Into the tunnel

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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.