The Peckish Synapse

KARNUT · July 11, 2025

56 minutes ago, Donstar said:

I also have flat feet and Sketchers. For walking comfort and distance, I buy New Balance in the $200 range. ($150 US) If you're ever by one of their stores, get fitted and try on a pair of good quality walking/running shoes. Your Sketchers and SAS shoes are fine for general use but you will be very surprised and happy with your improved performance at the track by treating your feet to this experience.

I have used new balance. As you know sketchers come in all styles. Basically they do the job at a reasonable price. My wife used to be on her feet all the time and SAS worked for her. So I used them for a while. Comfortable and expensive. My feet didn’t notice any difference. And they lasted about the same as sketchers. Actually the most comfortable shoes I’ve used were Red Wings. There’re work boots. I bought them from a boot store. They repair too. Expensive but worth it. Except the last pair I bought. They hurt my feet. When I took them back the owner said they weren’t made at the same place anymore. No worries I retired and they don’t go with shorts. Required apparel for the retired. Lucky I have pretty legs.

Grumpy Bear · July 11, 2025

11 hours ago, Silverado4x4 said:

They look like wooden shoes.

They look new :crackup: The pair shown are not even the top draw of hand made Italian shoe. Those are about 3X that much.

Mostly I wear cowboy boots and most of the time I buy at Blains. Lerado's, Cheap and pretty comfortable and even semi long wearing. But I also own several pairs of hand made to my feet Stewart's I was fitting for and the bucks they are made on are molds of my feet. Cross cut horse hide and they are like having nothing on your feet. There is no comparison. I also have a 35 year old pair of Stacey Adams Wingtips I wear weekly to Sunday services and gatherings out. I have six other pair of 'other' shoes that sit in the closet or live at the cobbler that are a fraction of the quality and all of the glitz.

My father is the Champion of short oil change, good oil guys (Phillips Trop-Artic) and has done remarkable well with that strategy. He's also the first one to tell you that after seeing the internals of some of my motors in the 200,000 to 300,000 mile range that he wishes he had known and wishes he had his earlier cars with these boutiques I run and his brother runs. AMSOIL guy with the pair of million milers my Uncle.

But today and at 96 he's running Supertech at 10K OCI's and bragging it up. Does he think it's better? Not on your life. He is forced to bend to his sub $700 a month SS payment. Necessity is laid upon him and he must save face. He also knows, and will admit, if only to me. "I'm 96! That Buick will outlast me with tap water in it" and he laughs like a Hyena.

I get it, I really do get it. There are a million reasons to deny and ridicule and the majority of those reasons have nothing to do with reality. Everything to do with circumstances and knowledge and personalities.......

We are going to continue to clash as long as circumstance, knowledge and personalities are being presented as the truth to wage against the truth. It's kind of what the thread is about. Go back and read the first entry. Train is on the tracks.

Really, why would I give up on what is true?

Edited July 11, 2025 by Grumpy Bear

customboss · July 11, 2025

On 7/7/2025 at 11:56 PM, Grumpy Bear said:

Harvey

Elwood P. Dowd: You see, science has overcome time and space. Well, Harvey has overcome not only time and space, but any objections.

Dr. Chumley: Fly specks, fly specks! I've been spending my life among fly specks while miracles have been leaning on lampposts at 18th and Fairfax!

Elwood P. Dowd: Harvey and I sit in the bars... have a drink or two... play the juke box. And soon the faces of all the other people they turn toward mine and they smile. And they're saying, "We don't know your name, mister, but you're a very nice fella." Harvey and I warm ourselves in all these golden moments. We've entered as strangers - soon we have friends. And they come over... and they sit with us... and they drink with us... and they talk to us. They tell about the big terrible things they've done and the big wonderful things they'll do. Their hopes, and their regrets, and their loves, and their hates. All very large, because nobody ever brings anything small into a bar. And then I introduce them to Harvey... and he's bigger and grander than anything they offer me. And when they leave, they leave impressed. The same people seldom come back; but that's envy, my dear. There's a little bit of envy in the best of us.

At least you have Harvey as a friend?

Atlas · July 11, 2025

Danner is where it's at. Still love me a good pair of USA-made Quarry. Or Haix. The Germans make a nice boot.

The whole point was, wear the appropriate shoe for the occasion. If going 200k miles on an engine is the goal, a big name brand oil of good quality will get you there just fine.

Just like a good steak. Beef only gets so good. A $70 steak cooked by someone who knows what they're doing is as good as a $300 steak. At some point you're just paying for a name and a bunch of fluff.

Edited July 11, 2025 by Atlas

Donstar · July 11, 2025

4 hours ago, KARNUT said:

I have used new balance. As you know sketchers come in all styles. Basically they do the job at a reasonable price.

Not all NB shoes are equal. Try the New Balance Store in The Woodlands Crossing when you're in the neighborhood and have them fit you in one of their mid priced walkers or runners. You don't have to buy anything but you'll leave with good information and appreciation for higher end comfort.

Grumpy Bear · July 12, 2025

A family tree is a amazing thing. Claim a person in the succession isn't real and an amazing thing happens. You now have to discredit several others and then several of several others as the tree branches.

I watch Louis Gates Jr's show on genealogy. People beliefs are unmovable and oral histories infallible until they meet science and recorded history.

Attacks on history and science to cancel them by those who have a need for it to be wrong and they, therefore to be right, for a laundry list of reasons, is mind numbing.

Such is the assault on truth. It can be uncomfortable, it can be in convenient and yet it is.

You are alive. Unless your argument is you don't exist then your forefathers exist and when in the search of you history you find a person that causes you to wince and wish it were not true, simply campaigning that they never existed or the circumstances of there life are unreal is to cast doubt your very being. That is special.

Everything true undergoes irrational threat and attack. I have no friends who behave such. I've met people like that, but they are not friends. They are not MY enemies either. In a practical sense...they don't exist. And yet...they breath.

How sad for them. How truly sad indeed.

You can go back in the USA into the late 1600's and find written records of family lineages. A few hundred years more in Europe. Not much exist before that but rational thinking says the end of recorded history isn't the end of history. Yet some claim that a lack of secular history is proof some person, place or thing never existed or it didn't happen. They then by their own word subscribe to the idea that "The absence of evidence is evidence of absence".

If they were held to that then when the family line ends due to a lack of records then they cease to exist. Their evidence is the breath they are drawing.

The stupidity of humans is appalling. Nope, haven't a single person in my realm of friends that stupid.

Atlas · July 12, 2025

diyer2 · July 12, 2025

Here we go again Grumpy.

Edited July 12, 2025 by diyer2

garagerog · July 12, 2025

1 hour ago, Atlas said:

The scene above reminds me of skits I've seen of hobos picking butts out of the gutter and using a toothpick to get a drag or two, but much funnier than what's shown here.

Atlas · July 12, 2025

30 minutes ago, garagerog said:

The scene above reminds me of skits I've seen of hobos picking butts out of the gutter and using a toothpick to get a drag or two, but much funnier than what's shown here.

That's not a butt, it's a joint. The gif is used to add humor to whatever vision quest was happening above with regards to genealogy and search for truth. And who doesn't love Awkwafina, she's great.

Edited July 12, 2025 by Atlas

customboss · July 12, 2025

26 minutes ago, Atlas said:

The gif is used to add humor to whatever vision quest was happening above with regards to genealogy and search for truth.

Quite appropriate too. Bums dragging used up butts is about right too.
Intervention time???

Im messed up and it takes one to ID one.

Grumpy Bear · July 13, 2025

189,000 Mile Original OEM Tail Pipe

What should it look like if I knew what I was doing?

customboss · July 13, 2025

10 minutes ago, Grumpy Bear said:

189,000 Mile Original OEM Tail Pipe

What should it look like if I knew what I was doing?

You’re doing great. corroded but you live in Illinoisistan.

garagerog · July 13, 2025

8 hours ago, Atlas said:

That's not a butt, it's a joint. The gif is used to add humor to whatever vision quest was happening above with regards to genealogy and search for truth. And who doesn't love Awkwafina, she's great.

Just goes to show you how naive I am about marijuana and old too as I've never heard of that broad. But I can tell you that the 62-64 Impalas had a built in bottle cap opener under the steering column, a notch and a sheet metal screw at the appropriate distance that served no other purpose than to act as a lever against a bottle cap. Engineer that designed that steering column must have been a beeraholic. Getting rid of beer bottles was a given when I was underage, just had to remember to dump the floor mat too. I lived in Wa. State during my youthful beer drinking days which didn't have an open container law until the MADD inspired feds mandated it, so a couple of empty beer bottles or stray caps didn't automatically result in a night in jail unless you failed the then .10 limit.