We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
You probably heard about the Southwest airliner that broke its nose gear while landing at LaGuardia Airport last Monday. Like I presume most people, I figured the nose of the jet dropped down too hard after the rear wheels had set down, snapping the structure.
Not so!
I'm sure we're all grateful to hear that crashing upon landing is "not in accordance" with Southwest's usual procedures.
So, this raises a damn good question. How does the nose of a modern jetliner drop five degrees in four seconds? Pilot sneezed and accidentally pushed the steering wheel all the way forward? These things are so big and clumsy that I'm not sure even that would do it in a mere four seconds.
Here's the footage from nearby:
Must have been a real case of 'mixed emotions' for the Southwest passengers. "Oh, no, the plane's having a dire problem — but at least we're on the ground!"
Still, from a by-the-book 2-degree up angle to minus-3 degrees down angle in a mere four seconds is a real poser. I'll post an update if & when we hear word from the NTSB.
Collectively, our readers seem to know about everything.
I am having battery problems. I do not understand batteries. I think the main purpose of these batteries is ignition. Or are they for generating sparks too? I am ignorant.
Anyway, I have beeb experiencing a rash of dead batteries.
This excellent, heavy-duty baby takes a gel 6 V. battery. It died over the winter. I tried to recharge it but that didn't work. The guy said not to leave its batteries out in the winter.
A also have one of these cool trimmer-mowers which are fine and easier to use for weeds and tall grass in tight or steeply-sloped areas. It's like a gas-powered scythe. Luckily or not, it's a pull-start so no battery issue there.
Our Farmall tractor takes a regular 12 V car battery, so that's simple. Naturally, the battery dies over the winter from disuse, but is sometimes rechargeable by jumping it. However, our old Ford tractor takes a 6 V which will not hold a charge after jumping it and running it for hours.
I don't like that because I sometimes stall out on hills, and don't want to leave the tractor stuck outdoors. Do I need to buy a new 6 V tractor battery every Spring?
Fox News: Texas GOP Rejects Voting Challenge NBC News: 'Talking' cars bring comfort and sci-fi safety ABC News: Husband Charged in Poisoned Docs' Death CBS News: Father of American killed: Spain train crash "pathetic" USA Today: Report: Arrest of Egypt's Morsi ordered Washington Times: Crisis in Kabul: Security at U.S. Embassy in disarray, diplomats at risk Washington Post: Halliburton to admit destroying evidence in spill New York Times: Roberts’s Picks Are Reshaping Surveillance Court’s Makeup
And then we have CNN:
The thought of having the event fade into the distant past must have been just galling to the editorial staff. "Whatever can we do?", they asked.
Picasso once said it took him a lifetime to learn to paint like a child and it’s taken me about the same amount of time to get back to the unbrainwashed brain I had back in 1988. It seems intuitive to the point of redundant to say that women are not the same as men and America is not a racist hellhole. I knew all this as a kid and I have finally relearned it as an adult. Now, if I could only get back the fifteen years in between.
Seth Klarman, billionaire investor and promoter of risk-averse value investing, is concerned. Seth thinks the U.S. should actually try capitalism. He's right, considering the current status of Detroit, with many other cities and states to follow. Living within your means is a good idea. Competition and the market are more effective tools than policies promoting 'fairness' and picking winners.
I tend to agree with Alan Greenspan, that bubbles can't be predicted. I'd go so far as to say they can't even be defined. You 'know them when you see them'. Didier Sornette would disagree and has some basis for his view. However, Sornette's model isn't necessarily predictive of bubbles, and rather charts obsessive investing behaviors. Not all obsessive behaviors lead to bubbles, though his model is still informative. Regardless of how much you trust Sornette's models (and I do), the question is less one of 'what do you do' and rather 'what don't you do'.
It's worth noting if you do something right, it usually appears that you did nothing at all.
The topic of physical or emotional trauma is complicated as heck. For starters, what is "traumatic" for one person might very well not be for another. What is termed "traumatic" depends on the severity and duration of the effects, not the event or situation itself. There are just too many things to be factored in for each individual. I once had a root canal done without Novocaine. That hurt terribly, but was not traumatic. My first break up was traumatic, and the scar remains and affects me many years later.
A life, lived long enough, will collect many physical and emotional painful or disruptive experiences. Some will scar over, some will remain oozing wounds, and some may be crippling. It's normal life. Shrinks and therapists try to find ways to be helpful with emotional pain, but there is no panacea.
— My special thanks to D.M. for the nice contribution he made this morning to my Help Keep Doc From Gnawing Off His Right Foot fund. While the hospital has been real easygoing about the debt, the independent lab that did the in-depth blood work is already talking 'collection agency' for my being a whole month behind. On that note, it does seem in recent years that companies have become a lot more short-fused than in the past. My electric company gives you a whole 20 days before they cut your power, and without any further warning.
— I won't be posting much over the next week as I'll be saving up the goodies for when Bird Dog goes on vacation on the 1st. Who leaves for vacation on a Thursday is anybody's guess, but I figure he and the missus are headed for the Two-Seed-In-The-Spirit Predestinarian Baptist All Revival Revue & Clam Bake in Wopaskisquipsiecola, Mass, which starts on the 2nd.
As for the following, I turned yet another person on to this great drink the other day, so figured it deserved a repost.
Personally, I think coffee is one of the most putrid things I've ever tasted. I simply can't understand how it ever became popular in the first place. You'd think someone would have taken the first sip and gone, "Yuck! Ptooie!", and that would have been that.
On the other hand, I adore its effects.
If you feel the same way, try mixing it with chocolate milk. And I don't mean just adding a dab of chocolate, I mean making it half-and-half. It's called a 'mocha' ("mo'-kah") in the bar world and, while I wouldn't call it "great" tasting, it sure beats the hell out of straight coffee.
I boil half a cup of water in the microwave, then drop in a heaping teaspoon of Taster's Choice, some sugar cubes, then fill up the second half with chocolate milk. I have no idea if chocolate milk mixes tastefully with other brands of coffee or not as I've drunk Taster's Choice from the beginning. So, if you try this and it tastes terrible with your own brand of coffee, at least pick up a tiny jar of Taster's Choice and give it a try.
The chocolate milk should be the type you prefer, but you should test all available brands. Like there are different types of chocolate in the world of candy (Hershey bars vs Mars bars, e.g.), there are also different flavors of chocolate milk.
Remember, we're not looking for a big "Mmm, delicious!" moment when you take your first sip. Simply not gagging and retching is a good start. What you're basically shooting for is whichever milk makes the putrid coffee taste the most palatable.
On the subject, one of my favorite things in the world is my coffee mug warmer. Your local hardware store or K-Mart/Wal-Mart might carry them. What's fun is that the chocolate milk in the mocha settles slightly over time, so if you baby the mug along for an hour or two, it slowly goes from being a coffee-with-chocolate drink to a hot-chocolate-with-coffee drink, getting slightly sweeter all the while. In that way, the mocha is kind of unique, as it's actually a 'dynamic' drink in that the taste changes slowly over time.
As a small side note, I noticed while digging up the accompanying pic that there appears to be a number of USB-powered warmers on the market, although I'd have serious doubts they're very effective. A USB line carries an extremely low voltage and I'd guess that it'd take forever to warm up (by which time your coffee has gotten stone cold) and it wouldn't get very warm when it finally did. The regular wall-current models keep it piping hot.
And, ironically, the one place where you might use a portable, USB-powered coffee mug warmer would be, say, on vacation using your laptop — and the last thing you'd want to do at that point is purposefully drain the laptop's battery!
I guess that's wasn't what that idiot on The View would term "rape-rape."
This seemingly naive or reckless young girl (which is not to blame her) should have called the cops, and let the DA sort out the facts and the details.
Perhaps the issue is that college kids these days do not view themselves as part of the big adult world yet.
I have always countered people who complain about parking with the observation that they should feel fortunate to live where many other people want to be instead of some dying place where nobody wants to be and there is nothing to do.
I mostly avoid malls since internet shopping took hold, but you never really hear people complain about a 5 or ten-minute walk from a garage to their destination in the mall. Similarly when you drive into Manhattan and usually require a lengthy - but scenic - hike to your destination. Same with a stadium.
When street parking is available, people seem to think differently.
My wife and I have been scuba diving for 20+ years, and we've seen all kinds of fantastic sights. I was lucky enough to meet a Sea Turtle on my first open water experience, at 120 feet. Barracuda have eyed my wife and I hungrily, while we off-gassed on the hang line. An octopus shot some ink while we watched him in his lair. Probably the most amazing thing we experienced was being buzzed by a pod of Atlantic Bottle-Nosed Dolphin while we ascending from a WWII wreck.
It was a disconcerting experience, at first. As the video below only hints, baitfish will suddenly move in a unified direction as a predator approaches. We were surrounded by baitfish and they disappeared suddenly, as if being washed down a funnel and into the darkness of the ocean. You don't need much experience to know what that mean. Our eyes as big as plates, we anticipated the arrival of a shark. When the Dolphin suddenly appeared, it was as if playtime was declared. They whipped around us two or three times, encouraging us to let go and join them.
But I've never, ever, come this close to being lunch.
I guess it must be. No different than hoarding a stock, I suppose. Or is it more like price-manipulation? U.S. Weighs Inquiry Into Big Banks’ Storage of Commodities. Cornering markets? Soros got very rich doing this. So did the Hunt family, for a while.
I like this refreshingly hot, crunchy Chinese pickled salad in the summer. Here's how I make it:
Peel and then cut some raw turnips (real turnips) into small (1 inch) bite-sized chunks. Same with some carrots. I cut them in irregular shapes. Some cauliflower chunks. Being a turnip person, I make it about 50% turnip. Chopped cabbage, too, if you want. Blanch them all in boiling water for a minute (separately, in order of color, or you will end up with orange cauliflower). You might want to give the turnip chunks a little more time to boil, but it's all meant to be crunchy.
If you want, some (unpeeled) raw cucumber chunks in it to add color and fun, great, but add those chunks at the last few minutes before straining because soggy cucumbers are not good.
Mix clear vinegar with some salt and a teaspoon or three of sugar (to taste). Toss in some of those very hot dried red Chinese peppers, also some red pepper flakes and/or fresh jalapeno slices, and some thin slices of fresh ginger root. It's fine without the ginger too.
Throw the roots and vegetables in a garbage bag or bowl with the mixture, cover, refrigerate 6-24 hrs, stirring it up occasionally. It should be meaningfully spicy, but it doesn't have to be.
Call the police. Their number is 911. Easy to remember, even if you aren't so good with numbers.
Now if your only complaint is bad manners, I suppose that's another matter. I suppose a college has the power to enforce gentlemanly and ladylike manners if they wish to, but, if so, I am not impressed. Manners, like Codes of Conduct and Codes of Honor, are so old-fashioned, aren't they?
HUD's
New 'Fair Housing' Rule Establishes Diversity Data for Every
Neighborhood in U.S. - See more at:
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/huds-new-fair-housing-rule-establishes-diversity-data-every-neighborhood-us#sthash.Mpoyg2CL.dpuf
HUD's
New 'Fair Housing' Rule Establishes Diversity Data for Every
Neighborhood in U.S. - See more at:
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/huds-new-fair-housing-rule-establishes-diversity-data-every-neighborhood-us#sthash.Mpoyg2CL.dpuf
HUD's
New 'Fair Housing' Rule Establishes Diversity Data for Every
Neighborhood in U.S. - See more at:
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/huds-new-fair-housing-rule-establishes-diversity-data-every-neighborhood-us#sthash.Mpoyg2CL.dpuf
HUD's
New 'Fair Housing' Rule Establishes Diversity Data for Every
Neighborhood in U.S. - See more at:
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/huds-new-fair-housing-rule-establishes-diversity-data-every-neighborhood-us#sthash.Mpoyg2CL.dpuf
Image via 
'Nobody Can Tell You Why' 
On the subject, one of my favorite things in the world is my coffee mug warmer. Your local hardware store or K-Mart/Wal-Mart might carry them. What's fun is that the chocolate milk in the mocha settles slightly over time, so if you baby the mug along for an hour or two, it slowly goes from being a coffee-with-chocolate drink to a hot-chocolate-with-coffee drink, getting slightly sweeter all the while. In that way, the mocha is kind of unique, as it's actually a 'dynamic' drink in that the taste changes slowly over time.
I like this refreshingly hot, crunchy Chinese pickled salad in the summer. Here's how I make it: