Tings Bruk Down

 

This is a bathroom ceiling fan.

Specifically, this is the ceiling fan that has been sucking clouds of shower steam out of MY bathroom since long before it was mine (or my Bride's, whose mortgage the Little House was in, and whose name is on the ownership document...). Our guess is that it dates from somewhere around the Eighties; that would be consistent with the provenance of a LOT of the post-Twenties work done on this house.

(Which, I should remind you, was massively fucked with after the house fire sometime around then, when the occupants took the insurance money, spent it all on hookers and blow, or Vegas, or any other damn thing than making halfway-decent repairs on the poor little house...)

Well, about sometime this spring the old fan began making expensive squealing noises and shutting down. I suspected that the fan bearing had worn our, advised the rest of the Fire Direction crew not to use it, and contemplated having to replace it with no real enthusiasm.

After putting the distasteful chore off as long as possible (and long enough for some nasty mildew to build up on the bathroom ceiling) I finally went to the friendly Home Depot folks and bought a new fan.

 
Went to the 1920's attic stairs, pulled them down, and read, stamped on the upper section in 1920's ink:

"Maximum weight: 200 lbs".

I think I was below 200 some time back in 1988, right after I got out of the service all lean and hungry. And since then food and I have been better acquainted, and that weight is long since gone.

Luckily I have good friend who aren't so damn fat. And are also good people, and kindly, and pretty awesome handimen, too, so it was my friend Brent who came over with toolkit in hand and headlamp and power drill, and...

...yanked the old junker, checked the wiring (still good), put in the new fan, tested it to see if it worked (it did), fixed it to the joist, and there we had it; a new fan.

Thank you, Brent! I owe you something nice, really, and that's not even counting for snaking the nasty damn utility sink in the basement that was running slow because of the nasty washing machine lint!

Now I just have to spackle and paint the new L-angle piece of drywall and it'll be a thing of beauty and a joy...well, until the NEXT time it craps out. Hopefully some time in the 2060s long after I'm dead.

When I was with my ex, whose family were very "boat-y" people, they liked to say that a sailboat was a hole in the water into which you poured money.

Yeah, well, home ownership. Let's talk.

And speaking of fucked up things...

I see our new House Republican overlords finally got tired of pantsing Kevin Fucking McCarthy and let the poor stupid sod play Bang the Gavel.

The clusterfuckery was entertaining, yes, but let's not let it distract us from the plot of the story "The Cannibal Children Come To The Birthday Party".

The Traitor Twenty did what they did as much to extort their fap fanstasies of endless Hunter Biden and the other QANut nonsense we're now going to get 24/7/365 from these fucksticks.

But hidden in the pile of MAGAt shit is this tasty little raisin, noted by Kyle Cheney at Politico and emphasized by emptywheel:

Yep.

They're going to use their power to destroy the notes that the DoJ took on their criminal fuckin' conspiracy

So, even as we contemplate the goodness of new bathroom fans and good home improvement news, we need to remember that for at least the next two years we're going to be ruled - to the extent they can - by people who tried to betray the Constitutional requirement to peacefully transfer power to the winner of the general election.

That is, by traitors no different in fact from those guilty of Confederate treason 162 years ago.

And it's also a reminder that the thing that distinguished a criminal like Trump from a criminal like Nixon is that Nixon's crimes were, at bottom, political. 

Nixon had an agenda - loathsome, true - that he wanted to rule by. He had made his bones kneecapping his political enemies in California, and he grew to power with the same vicious political instincts until he finally went too far for even his political party to ignore.

Trump, on the other hand, was just a mobbed-up grifter, a real-estate crook with the instincts of a made guy. His crimes were the crimes of a streetcorner hood, a Mob guy, running his numbers and thumbbreaking his debtors (and stiffarming his creditors).

So it should be no surprise that the remoras that have fastened themselves to the Mob that is the Republican Party are not that much different. They know they're guilty of criminal conspiracy.

And, like their Orange Julius Caesar, they're now trying to use legal bullshit and lies to escape with their gains.

Well, the American people did, at least in this case, vote for these sonsofbitches.

And now, thanks to the people who voted for these sonsofbitches, all of us are gonna get it, good and hard.

But at least I'll have a nice new bathroom ceiling fan when they implode the debt ceiling this October.