We’ve featured sweat-equity palace opportunities in Madison and Sangerville, Maine recently. How about something a little smaller? More manageable. Maybe you’re just starting out, and your toolbox only has a few screwdrivers and your lunch in it. Don’t worry, you’ll get there. Why not buy this place In Byron, Maine, for a relative pittance, and bang on it until it’s livable, and your toolbox is full?
It’s just under 1,000 square feet of problems, so you won’t get overwhelmed. And, not to exaggerate or anything, but it’s kind of adorable. It’s got a jerkinhead roof! A curved, glassed-in porch! Exposed rafter ends! Original equipment shingles on the sidewalls! Those sort of proto-toboggan shutters that were popular with houses built 75 years ago!
Sorry, I got infected with the realtor flu and started shotgunning exclamation points all over. But my point stands: It’s kinda peachy, ain’t it?
Well, look on the bright side. You’re not likely to get lost in there. It’s tighter than a landlord’s wallet, but it’s just short of livable.
Small might be good, because you’re going to have to heat it, and if you haven’t noticed, the United States gets winter once a year. Byron gets it plenty. You’ll need beaucoup heat. In the last picture, you can see a version of a Franklin Stove to heat the main part of the house. Believe me, there’s no thermostat on the wall you can turn to get anything out of that thing. But firewood is easy to come by in Byron, Maine. You spend all your time at the gym lifting weights. Why not lift some firewood instead, and save on the gym membership fee?
There’s a more traditional fireplace in the back, and some form of direct vent furnace on the wall somewhere. Probably burns propane, or maybe kerosene. As far as utilities go, Byron is out in the landscape, and many people go “upta camp” around there. Camp can require pooping outdoors in that vicinity, but this little house has a well and some kind of septic in place. And while the meter’s not currently on the place, it can have regular electrical service turned back on. Practically luxurious.
A cooking stove is currently MIA, but there’s room for one in the kitchen-y area. The house probably wouldn’t seem so small after you cleaned out some of the junk:
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
There are a couple of bedrooms, and a sleeping loft area for your manservant.
Byron Maine isn’t overcrowded just yet. There are 103 residents as of 2020. It’s home to Coos Canyon, a picturesque and popular spot to go swimming in the summer and to shiver in the winter. If you keep wandering north, it’s not too far to Mooselookmeguntic Lake, and one of my favorite spots in western Maine, the Height of Land.
So it’s sixty grand. You could live in it right away, more or less, and fix it up. It’s not a dangerous place, unless you decide to fight with the bears over the trash you left outside. You could hike and hunt and fish and birdwatch and snowshoe and ski and snowmobile in Byron. What say you? Feeling Byronic?
Some old school Country, with more than a few hints of what was to come. Dolly Parton at around 7:00 piled up the hair and sang it straight. She’d wander onto the pop charts, bigtime, a little later, with the crossover sound that fell out of the old country music tree.
Rock music had already worked its magic on country music. Up until the late fifties, pop music was very wide-ranging and catholic. Elvis and his cohort had one foot still in country, for instance, but they started the deluge of rock or nothing that found everyone shifting over from whatever genre they inhabited before. When Bobby Darin starts trying to sing rock music, things have truly shifted for good. Eventually, in 1964, the Beatles wiped the charts clean and scrawled their name all over it. Country music had an identity crisis.
This video is a museum exhibit of the end of the original Grand Ol Opry movement. Shortly after this, the Opry moved to a new venue. It didn’t look down-home anymore, and the acts moved into New Country, and various forms of crossover styles. In some ways, it isn’t a long trip from this video to stuff like the Eagles, or Eddie Rabbitt, or BJ Thomas, or Charlie Rich, or Kenny Rogers, or Dolly Parton’s transformation, or the Bellamy Brothers, but there’s an oceanic gulf between the styles. It’s nice that someone pointed a camera at the dotted line that divided the eras.
Me? I love to lie whether I’m listening to music or not.
Anyhow, lots to like in this video. You’d have to cast your mind back to the 1940s to find close harmony singing on a par with the Quebe sisters. Asleep at the Wheel has always been amusing. They’re musical scholars. Unlike most people who keep musical traditions alive, they have musical talent to go with their enthusiasm. Ray Benson has a pleasant tenor/baritone voice, and sounds like he woulda fit right in with the Texas Playboys.
Along the Navajo Trail is the title song from a 1945 Roy Rogers movie. All kinds of people have covered it at one time or another. You can run the gamut from Bing Crosby to Fats Domino and back again if you like. But there’s no great need to go hunting around. There can’t be a better version, can there?
In a way, until recently, we lived in the most notable house in Maine. Pretty much no one in the town knew it, but hundreds of thousands of readers watched me bang away on the guts of it, listened to my children bang away at music inside it, and wondered how much aspirin my wife must have taken to put up with the lot of us.
But Alice doesn’t live there anymore, and neither do we. We finished the house, and the kids, so to speak, and sold the old pile for a pile. Regular readers might recall that we liked to travel to Hallowell, Maine, and ride our bicycles on the rail trail that wends along the Kennebec River. Well, the other end of the rail trail was Ogguster, the state capital, and dang if we didn’t move there. It’s the big city for us. It has nearly 19,000 people in it, I think. The metrop. If I was going to be the town drunk, that’s just about the largest size of a place I could handle.
So watch the video from WCVB, and you’ll see the front and back of our new place about forty times. You can’t miss it. Of course I could tell you which place is ours, but where’s the fun in that? Normally, you could look for my sedan chair and bearers waiting outside the door, but I gave them the month off, because it’s February and has been 4 below zero at night. But get this: someone else shovels the snow!
Honestly, I’m not sure how to act anymore. City dwellers!
OK, buoys and gulls. It’s Tuesday. Time to clean out those browser bookmarks. You can just erase yours, but I have much more fun inflicting mine on the general public through these roundups. And then erasing them, with extreme prejudice, natch.
It was found by someone going through their father’s work documents, and subsequently destroyed in a flood. I spent some time corresponding with the IBM archives but they can’t locate it. Apparently it was common for branch offices to produce things that were not archived.
Whoever produced that document adumbrated the big question in today’s computing. Who’s responsible for what a computer tells you when you ask it a question? Also, whoever produced that document never worked in an office with women: My computer totally hates me!
Four public shipyards that perform maintenance on nuclear-powered submarines are understaffed, and only a third of maintenance across the fleet is completed on time. Growing the fleet will place added strains on overworked shipyards and exacerbate the past-due modernization of its 17 existing dry docks, that—unless more are built—will not be able to sustain even the current too-small fleet. New shipyards and workers are needed, but only a revitalized industry will attract the necessary investment and people.
I’m sure preparing to fight World War II again will work out in the end.
A small Costa Rican supermarket has emerged victorious from a legal battle against the renowned video game giant, Nintendo. José Mario Alfaro González, owner of “Super Mario” in San Ramón de Alajuela, found himself in an unexpected legal showdown when he attempted to formally register his store’s name. In Costa Rica, the term “super” is often used as shorthand for “supermarket.”
Do they have Super Mario Karts with one hinky wheel?
The near-complete prohibition on mass burns of agricultural prunings and field crops, as well as orchards and vineyards removed from production, marks a major shift for the San Joaquin Valley, an agricultural powerhouse that is home to some of the worst ozone and particulate pollution in the nation. The state has pushed for years to curtail open burns, citing the region’s high rates of respiratory illness and other health concerns associated with poor air quality.
When enough Modern Farmhouses get built in your town, actual, icky farming always gets banned.
Speaking to ANI, the spokesperson said, “I have received a number of inquiries on reporting of a deportation flight to India. I can’t share any details on those inquiries, but I can share, on the record, that the United States is vigorously enforcing its border, tightening immigration laws, and removing illegal migrants. These actions send a clear message: illegal migration is not worth the risk.”
First of all, any one of these containers takes months to set up. It starts with working with the factory designers and engineers, then negotiating pricing, fronting the production, dealing with inevitable production delays, quality inspections before shipping, booking sea freight, working through customs and handling tariffs, setting up incoming freight, and finally landing the container at your doorstep.
They’re kinda cute. There are places you don’t want to use a diesel machine for moderate work, like demo inside a building. But forklifts have run on bottled gas for interior work like that for ages, and don’t stink up the air. Unions and teenaged sons will like the four-hour battery life of these electric models, though.
Our op-ed in today’s NY Times explores an unexpected finding. A series of recent studies compared the performance of doctors with A.I. versus A.I. alone, spanning medical scans, diagnostic accuracy, and management reasoning. Surprisingly, in many cases, A.I. systems working independently performed better than when combined with physician input. This pattern emerged consistently across different medical tasks, from chest X-ray and mammography interpretation to clinical decision-making. In some of the studies, summarized in the Table below, the gap for performance favoring A.I. alone was large.
“Unexpected”? Have you talked to a doctor lately? If you go in there with a limb hanging off by its last tendon, you’ll get nothing but 30 minutes of questions about whether you’re depressed, abused, unsure of your gender, and would you like a fifth booster while they shove a GoPro up your bottom. Of course I’m depressed, doctor. I’m talking to you.
Thompson’s case dates to his discovery of the S.S. Central America, known as the Ship of Gold, in 1988. The gold rush-era ship sank in a hurricane off South Carolina in 1857 with thousands of pounds of gold aboard, contributing to an economic panic. Despite an investor lawsuit and a federal court order, Thompson still won’t cooperate with authorities trying to find 500 coins minted from some of the gold, according to court records. He has previously said, without providing details, that the coins — valued at about $2.5 million — were turned over to a trust in Belize.
Ten years in prison for civil contempt of court. Now he gets to serve two years for criminal contempt of court. I suspect that his contempt for the court hasn’t diminished much. Mine didn’t after reading that.
Researchers found that women between the ages of 25 and 65—the life stages of early and middle adulthood—spoke on average about 3,000 more words per day than their male counterparts. Significant gender differences did not appear in the study’s other age groups: adolescence (ages 10 to 17), emerging adulthood (ages 18 to 24) and older adulthood (65 and up).
Well, in our household, the extra 3,000 words a day are spent arguing with the imaginary woman in the GPS device.
In a sane world, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors would do everything in its power to approve new grocery stores. The legislators would put up a huge fight against the closure of the Fillmore’s Safeway, which is expected this Friday and is the topic of a public hearing this afternoon. And they wouldn’t allow a new Whole Foods to be delayed and obstructed through the hijacking of an environmental appeal process.
“In a sane world” is the lede in a story about San Francisco. Sometimes, the jokes write themselves.
Month: February 2025
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
Recent Comments