematic as it did not want to boot from the USB key. I didn’t have this issue when I did so a few months ago in order to backup all the files that resided there. I keep getting an error I have not yet been able to translate. I haven’t given up, I’m just taking a step back to see if I have another approach I can use. I may try booting to a different distribution of Linux to see if it may be a problem with the disk image I’m using to do all of this.

One thing I did complete today was dropping off the trusty RAM 1500 at the body shop this afternoon. It will be waiting for them first thing in the morning.

And one more thing I finished – cleaning out the front gutters on The Gulch…again. I took care of it early yesterday and with all the wind and rain overnight they had collected a lot more leaves. I will also be doing likewise for a neighbor.

It seems the remaining leaves decided to come off the trees all at the same time which has made it an ongoing chore to keep the gutters open over the past couple of days. With the rain we have coming overnight and on Tuesday, I must keep the gutters clean. Thank goodness it is only one set of gutters on the front of The Gulch and the neighbor’s house I must attend to, so it only takes about 10 minutes or so to take care of each of them.

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This doesn’t exactly surprise me. My only question about the move is why did Ford what so long to do so?

Report: Ford Might Kill the F-150 Lightning Electric Pickup Truck.

Seeing as the F-150 Lightning did so poorly in towing comparisons I can see why Ford might be willing to kill the Lightning. My old 2004 F-150 with the V6 and four-speed automatic outperformed the Lightning when towing, and cost a small fraction of the cost of a Lightning, even taking into account inflation. Some folks may have bought it for the same reason folks who bought the Tesla Cyber Truck and the Rivian, and it had nothing to do with their suitability for use as an actual work truck. It’s been virtue signaling across the board.

With that in mind, I will not lament its passing should Ford kill off the Lightning.

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I don’t know about you, but I am finding it more difficult to shift back to Standard Time than I have in the past. Being that I live on the eastern edge of the Eastern Time Zone might have something to do with it, so that sunset is around 4pm now and will be closer to 3:30pm by the winter solstice. (Actually, the sun will dip down behind the surrounding hills by 2:30pm.)

I am still waking up at 4:30am EST, a good hour earlier than necessary. It’s taking me a lot longer to adjust to the time change. Frankly, we here in New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts would be better served if we stayed on Daylight Savings Time year-round, or alternately, moved from the Eastern Time Zone to the Atlantic Time Zone and stayed on Standard Time. Being at the extreme eastern edge of the Eastern Time Zone makes the shift back and forth a real pain. I know it’s likely the folks on the extreme western edge of the Eastern Time Zone would rather stay on Standard Time year-round. I think that is true of the four time zones in the Continental US, but probably more so in the Eastern Time Zone since it seems to me it is wider than the Central, Mountain, and Pacific Time Zones.

I know most folks would prefer to have more daylight later in the day despite it being darker for longer in the morning. Some make the argument that dark mornings will put school children at risk, but the same argument could be made for them being at risk at the end of the afternoon as well.

I think the twice-yearly switch between Standard and Daylight Savings Time has outlived its usefulness, at least on the eastern and western edges of the time zones. It also makes no sense that Standard Time is in effect for four months and Daylight Savings Time for eight months.

Let’s save time and annoyance by staying on one time or other.

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This is something I’ve known for a long time, “this” being that socialism/communism doesn’t work. It never has and never will, particularly if it’s human beings trying it. We have hundreds of years of history showing again and again that it doesn’t work. One of the first trials here in the US was the Mayflower Compact of the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts back in the 1620’s. The colony almost died out because the “From each according to their ability. To each according to their needs” didn’t work because everyone wanted to draw from the common larder but no one wanted to work to fill it. Once the Plymouth colony abandoned their experiment in socialism it started to thrive. But it seems we can’t learn the lessons from the endless failures and now it looks like New York City is going to learn that lesson the hard way.

In January 1996, Democratic President Bill Clinton declared during his State of the Union address that “the era of big government is over.” And following America’s decisive victory in the Cold War, it seemed it might be so. Socialism began as a hypothesis – that central planning would improve the human condition. The ensuing decades-long experiment, stretching across all corners of the world, resulted in the opposite: Where communism spread, liberty’s flame was extinguished, ushering in unprecedented human suffering for billions.

By every empirical measure, the socialist hypothesis has been falsified. And yet, socialism is catching fresh wind in its sails – not in Moscow, Havana, or Hanoi, but in New York City, capitalism’s capital.

This week, New York voters elected self-declared and unapologetic socialist Zohran Mamdani, a man endorsing proposals like widespread rent control, fare-free public transit, and government-run grocery stores. In November 2025, the Democratic mayor-elect declared during his victory speech, “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about.”

The incoming mayor’s policies have been tried and tested many times, and robust evidence shows they don’t work, putting their continued advance in the same category as flat Earth theory, Moon-landing denial, and chemtrail conspiracies.

While the linked article posits that socialism and its even more malignant cousin, communism, was more of a modern phenomenon, but as I mentioned above. It’s been tried again and again under different names in many places and it never worked.

If Mamdani gets his way I think we’ll see New York City starting to resemble the Moscow of the Bad Old Days of the Soviet Union and not a Socialist Utopia.

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I think we can place the following under the “Well, That’s Obvious You Moron” heading.

The More Violence You Find Acceptable the More Violence You Will Get

I think we can safely replace the word “violence” in the above with “crime” and it will be equally valid. We’ve seen that amply demonstrated in US cities that have been ignoring crimes and taking on bail reform of the kind that means little or no bail for criminal miscreants who then go out and commit more crimes. Then they wonder why crime is skyrocketing, not making the connection between their actions and the dramatic rise in crime. This in turn leads to businesses and citizens deciding it is no longer viable to remain in the crime-ridden areas and leave.

In the case of the article linked above, they are looking at violence as being politically motivated and the worries that people have about the increasing violence, particularly politically motivated violence. Their concerns are no less valid.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the winds and rain have done a good job of stripping many of the remaining leaves from the trees, those same leaves are clogging gutters and causing some roads to be as slippery as if they were covered in ice and snow.

Computers And Trucks

It’s a busy weekend for yours truly between trying to resurrect two of the Weekend Pundit computers and prepping the trusty RAM 1500 for its visit to the local body shop.

One computer, the Official Weekend Pundit laptop seems to be working after I reloaded the OS – Ubuntu Linux – and seeing if I lost anything. Fortunately, I have a full backup of the laptop data files which I will check on Sunday. The other computer, the Official Weekend Pundit Desktop, also needs the OS reloaded. I need to download the latest image and create a bootable USB key so I can do that. It gives me the option to run Linux from the USB key or to load the OS. I plan to run it from the USB key first and see if I can access the files on the hard drive. If I can, I will backup the files before reloading the OD, in this case Linux Mint.

I have no idea why two Linux machines could not boot after installing an upgrade and restarting. This happened about 6 months apart and I haven’t seen an answer on the Linux forums I’ve pinged.

I’ve used Linux for years and never had any issues with it until recently, something surprising. Hopefully, I can get the desktop squared away by the end of the weekend.

As mentioned above, the trusty RAM 1500 is headed to the body shop first thing Monday morning to have both front fenders replaced as the rust has gotten to them (though only in two places on each fender). One of the ‘preps’ I did was perform the twice yearly repaint of the RAM’s bed with a half-can of Rustoleum, something I do to deal with the scratches on the truck bed from all of the stuff that goes into and out of it during the year. The scratches generally aren’t deep or down to the metal. Rather they are surface scratches that expose the primer layer. If there’s rust showing the wire wheel gets installed on my drill to get rid of the rust, then primer is sprayed and once that dries, a coat of Rustoleum. I haven’t had to deal with any deep scratches/rust streaks over the past year and a half, and that suits me fine.

The trusty RAM 1500 will be in the body shop until Friday, and the week after that it will be going to the mechanics shop for an oil and lube job, tire rotation, and undercoating. Then the it will be ready for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday and the travel it will entail.

Friday Funny - Confusing As It Gets

I'll Tell You The Story - Binky And Megabucks

Thoughts On A Sunday

As you may have seen in yesterday’s post, my Linux desktop failed to boot after an OS update. I ma using my work laptop to craft today’s musings, but I am hoping to have everything squared away by the end of the day tomorrow as I am taking my time before applying the needed fix. One thing I did was boot Linux Mint from a USB key which allowed me to access files on the machine and back up the most recent ones onto an external drive in case my restoration effort fails, and I must reload the OS from scratch. It’s a pain in the butt, but at least I can be sure I won’t lose anything…I hope.

It was quite windy up this way over the previous two days and a lot of leaves have been blown off quite a few of the trees. Some are bare, primarily those which hit their peak colors early. Those that followed recently still retain a lot of their leaves and I don’t expect to see them fall anytime soon. The winds also caused quite a few power outages across the state, but fortunately our area wasn’t affected.

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Today’s post will be abbreviated for the reason mentioned above.

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I know it was getting bad, but I didn’t realize it was getting this bad.

NBC News Spins Illegal Alien Pedophile as “Undocumented Father”

Really?

An NBC News affiliate is facing backlash for attempting to portray an illegall immigrant with an extensive criminal background—including lewd and lascivious acts with a child—as merely an “undocumented father.”

Gerardo Rojas-Leyva, an illegal immigrant whose arrest by federal agents was covered by NBC Bay Area … has “a rap sheet including lewd and lascivious acts with a child, battery of a spouse, domestic battery, and providing compensation for prostitution,” according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

How can they possibly explain their ‘support’ of a pedophile with a long criminal history?

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This is something of which I have been aware for some time.

Study: Onshore Wind Turbines Are Major Cause Of Environmental Damage

I’ve known of the environmental issues with off-shore wind turbines and have seen more than a few reports of the effects of land-based wind turbines as well. However, now there’s some data showing that such damage isn’t just anecdotal but is a real problem.

Fresh insights into the ecological devastation caused by onshore wind turbines around the world are contained in a shocking new paper published last month by a group of ecologists in Nature. The paper is paywalled and has attracted little mainstream media interest, but it highlights research that illustrates that the effect of utility-scale wind energy production “can be far reaching and sometimes have large and unexpected consequences for biodiversity”. An annual figure of around one million bats are killed in the countries with the highest number of turbines, but harmful effects are seen in many other parts of the ecosystem. The number of top predators such as jaguars, jungle cats and golden jackals can be changed by turbines in tropical forest gaps, leading to the “possibility for cascading effects” along similar latitudinal levels.

Yet another example that “green” energy isn’t automatically better than more traditional means of generating electricity, but that it can be worse.

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The trusty RAM 1500 is heading to the body shop next week to get the last of the rust taken care of, in this case on the two front fenders. I stopped by the body shop last week to get an updated estimate for the work to be done and then scheduled the work.

As with the original estimate a couple of years ago, both front fenders will be replaced rather than repaired as the owner of the body shop, someone I trust, stated “If we just fix it, you’ll be back in two or three years to have it done again.” At least he was able to get me OEM replacements for the cost of aftermarket fenders.

Some of you may wonder why I’ve been putting thousands of dollars into an 11-year-old pickup truck. The answer is simple: It’s a lot cheaper than buying a new pickup.

Seeing as a 2025 version of my present pickup costs about three times what I spent to buy my 2014, it is a lot cheaper to put the money into the existing pickup. While it is 11-years-old, it only has 101,000 miles on it and it is in excellent condition mechanically. I have kept up with all of the regular maintenance as well as preventative maintenance to keep it that way. I figure between all of that and the body work over the past couple of years I’ll have dropped about $8500 into my pickup. That’s a lot cheaper than having to make loan payments on a $75,000 truck. What I’ve spent would amount to approximately 8 months of loan payments on a new truck. (I’ve seen some auto loans running $1000 a month. Thanks, but no thanks.)

Once the body work is done, the trusty RAM 1500 will be headed to the mechanic for an oil change, lube, tire rotation, and undercoating. It will all be done before Thanksgiving comes around and it will all set for another New England winter.

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In light on my tale above, I find it interesting that Chrysler has decided to resurrect the Hemi-V8 in the RAM 1500 pickups. It had switched over to the twin-turbo inline V6 Hurricane engine as a means of reducing some costs (and emissions), but Mopar enthusiasts didn’t like that and a revamped 5.7-liter Hemi is returning to the RAM1500 line for the 2026 models.

After Tavares’ departure from Stellantis late last year, the company immediately set to work righting the ship, and the reintroduction of the Hemi became one of its top priorities. Aside from a few tweaks that were needed to get it to play nice with the truck’s recently revamped electrical architecture, the 5.7-liter Hemi returned to the Ram 1500 lineup for the 2026 model year essentially unchanged from the version that had bowed out in 2024.

Even with Ram’s eTorque mild hybrid system now standard for V-8-equipped models, the 5.7-liter Hemi still lags behind the standard-output Hurricane engine in terms of both horsepower and torque (395 horsepower and 410 lb-ft of torque versus 420 hp and 469 lb-ft, respectively), and it requires an additional $1,200 outlay over the more powerful standard-output I-6. So why, you might ask, are these less powerful and more expensive V-8-powered trucks selling so well?

The baritone bark that’s triggered by a press of the engine start/stop button immediately makes it clear what you paid for. In a stroke of product planning brilliance, Ram also decided to make a sport exhaust system standard equipment on all 2026 Ram 1500s equipped with the V-8, and while the 5.7 might be getting on in years, it still sounds fantastic both at idle and when you’re muscling the truck through traffic. There’s an emotional connection here that you just don’t get from the inline-six, which, while totally competent at its job, is virtually silent in almost everything Stellantis has used it in so far. Even in the admittedly excellent Ram 1500 RHO, which uses an active exhaust setup that allows the high-output Hurricane to sing the song of its people a bit louder, it just feels like something’s a little bit off.

As someone who has owned a few turbocharged vehicles (a ’85 Dodge Daytona and an ’88 Dodge Dayton Shelby Z), they do have the advantage of lower weight and a lot of horsepower. The only downside to owning both of those cars was that I had to use high-octane gas – minimum 91 octane – in order to extract all of the horsepower and fuel economy. My present RAM 1500 requires minimum 89 octane mid-grade gas, but it’s a lot cheaper than the high test gas.

Give me the rumble of a V8 any day…

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee where the leaves have finally dulled and are falling, nights are getting close to freezing, and where Monday is coming around to plague us yet again.

Oh...Doggonnit!!

The Officcial Weekend Pundit Linux Desktop suffered a malfunction after an OS upgrade and I am in the nidst of a recovery before reloading the OS. As such, I did not put together a post for Saturday. There will be a Thoughts On A Sunday post as I should have the computer up and running again by then.

Friday Funny - Fluffy On Disneyland

I'll Tell You The Story - Haunted New Hampshire

Considering Friday is Halloween, I thought this might be appropriate.

Thoughts On A Sunday

We’re finally seeing rather cool temperatures up here at the lake. So far we have not seen freezing temperatures overnight, but the nighttime temps have been in the upper 30’s around here. Daytime temps have been in the 50’s, so it isn’t time to break out the heavier jackets.

We have had some rain and ironically that has helped some of the fall colors to ‘pop out’ seemingly overnight. Though we were supposedly past peak foliage colors, I have been seeing more trees changing and with more brilliant colors than we saw during the alleged peak. However, due to the lengthy drought they do not last very long and the trees seem to be shedding them more quickly than is usual.

The water level on the lake continues to drop, though this time it seems to be due to what is called “draw down”, where the lake level is dropped on purpose to help prevent ice damage to docks and piers during the winter months. Quite a few of us are asking they the state is doing this seeing as how the lake level was already close to the normal draw down level due to the months long drought. It doesn’t make sense to us.

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The New Hampshire legislature has brought forth a bill that “will reaffirm that it is the state legislature…that holds the sole authority to regulate weapons on public property.” Not state agencies. Not local governments.

House Bill 609, sponsored by Rep. Samuel Farrington (R-Rochester), seeks to close what he calls loopholes in the state’s existing firearms preemption law after learning the New Hampshire Department of Transportation barred its employees from carrying firearms on the job.

“The intent here is to emphasize that the Legislature’s preemption is the last word on the subject,” Farrington told the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee.

New Hampshire’s current preemption law , signed in 2003 by then-Gov. Craig Benson, already reserves regulation of firearms, components, ammunition, and supplies to the Legislature. In 2011, Gov. John Lynch expanded that statute to include knives.

Farrington’s proposal would extend those protections even further—covering stun guns, Tasers, pepper spray, and other self-defense tools. It also bars any state, county, or municipal agency from creating or enforcing its own weapons rules that conflict with state law.

If this bill becomes law, a lot of so-called “Gun Free” zones would be eliminated. Not that Gun Free zones have ever stopped criminal miscreants from carrying and/or using guns in those zones. All they do is signal that everyone on those zones are unarmed and are easy targets.

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It looks like Germany is taking yet another step in de-industrialization by eliminating yet another source of energy needed by its industrial sector, in this case by demolishing the cooling towers of an inactive nuclear power plant.

I find it inconceivable that Germany has shut down and is decommissioning its nuclear power plants in favor of wind turbines, coal, and Russian natural gas to generate electricity. I have a feeling that Germany will end up being yet another object lesson showing why governments shouldn’t be listening to the rabid and deluded “green energy” faithful when it comes to what is and is not green energy.

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I have to wonder if this is true:

Just the sight of an American Flag entices people to vote for Republicans.

Can it be that easy?

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I’m not sure I understand the logic behind this reasoning, that being that dropping gasoline prices are actually bad news for President Trump.

Really?

To recap: low gasoline prices are bad for Trump. If prices fell further, that would be more bad. If prices went up again, that’s more bad news for Trump.

The national average gasoline price stood at $3.07 per gallon on Friday, according to AAA. That’s down from $3.16 a month ago and $3.15 a year ago.

Yesterday I saw gas prices at the gas station where I usually buy my gasoline for the trusty RAM 1500, with regular at $2.79 and mid-grade (89 octane) at $3.19 which are down about 20 cents from about a week-and-a-half ago.

A drop in gas prices isn’t all that unusual around here once we get into mid-October as tourist traffic drops off after summer and again after fall foliage season comes to an end.

I’m curious as to what heating fuel - #2 heating oil and propane – will cost over the heating season.

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Well, the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout was dropped off at the boatyard for winterization and storage this past week. It will be serviced, cleaned, shrink wrapped, and then stored away for the winter. Seeing the large number of boats waiting at the boatyard to be winterized I figure it will be at least another week or two before they get to it, something not unusual at all. Even with boats being pulled out of the lake earlier than usual because of the low water level, there are still quite a few that are still at their slips in our local cove. Again, something that isn’t all that unusual.

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And that’s the (abbreviated) news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the temps are getting chillier, the boats are still coming out of the water, and where Daylight Savings Time will be ending next weekend...