Sully's Side

Everybody knows the Germans make good stuff

2010-12-26T11:04:00.005-05:00

I love the line in that Shamwow video where the pitchman says, "Everybody knows the Germans make good stuff," because even though it's arguably contentious with respect to a particular product like a wiping rag, there is an element of truth in it. Germans are renowned for craftsmanship. They were making precision instruments as early as any country. And one need only take a trip to Germany to see how dedicated they are to order and the following of rules and laws.

So it seems fair to assume that when Germans made and used good thermometers as early as anybody, and that their clerks were as meticulous as any in recording the data.

This fellow takes that concept and runs with it, giving a graph of German temperature records since 1750. Talk about an inconvenient truth. How can the world be warming if Germany hasn't been warming for the last 260 years?

Meanwhile, here in the U.S., the folks at NASA have been "adjusting" the temperature records continuously in order to produce scary headlines claiming that recent years have been warmer than 1934, whose raw temperatures are the warmest on record.

An interesting video about progress

2010-12-24T01:12:00.002-05:00

The video at this Cato Institute page is a bit long at 78 minutes; but the interesting part is Matt Ridley's ten or so minute talk and then the first ten or so minutes of questions that follow the fellow who gets up to comment on Ridley's talk.

In any event it's worth seeing since Ridley's take on why we live better than our ancestors is somewhat novel and very persuasive. I may have to break my rule and buy his book at some point. Or perhaps I'll do a really novel thing and check his book out of the library. For some reason I'm very open to getting audio books at the library; but I can't remember when I checked out an actual reading book.

This article made me think of Mom

2010-12-17T23:08:00.004-05:00

Mom was liberal to the core (in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt New Deal sense and also the anti-war sense), although she rarely talked about politics. But despite, or perhaps because of that, she despised the Kennedys. It was Aunt Mary who regularly used the term "whoremasters" in referring to politicians; but the fact is that the Kennedys (Jack, Bobby, Teddy and many of their politically involved children) really were whoremasters, as well as thorough cynics who considered themselves above the laws pertaining to ordinary people even as they loudly trumpeted their supposed love for the little people to attain and hold public offices.

Mom would have loved this article and commented on it. After which Aunt Mary would have delivered her classic line, "They're all whoremasters." Then they would have laughed together at the very best sort of joke, the bitter joke that simply states the real, though crazy, truth of things.

Congratulations and thanks to the Tea Partiers

2010-12-17T01:54:00.004-05:00

The new Tea Party backed congressmen and women who were elected last month won't take office until January 20th; but the effects of the Tea Party effort have already been felt in Washington.

Today the Democrats gave up on passing a new $1 Trillion dollar pork barrel bill in the lame duck session of congress. And, on other side of the coin, the Democrats failed in their attempt to pass a massive tax increase when the lame duck congress extended for two years almost all of the lower tax rates that have been in effect for the past nine years.

Elections have consequences, and in this case the Tea Party uprising that helped defeat so many long entrenched big spending congressmen and senators has already done a lot of good by forcing the politicians in Washington to realize that they can be defeated if they get too far out of line.

This doesn't mean we can afford to become complacent. We need to keep up the pressure to ensure that the new congress which convenes in January takes action to actually slow the pace of increase in government spending overall and to cut back spending on things the government now does which make no sense.

Cluelessness

2010-12-12T13:28:00.002-05:00

Alan Sorkin wailed away,
On his blog the other day,
'Cause Sarah Palin shot a moose,
Or was it Rudolph on the loose,
While hunting up Alaska way.

Mr. Priss procures his meat,
When Bambi he's of a mind to eat,
From someone who a cleaver wields,
Behind a screen at the Fresh Fields.
His hands are clean; but he's effete,
And his cluelessness is hard to beat.

The few, the proud, the Santa Marines

2010-12-11T15:31:00.003-05:00

Many are called but few are frozen.

Warning, the marching song has a funny line that may stray just a bit over the line for prissy folks; but I'm certain the Supreme Court would rule that, taken as a whole, this video has redeeming social value.

Winter is here

2010-12-09T00:43:00.002-05:00

The past three or four days have made it clear that winter is here. Cold, cloudy and blustery. Downright miserable most of the time.

I'm glad I got the fig tree well wrapped last week. I'm pretty proud of that wrapping job. The thing actually looks rather neat out there with the green bucket on its head. Tomorrow or Friday I need to get a bunch of leaf mulch from down by the maple tree to stack around the base of the fig in order to keep its roots from freezing.

I'm also glad I have plenty of really prime wood stockpiled this year. Thus far I've been burning mostly trashy stuff since it hasn't been all that cold; but temperatures are getting to where I need to burn the good hardwood. I have plenty of apple, cherry, mulberry and walnut stored up.

In other news: we have two herons hanging around down by the creek pretty much all the time. It's hard to believe those lanky birds can keep themselves warm enough around here during the depths of the winter; but they certainly do.

And in still other news: Rick the bowhunter came by the other week and introduced his fiance, who is also a bow hunter. The two of them have been hunting regularly on the property. I hope they take out a half dozen of Bambi's relatives. Our usual cross bow hunter has not appeared so it may be he has finally gone to the great hunting ground in the sky. He's had cancer for the past couple of years.

Global Warming Delegates sign a petition to ban water

2010-12-09T00:12:00.002-05:00

Priceless. Some college students went down to the big global warming convention and government paid vacation thing in Cancun and pulled the same sort of trick Penn and Teller did at a gathering of ignorant hippies.

These fellows asked delegates at the international climate science gathering to sign a petition banning Dihydrogen Monoxide, which is, of course H2O or water. The best part was that they got them to sign it at a water cooler.

In addition they got a bunch of delegates to sign a petition urging the UN to cripple the US economy and gut our Gross Domestic Product by 6%; but that doesn't surprise me at all since the whole global warming scam is about crippling the rich world and extorting lots of money that the global warming folks can feed off of.

You can watch the short video here.

I'm hoping they will post the names of the folks who signed those petitions on the internet along with their government position titles and their supposed credentials.

Ravioli and stuffed olives for a bunch of people

2010-12-06T13:30:00.004-05:00

I mentioned the other day that Linda found Aunt Mary's recipe for a whole lot of meat ravioli after Angela and I semi-finalized the mad plan for December 19th.

Here it is:

For the Dough:
5 pounds flour
8 extra large eggs
12 oz warm water
Knead approx 20 minutes
Roll out dough into tube and cut into slices
Press slices flat and dust flour on both sides
Run through pasta machine first on 1 and then on second to last slot
Put in meat, fold over and shape

For the meat filling:
8 pounds of cooked chicken and pork total weight
1 cup bread crumbs
1 cup cheese
4 cups chicken broth
4 eggs
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 tblsp salt
1 tsp garlic powder
1tsp parsley
Grind pork and chicken mixture together and fill pasta

(The recipes for the dough and filling are next to one another on a card, so I assume the meat mixture is designed to fill the amount of rolled dough that the dough recipe will produce. Assuming it's a recipe for about 200 ravioli that would mean about a half ounce of meat in each ravioli.)

On the back of the same card is a recipe for cheese filling:
1 pound of ricotta
Cheese to taste
1 egg
1/2 tsp parsley
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbl bread crumbs
Mix together and fill pasta

(Clearly the Ricotta recipe is not in proportion to the dough recipe, so my guess is that she wrote that on the back of the card for reference and it isn't meant to be used with the 5 pound dough recipe.

On the other hand Angela remembers the old time dinners consisting of fried meat ravioli, boiled meat ravioli with cheese and cinnamon, and then boiled cheese ravioli with gravy. So perhaps this is a recipe card for those occasions. But even that doesn't explain the problematic proportions since 1 pound of ricotta filling would not have made enough cheese ravioli with the sauce for the dinners for 15 or so that they used to have, even on the assumption that we had already eaten fried and white meat ravioli..

We'll learn the truth on December 19th. I'm figuring we'll do fifteen pounds of flour for dough and then fill with 16 pounds of meat and 8 pounds of cheese so as to end up with about 600 ravioli.

In addition we're going to do six times the following recipe for stuffed olives that Angela sent me so as to end up with about 450 olives:

2 1/2 lbs spanish olives (about 30 olives to the pound)
1 1/2 lbs ground veal and pork
3 eggs
1/8 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp parsley
2 tbsp romano cheese
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp garlic powder
3 tbsp bread crumb

Footballs

2010-11-27T19:11:00.003-05:00

Foods you enjoyed as a kid never taste exactly as you remember them; but sometimes you can get pretty close.

Today we made footballs according to the by guess and by gosh method. Using the old hand cranked grinder we ground up about a pound and half of leftover turkey (both white and dark meat) along with about the same amount of cooked Swiss Chard. Then we added about an ounce or so of grated Locatelli, about a teaspoon each of salt and garlic powder, and about a half teaspoon of pepper. I mixed that all up well, Alex and I tasted it for flavor, and then I formed it into footballs about two inches in diameter at the equator. I floured, egged, and breaded those; and then deep fried them.

Excellent! We ate them with mashed potatoes, leftover turkey gravy and swiss chard saute'd with garlic.

Now the question is whether they actually were different from Mom's because she used frozen spinach and we used the last picking of Swiss Chard from the garden (leaves only - the stems are now pithy); or whether 62 year old taste buds don't work exactly the same as 10 year old ones.

Either way they were very fine indeed. A very fine way to dispose of leftover turkey without having to suffer the taste of leftover turkey.

Winter is a comin'

2010-11-20T16:31:00.003-05:00

The signs are now too numerous to avoid that winter is on its way. I just picked the last Swiss Chard in the garden. The last five of the tomatoes I picked green in early October are almost fully ripe and will probably be used up within a couple of days. And virtually all of the leaves are down on the lawn except for those on the stubborn Sweetgums, and those on the Post Oak, the tatters of which won't fall until they're replaced by new leaves in the Spring.

Also, the price of olive oil has risen quite smartly to its late Fall, Winter and Spring level in the market. Having carefully observed the annual trends in that market for several years I invested heavily in olive oil futures during the late Summer and early Fall. As of now I have an unrealized 50% gross return on investment. My ROI is even higher on an annualized basis.

In other news: I've learned that bamboo, in addition to its many other uses, makes excellent kindling for the woodstove.

Gnocchi or Cavatelli

2010-11-15T21:23:00.004-05:00

I've often wondered why Mom always said she was making "cavadeellie" from leftover mashed potatoes when we were kids, since actually she was making gnocchi. Not that I knew it at the time. I don't think I ever heard the word "gnocchi" until some time in the 1970's or 1980's, when Mom, paradoxically, had started making actual cavatelli, with ricotta instead of potatoes.

Anyway, today I made gnocchi from some leftover mashed potatoes. They went down just like Mom's old cavadeelies, but not so elegantly. Mine were all shapes and sizes. It turns out to be hard to get them nice and uniform. Mom and Aunt Mary no doubt had those little mocking smiles on their faces if they were looking down this afternoon when I was struggling with that dough.

In other news: Sam and Don and I went down to Norfolk last weekend to take a tour of the Enterprise. It was good to see and walk around the old ship again, especially because, just by chance, the Ensign who served as guide for the group we joined is the Assistant First Lieutenant and thus happens to hold the same job title that I had back in the day (after I had spent a year as a Division Officer and more or less knew which end of the ship was the bow and which was the stern).

His job function is hugely different from mine since he got his commission via OCS after rising to First Class Bosun's Mate as an enlisted man, so he actually knows a lot about the management of the anchors, the mooring winches, the ship's boats and such, and he actually functions as the Ship's Chief Bosun. I was more or less the administrative assistant to the First Lieutenant, helping with paperwork that required an officer's signature and overseeing the department watch bill and duty assignments and such so the young department yeoman wouldn't be bullied too much by the petty officers. In port the job took me a couple of hours a day in the office, plus a couple of hour long walking around tours to check the various department spaces and go over stuff with the Division Officers.

Underway I was on a one in three rotation on the bridge; so the department management function was a duck in to the office and do a couple of hours of paperwork every couple of days sort of thing; and I did wandering tours of the department spaces on the way to and from bridge watches.

It was good to stand up there on the bridge and go back mentally to those heady days when the captain left the bridge and trusted me in charge out there, back when Enterprise was still "the largest warship in the history of the world," as he put it to me when he qualified me as Officer of the Deck. Heady days. The 1MC box next to the Captain's chair still connects to all those innumerable watch stations throughout the ship that could call in the middle of the night to report a problem or an emergency.

Mostly, even an actual emergency could wait on a decision for the few moments it took to call and wake up the captain in his sea cabin so you could explain the situation to him and get orders that you would merely pass along for action. But occasionally there would be an emergency that couldn't wait, one that needed orders right now; and you informed the captain after you had actions in train to put things right.

Then to, every so often there would be a merchant ship that was clearly in a privileged situation that suddenly and inexplicably changed course and put you in a situation where you had to maneuver right now to avoid a collision, and inform the captain only after you had given the necessary helm and/or engine orders, while the ship was already in process of making the unexpected change in course or speed. It was very gratifying when he merely gave you a "very well" over the phone after you had reported on what you had done, or when he came out in his bath robe, looked around and listened to what you were up to for a few minutes, or perhaps asked a couple of questions, and then quietly left the bridge to go back to his cabin.

One thing I noticed is that they've cluttered up the windows on the bridge with a whole lot of electronic equipment that was not there in 1971 and 1972. Back in those days we figured the course and speed for flight operations with a circular slide rule, and we kept track of nearby ships and did maneuvering board solutions for collision avoidance by hand on plotting sheets. They have special dedicated computers with touch screens for that stuff now.

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month

2010-11-11T09:14:00.005-05:00

Today is Armistice Day, or at least it used to be Armistice Day. It used to commemorate the truce, or armistice, that finally ended World War I, which used to be called The Great War, before World War II, which started a bit more than twenty years later, proved that it wasn't so uniquely great at all. And certainly proved that it wasn't The War to End All Wars, another one of its names.

Armistice Day was quite a thing for those Doughboys who had, until the truce that took effect at 11:00 AM on November 11th in 1918 ended the killing, crouched in their trenches and dugouts waiting for the random artillery shell with their name on it, or for the order to go "over the top" and charge into the machine gun fire.

Such artillery! And such an unimaginable volume of fire! A volume of fire such as had never been imagined in the quaint world before 1914. More than eight hundred thousand artillery rounds were fired in one battle toward the end of the war, with the guns on the allied side averaging one for every eight yards of front. The poor Germans, their economy struggling by that point, had only one artillery piece for each 25 yards of their front.

It all seems so quaint now. After all, it occurred more than 90 years ago. Long enough ago for Armistice Day to have been morphed into Veteran's Day and long ago enough so that the original reason November 11th was seen as a notable day has been all but forgotten.

I'm thinking on this in part because Sam and Don and I visited the Fredericksburg Battlefield National Monument on Sunday on our way back home after touring the USS Enterprise on Saturday. Fredericksburg, because it was a Civil War battlefield, is on a scale one can grasp. One can walk a one mile loop trail there and see all of the area on which the most furious part of the fighting occurred. One can stand in the sunken road, which is overall barely longer than the 1000 foot length of the Enterprise, and look down the slope onto the several acres where the Union Army, insanely trying to advance against a perfect defensive position, lost something like 10,000 men in a day, most of them killed within an area smaller than the four and a half acre flight deck of the Enterprise.

Artillery played an important role in the battle of Fredericksburg because of how perfect the defensive ground was for the Confederates. The Confederate artillery officer in charge of the nine guns on Marye's Heights right behind the sunken road assured Robert E. Lee before the battle that, "a chicken could not live on that field." He was a being a bit boastful about his artillery, but only a bit. His artillery, firing like giant shotguns at point blank range; but most of the killing was actually done by the several thousand Confederate troops lined up shoulder to shoulder a couple of ranks deep in the sunken road who fired something like 100 rounds each over the course of the day into the dense packed Union troops that kept madly trying to advance uphill over the open ground.

The deep irony is that those Union troops were never intended to attack up toward Marye's Heights. Burnside, the General commanding on the Union Side, only intended them to advance toward the heights as a diversion to pin down some of Lee's troops while others of his troops attacked a more vulnerable point on another part of the battlefield. The attack on Marye's Heights was all a big misunderstanding.

Just like the War to End All Wars, which was expected by all parties to be over in a few months when it started in 1914.

Update: Naturally I wrote the above and thought about it being Veterans Day; and then I proceeded to go to the post office to send some mail, and I was surprised to find the windows closed. All other government offices are also no doubt closed, and the banks, I guess. Banks, of course, have been so heavily regulated by government since the 1930's that they were probably all but ordered to close for Veterans Day.

Veterans Day is just another day for most of us, even us Veterans. But the fact that holidays are becoming meaningless, including a rant about one of my favorite pet peeves, is a post for another day.

Update 2: Here's a short clip of actual World War I combat footage that I got at the Optimistic Conservative Blog, which is always interesting even though she writes much of her best stuff for Commentary Magazine's site and she's apparently not allowed to also post that stuff on her own site. Opticon has an excellent post about Veterans Day, and she quoted In Flanders Fields, which I was thinking about when I wrote the post above.

Hopefully you're not suffering from torschlusspanik

2010-11-05T09:24:00.005-04:00

I deliberated about whether to share this word I just found, because it seems to me that I've very rarely suffered from torschlusspanik; but I'm mildly suffering from it now that I've found the word and reflected a bit on its meaning.

I recall telling Alex, on the beach in North Carolina when he was about thirteen or fourteen years old, that he should glory in the day because, "It doesn't get any better than this."

The sad fact is that's the the plain truth, at nearly any time and at almost all times.

But enough of brooding. Clearly it's time to perk up my spirits by watching and listening to this.

Update: I wonder if there is a name for the class of words, each of which, by the very fact of learning and reflecting on its meaning, is a bummer.

A great video

2010-11-04T19:49:00.002-04:00

The next time you hear some idiot commentator or politician talk about the decline of civility in politics remember this video which shows you how viciouslyThomas Jefferson and John Adams attacked one another back when politicians were more polite.

Cuckoo for Cocoa Beach

2010-11-04T12:55:00.006-04:00

We've been back for four days now, huddling by the wood stove, staring out at the nearly bare Sugar Maple, Boxwood and Persimmons, and watching the leaves fall, fall, fall, from the Red Maples.

Last week we travelled down to spend a couple of days at the Luna Sea Motel in Cocoa Beach, where we walked on the clean, pleasant beach in high 80's temperatures and waded a bit in the mid 70's water. While we were there we visited The Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral for a pleasant and interesting few hours, seeing the technological marvels our country is capable of creating when it isn't wallowing in hyperlegalism and self doubt. The Saturn Five Moon rocket, lying on it's side, now enclosed in a vast museum a couple of hundred yards long with a fifty or sixty foot high ceiling, is impossible to adequately describe. A thirty six story skyscraper that once lifted itself off the ground and flew, it's payload eventually reaching a speed of 25,000 miles per hour. You have to see it.

You can no longer go up close and walk around the giant crawler tractor that transports the assembled rockets, or the vast vehicle assembly building, as I could when I was visited there many years ago, before the 9/11 attack that so changed the nature of security at any sort of government installation. But the crawler is still amazing from a distance as pick up trucks parked near it provide some sense of scale. The vehicle assembly building, seen from a half mile or so away, is not nearly as impressive, even if you realize that the medium sized flag painted way up there on it's side is bigger than a pro basketball court. Besides the bus and walking tours the center also has a very good 3D IMAX movie about the Hubble Telescope. There are some awesome 3D scenes of the astronauts spacewalking to repair the telescope in orbit.

Cocoa Beach itself is a relatively undistinguished beachfront town, although you have to grant that they have it landscaped and planted pretty nicely. They also have it very clean and pleasant despite the empty storefronts in relatively new looking shopping centers that show it was no stranger to the huge overbuilding of commercial space in some parts of the country. I suspect there are also a lot of empty condos available there for attractive prices; but as I mentioned they are clearly going to a lot of trouble to keep the town desirable looking.

Linda was especially taken with the big surfer statues in front of Ron Jon Surf Shop which is quite an eye catching store. And we both liked the very good food at Rubio's Cuban restaurant, a little place, and at the Florida Seafood House, a much bigger place. Cocoa Beach is well worth a visit for the sun, surf and endless beach. The prices were also very nice although that may have been a function of it being the off season.

After Cocoa Beach we headed over to The Villages for a four night stay with Jas and Kathy in their new house in the kingdom of pickle ball, pinochle, pools golf carts, dancing and crossword puzzles. More on that next time.

In other news: The other day all of President Barack Obama's many enemies, for that's how he very clearly characterized everyone who doesn't agree with him last week, got together and delivered termination notices to a whole bunch of his political cronies. Taking back the House of Representatives from the lefties and achieving a better balance in the Senate are, of course, only the first necessary steps; but it is good to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Now we must keep the feet of all the newly elected Republicans to the fire to ensure that they don't get the Washington disease that spreads so easily to newly elected members of the political class.

Counting presidents

2010-10-22T22:10:00.004-04:00

Today I went down to Blue Bell to attend a rally in support of Pat Toomey who's running for a U.S. Senate seat. Toomey's running against Joe Sestak, who has gained some distinction by managing to advocate positions that are actually to the left of those espoused by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Sestak has been a disaster as a member of the House of Representatives, and he would be a worse disaster as a member of the Senate.

Pat Toomey, of course, spoke at the event, as did Rudy Giuliani who was here to endorse him and campaign for him. They're both very impressive public speakers, as you would imagine. At that level of politics there is seldom room for a candidate who can't give an excellent speech in person to a medium or large crowd. And there is absolutely no room for someone who can't impress a small crowd, impress them a lot.

I've only attended one other political rally in my life, and I went to that one as, ahem, a gentleman of the press rather than as a partisan. It happened that in 1992 I was writing an article and an opinion column each week for The Collegeville Independent and the newspaper got me a press pass to a campaign speech given by President George H.W. Bush at the Uniform Tube factory in Collegeville. Jimmy Stewart, the editor of the Collegeville Independent and I were in the front row of the press section for that speech along with reporters from other local papers. Reporters from the national press were in the second and third rows. Someday I'll find a copy of the rather quirky article I wrote about the event and transcribe it here. Suffice it to say that George H.W. Bush gave a great speech that day. He was not as good a public speaker as President Clinton who beat him in that election; but he gave the most impressive speech I've ever seen in person, and I've seen a lot of corporate speakers.

But that's not what I want to write about today. Today I want to mention that George H.W. Bush (the first President Bush) is the only president I've ever seen in the flesh. I've watched a lot of political speechers on TV; but, as I mentioned, I've never been a big one for going to political events.

The other night during our walk I learned that Linda has also only seen one president in person. In her case it was President Richard Nixon, who gave a brief speech in Hawaii when Admiral John S. McCain Jr. (Senator John McCain's father) retired from the navy in 1972.

All of this got me to wondering who I might know who has seen a lot of presidents; and that led me to call my uncle Bert DeAngelis a few hours ago. I knew that Uncle Bert had been involved in local politics, as a Republican Committeeman, for many years; so I suspected he had seen a few presidents in person and I was not disappointed. It turns out he's been a Republican Committeman for 51 years, so he's naturally attended a lot of political events. But even before he became a committeeman he was attending political events.

He saw President Harry Truman when Truman came to Bridgeport to give a speech. Bert said Truman was presented with a bolt of cloth from a local factory that was to be used in making him a new suit. And he saw President John F. Kennedy when Kennedy came to Norristown to give a speech while he was campaigning for the presidency against Richard Nixon in 1960. Nixon gave a speech in Norristown on the same day; but Uncle Bert went to the Kennedy speech, so he never saw Nixon. Incidently, Uncle Bert mentioned that he voted for Adlai Stevenson when he ran against Dwight Eisenhower, and he voted for Kennedy. So, like Ronald Reagan, Uncle Bert was a liberal in his youth, before he became older and wiser.

But liberal and conservative are relative, of course. Today Truman, Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson would not be welcome in the Democratic Party. Going further than that, those three men could not have imagined how far left the Democratic Party would move and has moved in the past forty years.

But back to Uncle Bert. In addition to Presidents Truman and Kennedy, he also has seen Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. So in the course of his life he's seen five presidents in the flesh.

Leave a comment if you have ever seen a president in person. It doesn't have to be while they were president.

Fried green tomatoes

2010-10-20T11:43:00.003-04:00

A couple of years ago in Florida, while walking through the Market at Marion with Jas and Al, I bought a serving of boiled peanuts from one of the vendors. I quickly learned that folks who eat those things willingly must have acquired a taste for them during very hardscrabble childhoods. I threw away most of the little bag of them. They have no flavor and an unpleasant mushy consistency.

Yesterday I learned that fried green tomatoes have the opposite problem, at least when fried with only a simple corn meal coating. They're too tangy and taste almost like a pickle. Linda and I finished the six slices I fried; but I think the corn meal coating recipe is one for the failed file. Perhaps I'll try making them with a regular flour egg and bread crumb coating before my supply of green tomatoes runs out.

In other news, there was a raccoon on our patio last night after Linda went to bed. This is news because I've only seen raccoons four or five times in the 25 or so years we've lived in this house. They must be remarkably reclusive beasts. We've seen foxes much more often.

In yet other news, the sugar maple tree is now at the very height of its color. It's lost more leaves than usual for this early in the fall, perhaps because of the drought we had earlier; but it surely is still a magnificent looking tree.

Into the tunnel

2010-10-15T09:24:00.005-04:00

It's getting cold around here. Yesterday, for the first time, I lit the woodstove during the day when it became clear that the sun would not emerge to warm up the house. And we're now down to a pitifully small selection of remaining ripe tomatoes from the garden. Later today I think I'll go down and gather the reasonable sized green ones. I expect we'll be getting our first frost any day now. There's also a picking of Swiss Chard down there.

I'm happy to report that the good guys appear to have triumphed once and for all over the naysayers at Wikipedia. The entry for Xenopus now correctly states that African Clawed Frogs can live into their twenties. There was a period a few years ago when I went back and forth several times with a denier at the site who refused to let my editing of that page stand. In the course of checking on the matter recently I found that at least two others have reported on their own long lived Xenopuses (Xenopi?) on the web.

Assuming those web sites are to be believed, William the Frog lived to be 21 years old and the unnamed frog at Downend School lived to 30 years old before dying in 2001. My Xenopus is now about 23 or 24 years old so he (or she - I remain too lazy to check on the matter) may now be the oldest in the world. At the least my frog appears to be the oldest one in the world that is memorialized on the web.

For the record he's still quite spry and active over there in his bowl, still quite capable of moving the rocks around and splashing noisily to get attention when he hasn't been fed for a while. And he's still possessed of plenty of energy and will to present a problem when it's time to put him back into the bowl after I change his water. One of these days I need to give him the run of the house again to see how high and far he can jump.

On to other business. I've been rereading Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels over the past few weeks. And the other day I came across his assertion that Admiral William Mitchell of the Royal Navy had not only started his career as an enlisted man but had moreover managed to rise in rank after having been flogged around the fleet for desertion. According to the words O'Brian puts into the mouth of Captain Aubrey, Mitchell was an impressed man at the beginning of his career and he deserted his ship multiple times in order to continue a liaison with a young lady ashore. After having been several times been recaptured and punished with moderate floggings by his captain he decided to go the sea lawyer route and demand, as was his right, a court martial. Big mistake! The court martial board turned out to be a bloody minded one that decided to make an example of him in order to deter others. He was sentenced to receive five hundred lashes in a boat that was rowed from ship to ship so the sailors of the whole fleet could view his punishment.

The Wikipedia entry confirms that Vice Admiral Mitchell originally joined the Royal Navy as an able seaman; but it casts doubt on the flogging around the fleet story, saying that no official records exist of that event and that it's only provenance is a story told several years after his death. It remains potentially true however, because according to Wiki a whole chunk of Royal Navy records covering the early years of Mitchell's career are missing.

This interested me because when I served in USS Enterprise from 1970 to 1972 my boss was Lieutenant Commander Jack Henrizi, who said he was (at that time) the most senior unrestricted line officer in the navy who had started his career as an enlisted man. As I recall Commander Henrizi was careful to mention that he had worked his way up to Chief Petty Officer before becoming a commissioned officer; so it may be that there was a more senior grade officer who had started as seaman and then had immediately (more or less) been recommended for Officer Candidate School on the basis of test scores or such.

Jack Henrizi was nn interesting man with quite an extensive and colorful vocabulary. I vivedly remember the chewing out he gave me and the Fourth Division officer after the party pavilion at Subic Bay Naval Base somehow came to be burned to the ground during a joint party we had convinced him to let us hold for the nearly one hundred men of our two deck divisions, much against his better judgement. That was some party. And Commander Henrizi was some stand up guy. He took the whole brunt of reporting the incident to Captain Peterson, who never mentioned the matter to me or Mike Murphy even though he saw us every day on the bridge when we stood OOD watches.

Shortly after he retired from the navy in about 1974 or so Commander Henrizi was killed by a drunk driver who lost control of his car and came across the center lane of an expressway in California.

Update: I'm not the only one in the world with too much time on his hands. Behold - sheep fireworks - The nighttime sheep game of pong is neat, but you have to watch to the end to see the fireworks.

Signs and portents

2010-09-21T22:13:00.005-04:00

I haven't been paying attention to the astronomy websites recently so it took Alex's mentioning it for me to realize that Jupiter is not only very bright in the sky right now but it's actually brighter than it has been since 1968. Checking a couple of astronomy websites just now I found that Jupiter will reach opposition tonight (September 21st) at midnight. "Opposition" is when an outer planet is closest to Earth. Jupiter comes into opposition with Earth about every 13 months (as Earth catches up with Jupiter since it goes around the Sun much quicker). This is an especially close opposition because Jupiter is just now getting toward the closest it ever comes to the Sun in it's oval orbit.

So, if you want to see Jupiter shining brighter than you will see it for a very long time, go out after 9:00 PM or so and look in the Southeastern sky anytime over the next few weeks. Because Jupiter is so far away it's brightness won't change very fast as it moves away from it's closest approach.

Keep this in perspective. Jupiter will seem to be a very bright star (brighter than anything else that's ever in the sky except the Sun, the Moon and Venus); but it will not be anywhere near as bright as the Moon. As an added treat, tomorrow (September 22nd) the full moon will be very close to Jupiter in the sky, and, as an added treat Uranus (I just learned at space.com) will be even closer to Jupiter than the Moon will be (just above it in the sky). If you have a good pair of binoculars this is one of the (very few) easy times to find Uranus since it's so close to Jupiter in the sky.

Enough of astronomy stuff. I have a lot of other stuff to write about our trip up to the Peoples Republic of Massachusetts this past weekend; but I'm typing this on our old home computer because my laptop is acting up and I'm not very patient when writing at this computer, so I'll just present the highlights:

We spent a good bit of time with Alex and Christina, of course. And we met an Indian fellow who is now an Australian. The Indian fellow wore a bad wig; but he was interesting because he's at Harvard right now finishing up his second Ph. D. in International Relations, specializing in the Law of War. I found it surprising that he seemed to be so lacking in technical knowledge about nuclear weapons technology even though nuclear proliferation is a big deal in International Relations, perhaps the biggest deal of all in the long run.

At church on Sunday with Alex and Christina we met a soon to be Harvard Professor of BioPhysics and his wife. If we hadn't talked to them I would have guessed them both to be high school students of perhaps college freshmen. Increasingly everybody under about forty looks like a child to me. They were really nice folks.

We stayed at a nice bed and breakfast place in Cambridge called the Bed and Muffin. Go figure, the place laid out a workable continental style breakfast; but surprisingly there were no muffins. It should perhaps more accurately be named the Bed and No Muffin.

If Seinfeld was still doing his show he could make a nice half hour comedy about that, and the Australian Indian fellow with the bad wig, and the stereotypical New England Liberal woman who was at the no muffin breakfast when we met him. To help us understand where in the world he was from he mentioned that we might have heard of Crocodile Dundee. She in her turn (or perhaps it was her husband) mentioned Rupert Murdoch after breathlessly relating that she thinks Sarah Palin may be becoming less popular with all but the Fox News set. I thought about mentioning that Linda and I watch Bill O'Reilly fairly regularly; but I didn't want to court the risk of having the woman drop dead of apoplexy.

After taking leave of Alex and Christina on Sunday afternoon we drove to western Massachusetts where we had a very nice walk around Stockbridge which is a very picturesque town that happens to have the tallest wood framed church steeple in New England, or so it claims. It was a pretty tall steeple, if a bit warped, on top of a very large United Church of Christ built in the 1880's. The church, all made of wood, badly needs scraping and painting. I'll bet that's going to be a very expensive job.

After staying at a Super 8 motel in Stockbridge, which did have muffins as part of it's continental breakfast, we headed off to tour Naum Keag, a large summer cottage built by a lawyer named Choate who led the successful fight against the first attempt to implement an Income Tax in the 1911 or so. According to the tour guide this Choate correctly predicted that the original Income Tax would be ruled unconstitutional and that a constitutional amendment would be necessary to implement an income tax. That amendment, the 19th was eventually passed and ratified in 1919 (I think). A valuable man. If it hadn't been for Choate and his holding back of the "progressive" tide, the country might well be ten more years advanced toward a state of utter perdition.

Choate built a modest little 49 room summer cottage with his law earnings. After he died his daughter spent the next forty or so years spending her inheritance on very nice gardens around it. An interesting place, sort of a time capsule of upper upper middle class life in the Gilded Age when the glitterati summered in the Berkshires to get away from the heat of the cities.

According to the tour guide, Choate's oldest son died of apoplexy when he was in his late teens. He was home from college for the summer and mentioned one evening at dinner that he had a headache. Fifteen minutes later he was dead. Choate's second son attended a couple of years of college and then went off his rocker and ended up institutionalized for the rest of his life. His oldest daughter died of some sort of intestinal problem in her late 20's.

Linda wonders if the maiden daughter, the tour guide called her Miss Mabel, poisoned her three older siblings to get the house. If so Miss Mabel missed on the youngest son, who lived to go on and have a law career himself, according to the tour guide. Maybe Miss Mabel could never get him to try her muffins.

Heading into the tunnel

2010-09-16T08:35:00.004-04:00

I'm trying to understand why the upstairs thermometer is reading 70.3 and the downstairs thermostat is reading 71. That seems a curious situation. Perhaps the heat given off by the refrigerator is slightly raising the downstairs temperature. Or it may be that the upstairs radiated away more heat overnight while it was serving to insulate the downstairs.

I'm thinking on this subject because we're clearly approaching the turnover point where we have to turn on the heat and/or begin running the woodstove. We usually resist that until the night-time fall in temperature gets the house down into the low 60's. At this time of year a battle is going on. The sun is now travelling low enough in the sky to shine half way into the dining living rooms under the overhangs, which raises the daytime temperature into the high 70's on a calm day. Later, as the sun travels still lower, it will be capable of raising the temperatures into the 80's during the day; but the steady drop of outside night-time temperatures results in more and more heat radiated away.

Yesterday I had a semi-competent seeming chimney sweep here to check and clean out the flue. I also had him install a new stainless steel chimney cap to replace the one that blew off twice during it's twenty or so years of service. The screw clamps that are designed to secure the new cap onto the top of the chimney don't look very robust to me; but he assured me that he'll replace the cap if it blows off and he wrote that as a guarantee on his very reasonable bill.

Meanwhile, the squirrels are plentiful and very busy, carrying black walnuts thither and yon to bury them. Yesterday one of those squirrels left a chewed acorn on the patio bench, which was somewhat of a surprise. The nearby trees include black oaks, pin oaks and one solitary post oak none of which produced many acorns this year. That acorn may have been one of the last of his hoarded stock from last year's banner crop, or he may have gotten it from the woods across the creek where there is an overcup oak. That latter shouldn't be the case since I understand that all oak species talk to one another with chemical signals and come to an agreement on whether to produce acorns in any given year. I need to go across the creek and see if any of the oaks over there have produced acorns.

Those squirrels had better be careful out there. This year I've seen more middle sized hawks near the house than ever before. A few weeks ago two juvenile Cooper's Hawks (I think), were working together clumsily to try to catch a squirrel that had hidden under the back door landing. They failed in that case, and at one point the squirrel even turned the tables and ran out to startle one of them and drive it off; but I bet those two have learned a thing or two about squirrel hunting in the past few weeks. And, if there are juvenile Cooper's Hawks about, their parents must also be around.

In other news, I cleaned out the frog's bowl last week and found him surprisingly frisky and agile for a 24 or 25 year old. It was downright difficult to collect him from the sink and get him back into the bowl after I scrubbed off his rocks and changed the water. I was tempted to give him the run of the house for a couple of hours to see if he can still broad jump as far as he used to; but I resisted the temptation. There are too many ways he can cause trouble by hiding under furniture and such.

How does he stay in shape living in that little bowl? Is he doing isometric exercises while he appears to be placidly hanging out under his rocks? He occasionally gets into a mood and moves the rocks around quite vigorously but not often enough to qualify as an exercise program.

Moving on to consider news of the wider world, I read that the stork has delivered 43 new baby Komodo Dragons to the Los Angeles Zoo. Cute little 6 inch long tykes they are; but the one being held by the zoo curator has much longer claws than my frog, and, of course, he has teeth which the frog thankfully lacks.

The zoo news set me to wondering how many reptile afficionados across the country have managed to import baby Komodo Dragons as pets. And how many of them are going to turn those cute little babies loose in a few years after they've grown into not so cute five or six foot long drooling beasties.

A couple of months ago Linda and I watched a Discovery Channel show that claimed there are now estimated to be a hundred thousand or more Burmese Pythons in Florida some of them growing quite large. I imagine a big enough python will eat a Komodo Dragon if given the chance; and I'm sure that works the other way around as well. Both of them, I'm sure, will quite happily eat a jogger; but I doubt that a python could catch one of those, unless it got very lucky.

Ah, the great circle of life.

Where were all these chipmunks when we were growing up?

2010-06-03T08:48:00.003-04:00

Linda suggested that the chipmunks are especially plentiful this year because last year the oaks produced a bumper crop of acorns. Whatever the reason the little guys are seemingly everywhere. Each wood pile has one, there's one under the front steps, and there's one using each downspout as a runway to the roof. Yet I don't remember ever seeing a chipmunk as a kid.

Surely Jippon would have quickly dispatched any that came within reach; but Jippon was almost always tied up to his wire run in the back yard. Why weren't there any at the front of the house where he couldn't get at them?

Meanwhile the flock of geese is finally getting around to harvesting the seed heads of the tall grass down toward the sugar maple. It looks like there are three adults and about ten youngsters. We haven't seen geese all that much this year. Their nests must have been carefully hidden away from the pond.

Man caused disasters

2010-05-12T09:19:00.003-04:00

Like most politicians, the ones in Greece have been spending like drunken sailors for decades. And besides stealing or spending every penny of current taxes they collect, the Greek politicians have been buying votes with promises of future pensions and benefits that everybody knew were way beyond reasonable and affordable.

So a couple of weeks ago the world woke up and suddenly nobody with any sense wanted to loan the Greek government more money by buying its bonds. But that doesn't mean the drunken party is quite over in Greece. For this week American and German and French and British politicians decided to fund one last burst of Ouzo soaked revelry for the Greeks.

I can almost understand why the Kraut and Frog and Limey politicians have decided to send almost a trillion dollars to the Greek politicians. For one thing they were stupid enough to give the Greek politicians a sort of license to print Euros or at least issue bonds denominated in Euros. And, for those of you who don't know, Euros are the new fangled paper money that all the Europeans use, so if the Greek bonds go bust all the Euro denominated bonds may go bust. For another thing, the Greeks are now part of the European Union, so if the Greek government stops paying welfare to all the lazy and deadbeat Greeks those Greeks can just move to France or Germany or England and sign up for welfare there.

This has, of course, raised some difficult questions for politicians all over Europe. The Germans, for instance, are asking their politicians why they have to work and pay taxes until they are in their late 60's before they can retire while their politicians are sending money to Greece, where even the people who actually do work are allowed to retire and start collecting pensions at 55 years old.

But enough about the Krauts and Frogs and Limeys. The truth is that I really don't give a darn about how they spend their money. If they want to send money to Greece that's their business.

What I want to know is why our politicians have also decided to send money to bail out the Greeks when their problems are completely the result of their own foolishness. Don't get me wrong here. I have nothing against Greeks. I've liked all the Greeks that I've ever met and I was going to Greek restaurants in Chicago well before John Belushi made Greeks cool.

The Greeks have a beautiful country over there and, unlike the Krauts and the Limeys, they know how to cook. But it makes no sense for politicians to send my tax dollars to Greeks who get to live the easy life in world renowned vacation spots like Santorini and Rhodes and Mykonos and Corfu while I have to slave like a dog in cold and rainy Pennsylvania.

Novertheless President Barack Obama, and Senators Nancy Pelosi and Chris Dodd, and Representative Barney Frank and their pals have decided to send $50 Billion of my money and your money to Greece so the scam over there can continue for a little while longer. For, make no mistake, the Greek welfare state model of paying people for not working is not sustainable. Socialism appears to work fine until you run out of other people's money. And it's not just Greece that's running on debt. Italy and Spain are not far behind. We'll be hearing from them for bailouts within a couple of years. And France, Germany, the U.K. and we ourselves are not a whole lot of years behind them. Ponzi schemes eventually end.

But lets talk about Greece for the monent. I just checked and learned that there are about 11 million Greeks who are still in Greece. So, by my calculations, our corrupt politicians just sent almost $500 per Greek to their corrupt politicians so they can do what's necessary to quiet down the folks in the streets of Athens and such. With cheap Ouzo selling for about $10 bucks a quart that means you, the American taxpayer, are buying each Greek 50 quarts of booze which should keep the streets of Athens pretty well anesthetized for at least a couple of months. With the addition of the German and French and British money the Greeks will probably remain quiet for a few years.

The deluge has been put off for now.

It's windy out there

2010-05-08T16:31:00.004-04:00

Linda is in the kitchen making chicken stir fry as low fat penance for eating a Bridie and a Scotch Egg at the Phoenixville Irish festival. The Bridie was ground meat filling inside puff pastry, the whole thing about as long and fat as an eight inch roll. The Scotch Egg was some sort of sausage meat molded around half a hard boiled egg and then breaded and deep fried. Linda let me take a little bite of each. The Bridie I would call pretty decent; but the Scotch Egg probably explains why most Scots emigrated when they could.

I ate Fish and Chips and then about half of a Funnel Cake for dessert. While we were eating we ran into a British woman and her husband who were also getting Fish and Chips. The woman looked like the Queen Mother when she was about eighty or so. She said she has been in the U.S. for several years. A nice lady; but like most Brits she talked funny.

The Irish festival was interesting; but I'm not sure Phoenixville drew the crowd it was hoping for, perhaps because it was partly cloudy and surprisingly windy. The wind was probably gusting up toward forty miles per hour. And it still is gusting very strongly. I just got back from walking the paths over on the other side of the creek with my pole clipper. There were many small branches broken off the trees, and a few big ones. Oddly enough the biggest broken off branch is from a Red Maple while there are no branches broken off the Silver Maples. And it's the Silver Maple that is supposed to be the fragile one. Go figure. It's one of those mysteries; like the fact that Scots wrap their eggs in sausage meat and play bagpipes while Brits talk funny and look like the Queen Mother.

Not that I'm down on bagpipes. They had a bagpipe band down in Phoenixville that wasn't half bad; although I wondered if the bagpipers were a little chilly under their kilts, what with the wind. And I wondered why there were Scottish bagpipers and a Scottish food vendor at an Irish festival. You would have thought there would be an Irish food vendor; but maybe the Irish in Ireland did something even more questionable with their eggs, assuming they had eggs to go with their potatoes. Irish Stew and Corned Beef and Cabbage are pretty much the only Irish food items I can think of except for those those cinnamon dusted Irish Potato things that they sell around Saint Patty's Day. But come to think of it I've only ever bought those Irish Potato things at the Jewish Deli up in Fort Washington, so maybe they aren't even Irish.

While we were walking around the Irish festival we ran into Rich, who regularly dances with a woman named Monica up at the Ballroom on High in Pottstown. He was there specifically to catch the performance of Charlie Zahm, whom Linda and I once heard at one of the The Joyful Noise performances that used to be held at a couple of the local churches. We learned that Rich and Monica travel all the way from the Fort Washington area to Pottstown to go to the ballroom.

Very interesting, especially when coupled with the fact that we ran into Bob and Grace at the Norristown Arts Festival the other week and learned that Bob travels all the way from Norristown by bus to go to the ballroom. Given the relatively small number of regulars we've gotten to know at the ballroom our recent proclivity to bump into them at festivals is surprising. We've met an average of one and a half ballroom people and one Brit at each festival so far this year. Curious.

Talking about statistics, I've been keeping track of how much meld partners supply during each hand at our weekly pinochle games. We've always repeated as a rule of thumb that you should count on your partner for two meld when deciding whether and how much to bid. I want to see whether that rule bears out in practice.

The case of the mysterious Rubbermaid

2010-05-04T21:13:00.003-04:00

Since Easter we've had a nine cup Rubbermaid food container hanging around the house. Someone left it here; and we've been surprised no one's said anything because it's clearly a top of the line sort of model. Unfortunately it doesn't fit in well with our motley collection of such stuff, so I can't just put it in the mix.

So there it sits, on top of the refrigerator, waiting for Linda to puzzle out who its owner is. She suspects that Alex is somehow involved in getting it to our house; but she's not sure whether it came from Boston or whether Alex and Christina were given some food in it which they brought back to our house from Easter dinner at John A's house.

Meanwhile, I'm now more than one third of the way through my twelve step smoking cessation program. Since May first I've been having only eight cigarettes per day. Contrary to Jas's cynical comment on the phone a month or so ago I haven't cheated on the program even once since New Year's Day.

Giants walked the earth in those days

2010-04-29T11:43:00.005-04:00

I'm thinking about work. Specifically I'm thinking how lucky I was that I didn't end up crippled from trying to handle the 100 pound sacks of potatoes that Harry set me to unloading when I first started working for him at about 12 years old. Those potato sacks were stacked about head high to me. Fortunately there were only two ranks of them at the front of the truck, stacked bricks and mortar fashion. Some potatoes got bruised after I learned that there was no way I could handle those sacks on my shoulder the way I had seen Harry do. I tried the best I could to slow the descent of the higher stacked bags and ended up slowly dragging each to the end of the truck where I was again presented with a rank on bags almost head high once I climbed down. It took me several hours to unload probably thirty bags of potatoes.

Now that I'm thinking about this I'm realizing that I can't ever remember encountering hundred pound sacks of potatoes again. It just may be that Harry was getting old enough by then to doubt his ability to handle them. And it may be that he was paying attention to how I was unloading them; although I don't remember him checking on me. I've always thought I could easily have been dead under one of those sacks for most of a day before being discovered.

This came to mind again today, for I was thinking about it the other day in another context, because I'm listening to a Larry McMurtry book about Buffalo Bill Cody and Annie Oakley. McMurtry is skeptical about a lot of Buffalo Bill's yarns, such as his claim that he killed an Indian at eleven years old while defending himself during a raid on a cattle drive he was working; but he seems pretty certain that the man was telling the simple truth about starting work at eleven years old. And McMurty mentions that his father and his several uncles were all handling more or less full responsibility for work on his grandfather's ranch by eleven years old in the early 1900's.

One of the things Buffalo Bill certainly did at eleven years old, according to McMurtry, was to singlehandedly take a small herd of twenty or so cattle to an army outpost thirty five miles away from Leavenworth Kansas, presumably after he had proven himself reliable at delivering messages on mule back within several miles of town. And that was at a time, the 1860's, when there were still at least some untamed Indians still to be found in Kansas, if only in the form of occasional raiding parties from wilder regions west of there. I've been trying to put myself into the mind of an eleven year old responsible for those cattle during what had to be at least one overnight, knowing that there might well be Indians about, even if that was unlikely.

Giants walked the earth in former days.

The other day I was reviewing the various sorts of work I've done over the course of my life in the context of finishing up a stint at one of the more boring sorts of work I've ever endured. And I promised myself I would make a list, so here goes.

-Unloaded 100 pound sacks of potatoes from a truck, possibly the most dangerous job I've ever done if you discount jobs that have involved driving.
-Waited on customers at the fruit and produce market.
-Sorted endless tomatoes into greens, pinks and ripes, and resorted them again and again and again, after unloading a tractor trailer load of boxes of them. I still remember the ugh factor of encountering a rotten one, seemingly always by surprise. This may have been one of the more useful early jobs I ever did. You have to learn to achieve a sort of out of body zen state to mentally survive sorting tomatoes for 12 hours.
-Unloaded most of a tractor trailer load of watermelons over the course of two days between waiting on customers at the market. I did that before reading Chairman Mao's phrase, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
-Helped more or less at a paper mill on the night shift, when I wasn't napping in the bin of paper scraps because the regular workers didn't consider me much help. I took away and still retain amazement at the the balletic artistry the lead guy exhibited as he threaded the first run of pulp through the big machine's almost quarter mile long run of rollers. I also remember the size of the cockroaches down in the level under the machine, where mushy paper pulp was almost a foot deep, and where I had to go once because I dropped a tool down there.
-Machined endless strangely shaped fiberglass wheels with brass bushings whose purpose I still can't imagine. One of my jobs was to help the foreman muscle a 55 gallon drum of brass shavings into his pickup truck every few days. Evidently he could hide taking the brass; but he couldn't hide using one of the union guys to help him load them after the shift end.
-Did public opinion polling of Job Corps dropouts in the projects in Chicago. It was hard for that company to find literate people willing to put on a jacket and tie and walk into the projects to question Job Corps dropouts so the job paid what I thought was a pretty good hourly rate; but I didn't know the half of it at the beginning. It turned out that achieving two completed interviews was considered reasonable quota for a 40 hour week. My supervisor berated me for turning in five interviews with my 40 hour time sheet that first week, and she had me correct the error by filling out a second time sheet under a variant of my name. I never made that mistake again and I became much more efficient at getting interviews as I learned the ropes. That job ended up paying an effective hourly rate that was astronomical. But it did have associated expences. After the first week I paid a fraternity brother to drive me and keep the car running so he could help with a fast getaway if necessary or at least report my disappearance to the police. But I never had so much as a really scary encounter during the course of doing a hundred or so of those interviews.
-Counted shoppers emerging from a supermarket and noted how many bags of groceries they had. For quality control purposes I was part of a two man team with a fraternity brother. We customarily started the day with a gallon of wine in my car facing the entrance to a supermarket and we ended the day recording very suspect numbers; but the market research company loved our work. Put not your faith in data unless you gather it yourself.
-Chauffered for a very wealthy family. I learned about pecking orders since I was at the very bottom of the chauffer one since I drove a Chevy station wagon. The black guy at the top of that pecking order was responsible for one of those 1920's cars with the separate compartment for the chauffer, something out of a movie. Plus he had an actual uniform and hat. I say he was responsible for the car because he never actually seemed to drive it. He only dusted it with a soft cloth. His Mrs. Gotrocks employer never went out.

Well, that's enough for now. I haven't even gotten to the Navy yet. I'll think on this jobs business again.

The chicks are in the mail

2010-04-27T16:01:00.002-04:00

I went to the post office this morning to mail off Stephen King's novel The Stand to an eager Amazon book buyer and learned that you can send live chicks via overnight mail. The guy in front of me in line received a box of them. Who woulda thunk it? I didn't actually ask if other kinds of livestock can be mailed; but I suspect this means that if someone should be of a mind to send a bunny rabbit to Hatfield Packing, for instance, they can simply box it up and ship it overnight via the post office.

But enough of livestock. I have to report on the current state of Norristown, which Linda and I visited on Saturday when they were holding a street fair to celebrate their designation of Dekalb Street as an Arts Avenue. While there we had a pretty decent lunch in a little Mexican restaurant at the corner of Airy and Dekalb. And we watched a performance of the Ballet Foklorico De Mexico in a big tent they had set up next to the county jail. And we took the opportunity to check out the old Lutheran Church that's between Airy and Main to see what the Copts have been doing with it. We also stopped in to see Saint Patricio's Church to check whether there have been any more changes since we were there a few years ago for an Irish corned beef.

Norristown when I was growing up seemed to be mostly Italians and Irish and Blacks, but there must have been some Germans skulking around since they had a Lutheran Church. Now the town seems to be mostly Blacks and Mexicans and, surprisingly, Coptic Egyptians; but there is still a marker from the Italian past on Dekalb Street. Al R told me to check for it, and sure enough it's still there, although perhaps it's not as old as he thinks.

LaRoma Pizzeria is still at Marshall and Dekalb; but it's menu says that it's only been the "Home of Fresh Dough Pizza since 1960." In 1960 Al would have been 14 years old.

While we were down in Norristown we ran into Bob and Grace from the ballroom, of all people. It turns out that Bob lives on Buttonwood Street and he's been mostly getting to the Ballroom on High in Pottstown by bus. Small world that it is Bob's son came to meet up while we were talking to him and Grace and we learned that Bob's son recently started in Sam's department at Mascaro.

I was going to write about the slaughter of the innocents; but I've got to run now. I Need to make a salad to go with the pork enchiladas and corn bread that I'm making for dinner. Maybe tomorrow I'll write about the slaughter of the innocents.

Aargh! She's over there messing with the soup

2010-04-26T13:15:00.004-04:00

Linda is working at home today, so things are pretty tense around here. Earlier she somehow found time to come down from the computer room to kibbitz while I was measuring the water and now she's over there gratuitously stirring the soup, which I just stirred. If I don't stay nearby she will surely return and again try to ruin the delicate balance of flavors by skimming off the tiny bit of oil that has leached out of the pepperoni. As it is, despite my grouching she insisted on changing the burner setting.

This wouldn't be important except that my split pea soup is worthy of world renown due to the decades of patient experimentation I've put into its development. The only reason it isn't better known is that I've never considered the world worthy of the recipe, so I've followed the advice in the Sermon on the Mount.

Pulling through

2010-04-25T10:52:00.003-04:00

The other night Linda and I got a surprise at Sam and Deb's when they described how funny a comedian at their golf club was. What got our attention was that Sam and Deb had never heard of a pullthrough parking spot. That surprised us because we've been joking between ourselves about the luxury of finding a pullthrough spot for years.

So I put a question on facebook to see what others thought of when presented with the idea of finding a "pullthrough." Don A thought of a pullthrough at a bank or a fast food place. Sandy H thought of a place to turn around. Marianne mentioned specific pullthrough spots for big things like RVs and trucks.

After seeing that I did a google search and found that there is a facebook page for people who love pullthrough spots and that page has something like 128 fans. http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/I-3-pull-through-parking-spots/110710052284415

But at the pullthrough spot facebook page I found that most of its fans appear to be young people. And it's not young people who need pullthrough spots. Young people can still turn their heads around to see, so they should only take parking spots require them to back out. It's us old geezers who need the pullthrough spots. I'm no fan of big government but it seems to me that young people should not be allowed to use or block pullthrough spots. We need a law that restricts the use of pullthrough spots to stiff necked geezers.

Don't trust the media. . . but you knew that.

2010-03-29T01:34:00.006-04:00

The Tea Party people held a rally in Searchlight Nevada on Saturday. CNN's anchor woman showed no pictures of the crowd but basically dismissed the event as a flop, saying that only "hundreds of people, at least dozens of people" were there.

Here are some pictures of the crowd and the highway leading to the event. The security firm handling the crowd control estimated 30,000 people. Other estimates ranged from 9,000 to 14,000 attendees. And those numbers didn't take into account the fact that there was a massive traffic jam on the road headed to the event, so many people never even got there.

Why would CNN anchorwoman Fredricka Whitfield get the number so wrong? Why indeed?

If you want to see the entire CNN transcript it is here.

Today's new word is iatrogenic

2010-03-27T00:30:00.002-04:00

This is a article written by a businessman who set out to understand the health care system after his father died of an infection he got while in the hospital. The author says he's a Democrat, and he says he favored health care reform this year.

It's a long article; but if you want to understand the problems that we currently have in our health care system it's a good place to start.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-american-health-care-killed-my-father/7617/

"Iatrogenic" by the way means "caused by physicians." Every year hundreds of thousands of people die due to physician and hospital mistakes. In a way that isn't surprising, because doctors are no different from other people and hospitals are no more efficient than other human institutions. They're not perfect -they have bad days, they make mistakes, and sometimes they're careless or distracted. And, sometimes they are simply wilfull. What killed the author's father is the fact that doctors and hospitals don't pay enough attention to infection control and sterilization. On the simplest level many doctors resist the added time and effort needed to really control hospital caused infections, and hospital administrators are not willing to push them on the matter, in part because our current system of health care reimbursement does not penalize hospitals for bad results.

Snakes and hawks and eggs benedict, oh my

2010-03-21T01:09:00.003-04:00

As luck would have it I went to Gettysburg with Sam and Don today. So I got mediocre Eggs Benedict for breakfast and a nice battlefield walk and drive; but I missed quite a bit of natural drama around here.

Linda got to see several garter snakes emerge from the yucca plant in front of the house after hearing them rustling around in there. She figures they must have been hibernating either under the yucca or between it and the foundation of the house.

A little later a large hawk landed in the small maple tree just in front of the patio and then proceeded to go down to the ground and try to catch something. Linda thinks it was a Coopers Hawk, but she didn't sound too confident about her identification.

It just goes to show that there's no place like home; although Gettysburg was pretty nice. It was the perfect day for touring around out there. Ideal shirtsleeve weather, and there were only moderate numbers of other tourists because it's so early in the season.

If it's springtime that must be a wolf spider

2010-03-11T18:31:00.004-05:00

Linda is on the phone trying to get us senior citizen discounts on the tickets for a play this Saturday night. When did we suddenly get old enough to qualify for senior citizen discounts? It seems only yesterday we were in our fifties.

Meanwhile we've had spring like weather around here for the past week, so the snow is almost gone. Yesterday the last snow that was holding down part of the clump bamboo grove finally melted away. The aggressive radiating bamboo has been clear of snow for several days and, in the way of these things, the evil aggressive bamboo has sprung back up even more eagerly than the clump bamboo.

There's been a slight interlude. First Linda professed to see a stink bug on the side of the small couch, so she advanced gingerly to catch it because you don't want to squash those things. Suddenly a scream rang out. The supposed stink bug turned out to be a medium sized wolf spider that went flying. It was, I imagine, not amused at being gently grabbed with a napkin and it quickly retreated under the couch. To her credit Linda grabbed it again with the napkin, much less gently, after I tilted back the couch. Scratch one wolf spider. It's getting past time for me to replace the weather stripping at the bottom of the front door. And it may be getting past time for Linda to see the optometrist about the prescription for her glasses.

Now that both our heart rates are back to normal, where was I? Ah yes, Spring is in the air. The pond is now ice free and the pair of possessive geese have been back for a few days. They were driving off another pair earlier today. You would think that pond would be big enough for two or even more nesting pairs; but that is decidedly not the case. The possessive pair will tolerate ducks on their pond; but they will not tolerate other geese. Later, after they have young they will join up with the pair that ends up in possession of the other pond up the way; but for now they want exclusivity.

I just brought in the last of the semi-cured wood, the rounds I cut and split in the fall from the big partially rotted branch that broke off the apple tree down toward the creek, so there had better not be too many more cold nights. I have got to get to cutting next winter's wood. So far I have only a trivial amount that I've cut by hand. I already have an apple tree and a couple of maples that are within range of the electric chainsaw marked for harvesting, and there are two fallen mulberries that are worth starting the gas saw up for. Aside from that Dan has a big pile of hard to split rounds put aside for me up behind the old house. I'll retrieve those as I go back and forth to mow over there this summer.

I have a fire of the apple going in the stove right now. Such great wood! Even half cured it burns hot.

In other news I think we will have our first crocus blooming tomorrow. Last year we had them before the end of February which was early.

Tar and Feather Specter?

2010-03-03T23:06:00.005-05:00

Linda spent a couple of minutes listening to Senator Arlen Specter's so called town hall meeting last night and then declared that he ought to be tarred and feathered.

Senator Specter, who is clearly afraid to actually meet with voters since he was disrespected at his last real town hall meeting, set up a sham meeting which was strictly a telephone event. The couple of questions we listened to were nice easy soft pitches designed to let him spout his bull without fear of contradiction. I pictured him surrounded by three or four advisers who were feeding him talking points.

What is it about long term politicians that prevents them from understanding when their time has passed? Specter has been a joke for close to a decade. He should be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail. And hopefully he will be come November.

Meanwhile, in other news, the clump bamboo canes are showing amazing resilience. As the snow has been melting more and more of them are standing up again. It's hard to believe that they didn't get kinked from being held down almost flat to the ground for almost a month. The evil linear growing bamboo is also recovering somewhat; but many of its canes are not going to stand proud. I'll need to do quite a bit of pruning over there.

And, I was looking at the pine trees behind the house the other day in a whole different light. I had a mental picture of them as pretty big trees; but now that there's a leaner in among the group I've had to give some consideration to just how difficult and dangerous it would be to cut a couple of them to get to the leaner. I think I'm going to punt on that and get a professional to come in and do it. I'm guessing those trees are over a hundred feet tall.

The snowstorm was a dud

2010-02-26T16:32:00.005-05:00

All last night the wind raged and howled as snow came down at what seemed like a rapid rate; but even as the snow was falling it was apparent that the storm was more or less a dud. Most of yesterday's snow melted on contact with the roads and the driveway even as it piled up on the old snow in the yard and appeared impressive. And when the snow did stick it insulated the roads and driveway so there was a layer of relatively warm wet under the five or so inches that actually did accumulate.

Last evening Linda and I had a moderately exciting drive back from Sam and Deb's house at about 9:40. By then there were a couple of inches of snow on the roads where the wind was drifting it across from fields in exposed areas. All in all we had less problems on the road than we did in playing pinochele with Sam and Deb. They beat us handily in the first game and were leading heavily in the second when we decided we had better leave. Debra had an amazing run of luck with her cards. It seemed that neither she nor Sam could bid without the other having eight or ten meld and a couple of aces. I don't think they went set more than a couple of times and they took most of the bids.

This morning the snow looked impressive while it was still coming down; but when I went out at about noon to plow I was able to do the driveway in two passes.

I just returned from a trip out to the post office and the gas station. The roads were already simply wet since the sun has been out. And, thankfully, all the essential services, like the gas station and the tanning salon were open as normal.

There's something to be said for snowstorms at this time of the year. The sun is high enough to clean things up pretty quickly once the snow stops. We're hoping that Mark and Linda L were able to get their driveway plowed because we're planning to meet them for dinner if they can do it. The plan is to go to The Texas Roadhouse, which we've been wondering about for years as we've passed it on Route 422 going back and forth to the Ballroom of High.

We deserve steaks tonight because yesterday we ate pretty healthy beef barley soup that I made. And, on Wednesday we had only a light dinner because we needed to get out of here pretty promptly to go up to Pottstown for our Tango lesson.

Speaking of the tanning salon, Alex called the other night to tell us that those SOBs down in Washington are trying to tax tanning. It seems they were going to tax botox treatments and boob jobs; but the cosmetic surgeons, the Botox maker and the boob implant people must have been able to put together a fatter set of bribe envelopes than the tanning people.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2124186720091221

Who knew there were 20,000 tanning salons in the U.S.? Imagine how many wrinkle wranglers and boob ballooning surgeons there must be to outbid the tanning industry when it comes to bribing Harry Reid and the other corrupt Senators and Congresscritters down there in DC.

Is this a great country or what?

A blast from the past

2010-02-23T15:10:00.004-05:00

This morning I got a call from Susan the daughter of The Count. It turns out Count is now 87 years old and in a nursing home and he has been reminiscing about the Redpeppers. So Susan has been trying to track down folks her father and brothers remember from the picnics in the 1950's and 1960's. She found the Redpepper team picture and Pop's picture as a pitcher that I apparently posted on Flikker a couple of years ago and finally worked her way to me.

We had a very interesting conversation. Susan and her brother Michael are ten years or so younger than their brothers John and Ronald whom we knew better. I told her to remind John of the time we dared him to break the little window at the peak of Trooper School with a baseball thrown from home plate of the baseball field. He amazingly did it after only three or four throws although it had to be at least a two hundred and fifty or three hundred foot throw and the window was three stories up there.

Susan now lives in Tennessee and has a 22 year old daughter. Her brother John still lives in Philly and has two boys. Her brother Ronald lives in Newport Florida. And her brother Michael lives in Trevose. The Count, whose real name is Gaspare or Gap, has not been too well because of his heart.

I suggested that Susan hook up with Marianne on Facebook and also suggested that she friend Angie R. And I told her she probably should friend Don A if her dad wants to get into old Norristown stuff. Don is a few years older and knew those guys who hung around the corner of Main and Walnut and over at Lou's a lot better than me or Sam and Jas. I gather that John is trying to interest Count in using a computer so perhaps he can get in touch via email and Facebook and such.

Talking to Susan brought back vivid memories of those picnics. She too remembers looking forward to them all year long - the ball games, the corn roasting on the big grill, that creek where we bigger kids would catch crayfish and minnows, the ball games.

Good times!

Twenty two chronometers

2010-02-20T14:22:00.003-05:00

Well, Charles Darwin finally made it back to England on HMS Beagle, after a five year voyage. He spent most of his time ashore during the voyage since the actual transit time betweeen the various stops was only about 18 months. Of course the Beagle itself spent a lot of the other 36 months at sea in and around the harbors where Darwin was set ashore for his explorations.

The appendixes at the end of the book turned out to be almost as interesting as the book itself. For instance, the Beagle left England with 22 chronometers in order to be sure that Captain Fitzroy could accurately chart the longitude of a bunch of places, which was the real job of the ship. Even with 22 of the most accurate clocks that could be bought in 1831 the ship's itinerary was planned to allow stops in many places whose longitude was known with fair precision so Fitzroy could calibrate his chronometers by observing and timing the occultations of stars by the moon. Fitzroy took an instrument maker whose sole job was maintenance of the clocks.

It came to me as I was listening to all of this that the sheer amount of detailed mathematical work which needed to be done after the Beagle returned to England was unbelievable. By taking his observations at the known longitude places Fitzroy would have related the time shown by all of those clocks to the actual known time of the occultation. None of this would have had any precise meaning until after he returned to England and compared the time on the clocks to standard Greenwich Mean Time. At that point Fitzroy, and several assistants no doubt, would have had to go back and reconstruct the whole voyage to calculate the real longitude of all the places where he took what had to be tens of thousands of soundings and bearings to known points of land. Almost unbelievable how much detail work had to be involved.

The other thng that struck me was Darwin commenting at length on how easy the voyage was relative to the previous voyages of Captain Cook and the other earlier explorers. The Beagle was 90 feet long and 24 feet wide in the beam. It was home to no less than 74 men for those five long years. Of course that was far fewer men than the Beagle had carried when it was outfitted with 12 cannon as a warship. For that purpose the crew was 120 men. As a survey ship the Beagle carried only 6 cannon.

We think of Charles Darwin as the plump bald guy with the heavy brows whose picture was taken in 1854, or as the fusty old bearded guy whose picture was taken in 1868. But when he went off on the Beagle he was a determined looking 22 year old. A rich 22 year old, by the way. He took a servant with him for the five year exploration trip. He was the grandson of the Wedgwood pottery guy and also the son and grandson of two generations of very prominent doctors. His grandfather had the nerve to turn down King George the 3rd's invitation to be his personal doctor.

The Voyage of the Beagle was an interesting listen.

The big global warming lie is coming undone

2010-02-18T14:42:00.004-05:00

For the past couple of years people have been digging deeper and deeper into the details of the so called research that the global warming believers have been basing their reports on.

Now we learn that the oldest thermometer station in Europe, which is in Czechoslovakia, actually show that temperatures have gone DOWN over the past two hundred years. Pehaps that's why the global warming fanatics removed that thermometer station from their data. They did the same thing with the 130 year old thermometer station in Darwin, Australia. And they did the same thing with the over 100 year old thermometer station in Central Park in New York.

http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTJjNGQ1Mzk2OWM0NWRkZjBmYWU5MWYxNjc2ZTNmNjQ=

A new recipe you may or may not want to try

2010-02-17T11:57:00.005-05:00

I haven't tried the recipe Beppe Bigazzi talks about at the link below; but perhaps I will the next time something that cooks up "better than chicken, rabbit or pigeon" comes wandering around. Ruperto de Nola, writing in the classic days of Italian cuisine, recommended spit roasting after basting with olive oil and garlic. Remember to soak for three days in spring water. Very popular in Arezzo, they say.

Watch the short video! His young assistant keeps trying to get him off the subject; but she can't once he gets on a roll.

Fluffy, the other white meat.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/article7029058.ece

The new snow turned wimpy

2010-02-16T09:40:00.002-05:00

Yesterday they were predicting two to five inches of snow around here; so I went out and more or less eliminated the worst of the moguls in the driveway. I also widened it just in case we really got a significant snow. All this while I was making Lobscouse for dinner.

The Lobscouse turned out to taste remarkably like Mom's stew, even though it was just meat, potatoes, onions and about a third of a can of left over LeSeur peas, all simmered for about three and a half hours after a brief frying of the beef and then the onions in a tablespoon of olive oil. Oh, and I also put in a couple of teaspoons of instant beef boullion, a tablespoon or so of Worcestershire Sauce and few small bay leaves. This was for a pound of beef cubes, three onions and about half of a five pound bag of potatoes. Mom always put celery and carrots in her stew. And she never put in a can of beer, which is what most of the Lobscouse recipes called for.

Next time I think I'll try adding carrots and celery along with the beer.

It's snowing pretty good again out there but from the forecast I doubt we'll get more than an inch or two of total accumulation.

Mmmm! Nice and warm in the house

2010-02-11T15:02:00.005-05:00

I just came in from digging out a bit in front of the mailbox. Too late, as it turns out. The mailman had already dropped off the mail. Why would he be early on a day when many of the roads on his route are probably a mess? And a day where he needed arms like an orangutan to reach into most of the mailboxes.

When I went to the Post Office earlier to mail off three books I found that the Collegeville PO has the very best snowplow guy in the United States, or at least one of the best. By 11:00 he had that parking lot completely cleared and wet. Meanwhile, the road outside the post office looked like it got ahead of the Collegeville Municipal plow guys. It was thick with ice and crusted snow.

The guys at the Post Office told me the plow guy should do a good job considering what he charges. Whatever he charges it wasn't enough for the job he did on this snowfall.

Three stems out of the whole clump bamboo grove down by the garden managed to shrug off the wet snow and stay standing. All of the others in that clump, and all but two of those in the long grove of the evil linear spreading bamboo on the other side of the yard, are bowed down to the ground. By appearances it seems impossible they will ever be able to straighten up. Appearances have been deceiving in the past; but I'm not sure I've ever seen the bamboo so thoroughly smashed down as it is today.

The pine trees turn out to be pretty vulnerable to this sort of snow. The pine grove behind the house is strewn with broken off branches up to four and five inches in diameter at the base, and the pine trees along the driveway have large branches still bowed down to the ground. There are also a good number of big branches broken off the deciduous trees. I'll cut the deciduous wood up for firewood next year; but I can't use the pine because it makes too much creosote.

Maybe I'll cut up those pine branches into six foot lengths and we'll make a bonfire with them to celebrate the beginning of spring. Or perhaps we'll hold off having a bonfire and weinie roast til the beginning of April when Jas and Kathy will be back up from Florida.

As always at this time of year the good news about snow is that the sun melts the heck out of it pretty quickly. The driveway was like a toboggan chute this morning when I went out; but it is already getting much less daunting. Tomorrow it should be pretty much normally negotiable, although it will be narrow for a while. The banks of snow on either side of it are pretty high and dense.

Somehow I got completely sidetracked from the reason I sat down to write. When I came in I had to take off my sweatshirt because the house is so warm. The downstairs is now at 72 degrees, down from the high of 73 that it reached an hour or so ago. The upstairs is at 78, down from 79 that it reached earlier. The sun really warms it up a lot when the ground is covered with snow.

I have noticed that the house doesn't hold the heat the way it did when it was new. Back then it used to go up into the 80's (downstairs) on a sunny day and it would then hold that heat until well into the evening. On such days I used to light the woodstove at eight or nine at night and that, in turn, would keep the house in the high 60's til it really got cold outside late at night.

All this is a long way of getting at the fact that a lot of alternative energy things, solar especially, are being written about and analyzed based on the energy production in the first year when the system is new. But just like this house, those systems will degrade as they age. In the case of solar cells I read somewhere that it only takes a very little scratching on the surface of the cells to cut their energy production significantly, because the scratches scatter light rather than letting it go straight through. Naturally those solar cells will work best in the hot and dry areas like the Southwest, where, as it happens, there is lots of sand and dust being blown around that can scratch the surfaces.

I keep an eye on solar power stuff because 24 years ago when we designed this house I specifically settled on a roof pitch that is pretty close to the optimum for solar cells in this latitude. Back then I expected to eventually install solar panels on the roof once they got economical. Well, here we are, a quarter of a century later, and solar panels are still not even close to being a good investment in this area, even with the government tax credit subsidy. Solar assisted hot water would be just barely a good investment, given that we already have the properly sloped South facing roof; but only if it could be depended on to function without problems for fifteen or twenty years, which I don't believe it can be.

Update: I had to go out and put the bucket back on top of my wrapped up fig tree. for some reason that tree is bending over this year.

We're finally getting the promised blizzard out there

2010-02-10T16:59:00.004-05:00

It's been snowing pretty hard all day; but there wasn't any significant wind to speak of until an hour or so ago. As a result the big pine trees have branches arching down to the ground. And many branches have broken off, including the one that landed on my car. I had to cut it up with the loppers to get it to where I could move it off. The car seems okay; but there's no sense checking on that yet. We're not going anyplace tonight, and probably tomorrow either.

I plowed the driveway at 10:00 or so and got stuck a couple of times. Then I plowed it again at about 2:30 and got stuck again a couple of times. Dense and heavy wet snow. The snow hasn't been falling as hard since mid afternoon; but there are probably another few inches out there.

The tractor gave me a bit of a scare this last time I plowed. I got it stuck after quite a little session of rocking and ramming a stubborn pile of compressed snow. So I had to get off and shovel out the wheels a bit. The upstart was that when I got back on it revved up revved up, but the wheels wouldn't go in either forward or reverse.

It took me a while to figure out that I had knocked the master transmission knob that hides down under the seat from the turtle setting into the neutral range. I've probably only shifted that master setting four or five times in the 24 years since we've had the tractor. The only reason to touch it is when you want the rabbit setting for going on a road, not that it goes all that fast on the rabbit setting.

We have plenty of wood in the garage and food to last for as long as this global warming keeps hurling itself at us.

The wind is really whipping out there now, but I think the snow is too heavy and wet to drift much.

A near run thing

2010-02-10T10:04:00.005-05:00

We woke to a winter wonderland here. Snow drifting down during the night had all the tree branches deep covered. Very picturesque, except for the bamboo grove down by the garden, which is a mess, most of its tall stalks weighted down to the ground helter skelter.

Fortunately I decided to walk out to get the Times Herald and discovered that the beautiful scene was very deceptive. A moderate sized branch broke off the big pine tree behind the garage and fell on my car; but it doesn't seem damaged. I'll get to that later. That car isn't going anywhere today.

Six inches of very wet heavy snow on the driveway is harder to plow that fifteen inches of dry powdery stuff. So I decided to plow ahead of the new snow that's expected to fall all day.

I got stuck twice pretty good before I could plow down to the gravel and churn it up enough to assure traction. On that first pass the plow was pushing a ten or twelve foot thrust of snow ahead of the tractor, until it lost traction and left a big curl of compacted wet snow blocking the driveway. It's fun plowing then; because the only cure is to put on the seat belt, back off, and hit that pile at ramming speed until you break through.

What a great tractor John Deere made for us twenty four years ago. Over the years I've abused the thing in virtually every way possible and it just won't break. The snow is now falling at probably an inch an hour or more, and its supposed to get windy later.

I think I'll make some hot chocolate and sit by the woodstove. My sweatpants were soaked by the time I came in so I have them hung on a chair by the stove to dry. Don't worry. I'm wearing my camouflage long johns, which almost look like normal pants.

Perfect. I caught the hot chocolate just as it got ready to boil over in the microwave. Delicious!

In other news, I see that the U.S. Senate has cancelled today's scheduled hearing on global warming, and that Al Gore still refuses to take the energy use pledge. Why should we give any credence to people who run around shouting that global warming threatens the very survival of the human race but who continue to use energy like utter hogs? Al uses twenty times as much energy and generates twenty times as much CO2 as the average American family.

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Pledge

The best kind of hot chocolate

2010-02-06T14:19:00.005-05:00

I just came in from plowing the driveway. A pretty straightforward job, although this was probably the third or fourth heaviest snow we've gotten since we moved into this house in 1986. Maybe the second heaviest.

When I went out to plow Alex had just called to say he was going walking on the frozen Charles River. When I got back in because my fingers were getting cold, Linda reported that someone had called 911 on him. So Alex was ushered off the Charles by the forces of the law, one cop waiting for him on the other side of the river and another cop waiting for him at the place he set out. Perhaps he will be on the evening news.

Linda told me this tale of the nanny state in action while I was searching for the old Dunkin Donuts hot chocolate mix that Albert gave us a couple of years back. Turned out that Linda had given the hot chocolate mix to Alex at Christmas time to take back to Massachusetts. But all was not lost, for I found a hoary box of Nestle cocoa powder way back on the shelf of the cabinet that should be marked "Here be dragons" or "Terra Incognita" like the empty places on Darwin's maps.

"Best by December 2007" doesn't necessarily mean it can't be used to make hot chocolate in February of 2010. Especially when you have a hankering for hot chocolate on a cold and snowy day after coming in from an arduous job of running the tractor up and down the driveway a half dozen times.

So I set out to make hot chocolate. But first Linda had to insist there was a recipe for it on the box even though I was telling her that there was no recipe on the box. Then she suggested that I consult Joy of Cooking for a recipe. As though I needed a cookbook to tell me that hot chocolate is cocoa and sugar and milk in more or less the right proportions. The Aztecs and the Mayans used to make hot chocolate before cookbooks were invented. They didn't even have milk.

So here I am enjoying the very best sort of hot chocolate; the sort that someone says cannot be made but that nonetheless is made out of suspect ingredients combined by instinct. Unfortunately there were no ancient crusty marshmallows to melt on top of it. But you can't have everything in life.

In case you find yourself in a similar situation the recipe is two heaping teaspoons of cocoa powder, a cup or so of skim milk, a packet of Equal, a healthy shake or two of sugar from the bowl because the spoon is already wet with milk and a clotted mess of cocoa, and a dollop of half and half. The cocoa was difficult to dissolve until after I heated up the whole mess in the microwave for a couple of minutes.

Linda is out sweeping snow off her car. In a few minutes I'll go out and sweep off my car so I can move both of the cars to the plowed portion of the driveway. Then I can finish up the plowing, warmed by world class hot chocolate. Eat your hearts out Aztecs and Mayas.

Life is good. Alex got his walk on the frozen Charles before he could be snared by the forces of the law. And I got my hot chocolate.

Glorious snow, cannibals, missionaries and Rosebud

2010-02-06T12:41:00.003-05:00

Linda thinks fifteen inches. I think more like eighteen inches. Both of us are too lazy to go out and measure the great heap on the picnic table. Eventually I'll have to go out there to plow. I'll measure it then, but of course I'll have to apply an adjustment to the raw data because it's a well known phenomenon that light drifty snow compacts down over time.

Linda reports that the post office has cancelled deliveries for today. Whatever happened to "neither snow nor heat. . ." Back in the good old days when Jas and Kathy were handling the mail this would never have happened.

Speaking of the good old days, The Beagle just got to New Zealand after a stop in Tahiti. And Darwin was going on quite poeticly yesterday about the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean yesterday while I was driving back and forth to the tanning salon. He was marvelling at the days and weeks of travel involved over the heaving trackless ocean to reach the little islands dotted around. He was also decrying the British naysayers he had heard criticizing the missionaries in Tahiti. He didn't quite point out that the naysayers would have been killed, cooked and eaten by the Tahitians in the days before the missionaries, but he hinted at it.

Meanwhile there are two kids down there by the bridge. Maybe seven or eight year olds, little enough so the snow comes up to their thighs. One of them is covered with dusty snow. Oh for the days when snow meant eagerness to get out there in it until the cold damp coming though your gloves and clothes drove you inside to warm up for a few minutes before heading out again. There are deer running around beyond the pond; but I don't think the kids see them.

Quite a lot of activity out there today. A teenage girl trudged across from Stratford toward Bridal Lane carrying a yellow sled a little while ago. She just headed back with another teenager and a younger girl in tow. They're probably going to try to sled down the sidewalks on Stratford. These days the local governments plow and salt too quickly and thoroughly to allow for proper sledding on the streets. Back in the good old days Park Avenue down in Trooper might stay unplowed all day, and when it was plowed there was still a good packed down base of snow to sled on, sometimes for several days. Those were the days when you had to have a plowed road to sled on because the only sleds around had thin metal runners.

Four deer just leaped and ran across the lawn from Bridal Lane to down by the bridge. Those little kids missed quite a sight, although on second thought the deer probably would have skirted well clear if the kids had still been there.

Gotta run now. The tractor calls. I should paint a name on the tractor. Perhaps Rosebud.

This may be the best headline ever written

2010-02-05T14:44:00.003-05:00

"RAHM EMANUEL COMPARES DEMOCRATS TO RETARDED PEOPLE, then apologizes to retarded people."

From Instapundit - http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/93043/

In other news: If you want to see the most amazing thing ever done with a piece of heavy machinery here's a video that Don A sent me from down in Florida where he's enjoying weather a lot nicer than we have up here where we're waiting for a big snowstorm to start. Don had sent me still pictures of this stunt and I wondered whether it was real or whether it was photoshopped. It's real. The video is about nine minutes long. At the least you should skip through it to see the good parts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB1dI44j0Rs

Ten to the 120th power

2010-02-03T09:45:00.005-05:00

The other day Samuel was here with Don and they got to playing a game of chess. Their game was pretty sophisticated, although Samuel needs to develop more pieces and avoid bringing his queen out too early. As it turned out Don got to chasing Samuel's queen around with his pair of knights and that put him on the path to the win.

During the game Don got talking about playing chess on the internet and to practicing by playing against chess programs. That led to me mentioning this article I had seen by Garry Kasparov in which he discusses why even computers can't play chess by brute force calculation because the possible move combinations in a chess game is about 10 to the 120th power, or 10 followed by 120 zeros. That's an all but ungraspable number. I'm too lazy to look it up, but I think the number of elementary particles in the universe is something like 10 to the 86th power.

Even the first eight moves in a chess game allow for more move combinations than there are stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. Computers currently solve the first eight moves and many more; but they don't even come close to solving a full game. It's possible to imagine a computer that will "solve" chess the way a computer recently solved checkers; but there is no current technology that would allow a computer to be fast enough to fully compute a chess game. Current chess playing computers use shortcuts to rule out whole classes of move patterns that are unlikely to be successful as a way to cut down the possibilities.

If you're interested at all in chess or in how the human mind works here's that article by Kasparov in which he talks about how he beat the computers until IBM finally built Deep Blue. Deep Blue was finally fast enough to compute moves out beyond what Kasparov could do by intuition; but to beat him it still it needed the advice of a couple of human chess grandmasters who helped it by making suggestions for how to avoid traps.

Interestingly, Kasparov, a very smart and well rounded man who writes on many topics besides chess reveals in the article that he's more or less in awe of Bobby Fisher who was by no means a well rounded sort of fellow.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23592

In other news Sam had to get a tetanus shot because of his little incident with the Cutco knife the other day. He's confident that his sewn up finger will be up to golf when he heads down to The Villages later this month.

Finally, Darwin got to describing his discovery of petrified trees high up in the foothills of the Andes, which reminded me of when Jas and I walked around Petrified Forest National Monument when we drove the southwest a few years ago. While we were walking the paved path Jas wondered if the park had gathered up all the petrified logs and put them near the visitor center. So we left the path at a point where we were out of sight of the ranger station and walked the dry washes for a couple of miles to see how much petrified wood there was out beyond where the tourists regularly go. There were other clumps of logs, although none as impressively dense as those near the visitor center.

There's a Great Blue Heron wandering around

2010-02-02T09:00:00.005-05:00

He glided in and landed down by the bridge and he's now patiently stalking along the creek. I can't imagine what he expects to catch in this cold.

But I didn't sign in to comment on the Great Blue Heron. I signed in to comment on the damn Canadian politician who's planning to swoop down here into the U.S. to have a heart operation.

We keep getting told and told and told that Canada has such a great health care system. If that's the case why is a damned Canadian politician coming down here for his operation? Perhaps all the good Canadian doctors have moved to the U.S.

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2510700

In related news Sam and Deb, along with Dolores and Don, came to dinner on Sunday. So we were able to see the stitches in Sam's finger. It turns out they didn't go to the hospital emergency room but rather to the Premier Urgent Care center in Oaks. They got good efficient service there. Sam said the doctor got to him within fifteen minutes of their arrival. This urgent care concept seems to make sense. The hospitals charge far too much for most emergency room care because of the way hospital accounting works. And the waiting times in hospital emergency rooms can be long.

Sam's main concern is that the stitches should be out by the time it's warm enough for golf.

One of the red headed woodpeckers is down there on the sugar maple tree, so I have to go now.

But first I should mention that I've been listening to Charles Darwin's book The Voyage of the Beagle while driving over the past couple of weeks. A very interesting book, although you do have to be patient when he runs on and on about some particular frog, or mouse, or geological formation that has interested him. What's most interesting is how humble Darwin is. He never asserts anything.

He's groping toward explanations for a whole host of natural phenomena besides evolution, including plate techtonics, ocean currents, vulcanism, mountain uplift, climate variation and change, extinction, etc.; but it's clear he doesn't make up his mind until the evidence is overwhelming. On the subject of evolution it's neat that at that at the point of his life when he wrote this book he was still somewhat of a believer in what was later called Lysenkoism, namely that acquired traits are geneticly passed down.

A very interesting book and a very interesting man, not at all like the forbidding bearded elder who's popular image comes down to us as a result of the fact that he ultimately got to the overarching theory of evolution.

On that subject Linda and I finally saw Ben Stein's movie Expelled a few weeks ago. The movie was contentious, and Stein skewered some of the too proud and exclusionary evolutionists; but it's hard for me not to think that Stein is more reasonable in the end than the evolution explains everything true believers.

The book The Voyage of the Beagle is worth reading, and the movie Expelled is worth seeing.

A man, a plan, a canal, Panama

2010-01-30T17:18:00.003-05:00

I titled this with that old saw because I like palindromes, and because I just got a friend request on Facebook from Dillon L down in Panama.

What a wonderful world we live in. Linda and I saw Dillon for a couple of days a few years ago when we went down to Panama; but contact with him has been intermittent since then. Now that he's on Facebook he was able to find me and I'll easily be able to look in once in a while and see what he's up to. And, I noticed that he is a friend to a woman who may be Randy D's mother. I don't know Randy's mother so I'll hold off contacting her to ask until I see if Dillon makes contact directly with Randy over in Switzerland as he plays with Facebook. It must be ten years since I've been in contact with Randy, and the time before that was probably another ten years back.

But enough of Facebook. When I left off my post the other day about the trip Linda and I took down to The Villages I left off some interesting details.

For instance, on the way home we met a woman at a coffee shop in Savannah who told us that she loved Amoroso rolls when she formerly lived in Allentown or Lancaster or whatever. What are the chances we would meet someone who's first thought on learning we were from near Philly would be to remember Amoroso kaiser rolls? I refrained from telling her that Corropolese kaisers are far superior. Sometimes I'm a surprisingly sensitive person.

I was more impressed with Savannah than Linda was. We didn't, unfortunately, see it at it's best. In fact we saw it at what is probably near its worst. We got there at about nine in the morning when it was in the low 40's and overcast, so the riverwalk was deserted and bleak. Still, I thought it had a certain charm. Linda just thought it was cold and bleak. We were ready for the coffee shop when we finished the mile or so walk. An interesting town, although not as picturesque as I expected. Perhaps we missed the best parts.

The day before Savannah we spent some time in St. Augustine, which was also pretty cold and bleak. Again we saw it at far from it's best. We need to go back there in the late spring or early fall when it's better weather so we can tour the town again in comfort and then get in some beach time. The big highlight was that I got my $6 credit card type lifetime senior pass for the national parks when we went into the old fort. Linda is still much too young to qualify for that deal. . .

We interrupt this blog entry for dinner. . .

An excellent dinner. Linda made rice and stir fry chicken with vegetables. With it we had our daily old people pills washed down with water, and green tea made in the little pot Alex and Christina gave us. Very good.

Just after dinner we got a call from Samuel to report some breaking news: Sam and Deb will not be going to the dance tonight because they've decided to go down to the emergency room instead. It seems Sam was cutting bread with one of their new Cutco knives and there was a bit of a mishap. Samuel reported that no essential parts were detached from his Dad; but it must be a heck of a cut if deb doesn't feel capable of dealing with it.

So, anyway, after we saw Savannah we drove all the way to Petersburg and stayed at a motel that may have seen better days ten or fifteen years ago. The neighborhood also may have seen better days a while back. Not that people weren't sociable. A young lady we saw when we were leaving seemed like the sort of person who has a lot of acquaintances who see her regularly.

Petersburg, as you Civil War buffs know, is just south of Richmond; so we didn't have far to drive to get to Charlotte and Louie's house. Jonathan was home for the weekend so he joined us in going out to breakfast. Charlotte seems to be getting around pretty well on her new hip or knee, or whatever. I get her and Louie mixed up in the replaced joint department. At any rate both of them and Jonny are doing well. Besides the knee, I'm pretty sure it was the knee, Charlotte also recently hurt her back a bit and got laid off from her job. But she was still plenty feisty.

After leaving Richmond it was practically a hop, skip and jump to get home. Two hundred and forty miles goes by fast at 70 miles an hour, which Jas's car did with ease, eve after its transmission asked to be checked after we got north of Wilmington with only a ten or fifteen miles to go. We couldn't find anything alarming about the Check Transmission message in the owner's manual so we continued on.

Enough for now except to report that the ground is frozen solid here, so I was able to get another tractor bucket load of wood from the other side of the property. I think I now have enough to get through the winter, although I'll be getting more to pile for next year whenever the ground is frozen.

A Journey of a Thousand Miles. . .

2010-01-25T01:42:00.005-05:00

A journey of a thousand miles. . . ends with a "Check Transmission" message.

Linda and I arrived back home yesterday after a magical week.

First we got on a big hunk of metal with a couple of hundred other people and the unlikely contraption flew us a thousand miles in less than three hours while we ate peanuts and cheese crackers and drank coke and orange juice.

Then we spent four days running around and playing with the other kids at The Villages, swimming in nice warm pools, riding bikes, driving a golf cart, seeing movies, walking all over the place in 70+ degree temperatures and meeting interesting new people. Just for instance, we met this English couple who've visited the U.S. twice, once for six months and this time for one month, without ever going anywhere except The Villages. We found them looking down into the water at Lake Sumter Landing, hoping to see an alligator.

We told the Limeys they could easily see all the alligators they could possibly want by driving a few hours down to the Everglades; but they seemed more interested in staying right where they were so they could play golf every day. Their main interest in The Villages was the warm sunny weather and the inexpensive golf. Evidently, England has a terrible climate and every place closer to England that has a good warm climate has much more expensive golf. They mentioned that golf in Spain and Portugal costs about $75 to $100 a round and that the courses aren't as nice as U.S. courses.

We didn't play any golf down there; but we did visit with Kathy and "The Other Brother" as Sam has dubbed our moved away sibling. By chance Jenny and Doug were there visiting Jas and Kathy the first two days, on their way to Fort Lauderdale; so we got to see their 23 foot sailboat. They described their plans for sailing among the Keys for about 45 days. It sounds heavenly, and makes me think of John Masefield. Well, actually it made me think of the line "all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by." I had no idea who wrote it until I looked up up with google.

Anyway, John Masefield's poem "Sea Fever" is too good not to quote in full. Out of respect I'm going to resist improving a couple of his lines.

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

Lucky Jenny and Doug! Forty-five days loose on a sailboat in the Florida keys. The very thought makes me want to find my Sea Chanty CD, but I had best put that off until Linda is not around.

More about our trip tomorrow.

The woodstove fire of the vanities

2010-01-11T00:55:00.002-05:00

The other day I noted that geezers in England are buying up heavy unwanted old books and putting them to their best use in fireplaces because they're cheaper than coal by the pound.

That got me to thinking about the heavy unwanted old books out in the garage. . .

Suffice it to say that Shakespeare can be very warming indeed, as can the Art of the Western World. Dickens is positively a font of warmth, and Carl Sagan can generate thousands of BTUs if not billions and billions.

All told I figure there's about a quarter cord of books out there that will never be wanted for reading again. Books are about half as dense as hardwood, so my guess is those books will save me the tractor fuel to haul in about an eighth of a cord of wood. They will also save me from burning uncured wood at the end of the winter if this unusual cold keeps up. I've been burning up the cured wood much faster than in former years.

Rag paper, I've learned, makes excellent kindling; much better than newsprint. One finds it in what were once good quality books, like the fine print one volume edition of Shakespeare's works. Glossy paper, such as one finds in color illustrated books is not so good as kindling. It leaves too much ash because of the clay they put in it.

On one level burning books feels like sacrilege; but I remind myself that Amazon now sells a substantial percentage of new books as electronic files for reading on Kindles and that Google and others are busy digitizing books by the tens and hundreds of thousands so they will be available on line.

If you find yourself wanting to read anything by Shakespeare or Dickens or a host of other authors in certified accurate form for free you can always go to The Gutenberg Project to do so.

http://www.archive.org/details/gutenberg

If you're not too concerned about accuracy and you simply want to find a Shakespeare sonnet or something that contains a particular quote you can always google the words you know of the quote. Doing that will take you directly to a dozen websites that have used that quote. Many of them will have the whole sonnet there for you to read free.

You do have to be a bit careful and alert when you simply google part of a famous quote. There are lots of folks like me out there who use famous quotes with a little twist. When I do that there is always at least a clue that all may not be totally normal on the page; but there are others who give no warning that Shakespeare or Dickens or Coleridge's meaning has been a bit modified.

Books cost less than coal by the pound in England

2010-01-08T01:54:00.005-05:00

England is suffering from the coldest winter in years. And some smart geezers have learned that thrift shops sell heavy old books for less than the price of coal.

The interesting thing about this is that just today I was looking at a box of old hardbound books in the garage and thinking that I really should just burn them in the woodstove or start putting them in the trash a couple at a time so as not to make the trash bags too heavy.

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/807821-pensioners-burn-books-for-warmth

hat tip to Greg Pollowitz of National Review who posted about the book burners on NROs Planet Gore blog.

This Just In from our Florida correspondent

2010-01-06T13:22:00.002-05:00

Jas just called, first joking that he wanted to come over for coffee. He didn't have to joke; it's going to be a very long time before my thoughts don't turn to making coffee when I see his name on the little phone view screen.

He called to check on our plans to fly down to Florida. And to report that the state is having its coldest winter in something like forty years. Jas and Kathy are wearing winter coats around because of the 50 degree highs and sub-freezing lows. It's been going down to the low forties by 9:00 at night, which is when all The Villages geezers are usually speeding along in their open golf carts, running back home from the music and dancing in the square.

Hopefully it will warm up some before we get down there. Temperatures at this time of year are supposed to be going up to the high sixties during the day.

Stuffed olives, Rebecca, Pop, the OED and knives.

2010-01-06T09:30:00.007-05:00

Don A, the other Don A who is now down in Florida for the winter, sent me a bunch of information about stuffed olives after seeing my little taunt about the very good appetizer Rebecca made for Christmas Eve.

Rebecca said her appetizer was "stuffed olives"; but actually it was little meatballs stuffed with pitted olives. Then she proceeded to argue that her little meatball recipe was the authentic one and that my memory of the olive being on the outside of the meat filling was faulty. This article sent me by Don is one more proof that she was wrong:

http://blogs.denverpost.com/preserved/2009/04/08/ascoli-piceno/

I suppose it's not surprising that Rebecca stubbornly maintained and defended her mistaken view despite the evidence, for Grandpop L used to periodically tell a joke that went like this:

Question - What's worse than having a dead body in the living room?

Answer - Having a stubborn Marche' knocking at the door.

The implication, of course, is that Marche's in general are a stubborn lot, impossible to get rid of. And Rebecca, of course, is three-eighths Marche' by the following calculation.

Grandmom and Grandpop L were both Marche's from Ascoli Piceno, as was Grandpop A. That makes Rebecca's dad three-fourths Marche. Grandmom A was not from Ascoli Piceno - she was born "a Muro Lucano" according to her birth certificate, which is in the L side electronic picture file I sent you a couple of years ago if you had a need for the family pictures.

"A Muro Lucano" means - well perhaps that will be your homework assignment. I figured out what it means many years ago before Al Gore invented this internet thingy, with the help of a librarian, much to Mom's irritation. Find and rattle your family own skeletons if you want to.

Speaking of family skeletons, there is evidence in the family picture album of at least two instances that prove Shakespeare was very right for all the ages when he wrote the best known line in Troilus and Cressida.

Now to other matters:

It's as cold as a brass bra on a witch's tit out there, as Pop and a friend of mine from Missouri named Randy often used to say at this time of year. A very useful quote which will stay useful for a lifetime.

Pop also used to say "another year shot to hell" each year on or after New Year's Day just as he would always say "another summer shot to hell" on or just after Labor Day each year. Not that he brooded on those things. Pop was a very optimistic person, perhaps the most naturally optimistic person I've ever met. Also just after New Year's Day, regarding the cold winter, which he most definitely did not like he always used to say "we're over the hump, it's all downhill from here." Pop managed to see the light at the end of every tunnel of life earlier than anybody else could see it. And he was optimistic about that light even after it became clear that the light might be an approaching train.

Don't go through life brooding about the approaching train that's gonna get you in the end no matter what you do. Most of the time the light is actually the other end of the tunnel, and even when the light is a train you may as well meet that train in a good mood, enjoying life until the moment it gets you.

I generally make my dentist appointments for 8:20 in the morning in part because the dentist usually has on the Philly radio station that has played the Monty Python song Always Look on the Bright Side of Life at about 8:30. Life is too short to go through as a brooding mope.

In other news: Samuel came by last evening Samuel to give me and Linda a presentation on the knives he's selling. A very interesting presentation, and we bought some of his knives to complement the very fine ones Alex and Christina gave us for Christmas. After his presentaion we spent some time over coffee and discussion of David Serdaris's books and of the Oxford English Dictionary, of all things because Samuel said he was interested in books that contain interesting historical information, so I pulled out The Profession and the Madman to give to him.

The madman in the book made the best of his unfortunate situation, being in an insane asylum for life due to an unfortunate crime or two, by making himself the most prolific contributor to the OED. The professor in the book, on the other hand, spent twenty years of his life being grateful for the many contributions being made by mail by a certain fellow and didn't learn that the fellow was in an insane asylum until he decided to visit the recluse and thank him in person.

Here's a piece of advice for you younger married folks. There are a lot of things one must tolerate in life because they're impossible to avoid. And then there are other things one tolerates because of sheer foolishness. We, for instance, have been using a drawer full of annoyingly dull knives all our life because we were too foolish to buy decent knives way back when. This doesn't mean you have to spend a ton of money all at once on good knives. But it does mean you should judiciously accumulate good quality stuff in those areas of life where you can purchase something that will truly last a lifetime.

If anybody is interested in books send me an email detailing the kinds of books you like along with your mailing address. If I have a book or two or a dozen that I think you will like I'll either put it aside for you or mail it to you - media mail is very cheap. My email address is sully(mylastname) at AOL dot com.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

2010-01-03T10:49:00.005-05:00

I got five gallons of diesel for the tractor yesterday, so I'm of a mind to wish for snow. This winter has started off well but we need more. We haven't had a really good winter for snow for a few years. Bring it on! I have plenty of wood stored up for the stove.

Now for the subject of Christmas Eve, which Rebecca reminded me of at Sam and Deb's house yesterday before she convinced me that I have to bit the bullet and yank my jammed toe back into proper alignment. . . which I may do once I get up the nerve when Linda isn't around to hear the scream. And then again, I may not. Who declared Rebecca a toe doctor to know whether I should torture myself intensively by yanking at that thing or whether I should simply leave it alone to torture me subtly and naggingly until it gives up?

Enough with the toe. It's mildly throbbing down there; but I have more important things to concern myself with, namely a rant on the general disrespect for tradition among the younger generation.

We deep fry battered vegetables and breaded fish on Christmas Eve because in the proper scheme of things, before the beginning of the decline of Western Civilization, no meat was allowed until midnight. This tradition has, of course, been corrupted for many a year by the introduction of red tomato gravy made with meat, which some barbarians insist on putting on my Spaghetti Aglio e' Olio, thus turning it into a fusion cuisine nightmare.

This practice is by no means new. It started in the 1990's, thankfully after Pop was no longer around to see it. Mom, however, was still around, and we had many a discussion about whether it should be permitted, the uneasy compromise being that we would not make the red gravy but would turn a more or less blind eye to its introduction into the house.

This year, however, Rebecca went further. She suggested that she would bring stuffed olives and I agreed to the suggestion in a moment of weakness. Thus did meat, actual meat, impossible to deny, enter the house on Christmas Eve. I agreed, of course, because stuffed olives are perhaps the finest achievement of Italian cuisine, at least in the appetizer category.

But then, when Rebecca brought what she said were stuffed olives they turned out to be olives in the middle surrounded by little meat balls. She made some claim that her dog had eaten the olives meant for stuffing, so she had to revert to pimento stuffed olives. Then she went further and claimed that putting the meat outside of the olives was actually the original Marche' recipe. Sam's Marche' cook book quickly proved that wrong; but it wasn't necessary.

My memory may have degenerated a bit over the years; but this is something impossible to get wrong. I distinctly remember Mom and Aunt Mary discussing the people who used pitted olives and the people who put the meat on the outside of the olive as they spiral cut the olives away from their pits, a fairly delicate task.

I just finished, by the way, a porchetta sandwich on a Corropolese medium kaiser roll. And I'm fairly confident you didn't. There was quite a bit of porchetta left over on New Year's Eve from that 9 pound roast I cooked; but I somehow neglected to give any of it away to the departing guests. I have five containers of it in the freezer, plus the bowl I've been finishing sandwich by sandwich since New Year's day.

Meanwhile, a large flock of starlings is flying and walking around the lawn out there even as a fifteen or so mile an our wind is whipping the 25 degree air around. It's hard to imagine just how those birds survive in this cold. Why don't they go south? They're clearly finding stuff to eat out there on the frozen ground; but wouldn't they find tastier and warmer stuff in Georgia or South Carolina where they would have warmer feet?

Sam and I talked to Al and Jas down in Florida yesterday and they were whining about the temperatures dipping into the fifties during the day. These starlings should be down in Florida annoying them.

There are, however, some small consolations for living up here in the cold. I have the woodstove roaring away in there. Sitting by it as those damned starlings freeze there little feet off because they're too stupid to fly south is one of those consolations.

In other news: Five scientists, no doubt working very hard down in Australia, where it is summer for those of you who are geographically challenged, have figured out how bees land. I was intrigued by this paragraph:

"First the scientists built a bee landing platform that could be inclined at any angle from horizontal to inverted (like a ceiling), then they trained bees to land on it and began filming."

One has to wonder whether it really took five scientists to do that; or whether a couple of those scientists were looking for an excuse to go to Austrialia and catch some rays.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091223074657.htm

Departures and Arrivals

2009-12-30T01:24:00.006-05:00

Alex and Christina headed back to Massachussetts today, So things are pretty quiet here in Collegeville just now.

When Jas called me late in the afternoon yesterday my first thought was that he was wanting to come over for coffee; but those days are over - he was calling from the welcome center just inside the Florida border. He and Kathy are no longer Pennsylvanians. They'll come back in April to sell their house; but based on how Jas was talking while here the two of them aren't going to be coming back for many extended stays.

Alex and Christina suggested that we all go and see the new Avatar movie in 3D last evening. We came away dazzled. Everything you may have read about the movie being seeded with trite and stupid political messages is true; but the sheer technical power of the thing easily overwhelmed the sheer idiocy of a great director putting such hackneyed tripe in his work. And the story and acting were on the whole pretty good for what is after all a combination kiddy film and second childhood film.

The movie is going to be a major hit with a very long run as word of mouth promotes it. If the director is smart he's right now working on a directors cut that will eliminate the stupidest of the references that will date the movie in five or ten years.

Even if he doesn't do that, I think people are going to remember and watch the film for a long time in the same way they watch the first Star Wars movie and Jurassic Park, as milestones in storytelling at new plateaus of technical capability.

The Pandorans in Avatar are very believable aliens, and the natural environment of the planet Pandora is very realisticly presented even while it is cleverly alien. Some of the plant and animal life on Pandora is reminiscent of the best thinking of writers like Larry Niven.

I'm thinking that the technology of movie making is getting to the point where realistic Puppeteers and Kzinti and Moties are possible. We may soon be treated to Ringworld and Mote in God's Eye as movies. I hope they do a better job with those than they did with Starship Troopers which was only so so. The bugs were true to Heinlein's sketchy description of them in the book; but what worked in 1950 for a novel did not work on the big screen. Plus, of course, the movie makers missed the whole point of Heinlein's book; but that was only to be expected.

Hollywoodians are very talented gabbling lefty geese. When they digest a plot the effect is much the same as what happens when you run grass through a goose. What comes out after processing is not recognizable.

In other news we've been having as cold a December as I can remember. Alex went out on the pond the other day and reported the ice almost 4 inches thick in the center. I can't recall ever walking on the pond this early in winter. It usually freezes solid enough to support weight in mid January or even February.

As a result of the cold and the fact that I've been home during the days I've been burning a heck of a lot more wood that I expected. I need my cracked toe to get better so I can get out there and get cutting and hauling more over from the other side of the big creek. Dan the woodcutter has quite a bit of unsplittable stuff set aside for me, but that's next year's wood, or even the year after, since unsplit rounds take a long time to dry out. The woodstove will handle and burn anthing that will fit through its door; but unseasoned rounds take some care and planning and plenty of dry kindling since they won't take fire easily.

The good news is that sunspots started to arrive again early in December and we've now had 22 straight days with sunspots. So it appears the latest solar minimum may be over. Better late than never. Global warming is a concern; but the sort of global cooling we could get if the sun fails to resume it's normal pattern and goes into a deep minimum (as it did in the late Eighteen Hundreds when they called the period the Little Ice Age) would really be serious. Global warming extends growing seasons in the main crop growing regions. During the Little Ice Age of the Eighteen Hundreds growing seasons shrunk and there were real agricultural problems.

Good for the Queen

2009-12-18T19:41:00.003-05:00

This article tickled me because the picture through the train window reminded me how much Mom looked like Queen Elizabeth. There is a picture of her on the golf cart with Pop which can cause you to do a double take.

The article also interested me because of how small an entourage the Queen travels with. Our presidents have gotten to the point where they travel like God Emperors, with a cast of thousands.

A friend once told me he was in Philly when the first President Bush came down Market Street in his motorcade. He said a normal seeming fellow in a business suit spontaneously got up on one of those concrete planters or trash can holders and yelled out, "All hail the king," or something like that.

Just so! Surely it's important for the president to have good security. But is it really necessary for him to travel with the huge entourage that commonly attends him. The president is not a God Emperor. He's a fellow we elect to do a job for us for 4 years. His office and he deserve respect; but really.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1236632/Your-commuter-carriage-awaits-The-Queen-catches-train-journey-Sandringham-Christmas.html

Some Good News, Europe May Be Waking Up

2009-11-30T15:09:00.002-05:00

The numinously neutral and peaceful Swiss have voted 57.5 to 42.5 to ban the erection of more minarets in their country. Great news which Daniel Pipes thinks may validate the support of realistic policies inhibiting the spread of practical submission to Islam in the rest of Europe.

There is certainly a significant element of racism (or whatever we’re calling religious bias these days) in that Swiss vote; but that does not negate the fact that continued encouragement of immigration of Muslims who have no intention of assimilating into the existing culture of Europe (and the U.S.) is madness since it will almost inevitably lead to a murderous clash.

That it was the usually quiet, low-profile, un-newsworthy, politically boring,
neutral Swiss who suddenly roared their fears about Islam only enhances their
votes’ impact.

Hopefully it’s not too late for a line to be drawn without widespread bloodshed.

http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2009/11/swiss-ban-minarets

I also posted this at Zombie Contentions:
http://ckmac.com/thewholething/2009/11/some-good-news-europe-may-be-waking-up/

Inconvenient Truths

2009-11-29T11:02:00.003-05:00

First there was the inconvenient truth that the world has been cooling since 1998 or so; despite the very clearly stated predictions of the global warming folks that it would continue to warm.

Then there was the inconvenient truth that we've just enjoyed a couple of the most mild hurricane seasons since modern records have been kept despite the alarmist claims of the global warming fanatics that we would certainly face more and bigger hurricanes.

Then there was the inconvenient truth that the so called scientists on the global warming side of the debate kept a careful silence while politicians and dissipated British princes made unbelievable claims about doom being around the corner if we didn't all go back to living like good peasants while they continued living like pashas.

Then there was the inconvenient truth that the so called scientists on the global warming side of the debate refused to release the basic data on which they based their climate models despite the fact that the data amounted to little more than temperature records kept by government paid for thermometers.

Finally, in the past couple of weeks we've learned the inconvenient truth that the so called scientists at East Anglia University and their worldwide associates who have been the primary providers of data and predictions behind all the hype about global warming have been running a Stalinist campaign to destroy their opponents by making them unpersons in the scientific community.

Isn't it about time to step back from all the hurry to hamper the world's economy and thus condemn hundreds of millions of people to lives of poverty and even actual starvation with hairbrained schemes like Cap and Trade until some of those inconvenient truths are examined carefully by real scientists with access to all the data?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6679082/Climate-change-this-is-the-worst-scientific-scandal-of-our-generation.html

Here's a report on the global warming "scientists" claiming their dog ate the primary data, so unfortunately no one can check and see how they twisted it to get the conclusions they wanted.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece

And here's a 30 minute video that tells about how the so called global warming scientists corrupted other data they came in contact with. In one case they sent out one of their toadies to do a shoddy half baked tree ring study despite the existence of a far more professional and extensive Finnish study. In another case they turned a set of Finnish lake sediment data upside down to achieve the hockey stick graph they wanted.

The Finns are proud and protective of their tree ring and lake sediment studies, so a nice sense of outrage comes through in the video, making it funny in parts. If only NOVA here in the U.S. were still doing science programs on PBS instead of propaganda programs

http://dotsub.com/view/19f9c335-b023-4a40-9453-a98477314bf2

Perhaps the funniest skit Saturday Night Live has ever done

2009-11-23T15:28:00.005-05:00

Saturday Night Live writers were obviously channelling what was really going through the mind of Chinese Premier Hu Jintao when he and President Obama did that joint press conference last week.

"While you are here, are you at least going to treat me to dinner and a movie? I think it is the polite thing to do before doing sex to me."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxYSduRES1o

Herons, an eagle, ducks and a cat

2009-11-23T10:07:00.003-05:00

It's November and the minds of great blue herons turn to thoughts of love, or maybe to thoughts of squabbling over territory. One of them has been persistently chasing another one, or else two of them are persistently chasing one another, back and forth across the property between here and the pond. Who but a heron can tell the difference between one and another? If this was a nature show on PBS or The Discovery Channel the scene would now shift to graphic heron porn; but this is an unscripted nature show so they'll probably retreat out of sight if they get down to making new herons.

But enough of the doings of herons. Last evening Linda and I went to Benny's 70th birthday party down in Kimberton. Benny put out quite a spread at the Kimberton Arts Center for about a hundred people. A bunch of folks from the Ballroom on High were there, along with Benny's family and others that he's met over the years. A real Italian event. Much of the dance music was from the Mob Hits CD, it seemed. Perhaps Benny grew up in South Philly. They have a nice dance floor at that place.

Afterwards we called Alex up in Boston and learned that Christina has had the flu for the past few days. One of her co-workers was diagnosed with Swine Flu, so that may have been the variant.

Now there's a golden eagle cruising around out there. Those herons had better not get too caught up in what they're doing. The ducks on the pond don't like that eagle circling, or maybe they've noticed the black cat stalking around. A lot of excitement over there but the ducks did not take flight the way they do when I walk over to the pond. Perhaps the eagle wants them to take off so he can get one on the wing?

Where was I? This has been quite a dancing weekend. Besides Benny's party we went to the ballroom on Saturday evening for another Samba class and then the dance party. There's clearly a trick to the Samba because older and fatter guys than me do it without getting exhausted. Heck, Vince does it and he's about a ninety years old; yet it wears me out. His secret seems to be that he just shuffles his feet a bit and lets the woman do all the fast moving; but that's hard to do.

A mob of crows just got cued to join in the nature show. About ten of them just chased the eagle away.

Linda and I took a walk around the new shopping center up on 29 the other day and found a store the size of an old time supermarket that sells nothing but cosmetics. It's a very strange movie we humans are acting in. Ten percent unemployment while a dozen stores over there are hiring staff at $8 an hour, and someone thinks there will be enough demand for cosmetics to paint and putty up a thousand Cleopatras for a barge trip down the Nile.

Before I forget, Sam and I talked with Al and Jas down in Florida on Saturday. The Villages is building over a hundred houses a month in new clusters that are stretching for more miles. Jas said his house will be equidistant between Spanish Springs and the new town center that they're planning. He met a couple of guys who drove about 45 minutes in their golf carts to get to the course he played with them. He and Kathy are flying up today (Monday) and they'll be staying until after Christmas.

Alex mentioned seeing the news that someone has hacked the computer system of one of the biggest science centers that has been promoting global warming "evidence." Quite a controversy building there if all those emails are real. According to the hacked and published emails those "scientists" have been tampering with the data for years in attempts to hide the lack of global warming for the past decade. That's the same group that has refused to release their raw data for analysis by others. And the same group that claimed to have "lost" or deleted data because they didn't have enough storage capacity on their computers when it appeared they would be forced to release the data because it was accumulated using government funding.

It appears some supposed scientists have been acting like predatory cats and eagles stalking around and hovering over ducks on a pond. We're the ducks.

Here are some samples from those emails:

Manipulation of evidence:

"I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline."

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

"The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate."

Suppression of evidence:

"Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment — minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise."

From National Review's blog Planet Gore -
http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NmE2MzdiZGE4ZDYyNDYzN2Y2Y2FmMTBlODEwY2E2OTk=

The BBC has reported that the emails are real. And it offers the suggestion that the "scientists" at that lab improve their computer security so they can manipulate data in the future without fear that their shenanigans will be embarrassingly revealed.

"I trust that they will now be looking at the systems, and investigating how this happened and ensuring that something like this does not happen again."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8370282.stm

Much better if the ducks never learn about the cat.

Cracked Poetic History For Dog Lovers

2009-11-15T14:46:00.006-05:00

In Xanadu did Kublai Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Where Ralph his bad Samoyed ran
O’er lawns laid out to impress the Han
And made quite free to pee.

So twice five kennel guards were bound
And whipped the circuit well and sound
Of yellow spots on lawn around
That set the Khan’s foul temper free.
Worse yet just then a Japanner laughed
And launched a great fleet that got foul gaffed
By a freak Tai Fun whirling timely round
Which only more Kublai’s wrath compounded
And set ancestral voices prophesying s’mores
Made round Mongol campfires through endless wars.

Merest luck for countries all around
That Ralphie just then playfully rounded
And soothed the Khan’s urge to re-pound
His grandpa Ghenghis’ stomping ground.
For Kublai Khan couldn’t stay annoy’ed
When romping with Ralph, his bad Samoyed.

So now you know why Italy, England and France
Never suffered the horse Mongol warlike dance
And also why the prophesied recipe for a s’more
Came west but slow, after many centuries more.
Both gratitude and blame go to a sassy Samoyed
Who Kublai Khan’s temper quite thoroughly destroy-ed.

I also posted this at Zombie Contentions - http://ckmac.com/thewholething/

Gardens, Bunny Huggers, Clouds of arrows to blot out the sun, Abandonment and Raw Sex

2009-11-06T10:15:00.006-05:00

The other evening we had the last three pathetic figs in our salad, an anticlimactic cap to a very disappointing garden year. Then last evening on our walk Linda raised the question, "What ever happened to the White House garden?"

As it happens Michelle Obama's garden, which was quite famous in the spring for a time, hasn't been getting much national attention since then. But it turns out to have produced pretty well if the Huffington Post can be trusted:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/29/michelle-obama-fall-harve_n_339172.html

Good for the First Lady! Her garden did a whole lot better than mine this summer even if she is, as I suspect, shading the cost figure just a bit. Huffington Post quotes her as saying the garden cost $180.

I'm figuring the real cost of the Ph.D. agronomist who must have tested the soil and planned the amendments was all by itself a whole lot more than $180. And that's leaving out the cost of the round the clock Secret Service guards who had to protect that patch from rabbits and other varmints in a manner calculated not to enrage the bunny and chipmunk huggers. There's simply no way they could have gotten away with fencing that White House garden on the cheap and ugly the way I fence my garden. And there's no way the Secret Service could just blow away any intrusive White House garden bunnies who yearned for a taste of the greenery.

Back here at home I had a visit from two local bunny huggers the other day. They stopped by with their medium sized kinky haired sort of black poodles to ask about the monster pickup truck that Chris the bowhunter parks on the circle near their homes while he's sitting in his tree stand slavering at the chance of putting broadheads into Bambi's mom and dad. I agreed to talk to Chris when I see him about parking his truck in our driveway.

They also expressed concern about the danger to their children of hunters filling the air with far flung arrows. I explained that Chris does not shoot in the manner of Persians raising clouds of arrows to block the sun shining on Spartans so they can fight in the shade. And I assured them that Chris is a very qualified and careful hunter who's unlikely in the extreme to shoot arrows at or anywhere near any children. I didn't feel it necessary to warn them not to dress their children in realistic deer suits complete with big racks of antlers.

On another front, Jas and Kathy left for The Villages on Sunday morning and probably arrived there on Monday night. We've heard no word from them as of yet; but that isn't terribly surprising. They put the Postal Service behind them last Thursday after 35 and 20 years respectively; and now they've put all of us who remain condemned to this chilly northern climate behind them as well.

Not that I'm complaining that Jas is down in Florida and has forgotten all about his older brothers and sister. It's a beautiful sunny day, and the ten point buck spent quite a bit of time earlier chasing does thither and yon about the lawn, over the creek and around the pond. I hope he doesn't wander over toward Chris's tree stand for at least a couple more days. He's pretty magnificent on the hoof.

Gather ye does, buck, while ye may; for at any hour thy time may come.

I will certainly call Al R tomorrow morning at about 10:30 to see if Jas has stopped over there for coffee. Can't count on him to remember to call me.

Warren Buffett made a big bet on coal

2009-11-04T13:11:00.002-05:00

Roger Pielke noticed Warren Buffett’s big bet on coal the other day and wondered what the Sage of Omaha knows.

http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/11/warren-buffetts-big-bet.html#comment-form

As it happens Alex sent me a long DOE report the other day that made me think things aren’t as bad as I had thought even if global warming fears are wholly reasonable. Or perhaps I’m just in an optimistic frame of mind.

http://www.netl.doe.gov/energy-analyses/pubs/Bituminous%20Baseline_Final%20Report.pdf

If the assumptions of the study and the analysis leading to the executive summary aren’t too far wrong electricity from coal will cost about 50% more with very high CO2 capture and storage. That means fossil fuels alone can support recently normal rates of economic growth for a hundred years or more. If the transition can take place over twenty years it’s not an insurmountable economic problem, if only because many existing uses of electricity are pretty inefficient and the economy will enforce a lot of energy conservation as electicity costs rise. So the actual economic effect of the energy cost change in terms of living standards will be less than a 50% rise.

And that leaves out the possibility that the public will eventually get comfortable with nuclear fission, which is operating now at cost levels that must be at least comparable to coal plants without carbon capture (or else it wouldn’t be operating). It also leaves out the possibility that fusion will eventually become possible at some cost that’s reasonable in the context of rising fossil energy costs due to carbon capture and depletion. Plus, it leaves out wind and solar and biomass and such; but they strike me as nearly trivial in the 20 year term next to the bigger sources of energy despite all of the hype.

The economy commonly reacts to such cost changes, and even worse cost changes, over time without too much disruption if the politicians don’t meddle too much, as they did in the 1970’s for a time. For instance oil and thus gasoline prices can rise and have risen in the past by more than 50% in a year or two without causing more than moderate pain, at least to anyone who has access to the technology to read this, despite all of the whining that always attends such price changes.

Perhaps that’s why Warren Buffet made his big bet on coal.

I also posted this on Zombie Contentions at http://ckmac.com/thewholething/2009/11/buffets-big-bet/

Obamandias

2009-11-01T11:29:00.004-05:00

I met a traveler, late of Norwayland,
A meme park, cloying as Candyland,
Who said, “A vast, nay global, king is crowned,
Hawaii spawned, of earth split diverse strand,
Pre timely marriage, by two not long for him around.
Oft’ stoned, he education gained, and phlegm,
Plus caustic wife, and rep for writing great renowned.
From him pure peace will sure from passion stem,
To one and all astound, stamped on world around.

On Nobel plinth we erect his image,
Sing fulsome praise unto his visage.
“Here’s to you Obama, this prize of prizes,
We predict, imagine, the deed that to it rises.
To you great king, serene Obama,
Fond hope of hordes of baser mopes,
We grant, we sing, this hail, hosanna,
Based whole on horde of our fond hopes.”

To you who question, we render this,
“Look on his glory, ye deniers, and despair,
For from your every taunt re things amiss,
There’s nary doubt the writers most folks read,
Who grant no wrinkle, on those who leftward lead,
Will with airy twinkle, his flawless rep repair.”

With apologies Percy Bysshe. I also posted this at Zombie Contentions
http://ckmac.com/thewholething/2009/11/obamandias/

Dave is going South and Deb is irked about holidays

2009-10-29T19:19:00.006-04:00

I've been remiss in reporting that Dave, our man of the woods, told me on Monday that he's moving in with a friend from Norristown for a couple of weeks and then he will he heading south to Florida. That's sort of good and bad news. The good news, for Dave, is that he'll no doubt be a lot warmer in Florida over the next few months than he would be here. The bad news, for me, is that I'll miss running into him in the woods.

The worse news is that Dave mentioned the possibility that he won't return north, at least this far north, next summer. He's thinking of summering in the mountains of Georgia. I told him to keep in touch, which he will hopefully do with Alex when he stops by the occasional library and can get on email.

In other news Debra showed up for a visit a couple of hours ago because she had dropped her mom Dolores off at the hairdresser nearby. We talked her into having a bit of dinner after which she complained that at her school they are not allowed to refer to Christmas and Easter as holidays, instead calling them winter and spring break. But they do refer to Yom Kippur and Kwanzaa as holidays. Kwanzaa, of course is a fake holiday invented by an FBI informant, if memory serves; but Yom Kippur is definitely a religious holiday.

Well. . . after Deb left I got on the computer and one of the first things I found was a post on The Corner by Jay Nordlinger of National Review complaining about the same sort of thing. Here's what he had to say in a post titled Unsilent Night:

"A reader from Boulder, Colo., sends a note that may interest you. It responds to an item in Impromptus today. She says, “In 1994, the Fairview High School Christmas concert was going to close with the students processing out of the auditorium singing ‘Silent Night.’ Huge controversy, with multiple cries against ‘religion in the public schools.’ The school district’s attorneys said no. Since it was too late for the music teacher to arrange for something else, the students began to recess in silence. The audience was having none of it, and started singing ‘Silent Night’ themselves. That story still gives me goose-bumps.”

Holy mackerel, that took brass (and I’m not talking about trumpets and trombones). By the way, I imagine the Boulder people were not able to call that concert a “Christmas concert.” “Winter Serenade”?

Another reader writes to say, “Every December in Chicago, they have the Christkindlmarket. If they called it the ‘Christ Child Market,’ the world would come to an end! And the local bank flashes ‘Happy Holidays,’ followed by ‘Feliz Navidad.’” True, true: You can’t say “Merry Christmas,” but you can say it in Spanish. “And, in my daughter’s public school, they banned Handel but allow black spirituals.” For sure, and thank goodness for spirituals.

We could do this forever, but I’m stopping now. Happy Halloween! (Actually, it’s the day of the Crash, but in any case . . .)"

You can find Jay's post here: http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NGVjOTg0NzY1MmQ4MjRjOTEzZmM5YTFmZWU0OWFmM2M=

Things are getting beyond ridiculous

2009-10-28T23:52:00.011-04:00

A Yale educated sycophant named Rocco Landesman made a fool of himself the other day. Based on what he said in his address of October 21st to the Grantsmakers in the Arts he would have better spent his time and money studying wrestling at Bobo Brazil University rather than Drama at Yale. Mr. Landesman is Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

He said about President Barack Obama, "This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar."

First off I'll give him a break and not quibble about the fact that a specific president is a "who" rather than a "that" even though I would have expected better usage from a holder of a Doctorate of Dramatic Literature, even one from Yale.

But let's get on to serious stuff.

Barack Obama is certainly not the first president to write his own books since Teddy Roosevelt because (duh!) since TR there have been many other presidents who have written their own books. Woodrow Wilson wrote multiple books while he was a professor. And Calvin Coolidge wrote books. And Dwight Eisenhower wrote a book. And Richard Nixon wrote books. And John F. Kennedy wrote a book, And even Bill Clinton wrote a book.

It's true that Eisenhower, Nixon, and Clinton arguably had at least some help with their books, and Kennedy almost surely had a whole lot of help. But it has been credibly argued that Barack Obama may have had a bit or more of help writing his books as well.

Now, about that other assertion, that Barack Obama is the first president to write books really well since Lincoln. First off, it's a bit of an odd assertion since Lincoln never wrote a book even though he did a pretty fair job as president and he wrote very good speeches. But regardless, it for sure ain't true, no how, no way; as Huckleberry Finn might have said. For Ulysses S. Grant was a president after Lincoln, and his book was highly praised by no less a critic than a fellow named Samuel Clemens who went by the monicker Mark Twain.

Back before the utter degeneration of university academic standards I would have assumed that a person with a doctorate from Yale would recognize the name Mark Twain; but in case Rocco is reading this, I'll mention that Twain was a middling fair writer back a while ago. One of his many books was titled Pudd'nhead Landesman, or Rocc'nhead Wilson, or something like that.

Now we come to that curious construction whereby Rocco asserts that Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. Aside from it being a tad strange to liken an elected American President with a usurping Roman Dictator, that's simply not true as well, if only because there have been numerous presidents who have certainly been writers, although admittedly some of their books are not very highly regarded.

But if one were to set out to think of a writer president in connection with Julius Caesar, I would have thought it impossible for a Ph.D. to fail to think of Dwight Eisenhower long before thinking of Barack Obama, unless he was on a crusade to find something nice to say about Obama.

For Rocco's benefit I'll point out that, like Caesar, Eisenhower's most famous deed before becoming president, was conquering Gaul. He even wrote about it in his well regarded best selling book, Crusade in Europe, pretty much the way Caesar wrote about it in his well regarded best selling book The Conquest of Gaul.

Now, in fairness to Rocco, I'll mention that they may well not have copies of Caesar and Eisenhower's books at the Yale Drama School, but they're fairly readily available. Really Rocco. Even I have a copies of them.

My copy of Caesar's book starts, "Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est." No it doesn't. I lied. My copy doesn't start that way because I pretty much cruised on autopilot through Latin One and Two in high school. So my copy starts, "Gaul is divided into three parts." Like Rocco Landesman's common sense, of which he must have left two parts back at his other job when he moved to Washington.

In that regard I'm reminded of a little piece of trivia that gives another reason why Rocco shouldn't be quite so ready to praise President Obama's intellectual heft to and beyond the sky in comparison with all presidents "since Lincoln".

President James Garfield, who I'll mention came after Lincoln in case any Yale Ph.Ds are reading this, was said to be able to write an answer in Latin with one hand and in ancient Greek with the other hand in response to a verbal question put to him in English. I just found out he could also juggle indian clubs, with one of which Rocco Landesman should perhaps be smartly tapped upside the head in hopes of loosening the cobwebs in there.

Here's the whole text of Rocco's spiel to read if you think you can stand it. It actually does have some other funny parts besides the paragraph I quoted above; but I don't think Rocco meant them to be funny. They're more like funny pathetic. If he doesn't have a speechwriter he should get one; but before that he should dispose of the crayons they gave him to write and color with at Yale.
http://www.arts.gov/news/news09/arts-works-release-and-speech.html

Update - Hat tip to Scott Johnson at the Powerline Blog http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/10/024805.php
On reflection I'm realizing that's where I originally learned of Rocco Landesman's speech

And: I also posted this on Zombie Contentions at http://ckmac.com/thewholething/

A brief visit to the Peoples Republic of Massachusetts

2009-10-26T09:54:00.005-04:00

Three days we've been away, and in that time the big sugar maple tree has dropped about half of its leaves. It was at the very peak of its splendor on Sunday of last week, all shades of gold and red and green. What leaves now remain on the tree are yellow or brown.

But I don't want to write about the swift decay of the splendor of the sugar maple, its leaves deprived of essential nutrients by the choking off of tree's systems. I want to write about the splendor of the great Peoples' Republic of Massachusetts, which Linda and I visited this weekend.

We stayed in the Brookline Holiday Inn, which Christina got for us via Priceline. A great location for observing some pretty interesting stuff, and only ten blocks or so from Alex and Christina's apartment. The very first evening was made special when I observed a local copper making time with nine well oiled young ladies who emerged from a building across the street as part of a much larger group who were perhaps the competitors for the Miss Miniskirt Massachusetts title. Every one of those girls had their heads in the clouds; but their legs reached all the way to the ground.

The copper, Steve was his name, loaned his uniform hat to one of the nine he was wooing. I was hoping she would try to make off with it the way Dillon tried to do with the Guardia Civil's fancy tricorn back in Barcelona in the 1960's; but she meekly handed it back after trying it on and displaying it to the passing cab drivers. Those cab drivers were not looking at the hat, and neither was Steve. The Guardia Civil back in Barcelona was definitely focused on his tricorn when he gestured very meaningfully at Dillon with his submachine gun. He looked pretty determined to me; but to this day I don't rightly know if he would have fired had Dillon not thought better of keeping his hat.

Steve got his hat back before he guided the nine young ladies into a cab and told the cab driver it was okay to take the passenger overload. Whether he scored a phone number or not I don't know; but he did give the dollies his email address. I hope he got a number because I don't think those lasses were in condition to remember an email address.

To be continued. . . The next thrilling episode will include our encounter with the exuberant
Russkis at the restaurant, and our tour of the Harpoon Brewery. It may also include
commentary on the events that did not occur when we found our car boxed in by the idealistic young civil engineer who was so preoccupied with saving humanity by delivering materials to the Boston Headquarters for Idealism that she had no time to worry about inconveniencing a few mere humans.

Ah to be young and heedless of the risks of rudeness. Hopefully the next time she will block in someone like me in my much younger days, for even idealists, perhaps especially idealists, need learning in the wages of sin. Randy or Dillon or Paul or Dave or Nick and I would have levied quite some wages on the car of someone who boxed us in back in college days. Thomas Harris had his character Hannibal Lecter go perhaps a smidgen too far; but it is a very certain truth that free range rudeness should be answered with consequences by anyone truly idealistic upon whom it is practiced.

Update: In other news I just got an exceedingly pleasant surprise when I leafed through the mail we collected upon returning home the other day. It included a very nice postcard from Aruba where Alex and Christina are enjoying a great honeymoon, or at least they were when they sent the postcard more than a month ago. They mention seeing "enough colorful fish, sunsets and iguanas to fill at least two honeymoons". The Aruba post office must have tied this postcard to an iguana who then hitched a ride on a fish to bring it to the U.S.

Just think how quickly and efficiently our medical care will be attended to when health care is run by the government the way the post office is.

The promised recipe for Pasta e' Fagioli and some other stuff

2009-10-22T08:16:00.008-04:00

There is a squirrel with a kinked tail sitting in the pot of the baobab. He's been sitting there grooming that tail, looking around, occasionally licking for salt at the sides of the pot for a good fifteen minutes. When Linda came over and stood by the patio doors he froze up until she moved away. His threat recognition system ignores a giant monster sitting fifteen feet away; but it reacts to one standing ten feet away. The amount of time and careful attention devoted to studying such things by the wildlife biologists and such must be truly stupendous.

This particular squirrel has time to waste playing with his tail because the big white oak by the back door has produced a fall of acorns practically beyond all imaginings. Like all the other squirrels, he's probably glutted with acorns and already possessed of enough caches of them to last the winter. Plus he knows he can be blase' about acorns because the black walnut trees have also produced a bumper crop. The walnuts are still in their thick and nasty iodine smelling outer coats on the ground right now; but those coats will rot away and leave just the nuts in their shells, which will lie there contentedly until the squirrels get around to them; because nothing else can eat them. Those nuts are everything but squirrelproof.

But enough of that fat and lazy rodent; who better save his teeth for the walnuts and keep them off the trunk of my baobab tree. I sat down here to complete the recipe for Pasta e' Fagioli that I started a few days ago and then abandoned. I set the beans to simmering on Columbus Day before Jas came to get me for our tour of the new Wegmans and Best Buy, and then I forgot to finish the preparation - at least I forgot to finish the description of the preparation - of the meal. And I just remembered that I promised Linda L a description of the full recipe when we had dinner with her and Mark at the creole restaurant down in Royersford.

Linda L wanted that recipe even though I mentioned that my Pasta Fagiole, which used to be Mom's, and before that her Mom's and Pop's Mom's Pasta Fagiole, has nothing much in common with the recipes the restaurants use and the one that appears on the box of ditalini. Those other recipes are for a watery bean and vegetable country soup which contains some macaroni. My recipe is for a fairly thick bean and macaroni stew flavored with garlic, salt and pepper, and olive oil. Linda L told me that she had tasted my version one time; but for the life of me I can't remember when I ever served such a thing to a crowd.

We ate the finished Pasta Fagiole for dinner on Columbus Day and then again on Wednesday, I think it was Wednesday, of last week. And, of course, I ate some of it for lunch a couple of days last week also, and one time for breakfast even. If you remember, I cooked two pounds of great northern beans pretty much according to the directions on the package, except about four times longer. I did not make Pasta Fagiole out of all of those beans because that would have been enough to feed me and Linda and much of Royersford. Out of the pot that resulted from cooking all those beans I used nine cups for the recipe I made last week. And I also froze three containers, of five cups each.

So, let's get that recipe out of the way before I get off on another digression as I am sometimes wont to do. Cook two pounds of Great Northern Beans on low for several hours, stirring occasionally, until most of them have been reduced to mush. Mom used to like a greater percentage of the beans whole; but then Mom sold out to the point of using canned beans eventually. Pop liked Mom's canned bean ersatz concoction; but he preferred the more mushy bean consistency you can only achieve by simmering those beans to death and beyond. This I know because Pop used to describe how good the bean scrapings from the bottom of the pot tasted when his mother gave them to him. She, Grandmom Filomena, used to cook her beans on the big woodstove that sat in Aunt Carmella's kitchen, and may still sit in that kitchen now, ten years and more after Aunt Carmella passed away.

That stove was huge, and the iron top of it was at least a half inch thick, which I know from playing with the round cover things that were about the size of CDs only much thicker while Mom and Aunt Carmella and Aunt Tavia and sometimes Aunt Mary were having coffee and cookees at the table. You could lift those round things and then let them accidentally clang down very satisfyingly onto the stovetop with that iron tool that slotted into them until you were given another cookie and chased from that kitchen.

You only get the sort of bean curd effect on the bottom of the pot that Pop described if you cook beans until they disintegrate. Which I would remind Mom about whenever I saw her opening bean cans in her later years and I wanted to generate a sharp reaction to liven things up. Despite her immediate reaction, which usually entailed the waving of her big spoon, Mom loved that line of discussion because it inevitably led straight back to feeding families cheaply in the days when she made great pots of beans and macaroni from scratch down on Penn Street. Sometimes it even led all the way back to the story about trapping blackbirds in the back yard of 403 Walnut Street; or the story of Grandmom Angela catching the boarder not shaking the milk and using the cream on top for his morning coffee; or the story of the men sneaking into the rail yard at night to dislodge coal from the cars, so the women could go in the morning to gather it; or the story of Grandmom Angela feeding ten, or was it fifteen, or twenty, with one pound of beef and a whole lot of potatoes and greens - in the era after the blackbirds had learned to avoid her back yard.

But I see that I've done it again, digressed from providing the recipe. Cook two pounds of beans according to the package directions but much longer. About 2/3rds of the way through cooking the beans add two bulbs of garlic, the cloves peeled and more or less finely chopped, of course. Fry the garlic just a bit in about a cup or so of olive oil, to drive the hotness out of it, before adding it and the oil to the bean pot. Also add two or three level teaspoons of salt and half or maybe a whole level teaspoon of pepper. And add a 14 ounce can of tomato sauce for color. If you don't have tomato sauce you can use ketchup or diced tomatoes, but if Mom heard you say you did that the spoon would really have waved. The addition of the oil and garlic will help in keeping the beans from sticking. This is the modern age of dials to control the heat and flat ended stirring spoons with which to scrape the bottom of the pot, not the age of cooking over a wood fired stove and wooden spoons shaped pretty much like blunt sticks. We do not end with bean mush stuck to the bottom of the pot, if we're careful.

From the resulting pot of beans, oil, garlic and tomato sauce for color, remove 9/24ths of the total and mix that with about 2/3rds of a pound of Ditalini cooked to the bare minimum time suggested on the package and then almost completely drained. If the beans are especially thick drain a little less water from the ditalini. If the beans seem a bit thin drain all of the water from the ditalini. That's the recipe I made the other evening. Each of the three containers I have in the freezer contains 5/24ths of that pot. I will probably mix each with about a third of a pound of ditalini, maybe a little more.

Pop used to eat Pasta Fagiole for breakfast whenever there was some of it in the refrigerator. In later years he would sometimes be sitting there in the kitchen window when I went over there for coffee, eating beans and macaroni with that giant flat bowled tablespoon he liked for that specific purpose. We have that spoon, the one with the slightly kinked metal fatigued spot on its handle. We still occasionally use it as a serving spoon for salad, although I prefer a different spoon for that purpose.

Pasta Fagiole is perhaps the ultimate comfort food from the days when people ate cheap and hearty stuff like beans and macaroni for the comfort of a full belly; before some wiseacre thought up the term "comfort food" and thus consigned such foods to mild association with eating to assuage our neuroses.

Update: In other news, scientists have discovered a new species of web spinning spider whose females grow to be bigger than a CD. So far they haven't actually seen a live one, just dead specimens in museums and parts of recently alive ones that have fallen to the ground in the rainforests of Africa. They think the reason they haven't seen a live one in its web is that the females live in the tops of the tall trees where they don't fear most birds and lizards and other such predators on ordinary two or three or four inch in diameter spiders because they look upon them as comfort food.

The scientist who study spiders are apparently short of help. They desperately need a few assistants to climb up those trees, ignoring the trifling snakes and foot long centipedes and other biting stuff, to find those giant spiders and study them, perhaps even capture one to bring down to the ground alive. They assure me that these particular spiders do not jump on things they want to eat but rather wait patiently, camouflaged in their sturdy webs, confident that plenty of food will come to them.

Who says there are no jobs available in this economy?

Update 2: The other night, after I told the story of Lefty and the drapes which Mom always used to tell, Linda told me she had never heard Mom tell her Lefty story, which was a cautionary tale about the taking in of stray troubled souls. Jas and Kathy also seemed to have never heard that story even though Jas remembered that Lefty used to sleep on the pile of burlap bags in the back of Harry's Potato Market until he pulled the knife on Patty. Lefty had a lot, a very lot, of very hard miles on him when we knew him. Mom's story predated that. One of these days I have to tell it here, but not in connection with a food recipe.

Harry took in strays all the time. He took in the quiet and nice black guy from down at the wharf who later stole some money Harry had in the trailor for a trip South to buy watermelons, which caused Harry to buy the pistol about which Patty used to act out a very funny story. And, of course, Harry later took in Eddie Fight, who never stole anything, but who also never did even a lick of work that I ever saw. Eddie had a lot of hard miles on him also, and he could be provoked to crack us up with one of his sayings. "Smarty, eh, smarty had a party." and "Nice man, Harry, very nice man. He'll give you a leaf for a lettuce patch any day."

Those idiots can't even carve up and pass out pork intelligently

2009-10-19T12:36:00.003-04:00

Mark Twain famously said, "Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself."

Well. . . we've just had an example of the liberals in congress passing out pork so stupidly that they gave far more to their opponents than to their supporters.

According to analysis at The Audacious Epigone blog the three most liberal states are Massachusetts, Hawaii and Rhode Island; and the three most conservative states are Wyoming, Idaho and Utah.

Now you would think that the liberals in congress would have passed out more juicy pork to the liberal states than to the conservative states when they put together their big stimulus bill back in February. But according to Recovery.gov the three most conservative states overall got one job for every 3,898 residents; while the most liberal states got only one job for every 10,544 residents.

Wyoming – 61 jobs/532,000 population = one for every 8,741 residents
Idaho – 632 jobs/1,523,000 population = one for every 2,410 residents
Utah – 536 jobs/2,736,000 population = one for every 5,104 residents
Total - 1229 jobs/4,791,000 = one for every 3,898 residents

Massachusetts – 583 jobs/6,497,000 population = one for every 11,144 residents
Hawaii – 249 jobs/1,288,000 population – one for every 5,172 residents
Rhode Island – 6 jobs/1,051,000 population – one for every 175,166 residents
Total - 838 jobs/8,836,000 = one for every 10,544 residents

Congresscritters aren't even smart and efficient when it comes to rewarding their friends. How can it possibly make sense to want to give them more control over the national economy?

State by state conservative versus liberal rankings from http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2009/10/economic-social-and-foreign-policy.html

State by state job creation figures from
http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/TextView.aspx?data=recipientTopJobs&ViewAll=100

State population figures from
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=phNtm3LmDZEMdMS7_GYVYYQ

Hat tip to Razib Khan who writes as David Hume on The Secular Right blog. His post there got me started on this train of thought with his link to The Audacious Epigone.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=phNtm3LmDZEMdMS7_GYVYYQ

You break it, you own it

2009-10-15T13:09:00.003-04:00

Colin Powell and Richard Armitage famously cited the Pottery Barn rule in talking about intervention into the affairs of other countries – “You break it, you own it.”

It seems to me that application of a corollary of that rule is a cure for one big problem that ails our current health care insurance system.

Currently, under COBRA, a company’s health insurance provider is required to offer continuation coverage at the company cost rate for two years after someone leaves the company. But after that the provider has no further obligation.

For people with pre-existing conditions continuation coverage is a great boon since they can’t easily get other insurance. On the other hand it’s a potential trap for people who don’t have pre-existing conditions when they leave a company because at that point they can get alternative coverage, but if they stay with the company’s provider they court the danger of developing a pre-existing condition during the two year continuation period.

If COBRA were amended to require insurers to offer continuation coverage to age 65 to anyone they once insure that problem would go away. People who develop pre-existing conditions would have the option of extending their coverage with the insurer who had them when they developed the condition.

Naturally, insurers would have to take this new obligation into account in setting their rate tables. And they would have to negotiate to swap responsibility with other insurers when people move to other states and such. But doing stuff like that is what insurance companies are good at.

All in all, it seems to me that this change would be far less onerous than what the insurers are going to get in the way of regulation because of the very understandable sympathy there is for people who become orphaned and uninsurable two years after being laid off.

Why can’t insurance companies be required to follow a “You own him when he breaks, you own him for life” rule.

Update: Another thing about the health care insurance debate. Why do many persist in saying that a new not-for-profit health care insurance provider is necessary without mentioning that there is already a national association of not-for-profit providers that’s a major factor in the market – namely the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association?

I also posted this at Zombie Contentions - http://ckmac.com/thewholething/

Being the continuance of Jas and Sull's excellent adventure

2009-10-14T08:37:00.007-04:00

When I left off the other day Jas and I were pretty much finished with our exploration of the big new Wegmans, so we drove over to the new Best Buy. We had to drive because the Best Buy is a pretty long way from the Wegmans. That shopping center is big; it has more length of commercial streeds than Norristown did in the 1950's when Al Martino was still a young pup of a crooner and Mom and Pop used to take us down to see the Christmas lights on Main Street.

We would go into Chatlin's Department Store and marvel at the toys, which were up on the fourth floor as I recall. Days of Wonder! Erector Sets and cap guns and bows and arrows and Daisy Air Rifles; and a Lionel Train display with working trains going around and around the tracks. Chatlin's display of trains was almost as big as the one Uncle Froggy used to set up in the combination living room and dining room of Grandmom and Grandpop's row house up on Walnut Street.

All four floors of that old Chatlin's would be lost within one corner of the Best Buy. The place is as big as an aircraft hangar. And it's positively crammed with toys for boys that would have been beyond our wildest imaginings back in the 1950's. The TV in our old house on Penn Street had about an 8 inch screen on which little cowboys and indians may have ridden; but I can't remember ever seeing that TV on. That was no terrible hardship because Uncle Chick and Aunt Mary had a big screen TV next door. Their TV was the most amazing thing I ever spent much time with until Uncle Froggy got the first color set any of us had seen in the 1960's.

I watched Hopalong Cassidy with Uncle Chick on many and many a Saturday morning, both of us lying on the floor with our noses a few inches from the twelve inch screen. Uncle Chick was a big kid on those Saturday mornings. He was also a Slovak, the only Slovak I knew. So I thought for quite a while that all Slovaks were big kids, just as I thought all South Philly Italians were big kids because Uncle Froggy was a big kid.

Uncle Froggy lived in Norristown, but he had grown up in Philly and you could tell. He acted like a kid much more than my other uncles. First off, he was a fireman, and when the fire siren sounded he went running. Plus, he drove a big dump truck around as his regular job. But he seemed to go where he wanted pretty much as he pleased with that dump truck. He was sort of like a foster son of the guy who owned the mill where the dump truck was supposed to be; so I guess nobody was keeping real close tabs on him. He also did unusual things when he worked the counter down at Babe's luncheonette. If me or Matty or Sonny went in there and gave him a quarter for a lemonade he would give us a big lemonade, and he would also give us three or four dimes and a nickel back as change. I was pretty little when we still lived in Norristown; but even when I was little I knew that getting four dimes and a nickel back as change for a quarter was unusual.

But I need to stop dwelling on my first childhood and get back to the present one. . .

The Best Buy has a wall of big screen TVs that's about a hundred yards long. Jas and I started off at the left end looking at the little 40 inch sets and then strolled up the marching line of sets until we got to the end of the selection of 55 inchers that cap off the display. In the cavern of the Best Buy those 55 inchers are suprisingly small looking even though any one of them is probably as big as the table in Aunt Mary R's kitchen that would hold enough meat ravioli to feed the 20 or so of us who would eat around it in shifts on Christmas Day because the dining room was, of course, filled with Uncle Froggy's train layout. Matty used to crawl under the train table and pop up through the hole in the middle of it to run the display.

After spending a good bit of time with the TVs we moved along to the laptop computers, the very smallest of which has a screen about the size of Uncle Froggy's first color TV set. The people on those laptop screens don't have green faces and the grass on them is not blue.

But enough of the Best Buy. We left there after spending some time with the young pup salesman near the laptops and learning that he had to go ask somebody else what the difference is between 3G network and a 4G network, or whatever, which Jas wanted to know for some reason. As if either of us would have understood the answer even assuming the salesman had come back with a coherent answer. I just looked up the matter on Wikipedia and I still don't think I understand it even though Wiki probably does have a coherent answer.

I made coffee when we got back to our house, and Jas and I discussed the usual things that we've been gnawing at like bones for thirty years over coffee. Then he suggested that we go for a walk becaue he wanted to see Dave's little camping compound in the woods. So we strolled out the driveway and over to the right of way on our neighbor's property that leads past the water company's little chlorine gas danger building and then past the little strongly fenced enclosure that I think has something to do with the sewer interceptor. That right of way took us back onto our property and put us on the path I keep mowed along the sewer line right of way.

Incidently, our neighbor may not know that the right of way on his three quarter acre suburban lot is not necessarily intended for use by private guys with tractors like me who are too lazy to make a ford across the big creek to allow easier direct access to the other side of their property, so if you see him don't say anything.

Anyway, Jas and I shortly came to where the side path leads to Dave's kraal, for that's what it's become, in the woods. Dave has been more or less been living back there in our woods, happy as a clam or a Masai, for a few years, but the kraal is new this year. Formerly Dave moved around between three or four little campsites where he would simply stretch his hammock between trees but he became more ambitious this year as the cold has started to come on. He now has a little low cabin made of cast off lumber, surrounded by a brush stockade which is quite impressive. Dave doesn't have any livestock in his kraal; but he does have a little semicircular seating area aound the firepit in front of his cabin for visitors.

By a miracle Dave was home at about noon when Jas and I stopped by. I say a miracle because the other day was the very first time I've ever come upon Dave sleeping in any of his campsites in all the times I've walked or driven my tractor over there. A bit inconvenient - I will no longer be able to say to the neighbors or the police that I don't actually know for a fact that Dave sleeps in the woods. Dave has always been elusive. I usually see him coming or going from his dad's house up in the neighborhood on the other side, or I see him on the paths, seldom more than once every couple weeks.

Jas and I spent a few minutes talking with Dave, learning that he's making a longbow, inspired no doubt by Chris the bowhunter who just got his first deer with a longbow a few weeks ago. Dave also told us that it was Chris who made the deer that died of natural causes a couple of weeks ago right near the pond disappear from the place where I dragged it with the tractor. Dave said Chris dragged the deer to a low spot in a gully where it will decompose faster. A mystey solved!

When we were done talking with Dave, Jas and I continued up the paths toward the old house on Route 29. And who should we encounter but Dan who was fueling his chainsaw. I gave Dan permission to cut wood on the property earlier in the fall because I want the field behind the Route 29 house to become a pasture. And Dan needs the money he's been earning by selling firewood since he's out of work. So far he's cleared about an acre of our land, doing a very nice job of it. The stumps are cut low enough so I'll be able to keep it mown without trouble.

It was at that point that Jas suggested lunch at the new Ray's across 29, his treat. Dan commented that he had found the hamburgers at Ray's very good, but considered the french fries a bit greasy. We found him to be right about the french fries, but thought them greasy in a good way, like Boardwalk Fries in Atlantic City. Route 29 isn't Park Place quite yet; but it's come a very long way from the two lane road with no shoulders that it was back in 1978 when we bought this property. It's now three lanes wide in front of the our old house there, and four lanes wide just up the way where the commercial office buildings are across from the big new Wawa.

I doubt that a single one of the pharmaceutical company yuppies who endlessly zip back and forth along that road are aware that Dan is patiently clearcutting in the woods behind a screen of trees and brush that I suggested he leave standing for the moment, piling up dozens of cords of firewood, about seventy yards away. I'm practically certain that not a one of them is aware that Dave is happily living in his kraal, making a longbow and practicing with his sling, generally living a bit of the life of a solitary pre-industrial Masai or Navajo, less than three hundred yards away from their bustle.

For God's sake don't tell them any of this. The new world those yuppies are making is an excellent, a fantastic, world, containing many new wonders; but I like being able to come across older style wonders as well.

Postscript: It would be wrong of me to close this out without mentioning that I just saw that Al Martino died yesterday at 82. Al got his start as a crooner in South Philly back in 1952, the year that Sam was born, and the year before Jas was born, when I was four and just becoming aware of the wonders in the world. http://tinyurl.com/Al-Martino-Dead-at-82

A day of wonder in second childhood

2009-10-12T13:54:00.005-04:00

First off, it's impossible to find time to think undisturbed. It's about 1:00 and I just sat down to write up this day of wonder. And almost immediately that possibly winter damned little woodpecker came back and started tapping at the patio door window and shamelessly displaying to his reflection. Yesterday he woke me up, very thoughfully just before the alarm went off, by tapping on the bedroom window. All the little buddies he was playing around with last week are gone. They may already be headed south. You had better give up with the windows guy, and get your backside south. It's getting cold.

Maybe he listened to me. He's gone now so I can get back to the events so far of the day.

Jas, who is off work because of Columbus Day, called at about 9:30 to ask if I wanted to go out and play. Of course I did; so he came by after stopping at the drugstore. While I was waiting for him I started two pounds of great northern beans on low. The package directions call for simmering them only a couple of hours after soaking them overnight; but I like them mostly disintegrated for Pasta Fagiole, so those beans are still over there slow cooking.

After Jas arrived we went over to the big new playground that just opened and took a couple of hour walk through the Wegman's and then through the Best Buy which are pretty much the only stores open over there at this point. The Wegmans is enormous! And it has friendly people giving out sample snacks here and there, which the little dusty playgrounds of my first childhood did not have. And even if those old time playgrounds had had people giving out snacks they would certainly not have included samples of buttery brie on bread. Very good brie, and the nice lady insisted on giving us some even after we told her we weren't shopping but only walking around.

As we were walking down one of the aisles I heard an old woman exclaiming to her buddy about the price of the gourmet cat food she was looking at. Once we were out of earshot Jas mentioned that she probably drove ten miles to price out the cat food the way Mom and Aunt Mary used to run around to all the stores buying this here and that there. Mom and Aunt Mary never bought catfood though. Cats ate leftover people food back in those days.

Old people sure are funny. They've got all the time in the world to go around doing stuff like strolling around five acre supermarkets eating free samples and checking prices. Which reminds me, I noticed that Wegmans sells the big bottles of soda for 89 cents, which is a lot better price than prevails at Redners where the best you can do, even on sale, is a buck a bottle. Not that I would save any money by going to Wegmans to shop. The place is positively filled with enticing stuff that is not priced at 89 cents and I'm an impulse shopper even when not hungry.

There is, for instance, and olive bar that has selections you don't even see down at the cheese and olive store in the Italian Market down in Philly. I could easily spend twenty bucks at that olive bar after I save 11 cents on a bottle of Diet Mountain Dew.

And Wegmans has five kinds of caviar. Imagine that, caviar for sale right here in Collegeville. And most of that caviar isn't even expensive. Four of the caviar varieties are bargains at only $5.17 an ounce; a pretty darn good price compared to the 28 bucks and change that they want for an ounce of the one expensive variety. Caviar for poor folks. I'm sure only really rich people buy that expensive caviar. Regular guys like me and Jas would never pay that outrageous price. We would stick to the cheaper stuff.

And the produce section! What a thrill that was for two kids who worked at Harry's Potato Market back in our first childhood. That was back when we told people to please don't squeeze the tomatoes displayed under the big cardboard sign that said "FLORDIA TOMATS - 3 lbs FOR 50 (CENTS)".

I put that "CENTS" in parentheses because this darn computer doesn't have a key for the little "cents" symbol. I'll bet Wegmans has computers that have a key for the "cents" symbol; and I'll betcha dollars to donuts they have somebody who knows how to reliably spell "Florida" as well - or maybe they have a spell checker on their computers. Harry apparently didn't have a spell checker on his computer, and he didn't trouble to use me or Jas or Sam or Patty as spell checkers when he made up signs. We laughed about that Flordia sign every year for three or four years when Harry took it out each fall after the last of the local tomatoes were gone.

Harry's computer used to do other funny things. One time, for instance, he priced the figs for individual sale at far less than their bulk cost. Which didn't much matter anyway because there was a lot of shrinkage of those figs. . . a very lot of shrinkage. Harry himself liked them quite a bit, and we did too. Working at Harry's had very few perks; but one of those was eating all of the fruit you could possibly want to eat. It was accepted practice, for instance that the last watermelon off the truck simply had to be dropped, not far enough to make it mushy, but far enough to make it needful of cutting up.

But back to Wegmans. They have fruits and vegetables in their produce section that I haven't seen since I walked through the outdoor markets of Singapore and Hong Kong and Bangkok back when live monkeys were to be had in out of the way places, and not for pets. And, even forgetting about the exotic stuff, there are brussel sprouts still on the stem, about fifteen varieties of lettuce and an aisle of different types of tomatoes that has more shelf space than Harry's whole potato market. The most impressive thing is that they have all of those fruits and vegetables in both normal form for people who eat normal fruits and vegetables, and in super high priced organic form for the kind of people who turn their noses up at cheap caviar and insist on the 28 buck an ounce variety. And the milk! Don't even get me started on the milk except to say that they have at least three big milk sections scattered around that store.

Not that I had a lot of time to pay proper attention to the milk sections. As always Jas was in a hurry, just like he always was back in first childhood. Now, as then, he even wastes time in a hurry. He was always a few steps ahead of me and making me feel guilty for not moving along fast enough. So now I'm going to have to go back to Wegmans one day to see if one of their milk sections is like their produce section. At this point I can only report that it will not surprise me one bit if I find that they have goat and camel and yak milk, all in both normal and organic varieties.

More later. . . I have some stuff to do for tonight's Pasta e' Fagioli. My next post will start "After we left the Wegmans. . ." That next post will include the thrilling tale of our stroll through Best Buy and our brief stop at the big new Wawa, along with the events that led up to our visiting Dave at his little camp in the woods and then coming upon Dan, who was refueling his chainsaw, and getting his opinion of the french fries at the place we were walking to for lunch.

With apologies to Samuel Taylor

2009-10-10T12:23:00.009-04:00

Ode to NASA's LCROSS Mission

At Cabeus did NASA geeks,
A swifty Centaur rocket hurl,
Where dust, and mayhap water reeks,
‘Pon craters numberless, and peaks,
Under the cosmic whirl.

Sent a metric ton of massy metal,
To feel out lunar soil’s fettle.
And cunning careful cameras set,
To record impact on lunar rill,
Ensure the wants of public met,
Make time long record of the thrill,
Assure balmy days for budget till.

But, oh! When stopwatch ended countdown,
To indicate the mighty crashdown,
Appeared no hint of fiery flash down,
There on Selene’s apparition.

Were the cameras to be faulted,
For missing flash on Moon assaulted?

Or had some Lunar Politician,
Told Ace, a junior lab technician,
"Strip down that leftover techy thing,
From building that new Saturn ring,
Set a force field strong and watchful,
To stop this arrogant man tossed missile. "

"Include a grokking gizmo, Ace,
To do that thing of the Martian race.
Twist that racing Terran thing,
Clear outa this here four D space.
Enough of taking human guff!
Teach those Earthlings right enough,
That they're not really red hot stuff!"

Cow Peas, Political Kings and Saturn's Rings

2009-10-08T09:34:00.014-04:00

Usually I'm the one who brings up scientific trivia during our nightly walk; but the other night Linda surprised me with news that scientists have discovered a new ring around Saturn. Then she moved on to calling the Nobel Prize given for ribosome chemistry "boring."

That led to me, falsely it turns out, criticizing the Nobel Committee for the "fact," as I then thought, that Norman Borlaug had never been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize while Fat Albert the Gorester and Jimmy the Peanut Farmer Carter had each been awarded one, along with Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat, at least one of whom should have been awarded iron shackles and a copper jacketed bullet to the head rather than a peace prize gold medal, depending on your point of view.

And thus I learned that Linda, who's probably better informed than 90% of this country's population, and 95% of the world's population, had never heard of Norman Borlaug.

. . . never heard of Norman Borlaug, even though he actually was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, plus a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977, and a Congressional Gold Medal in 2006.

Norman Borlaug was also awarded a Padma Vibhusan, which is India's second highest civilian award, also in 2006. He wasn't apparently thought quite as worthy as Nelson Mandela, who holds the distinction of being the only foreigner ever awarded the Bharat Ratna, which is India's highest civilian award.

Now, I certainly have nothing against Nelson Mandela, who is a very great man as men go; but, but, but. . . what sort of world is it where Nelson Mandela deserves India's highest civilian award while the best it could do for Norman Borlaug was to award him its SECOND highest civilian award.

India, of all places, where probably a third of the population is alive and eating instead of dead and rotting because of Norman Borlaug. . .

It's true that Norman Borlaug did nothing but stunningly boring and tedious work in agronomy, a stunningly boring field, from when he got his PhD in plant pathology and genetics in 1942 until he died on September 12th of this year.

First he fed millions of Mexicans by developing a high yield, disease resistant, semi-dwarf wheat. Then he doubled down and fed tens of millions more Mexicans by bucking his boss and the agronomy establishment and going on to develop various varieties of his special wheat to allow double cropping each season.

In 1962 he got bored with feeding Mexicans, so he moved to South Asia, where he fought and won a long battle with hidebound government bureaucrats (oxymoron alert) and proceeded to feed hundreds of millions of Indians and Pakistanis by proving to farmers that they could plant and harvest and eat his Mexican semi-dwarf wheat varieties without having to give up their naan and raga rhythms in favor of tortillas and mariachi music. In the process he made a fool of Paul Erlich whose Population Bomb, thereby, er, bombed, big time.

Probably because he missed the Mariachi music he was back in Mexico and had already left for his test fields in the Toluca valley by 4:00 AM on the day the Nobel Prize Committee called to tell his wife that he had won the peace prize. After she told him about that, totally in character, he finished his work in the fields before he came back home to where the microphones were and pretty soon made his name mud with the environmentalists by hurling a big cow flop at them.

. . . "some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things."

Having skewered the well fed and self satisfied Al Gore types like so many kebabs he retired to rest a bit, soakin' up the rays part of the time in Mexico and part of the time in Texas. But there was to be no enduring rest for him; because well fed Western European and American environmentalists were determined to keep most black Africans starving, their children stumbling dazedly around with hunger swollen bellies, even as they praised Nelson Mandela for achieving change by voluntarily starving himself in prison.

So it was that a Japanese shipbuilding tycoon, Ryoichi Sasakawa, called up Borlaug, who was probably enjoying a well deserved marguerita by the pool, and lured him to Ethiopia, where what he saw convinced him to stay in Africa for a while to feed tens and hundreds of millions of people there.

"I assumed we'd do a few years of research first," Borlaug later recalled, "but after I saw the terrible circumstances there, I said, 'Let's just start growing'." Soon, Borlaug had projects in seven countries. Yields of maize and sorghum in developed African countries doubled between 1983 and 1985. Yields of wheat, cassava, and cowpeas also increased in these countries."

Even Jimmy Carter was impressed enough to put down his knife and fork for a while to help a bit by travelling to Ethiopia and convincing the latter day pharoah there to let his people go. . . and use fertilizer. . . no matter how much the environmentalists who were growing fat eating lobster and caviar on the self congratulatory lecture circuit whined and stamped and insisted that Africans were better off dead or starving than alive and well fed enough to stomp around to the music of their koras and mbiras and bougarabous.

That's who Norman Borlaug was until he died last month at age 95 after a life spent saving the lives of perhaps a billion people.

Norman Borlaug, unlike Al Gore and a lot of other much more famous men, was a man who had a dream, a dream of well fed peasants in India and Africa and Asia and South America. A dream of a world without so many bloated belly babies to provide photo ops for Madonna and Bono and Sean Penn and Al Gore and Jimmy Carter.

And he was a man who patiently and incredibly made that dream a reality, with his hands and with his brain, on the ground amidst the cow flops, in a dozen countries, despite the carping of ivory tower environmentalist types and the foot-dragging of status quo government types. A man who actually did something, quite a big thing, about the simple fact that "Without food, man can live at most but a few weeks; without it, all other components of social justice are meaningless. . . Yet food is something that is taken for granted by most world leaders despite the fact that more than half of the population of the world is hungry."

And that's why it's a damn shame that there isn't even a plaque honoring his name in the hall in India, now home to a billion much better fed people because of his dream and work, where they mark the names of those, like Nelson Mandela, who have been awarded the Bharat Ratna.

Facts and quotes mostly from the well of Wikipedia. Outrage and shamelessly plagiarized Mario Puzo/Hyman Roth quote from my own deep well. The contents of a can of Campbell's Chunky New England Clam Chowder were heated and enjoyed during the writing of this message.

From a world lit only by fire to a world connected by the internet

2009-10-06T08:54:00.007-04:00

Bob just bought my copy of A World Lit Only By Fire; and Bill just bought my copy of Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army. Bob lives in Virginia. Bill, who is a Chief Warrant Officer, has an APO armed forces address, so there's no telling where he lives right now; but I'm going to take a wild ass guess and say he's either in Afghanistan or will be headed there soon.

There's an old military maxim that goes something like, 'Amateurs talk about tactics, professionals talk about logistics.' And, if Bill is indeed in Afghanistan, he's living out a bit of what it was like when the world was lit only by fire.

Alexander had to worry quite a bit about logistics when he decided to go to Afghanistan, which wasn't a walk in a park, because Darius had gone on the lam up that way after running away from the battle of Issus. Alexander was pretty serious about catching Darius. He took about 64,000 fighting men with him when he crossed the Khawak Pass in the Hindu Kush; and he also took about 36,000 or so camp followers who straggled along with his army providing various more or less essential services. For one thing there were thousands among those camp followers who managed the tens of thousands of pack animals that carried supplies from the fertile areas to the barren ones.

Logistics were a lot simpler in those days, but men have had to eat three or so pounds of food a day in all ages, so something like a couple of hundred thousand pounds of food had to reach those fighting men pretty much every day, especially when they were taking sixteen days to file through the narrow passes where there was snow on the ground and the cold was nearly unfathomable to we who have lived all our lives with central heating. The pack horses and the cavalry horses had to eat pretty much every day while they were up in those passes too.

Most of us will never walk the passes of the Hindu Kush as Alexander's men did and as Bill may. But quite a lot of us have crossed Rocky Mountain National Park on Trail Ridge Road while going from Denver to Craig via Estes Park and Hot Sulphur Springs. When I was last there it was still pretty cold at Milner's pass even during the day in late May. For a fairly sedentary sort like me walking that route is nearly unimaginable, although it is possible for me to imagine Dave and Alex walking a good bit of it when they went out there hiking a couple of years ago. Part of the very distant reason a million Alex's are named Alex is because that distant past Alexander walked and rode the passes of the Hindu Kush with those 64,000 men.

Which sort of brings me back to the Bill who's interested in the logistics effort behind Alexander's conquests. By the miracle of the internet I may know a bit more about Bill if I give my assumptions some rein so they can run pretty free. For instance, there's a Bill with the same last name who is a Technical Chief Warrant Officer 3 and was just selected for promotion to Chief Warrant Officer 4. If that's the same Bill I congratulate him on his promotion and thank him for his long service to our country that has gotten him to that rank.

I think I'll put a congratulations and thank you note in Bill's book when I send it off today.

Incidently, I also know a bit more about Bob than the fact that he's interested in history and technology and the way the world changed at the end of the dark ages. I know he's retired, and I know he contributed a couple of hundred bucks to a Democratic Party candidate for a state office. I'm not going to hold that against him; but he gets no note with his book, although I hope he enjoys it as much as I did both the first time a couple of dozen years ago and the second time a month or so ago when I rediscovered it. When I rediscovered A World Lit Only By Fire I listed it for sale at an artificially high price to ensure that it wouldn't sell before I had a chance to re-read it. Learning now that Bob is a Democrat I can't help but feel just a little pleased that I never got around to re-pricing it lower.

By great coincidence I happen to be re-reading A Canticle for Leibowitz right now because I rediscovered it in the course of sorting out my books and putting the ones that have any value on Amazon for sale. It's about a future world lit only by fire and in part about the nitty gritty details, the logistics if you will, that are entailed in rediscovering technology after a long dark age like that which still befogs most of Afghanistan. A Canticle for Leibowitz is also about a problem facing all of us who are readers - so many books, so little time.

Update: In other news, there is a somewhat confused but very persistent woodpecker who has been trying to mate with his reflection in our windows for a couple of days. The other day he gave up and joined with a flock of other woodpeckers who came around to see what was up; but he's now back and patiently going from window to window, doing his thing, trying to get a reaction from his reflection.

Health care is expensive - so is the newest and biggest plasma TV

2009-09-27T11:43:00.006-04:00

Recently there has been quite a lot written about how expensive health care is. Which isn't surprising, because health care is expensive, especially if you want access to all the latest technology, which most people do when their lives are at stake.

But the truth is that health care is just like TV. If you're satisfied to watch a ten year old technology TV you can get one at Walmart for a hundred bucks. If you want the latest huge screen plasma model it's going to cost you ten or twenty times as much.

The next time you hear someone whining about the cost of a new wonder drug remind him that he can save a lot of money by using an old generic drug that's probably almost as good. If there is no old generic drug that treats his condition you can remind him that the new drug is very logically worth quite a lot if he would have died before it was invented.

The government charges a young person something like 14% of his income for Social Security, which is insurance that he will get a fairly minimal pension in his old age. By that standard the value of medical treatments which will let him live to old age is quite high.

But just how expensive is health care? It turns out that it's not very expensive at all considering the alternative. There is a website called ehealthinsurance.com that will quickly give you quotes on health insurance if you put in your age.

It turns out that a 25 year old can get catastrophic coverage with a high deductible for $40 a month, or he can get a gold plated policy for about $175 a month. Figure one day a month working at the local McDonalds for basic catastrophic coverage and a few days a month of minimum wage work for gold plated coverage.

The rates for a 61 year old are, not surprisingly, quite a bit steeper since he's quite a bit closer to his sell by date and is probably already a medical mess. But even so, a 61 year old can buy catastrophic coverage for about $200 a month, which he can net with about a week's work at the local Wawa even after the government grabs its taxes. It's true that gold plated coverage at about $1,000 per month is pretty much out of the ballpark for the 61 year old unless he's saved up and/or built up the skills to make significant income; but if he's 61 he should already know that anybody who ever promised him a rose garden was bullshitting. A 61 year old is too dumb to be worth saving if he doesn't already know that life ain't fair, and then you die.

Another thing that gets to me is the constant whining about how the cost of extraordinary health care is driving some people to bankruptcy. Even as I feel sorry for those people, it's very hard for me to avoid thinking that bankruptcy is a whole lot better than dead, which is what they would be without the extraordinary health care.

The great circle of life

2009-09-22T10:45:00.007-04:00

It's the season of the fawns. Three of the cute little tykes have been gambolling oer the lawn, stretching their little legs, testing the strength of their little haunches. Their mothers move in somewhat more stately fashion.

All very picturesque and life affirming, until one of the mothers ceases to move in stately fashion and comes to just lie there with one unseeing eye staring up at the sky, proclaiming a very inconvenient truth, dead in the middle of the path behind the pond, flies gambolling around that one accusatory eye.

She was still alive the other day, that visible eye occasionally blinking, her breath shallow. She didn't seem to be suffering, unlike that other one with the hurt hoof a few years ago that somehow got himself all tangled up in the wild rose bush where he struggled and struggled. Thankfully this one died on her own, so I was spared the very unpleasant necessity of putting her out of her misery.

But she couldn't stay where she was. So I went out this morning with the tractor and dragged her to a less conspicuous spot. She's pretty well off the path through the old horse pasture, down near where the local kids dragged those rectangular clay drainage pipes and set them up as supports for benches around a firepit a few years ago. Nobody used that firepit this spring; and they certainly won't be using it this fall.

Early on, way back in 1979 or so, Mom got an introduction to the whims of the country just after she and Pop moved into Colwell's old house. Colwell's dog found a deer carcass in the woods and had a grand old time dragging ribs and long bones and big pieces of hide around the lawns. Unlike Pop, Mom was not amused. She wanted me to go down in the marsh and bury the carcass; but by the time the dog got to dragging pieces around there really wasn't much of a carcass to bury.

The good news is that there aren't any big dogs around to tear this new carcass apart and drag pieces of it all over the place; the bad news is that if something doesn't tear it apart it's going to raise quite a stink. I won't be walking the lower loop of the path through the old horse pasture until the cold of winter sets in. Other walkers will just have to take their chances.

Not quite the same as knowing about every feather that falls from a sparrows tail, but. . .

2009-09-21T14:15:00.005-04:00

These researchers set up a couple of cameras to watch the sky over part of the desert in Australia. Then they calculated where a meteor fell based on the track it made on the videos. They found the tennis ball sized meteorite within 100 yards of the place their system predicted that it had landed.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090917144123.htm

Springtime for Putin and Medvedev

2009-09-17T09:18:00.010-04:00

President Obama has done some very dumb political things since taking office. He's appointed people who have had obvious scandal problems and he's later had to withdraw their appointments. He badly underestimated the resistance there would be to the Cap and Trade energy tax that the Green wing of his party wants badly. And he was clumsy in the way he tried to sell his health care plan with the result that his Democratic Party allies have been put into bad political positions this summer.

But none of those mistakes were very surprising in light of the fact that he has not had much experience on the national scene. And none of those mistakes will necessarily doom Obama to being written down as one of the truly bad presidents, like Jimmy Carter. People forget that Bill Clinton, who is now considered a political genius, also made clumsy mistakes during his first few months in office. Lots of new presidents have made dumb mistakes early in their terms and then gone on to improve the quality of the advisors around them, reassess their plans and goals, and manage to do pretty well on the whole.

But today President Obama cancelled the missile defense system that's been negotiated for and planned for Western Europe since the Clinton Administration. As a result he betrayed the governments of Poland and The Czech Republic, which had each agreed to have one of the missile defense bases in their country despite knowing that it would cause them to get a lot of heat from the Russians. He made the Poles and the Czechs look profoundly stupid for trusting the U.S. and taking that heat over the past few years. And he gave a major psychological and political boost to Russia's thuggish leader Vladimir Putin, who had opposed the missile defense system even though it was not designed or planned to defend against Russian missiles but rather against potential Iranian or Pakistani missiles in the future.

This could have been put down to mere foolishness or inexperience on Obama's part if he had announced it last week, or next week, or even yesterday, or tomorrow. But he didn't do that. He announced it today, September 17th, of all days.

For those of you who didn't study any history in high school, today is the 70th anniversary of the Russian invasion of Poland in 1939. The Russians under Joseph Stalin invaded Poland on September 17th, 1939 as part of a cynical deal they had made with Adolph Hitler and his Nazi Germany to divide Poland up between them.

And on this day, of all days in the year, President Obama has betrayed the Poles and given a major concession to the Russians.

Anyone who thinks this is a mere coincidence, or the result of mere stupidity on the part of President Obama and his advisors must also believe in the tooth fairy. Certainly no one who has read anything about European history will believe it was a mere coincidence or the result of mere stupidity.

Vladimir Putin and Dymitry Medvedev certainly won't take it as a coincidence or mere stupidity. They will take it as a clear signal that the U.S. is no longer interested in central Europe and that the Poles and Ukrainians and Lithuanians and Latvians and Estonians are on their own. Those peoples, in turn will decide either to make accommodation with Russia or they will decide to prepare to resist, either of which will almost surely start again the whole insane central European power politics game that resulted in about a hundred million dead soldiers and civilians in the last century.

The lights will be on late tonight in every military headquarters and foreign office in Europe as prectical military men and diplomats start the process of revising all their plans and reassessing all of their assumptions about the future of peace in Europe.

Great news, if true

2009-09-11T11:33:00.002-04:00

"The Arctic as we know it may soon be a thing of the past," says Eric Post, associate professor of biology at Penn State University.

I'm skeptical of Professor Post's belief that the weather in the Arctic will be toasty anytime "soon;" but I certainly hope that he's right. Just imagining all that land up in the north of Canada that will "soon" be toasty enough to produce amber waves of grain has me tempted to reach for a box of cereal.

But I was a bit surprised by another assertion included in the article about the discoveries of Post's team.

According to Science Daily: "The scientists found that the increase in mean annual surface temperature in the Arctic over the last 150 years has had dramatic effects."

I'm hard pressed to understand how the actions of man could be, like, totally, responsible for starting the Arctic to warming 150 years ago in light of the fact that man didn't really start producing significant CO2 until, like, many years after that. Could it be that Professor Post is one of those global warming deniers who admit that other factors might have something to do with the climate?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090910142348.htm

Caught in a blatant lie within 24 hours

2009-09-10T15:06:00.005-04:00

While watching the president's speech last night I was suspicious about the story he told of the fellow who lost his health care insurance. Here's a fellow at sweetness-light.com who probably works in pajamas at his computer doing the job that the mainstream media would be doing if they weren't so deeply in the president's pocket that they're covered with lint and smell like Chinese Chestnut flowers in the spring.

Obama Misrepresents Insurance Case

From Mr. Obama’s address to the joint session of Congress last night:
“One man from Illinois lost his coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because his insurer found that he hadn’t reported gallstones that he didn’t even know about. They delayed his treatment, and he died because of it.”

This is the sad story of Mr. Otto Raddatz, a case that Mr. Obama has cited several times before, including in his August 16th editorial in the New York Times.

For the record, however, the case is not exactly the way Mr. Obama has characterized it, at least according to the sworn testimony of Mr. Raddatz’s sister.

From Ms. Raddatz’s opening statement, from pages 58-59 of the transcript (a pdf file) of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation Committee hearings on ‘The Termination Of Individual Health Policies By Insurance Companies,’ Tuesday, June 16, 2009:

Otto began more chemotherapy for purposes of preparing him for a stem cell transplant. In the midst of his chemo treatments, Otto received a phone call and letter from Fortis Insurance Company stating his insurance was canceled. It was rescinded all the way back to the effective date of August 7, 2004.

This meant none of his cancer treatments would be covered. Most importantly, he would not be able to receive the stem cell transplant need [sic] to save his life. My brother only had a very small window of time in which to have the stem cell transplant. He needed to be scheduled within the next 3 to 4 weeks.

My brother was told he was canceled during what they called a "routine review" during which they claimed to discover a "material failure to disclose". Apparently in 2000 his doctor had done a CT scan which showed an aneurysm and gall stones. My brother was never told of either one of these conditions nor was he ever treated for them and he never reported any symptoms for them either.

After months of preparation, the stem cell transplant could not be scheduled. My brother’s hope for being a cancer survivor were dashed. His prognosis was only a matter of months without the procedure.

Mr. Radditz was faced with having to pay for the stem cell transplant himself in order to save his life.

However, Mr. Raddatz’s lawyer sister contacted the Illinois Attorney General’s Office. They investigated and found that the doctor who did the CT scans could not remember whether he had ever told Mr. Raddatz about his findings.

Consequently, the insurance company overturned their original decision to rescind her brother’s coverage, and he was reinstated in the words of his sister, "without [any] lapse."

Again, from Ms. Raddatz’s sworn testimony:

After two appeals by the Illinois Attorney General’s Office, Fortis Insurance Company finally overturned their original decision to rescind my brother’s coverage and he was reinstated without lapse. This is after weeks of constant phone calls between myself and the Attorney General’s Office and we were literally scrambling hour by hour to get this accomplished so that my brother wouldn’t lose his 3- to 4-week window of opportunity that he had prepared for and lose his opportunity to have the procedure.

In other words, Mr. Raddatz’s did receive the stem cell transplant without delay.
Indeed, Ms. Raddatz does not seem to claim anywhere in her testimony that the insurance company’s actions shortened her brother’s life. (Though she does accuse them of having been cruel and unethical.)

From page 75 of the hearings transcript:

Mr. Barton. My next question is to the gentle lady there in the middle. Your brother, has he had his stem cell transplant? Ms. Raddatz. He did indeed receive the stem cell transplant. It was extremely successful. It extended his life approximately 3-1/2 years. He did pass away January 6, 2009, and he was about to have a second stem cell transplant. Unfortunately, due to certain situations, his donor became ill at the last minute and so he did pass away on January 6. But again, it extended his life nearly 3-1/2 years and at his age, each day meant everything to him…
This is not quite the impression Mr. Obama gives with his rendition of Mr. Raddatz’s story.
Despite Mr. Obama’s claims, Mr. Raddatz’s treatment was never delayed. And he did not die because of it.

Meanwhile, in this very same speech Mr. Obama accused others of misrepresenting the facts.

Hat tip to Kathry Jean Lopez of National Review who pointed to this post at sweetness-light.com.

A great pick me up for when you're feeling dumb

2009-09-10T12:37:00.005-04:00

Whenever you get to thinking that you've said or done something really stupid or inappropriate here's a column written by the Sports Columnist for the Orange County Register that will quickly convince you that you're not so stupid after all.

This is what he wrote about that young woman who was kidnapped and imprisoned in a shack as a sex slave for 18 years.

"It doesn't sound as if Jaycee Dugard got to see a sports page. Box scores were not available to her from June 10, 1991 until Aug. 31 of this year. She never saw a highlight. Never got to the ballpark for Beach Towel Night. Probably hasn't high-fived in a while. She was not allowed to spike a volleyball. Or pitch a softball. Or smack a forehand down the line. Or run in a 5-footer for double bogey. Now, that's deprivation."

Some jocks are dumb and some jocks are smart; but Mark Whicker, who writes about them, is dumb as a post, dense as lead and clueless as a conga drum.

If you want to read the whole column you can read it here: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/world-won-most-2555260-never-one

Too perfect to require comment - but I will anyway

2009-09-10T10:29:00.007-04:00

Three quotations to think about:

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
- George Orwell

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.
- John Derbyshire

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.
- Thomas Friedman

Back in the 1920's liberals made excuses for "the excesses" of Benito Mussolini because he "made the trains run on time." In the 1930's liberals made excuses for "the excesses" of Adolph Hitler because he built superhighways and claimed he was building Volkswagens for the masses. In the 1940's liberals made excuses for "the excesses" of Joseph Stalin because he industrialized Russia. In the 1960's and to this very day, liberals make excuses for "the excesses" of Fidel Castro because he supposedly increased literacy in Cuba.

Here we are in 2009 and a liberal idiot is making excuses for "the excesses" of the jackbooted thugs who run China because those thugs are supposedly doing good things for the environment, which is untrue in any case. China's rulers are making polite noises to lefty environmentalist idiots like Thomas Friedman about developing alternative energy sources while they're building coal powered electricity generating plants and spewing out increasing amounts of pollution at a far greater rate than any other country in the world.

Does Thomas Freidman know this? Of course he knows it, every bit as much as his predecessor lefties knew that Uncle Joe Stalin was purposely starving millions of people in the Ukraine while the New York Times was writing about the Soviet economic miracle. For God's sake, the Chinese Communist government had to shut down the industries near Beijing in order to make the air quality decent enough to hold the Olympics. Does that sound like a country doing good things for the environment?

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

Hat tip to http://lyflines.blogspot.com/2009/09/quote-chain.html and to Jonah Goldberg of National Review who steered me to this.

A couple of questions for the president

2009-09-09T21:48:00.004-04:00

I've been trying like hell, fairly successfully, to avoid listening to political ranting on the TV shows for the past couple of weeks. But, as a patriotic American, I was compelled to watch the president spout amazing nonsense for much of the 48 minutes that he addressed the joint session of congress earlier this evening.

So here I am, wondering if President Obama is the smoothest liar I've ever seen or heard of, or whether he managed to get through Harvard and several highly profitable years in Chicago and Illinois politics without learning anything about how government bureaucracies work.

For instance, he very forcefully said, several times, that he can pay for his entire massive health care program by saving more than a hundred billion dollars each year that's currently consumed by waste and fraud in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

Now, as it happens, I'm very cynical about the competence of government bureaucracies, so I believe Medicare and Medicare are paying for quite a bit of fraudulent care; but even I don't believe they're being defrauded for over a hundred billion dollars a year. And if they are being defrauded for that much money, I fail to see why President Obama hasn't already done a wholesale shakeup of the management of those bureaucracies. If they're really wasting more than $12 Billion per month there should be bureaucratic heads rolling all over Washington, DC.

So I have a couple of questions that I hope some reporter will ask the president.

"Mr. President, you've said you can pay for your health care program by saving over a hundred billion dollars a year in fraudulent Medicare and Medicaid payments. And you have been in office for almost nine months. Why haven't you already done something to to stop such an outrageous amount of fraud?"

And here's a follow-up question:

"Mr. President, who is the great manager that you plan to put in charge of Medicare and Medicaid to stop all that fraud? Will it be the same sort of genius you put in charge of the cash for clunkers program that can't seem to pay it's claims within the two weeks that the law explicitly promised? Or will it be the kind of genius you put in charge of the stimulus program that has given hundreds and hundreds of billions of tax dollars into the care of the same executives who ran the huge banks that made a mess of the mortgage market with their bad decisions.

Can't run Cash for Clunkers? Here, take health care.

2009-08-21T01:07:00.005-04:00

Democratic Congressman Joe Sestak is upset because the government's much talked about Cash for Clunkers program has failed the pay the auto dealers the cash it promised for the clunkers. It seems that the geniuses down in Washington (Sestak included) passed the Cash for Clunkers scheme without having the slightest idea of how to run it efficiently.

Among other things they grossly underestimated the speed with which people and auto dealers would grab onto the cash; and they failed to think through the effect on auto dealer finances; and they set up a bureaucracy that has proven to be a total clunker at administering the program.

You can find Congressman Sestak's letter complaining to President Obama about the program here:
http://blogs.mcall.com/penn_ave/2009/08/sestak-to-feds-fix-clunkers-program-red-tape.html

It's kind of rich that Congressman Sestak is complaining about the inefficiency of a program that he himself voted for. But I guess that's the kind of things you do when you're a congressman; you vote for unworkable and inefficient programs and then you blame someone else for then.

I have a question for Congressman Sestak. If this president and this congress and the rest of the federal government can't efficiently set up and manage a very simple little $3 Billion program like Cash for Clunkers, what possible logic can there be in thinking that they can run a very, very complex $2.5 Trillion industry like health care?

President Obama supports offshore drilling!

2009-08-19T21:36:00.004-04:00

President Obama supports offshore drilling; but not in the U.S. of course. Instead he's loaning a couple of billion dollars of your tax money to Petrobras to drill off the coast of Brazil. At the same time he supports so called environmentalists who use all manner of legal maneuvering to make it impossible for oil and gas companies to drill off the coast of this country.

This makes not one lick of sense in any dimension.

Since our government is running a deficit it must borrow money by selling bonds in order to loan this money out. So our government is borrowing money from China and others in order to lend the money to an oil company owned and run by the Brazilian government.

And, on another level, Petrobras must be the only oil company in the world that can't make enough money to do its own drilling. Which says something about just how inefficient government run businesses can be.

The Wall Street Journal has the whole story at the link below. I've quoted some of it below.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203863204574346610120524166.html

Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling
The Wall Street Journal - 8/18/09

You read that headline correctly. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration is financing oil exploration off Brazil.

The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil's Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil's planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan.

The U.S. Export-Import Bank tells us it has issued a "preliminary commitment" letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion and has discussed with Brazil the possibility of increasing that amount. Ex-Im Bank says it has not decided whether the money will come in the form of a direct loan or loan guarantees. Either way, this corporate foreign aid may strike some readers as odd, given that the U.S. Treasury seems desperate for cash and Petrobras is one of the largest corporations in the Americas.

But look on the bright side. If President Obama has embraced offshore drilling in Brazil, why not in the old U.S.A.? The land of the sorta free and the home of the heavily indebted has enormous offshore oil deposits, and last year ahead of the November elections, with gasoline at $4 a gallon, Congress let a ban on offshore drilling expire.

The Bush Administration's five-year plan (2007-2012) to open the outer continental shelf to oil exploration included new lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico. But in 2007 environmentalists went to court to block drilling in Alaska and in April a federal court ruled in their favor. In May, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said his department was unsure whether that ruling applied only to Alaska or all offshore drilling. So it asked an appeals court for clarification. Late last month the court said the earlier decision applied only to Alaska, opening the way for the sale of leases in the Gulf. Mr. Salazar now says the sales will go forward on August 19.

This is progress, however slow. But it still doesn't allow the U.S. to explore in Alaska or along the East and West Coasts, which could be our equivalent of the Tupi oil fields, which are set to make Brazil a leading oil exporter. Americans are right to wonder why Mr. Obama is underwriting in Brazil what he won't allow at home.

National Public Radio's lying host

2009-08-19T09:59:00.005-04:00

Yesterday afternoon at about 1:30 or so I happened to catch a brief part of a talk show on National Public Radio. During the segment I heard the host, a woman, make a clearly false statement about health care.

She said words to the effect that health care reform is needed because insurance companies cancel the policies of people with pre-existing conditions, and her guest made no effort to correct her lie.

The true state of affairs is that insurance companies must continue to cover the medical expenses of people who develop new medical problems. There is no way they can cancel someone's insurance once they have agreed to provide it.

The NPR commentator was trying to blur the fact that the current health care reform legislation requires insurance companies to write new policies for people with pre-existing conditions at the same price as for people without pre-existing conditions. This is complete madness. Writing a new health care insurance policy for someone who needs an operation tomorrow, or who is already known to have an expensive to treat condition, is welfare, not insurance, and it would quickly result in driving all of the insurance companies out of the health care market.

It's exactly the same thing as requiring a fire insurance company to write a new policy on a house that's already on fire, or requiring a flood insurance company to write new policies on houses downstream of a dam that just broke.

The day after the government passes a requirement that insurance companies cover people with pre-existing conditions the smart people in the country will cut back their health insurance to the bare minimum. While they stay healthy they will save money. When they get sick or need an operation they will apply for a full coverage policy as soon as they learn that health care is going to cost them a lot of money. Insurance companies, if they want to stay in business, will have to hugely raise their rates to cover the new consumer behavior, and that will make even more healthy people cancel their policies. It will result in a spiral that will quickly kill off private health care insurance.

This sounds like a complex matter; but it's actually very simple. Would you pay for flood insurance on a beach house every year if you knew that you could always call and get a new flood insurance policy whenever a hurricane is forecast? Would you pay for auto insurance every year if you knew you could call from the scene of an accident and get a new insurance policy to cover the damage you've already done to your car? Would you pay for life insurance all your life if you knew that you could call from your deathbed in a hospital and apply for a new life insurance policy? Would you pay all your life for health insurance coverage if you knew that you could wait and apply for a new insurance policy after your doctor tells you some bad news?

Medicaid, which is a welfare program, already exists to provide health care for people who can't afford to pay for it. The attempt by President Obama and the democrats in congress to ban pre-existing condition clauses in new insurance policies is nothing but a naked play to destroy the health care insurance industry and thus force the country to a single payer government system.

And. . . a single payer health care system will put your health care in the hands of people who are not ashamed to baldly lie to get what they want, like the National Public Radio host I heard yesterday.

Don't like the cost of new drugs? Use generics!

2009-08-17T10:04:00.004-04:00

Many years ago Aunt Mary A angrily told me that her eye operation had cost $3,000 and only took a couple of hours. I shocked her a bit, and made her laugh, by telling her that the next time she needed a similar operation I would read up on it and then do the operation for her for a lot less money.

Another time I was talking with Frank A at a reunion and he mentioned indignantly that a friend's mother was taking a heart medicine that cost (I think) $300 a month. What really burned him, he said, was that the same company sells the same medicine for dogs for only a few dollars a month.

Always willing to fuel a good argument, I pointed out to Frank that his friend had an easy solution. If the dog medicine was truly the exact same thing as the human medicine he could save a lot of money by buying the dog medicine and giving that to his mother instead of the human medicine.

In both cases I was being facetious; but there is a great truth in these incidents that relates to the current debate about health care. One of the things the health care "reform" boosters are arguing, and have argued for a long time, is that pharmaceutical companies often make minor changes to existing drugs and then charge a lot more for the new formulations, which are often only slightly better than the old drugs. This is viewed as somehow exploitative, even though everyone agrees that pharmaceutical companies spend huge amounts of money on research and development precisely in order to refine old drugs and develop new ones.

If it's true that a new drug is only a little bit better than an older drug that is now a generic and available for much less cost, why shouldn't people who can't afford to or don't want to pay the price asked for the new drug simply be satisfied with the older drug?

In every other area of life that's the way things are. I would very much like to drive a nice new Cadillac or Lexus every year; but I drive a Ford until it pretty much craps out because I don't want to pay for a Cadillac or a Lexus, and it would certainly cramp my budget to buy a new car every year. I would like to eat nothing but tenderloin and lobster prepared by great chefs in fine restaurants; but I eat chicken and tilapia prepared at home because I don't want to pay restaurant prices for tenderloin and lobster.

Someone who relies soley on much cheaper generic drugs is, at worst, trusting his life to the very best drugs that existed in the world as of about seven or eight years ago. It's true that doing that means taking a slight but significant risk with your life; but then most people take much more substantial risks with their lives by driving cheaper cars that don't have the super sophisticated safety systems that are installed in the most expensive cars.

Why is health care viewed so much differently than the other necessities of life? Why do people beat up on pharmaceutical companies when it's the pharmaceutical companies that have provided both the generic drugs and the slightly better newer drugs?

Here's an article by Tevi Troy that appeared in the June issue of Commentary Magazine that goes into other aspects of the health care, and specifically the pharmaceutical cost, debate:

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-end-of-medical-miracles--15162?search=1

Here are some quotes from it for those too lazy to click the link:

"Americans have, at best, a love-hate relationship with the life-sciences industry—the term for the sector of the economy that produces pharmaceuticals, biologics (like vaccines), and medical devices. These days, the mere mention of a pharmaceutical manufacturer seems to elicit gut-level hostility. Journalists, operating from a bias against industry that goes as far back as the work of Upton Sinclair in the early years of the 20th century, treat companies from AstraZeneca to Wyeth as rapacious factories billowing forth nothing but profit. At the same time, Americans are adamant about the need for access to the newest cures and therapies and expect new cures and therapies to emerge for their every ailment—all of which result from work done primarily by these very same companies whose profits make possible the research that allows for such breakthroughs."

"Liberals and conservatives appear to agree on the need to unleash the possibilities in medical discovery for the benefit of all. But it cannot be ordered up at will. It takes approximately ten years and $1 billion to get a new product approved for use in the United States. Furthermore, only one in every 10,000 newly discovered molecules will lead to a medication that will be viewed favorably by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Only three out of every ten new medications earn back their research-and-development costs. The approval success rates are low, and may even be getting lower—30.2 percent for biotech drugs and 21.5 percent for small-molecule pharmaceuticals."

"It is the very nature of scientific discovery that makes this process so cumbersome. New developments do not appear as straight-line extrapolations. A dollar in research does not lead inexorably to a return of $1.50. Researchers will spend years in a specific area to no avail, while other areas will benefit from a happy concatenation of discoveries in a short period. It is impossible to tell which area will be fruitless; so many factors figure into the equation, including dumb luck. Alexander Fleming did not mean to leave his lab in such disarray that he would discover that an extract from moldy bread killed bacteria, yet that is how it happened. Conversely, if effort and resources were all it took, then we would have an HIV/AIDS vaccine by now; as it stands, the solution to that problem continues to elude the grasp of some of the most talented and heavily funded researchers."

"Scientific discoveries are neither inevitable nor predictable. What is more, they are affected, especially in our time, by forces outside the laboratory—in particular, the actions of politicians and government bureaucracies. The past quarter-century has offered several meaningful object lessons in this regard. For example, in the 1980s, the Reagan administration undertook a number of actions, both general and specific, that had a positive effect on the pace of discovery. On the general front, low taxes and a preference for free trade helped generate a positive economic climate for private investment, including in the rapidly growing health-care sector. More specifically, the Reagan administration engaged in new technology transfer policies to promote joint ventures, encouraged and passed the Orphan Drug Act to encourage work on products with relatively small markets, and accelerated approval and use of certain data from clinical trials in order to hasten the approval of new products. All of these initiatives helped foster discovery."

"That which the government gives, it can also take away. As the 1990s began, a set of ideas began to gain traction about health care and its affordability (it seems hard to believe, but the first election in which health care was a major issue was a Pennsylvania Senate race only eighteen years ago, in 1991). Americans began to fear that their health-care benefits were at risk; policymakers and intellectuals on both sides of the ideological divide began to fear that the health-care system was either too expensive or not comprehensive enough; and the conduct of private businesses in a field that now ate up nearly 14 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product came under intense public scrutiny."

"A leading critic of Big Pharma, Greg Critser, wrote in his 2007 Generation Rx that President Clinton picked up on a public discomfort with drug prices and “began hinting at price controls” during his first term in office. These hints had a real impact. As former FDA official Scott Gottlieb has written, “Shortly after President Bill Clinton unveiled his proposal for nationalizing the health-insurance market in the 1990s (with similar limits on access to medical care as in the [current] Obama plan), biotech venture capital fell by more than a third in a single year, and the value of biotech stocks fell 40 percent. It took three years for the ‘Biocentury’ stock index to recover. Not surprisingly, many companies went out of business.”"

"The conduct of the businesses that had been responsible for almost every medical innovation from which Americans and the world had benefited for decades became intensely controversial in the 1990s. An odd inversion came into play. Since the work they did was life-saving or life-enhancing, it was not deemed by a certain liberal mindset to be of special value, worth the expense. Rather, medical treatment came to be considered a human right to which universal access was required without regard to cost. Because people needed these goods so much, it was unscrupulous or greedy to involve the profit principle in them. What mattered most was equity. Consumers of health care should not have to be subject to market forces."

"And not only that. Since pharmaceuticals and biologics are powerful things that can do great harm if they are misused or misapplied, the companies that made them found themselves under assault for injuries they might have caused. It was little considered that the drugs had been approved for use by a federal agency that imposed the world’s most rigorous standards, and was often criticized for holding up promising treatments (especially for AIDS). Juries were convinced that companies had behaved with reckless disregard for the health of consumers, and hit them with enormous punitive damages claims."

"The late 1990s also coincided with an unpredictable slowdown in the pace of medical discovery, following a fertile period in which new antihistamines, antidepressants, and gastric-acid reducers all came to market and improved the quality of life of millions in inestimable ways. A lull in innovation then set in, and that in turn gave opponents of the pharmaceutical industry a new target of opportunity. An oft-cited 1999 study by the National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) claimed that the newest and costliest products were only offering “modest improvements on earlier therapies at considerably greater expense.”"

"The NIHCM study opened fresh lines of attack. The first came from the managed-care industry, which used it as a means of arguing that drugs had simply grown too expensive. Managed care is extremely price-sensitive, and its business model is built on cutting costs; executives of the industry were well represented on the board of the institute that put out the report. They were, in effect, fighting with the pharmaceutical companies over who should get more of the consumer’s health-care dollars."

"The second came in response to the approval by the FDA in 1997 of direct consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals. The marketing explosion that followed it gave people the sense that these companies were not doing life-saving work but were rather engaged in the sale of relative trivialities, like Viagra and Rogaine, on which they had advertising dollars to burn that would be better spent on lowering the cost of drugs. And the third element of this mix was the rise of the Internet, which gave Americans a level of price transparency that they had not had before regarding cost differentials between drugs sold in the U.S. versus Canada and other Western countries."

"These three factors precipitated a full-bore campaign by public interest groups that bore remarkable fruit over the next several years. By February 2004, Time magazine was publishing a cover story on pharmaceutical pricing, noting that “the clamor for cheap Canadian imports is becoming a big issue.” Marcia Angell, a fierce critic of the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA, wrote in the New York Review of Books in 2004 that, “In the past two years, we have started to see, for the first time, the beginnings of public resistance to rapacious pricing and other dubious practices of the pharmaceutical industry.”"

"Harvard’s Robert Blendon released a Kaiser Family Foundation poll in 2005 in which 70 percent of Americans reported feeling that “drug companies put profits ahead of people” and 59 percent saying that “prescription drugs increase overall medical costs because they are so expensive.” Overall, noted the foundation’s president, Drew Altman, “Rightly or wrongly, drug companies are now the number one villain in the public’s eye when it comes to rising health-care costs.” "

Fortunately he was polite and they were slow to go to the nightsticks

2009-08-16T01:37:00.005-04:00

This story, if true, proves just how old you are if you're over 50.

"What is your name, sir?" the officer asked.
"Bob Dylan," Dylan said.
"OK, what are you doing here?" the officer asked.
"I'm on tour," the singer replied.

You're Bob Dylan? NJ police want to see some ID
Aug 14, 11:57 PM (ET)By WAYNE PARRY

Rock legend Bob Dylan was treated like a complete unknown by police in a New Jersey shore community when a resident called to report someone wandering around the neighborhood.
Dylan was in Long Branch, about a two-hour drive south of New York City, on July 23 as part of a tour with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp that was to play at a baseball stadium in nearby Lakewood.

A 24-year-old police officer apparently was unaware of who Dylan is and asked him for identification, Long Branch business administrator Howard Woolley said Friday.
"I don't think she was familiar with his entire body of work," Woolley said.

The incident began at 5 p.m. when a resident said a man was wandering around a low-income, predominantly minority neighborhood several blocks from the oceanfront looking at houses.
The police officer drove up to Dylan, who was wearing a blue jacket, and asked him his name.

According to Woolley, the following exchange ensued:
"What is your name, sir?" the officer asked.
"Bob Dylan," Dylan said.
"OK, what are you doing here?" the officer asked.
"I'm on tour," the singer replied.

A second officer, also in his 20s, responded to assist the first officer. He, too, apparently was unfamiliar with Dylan, Woolley said.

The officers asked Dylan for identification. The singer of such classics as "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Blowin' in the Wind" said that he didn't have any ID with him, that he was just walking around looking at houses to pass some time before that night's show.

The officers asked Dylan, 68, to accompany them back to the Ocean Place Resort and Spa, where the performers were staying. Once there, tour staff vouched for Dylan.

The officers thanked him for his cooperation.

"He couldn't have been any nicer to them," Woolley added.

How did it feel? A Dylan publicist did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment Friday. "

The story is from My Way News - http://apnews.myway.com//article/20090815/D9A334601.html

Dentist's face ruin due to Obama policies

2009-08-14T12:48:00.003-04:00

The Wall Street Journal reported alarming news today:

"Some of America's biggest food companies say the U.S. could "virtually run out of sugar" if the Obama administration doesn't ease import restrictions amid soaring prices for the key commodity.

In a letter to Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack, the big brands -- including Kraft Foods Inc., General Mills Inc., Hershey Co. and Mars Inc. -- bluntly raised the prospect of a severe shortage of sugar used in chocolate bars, breakfast cereal, cookies, chewing gum and thousands of other products.

The companies threatened to jack up consumer prices and lay off workers if the Agriculture Department doesn't allow them to import ..."

Oh, the humanity!!! Crazed chocoholics running wild in the streets because they can't get their fix. Dentists selling apples on the streets because of lack of teeth to drill and fill.

Actually I have to apologize here. The sugar import quotas are not just President Obama's fault. They're the fault of every president and every congress since the 1930's. Sugar farmers here in the U.S. have effectively been on welfare since then. Sugar import quotas are a nifty little hidden tax on everybody who eats or drinks junk food and beverages. The rich sugar growers live high on the hog as a result of that hidden tax, and they naturally share some of their wealth with the politicians who make sure the trough stays full. In this case Uncle Sam really is Uncle Sugar.

A neat new technology, especially for Star Trek fans

2009-08-13T15:54:00.005-04:00

This two and half minute video illustrates how a Japanese researcher has made it possible to "touch" and "feel" and otherwise interact with a hologram. He's still a bit of a ways from building the equivalent of a Star Trek holodeck; but he's demonstrated one way in which doing such a thing is theoretically possible. Very neat! The video doesn't seem to have sound, so it is safe to open at work.

Scroll down once after going to the link below to find the video:

http://www.physorg.com/news168797748.html

Hat tip to Jonah Goldberg of National Review, who posted this on The Corner where he periodically presents a list of weird and interesting links.

Priceless

2009-08-13T01:37:00.004-04:00

Democratic Congressman Eugene Green wants to be very sure that only residents of his congressional district attend his town hall meetings. So he has decided to require attendees to present photo ID in order to get in.

That's kind of funny, although not in a ha ha way, because Congressman Green has been a staunch opponent of requiring people to show ID when they go to their polling place to vote.

Apparently Congressman Green is perfectly okay with election fraud; but he's absolutely terrified that someone from outside his district may ask him a question at a town hall meeting.

Somebody ought to whack Congressman Green upside the head with a not too fresh mackerel.

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2009/08/11/cant-make-it-dem-rep-who-opposes-photo-id-vote-requiring-photo-id-town-h

"This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer." Will Rogers

When she's right, she's right

2009-08-10T23:17:00.005-04:00

Here's a fifteen second long video of a proud American forcefully asserting her right to free speech. This woman refuses to be silenced despite Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama saying that it's unamerican to question the decisions of our rulers down in Washington.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJxmpTMGhU0

And here's a one minute long video of a very well spoken fellow who says that President Obama's Cap and Trade plan for energy will cause your electricity rates to skyrocket.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlTxGHn4sH4&feature=related

Here's a 29 second video of another guy, an old guy whose mother should have taught him not to slouch so much, who says that Cap and Trade is a tax.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgUHol_WkDk&feature=channel

I've reported all of these radicals to the special snitch line at the White House. If you want to report something fishy or unamerican to President Obama you should email your suspicions to flag@whitehouse.gov

Nothing is too small to report. If you kids out there hear your parents or anybody saying things that are fishy or disrespectful about President Obama, or about any of his plans to make the seas recede and the world become like totally perfect for you, he wants to know so he can send some people to straighten out their thinking.

Meet the Mob

2009-08-08T11:51:00.005-04:00

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and President Obama are very concerned about the far right wing loons who have been intimidating innocent Democratic Party congresscritters by going to the town hall meetings and complaining. Some of these evil protesters are even carrying signs protesting the government takeover of healthcare that the Democrats are trying to do.

This blogger has done a patriotic job of labelling the sorts of wicked right wingers who have been protesting:
http://thedanashow.wordpress.com/2009/08/06/meet-the-mob/

I know it's very annoying when the filthy peasants appear outside the door of the manor house whining about things; but as a helpful reminder to Speaker Pelosi I've quoted the First Amendment to the Constitution below:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Now the nanny state is getting personal

2009-08-06T11:38:00.009-04:00

A Tulare, CA policeman shut down this little girl's lemonade stand because she didn't have a business license.

I'm remembering that I sold lemonade to the golfers at Eagleville Country club one summer before I was old enough to go to work at Harry's Potato Market. I forget the number of the hole I set up on, but there was a bench convenient to Trooper Road that was next to a hill on the course. Pop would drop me off on his way to Norristown in mid morning and then pick me up on his way home in mid afternoon.

The golfers were good customers; but if I had tried to charge them $2 a cup for lemonade they would have laughed me off the course. The dollar isn't what it used to be. The next year I started work at Harry's for less than a dollar an hour. For the first couple of summers Harry paid me one dollar less than the number of hours I worked in a day - for instance $9 for a 10 hour day. Of course I also got all the fruit I could eat, and occasionally a basket of spotted peaches or apples to take home to Mom. That was a pretty good deal for Harry because the next day Mom would send me back with a pie or a cobbler for him.

I could write a thousand words and not do justice to Mom's peach and apple pies. . . Suffice it to say that a scoop of ice cream would have defiled those pies.

Because I had better get back to the golfers. Besides lemonade I also sold them golf balls that I retrieved from the rough and the water hazards on the course. I think I charged ten cents apiece for the balls. Occasionally one of them would give me a quarter for an especially good ball and if one of Pop's buddies showed up I might get a half a dollar or even a dollar tip.

And, occasionally one of them who had lost a ball he had just hit up over the hill would inspect my collection of balls pretty carefully; but it wasn't me who had a habit of running across that hill stealing golf balls. It was (redacted) who did that. I didn't rat on (redacted) to the golf course manager back then when he questioned me about the tendency of balls to go missing on that hole, so I'm not going to do so now.

(Redacted) used to try to sell me the balls; but I never bought them. because that would have been foolish. First off, I knew for a fact that Pop knew the golf club manager, just as he seemingly knew everybody else within twenty miles who ever saw me do something of note then and later. Secondly, even then I knew that golfers keep track of what make and number of ball they're playing.

Good times. Lazy summer days, sitting in the shade on my bench with my cooler of lemonade that mom made and which thus cost me nothing, reading science fiction, and raking in a few bucks - with occasionally the excitement of wondering if (redacted) would get caught when he appeared to chat for a while, have a cup of lemonade, and then suddenly light off across the top of the hill to collect the balls the golfers had just hit. Some people are just not suited for honest labor, at least when they're young.

I don't know what became of (redacted); but I'm pretty sure he didn't become a priest even though he later dropped to his knees as though poleaxed when a disrespectful and inquisitive altar boy opened the gold plated door of the sanctuary in the altar on the stage at the Visitation gym on a dare to see what was in there and the door surprised us all by clanking open forcefully after the key was turned.

I pointed out to (redacted) that the sanctuary lamp was not lit and hence the altar was not live, so to speak; but even after that he stayed agitated and on his knees until I got the sanctuary door closed again. The spring on that door was pretty strong. I can still remember how it sprang open as though alive, probably because it took a little while for my heartbeat to settle down.

Fortunately no one was out in the gym beyond the closed drapes of the stage because they would surely have heard that clank and (redacted)'s alarmed and quite loud start of the act of contrition. (Redacted)'s surprisingly intense piety did not prevent him from trying a sip of the altar wine we liberated another time from the cabinet that Father L had surprisingly left unlocked. Father left the key in the lock of the sanctuary door as a matter of course; but he never left the key in the lock of the cabinet that held the vestments, wine, incense and self starting charcoal briquets for the censor.

Terrible stuff that altar wine. Even boosted and savored with friends it didn't taste good. All in all we drank very little, and we carefully refilled the bottle with water before putting it back, so no harm was done. It was probably just as well that Father L took very little water with his wine when he said mass.

The story about the little girl who got stopped by the Tulare police from selling lemonade is here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/73160.html

Hopefully the cop who shut her down will not be smart enough to avoid buying lemonade from her when she gets set up again. Such a cop deserves a bit of extra flavoring in his lemonade.