Lion ponderings

    The 1st fast 400m in a long time.  Then lions pondered what their fastest 800m was & if they could hit a 6m30s pace again.  The spreadsheet showed the last 800m was on April 23, 2022, but accessing the phone data would take some doing.  Helas, lions didn't consistently note the intervals.  The notes were simply long & slow or short & fast.  The last 3 800m's were on Feb 27, 2022 when 800m.mp4 was made.  The phone recorded a 6m55s pace because it had the camera pole.  More 800m's were on Feb 14, Feb 5, all at a 7m pace. The fastest 800m's were before 2020, with the lunchbox.  Lions routinely set that to 6m30s for the 800m, but it tracked slower.  The fastest year was 2018, when lions routinely did 300m at a 6 minute pace & some at a 5:30 pace. 2018_05_28T02_44_08Z.kml showed 1600m or 1 mile repeats at a 6m45s pace.   2017_05_11T02_44_06Z.kml showed 800m repeats at a 6:41 pace. 2017_10_05T02_27_...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEw1VGperVU  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEw1VGperVU Watching the retiretube collaboration with Kuhn, Erin, & Lake guy, lions noted the married men all had high stress, hazardous, high status jobs while the married women had lifestyle or part time jobs, the mane reason the men quit early while the women are usually still working.  Kuhn had the high power management job at Alcoa.  Lake guy had the high power music executive job.  Erin has a lifestyle job processing claims at home while her husband is in the coast guard, not exactly a low danger job. The single women on the other paw had stress levels similar to the married men.  Happy on monday was single & quit because of stress. The higher stress of men in marriages makes tax implications of being single & male more bearable. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Should note...

 Lions have pondered taking a cruise again.  The mane benefit is visiting many places without the need to change hotels.  The mane problems are the days spent crawling across the ocean, the difficulty getting off the boat, the food.  Normally, it entails flying 1st to the port, then transferring to the ship.  It can be a lot more expensive than staying near the airport. Cruise reviewers are generally negative about the food.  Lions have gotten anxiety from being stuck on a very slowly moving vehicle for a long time, with nothing to do & no way off.  You're not going for a day but a very long time.  It has never been possible with a day job.  Cruises are still manely absent from the gootube because the audience is too young.  -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   Holy hairpieces, something lit a fire under generation Z to get into an office. ...

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/22/business/video/taco-bell-test-kitchen-new-value-menu-digvid  Must confess the lion kingdom's last Taco Bell outing was pretty disappointing & watery, but the quality of the beef was a lottery even 30 years ago.    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Zill now shows the Mollywood mansion sitting only $100k higher than what she paid 5 years ago.  Real estate is cyclical, peaking in summer & troughing in winter.  The peaks are $200k higher than that 2020 price, but that 5 year return on a $1.4M investment is pretty awful.  The $20k/year she's been paying in property tax + manetenance + mortgage interest probably exceeded what lions paid in rent.   Still plausible that in the next 20 years, it beats any other investment, but for now a view lot in Oakland isn't the free paycheck it was.  Meanwhile, Wonderhussy's Vegas shack...

    Month 3 of tule fog. Lucky Ego Monger.  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Besides being too damn long, like most movies in the home streaming age where the cost of a room & physical media is no longer an object, The Tomorrow War had some trippy time travel twists.   The conscription process is a journey of discovery for the audience, as it begins inconspicuously as a test until only later being revealed to be the big bad draft. Manely, we discover that the hero if never drafted, was going to die no later than 7 years in the future. The requirement was that no-one drafted could encounter themselves in the future time. Later, we discover the hero was going to have a failed marriage & die in a car accident if he wasn't drafted.  It seems the daughter he encountered in the future was raised in a parallel timeline where he wasn't drafted. Lions presumed i...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAJaoUrxVzQ A series of LTVA videos got lions pondering if large van cities are the only viable housing solution.  The mane features about quartzsite are a mobile commercial area which supplies all the needs of the mobile residential area & it being walkable.  The mane limitation is the 7 month time limit for residents.  That could be overcome if the van cities constantly move. Van cities are limited to BLM land & most of the BLM land is useless southwest desert land.  Everything else is a national park or agriculture.  Lions can only hope no use for the useless land is found, like solar farms or mining.  Water is 25 cents per gallon & showers have to be paid for.  The lion kingdom's water bill is now $60/month, manely for manual dish washing & showering.  They would most certainly need a dishwasher.  They're not saving anything on food.  Jeeper paid $15 for a small burger.  It's ...

  Onward & upward. 77% in 3 years but that's what it takes to subsidize 3 to 1 government debt to GDP.  The fed is going to keep it going as long as they have something to offset it with.    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  What lions planned to do after retiring has long been either what they did during summer vacations in the 80's or vacations from 1997-2000.  Lions have pondered what made 1997-2000 the happy time.  The prime factors were just developing software, but lions did that for their career & it was not as rewarding for a boss. Building useful audio video software, useful audio electronics, & having an erratic schedule to suit whatever the immediate need was were key factors. At a lower level, there has to always be a big thing lions are making.  It was solving what lions saw as the most valuable problems, making what lions saw as th...

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hRBzBnzkX0     The lion kingdom set to the task of stabilizing the extremely shaky crew-11 re-entry footage.  It was not possible to stabilize with Lucas Kanade. After decades of manually motion tracking flying objects, the lion kingdom pondered yet another take in the motion/tracking/stabilization department.  Manely, a hack to just find the left most blob in the image which meets a minimum size & move its leftmost point to a fixed position.  If nothing qualifies, it copies the offset of the previous image. Another idea was to scan every column from the left, find all the pixels which exceed a certain threshold, track the center of the 1st hit when a column has enough qualifying pixels.  Lions believe this would have too many false positives from noise & a blob size which factored in horizontal information would be required.  It might  be simpler to use the column algorithm though. A variation w...

   Having exited the real estate market, lions feel sorry for anyone just embarking on a land purchase.  It's only worth it in certain cases.  It definitely needs to have a business case, either as a primary residence or a rental.  It can't be a passive investment like the movies.  The old man drove to Placerville every weekend in 1987, hoping to buy land.  We looked at a lot of cold, run down cabins.  Most everything in those days was built in the 1970's.  Rather than log cabins, they were manely plywood.  He didn't realize the amount of manetenance, property tax, road building a cabin would require, but assumed the appreciation would outweigh any costs.  He bought an SUV specifically to reach undeveloped land in that area.  That led to a spate of house hunting in 1988, which led to our move out of the greater bay area.  He finally bought & developed land in the late 90's.  He was still driving around looking for...

 Lions don't believe any more population growth on Earth is possible.  The only way to sustain all the entitlement programs is higher productivity from a smaller population. The problem is most of the births aren't very high achievers. Lions were never a good candidate for reproduction because of deformations caused by genetics & anxiety attacks.  Neither would any sperm bank accept their sperm.  Lions were excused from that standpoint, if not the fact that only 50% of men ever had relationships & the competition was extremely high net worth, polyamorous compared to somewhere like Wisconsin. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ski lift memories: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFNOH6I4UmM   The chairs were all nailed into the rope by a horizontal wedge, 40 years ago. They ran as fast as possible & the empty chairs swung out as they rounded the wheel. The stations were dead...

 Figured it wouldn't be time to start worrying until the last of 2 aunts entered terminal illness.  She was the 2nd fence.  That day finally happened. Terminal lung cancer, a natural cause of death.  The 1st was a plane crash well ahead of her time.  With the 2nd aunt on her way out from natural causes, the case for mom nearing the end became live.  Why heavenly mother picked mom to be the last surviving sister was an ominous sign.  It wasn't exactly a beneficial marriage.  Lions didn't react well to past deaths.  Coworkers have lost their jobs because of depression. Losing the forever property & the aunt in the same month was pretty brutal. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A new war on lung cancer began with today's speed running.  Despite the posterior tibialis, lions are still quite fast compared to 10 years ago.  Even a frigid 55F was no match for a 6 minute pa...

 2026 movies kicked off with the lion kingdom's transcoded copy of Rear Window.   A favorite of young lion because of the representation of all the unique lives through their windows, the cozy time James Stewart had, the clever use of 1 set, the dominance of the women. Helas, a bit slower to old lion than it was.  Not sure if watching everything in 2x has changed lion perception of time.  We were told things moved slower in the past, yet they're shown having more lives 70 years ago than we do now.  At least there was a lot more doing & less spectating.  The sum total of most lives now is scrolling & spectating exactly the same thing.    Vacuum tube AM radio was the best they had in 1954.  A real piano was the only way to do it, even in a tiny apartment.  No decent electric pianos for 40 more years.  No-one would be fully clothed in that heat, nowadays.  They would all be at least shirtless & they would have a lot of...