A couple one minute rants...

I leave at 5:30am tomorrow for Seattle, and it is now 11:10pm here in deepest, darkest central Joisey. So, I'll indulge myself in a couple of mini-rants and then I'm off to bed.

My first (and most obvious) target is the airline industry. Flying sucks! When I was a kid (shortly after Orville and Wilbur did their thing), flying was fun. Didn't get there as fast in the air, but the planes were actually fairly comfortable, the people staffing them and the ground facilities were not worked to within an inch of their sanity. And we didn't have to deal with the paranoia that has become SOP since 9/11. No, if I had any kind of an alternative...oh, like maybe trains...and could afford to take that much time, I would in a heart beat. But that alternative isn't really viable these days, so I subject myself to the horrors of modern air travel. It is just another huge, glaring example of how our quality of life is eroding away.

Then, also in a "transportation" sort of vein, there are the roads here in the Soprano State. They suck as well! What with deteriorating bridges, potholes that swallow smaller cars whole and a marked lack of new roads being built to handle the ever increasing traffic load, driving here in the Garden State has become an exercise in stoicism in the face of adversity rather than something one actually might want to do. Those Sunday drives of yesteryear are but a dim, fading memory 'cause there ain't nobody who actually goes for a ride in the country just for the ride any more.

Of course, it isn't just the roads that make driving suck here in the 'burbs. No, my slightly biased estimate is that at least 70% of the people the great State of New Jersey has awarded the license to drive are, in fact, not up to that task. OK, maybe not 70%...but the percentage is significant. These so called drivers wander from lane to lane; they drive 10 miles an hour below the posted speed limit in the left lane...and then have the presumption to look askance at those who pass them on the right. Only by some prodigious displays of vehicular control have I managed to avoid the fools who have been seriously trying to kill me of late. I do have to say that my Outback is quite agile for a station wagon, and I am grateful for that.

On other fronts, Hillary should read the writing on the wall and withdraw with some grace and in the best interest of the party. She'll get points for doing so.

The exciting news is that for the past few years I have been vainly scouring the shelves of America's retailers looking for a certain product. I finally drew up some very rough drawings and took them to a patent attorney who did think that it is an idea worth pursuing. So, $500 dollars poorer (me...he's that much richer) I am waiting on pins and needles for the result of the "art search". If that proves to be negative, I will file a provisional application and begin the process that could see me actually the possessor of a US patent. How cool is that? Plus, if I can patent it, I think I can sell it and make enough money to become semi-retired. (Meaning I'd still work, but only at things I actually wanted to do.) Further reports will be forthcoming as things progress.

And with that, dear reader (shrug...if there is even one of you out there) I am going to toddle off to bed and try for four hours sleep. I hate flying....

Those fun-loving guys are at it again...

The current issue of Time Magazine (4/7/08) has as its cover story an expose of the biofuel (ie. ethanol) stampede. Basically, Time reports that ethanol actually adds to the greenhouse gases while diverting crops like corn from being a food source to being a fuel source. This diversion of crops like corn away from the feedlots and grocery stores to the ethanol plants means that the cost of many foods is going to go up. In addition, the rush to biofuels is one of the driving forces behind the accelerating destruction of the Amazonian rain forest.

One of the factoids that Time trots out in the course of the article is that the amount of corn needed to produce a tank of ethanol for a hybrid SUV would feed one adult human for one year. The fact that there are tens of millions of human beings who suffer from (at one end of the scale) malnutrition to (at the other end of the scale) fatal starvation, the act of diverting food to something as inconsequential as fueling one of our behemoth vehicles becomes a little macabre at best.

So, not only is most ethanol a net carbon emitter (only sugar cane based ethanol contributes, net, less carbon than oil based fuels), but its production absorbs resources which once went into food production. All that corn that is going ethanol plants is not going to the feedlots...and that means that those burgers on the grill this summer are going to become a luxury rather than a regular event.

Of course, what we should be promoting and investing research dollars and resources in is hydrogen. As a fuel, hydrogen emits no carbon (when you think about it, its major byproduct is water...). The rap against hydrogen is that it is hard to handle. Which is why we need to invest in research to find ways to make it easier to use. Oh, and I do note that many of the biggest boosters of biofuels are American corporate agri-businesses. Yes, Corporate America, smelling the opportunity for some quick profits has jumped aboard the ethanol bandwagon while loudly proclaiming themselves to be truly committed to to protecting the ecosphere. This loud self-promotion does lead me to wonder why American Corporations are almost always on the wrong side of those issues which define character. Hmmm.

But that is a rant for another time...

We Democrats need an intervention...

What is wrong with our leadership? What is wrong with Hillary and Barack? Don't they see that they are giving McCain a priceless gift? I am beginning to think that the party is not important to either Hillary or Barack. I am beginning to think that they care little that they are ripping the heart out of the party and that they could very well be giving Mr. McCain the keys to the White House.

It is one thing to have a sitting President as your known opponent. A sitting President presents a continuing target. A candidate like McCain, however, only has to go around making "meet 'n greet" appearances while he quietly, in the background, builds his campaign machine. So, the fact that Bill Clinton didn't clinch the nomination until July was not all that bad. After all, he had George the First tanking the economy and otherwise being fairly unpopular. This year's candidate(s) don't have that luxury. Sure, they have George the Second, who is a true disaster, but George the Second isn't running again. The American people can throw all the bric-a-brac they want at George, but he's gone anyhow.

What our two erstwhile candidates need to do is retire to a room somewhere and not come out until they have decided between themselves who is going to carry the standard. I don't care how they do it: play poker, Indian wrestle, dueling pistols at thirty paces...whatever. Just stop this internal bloodletting and start focusing on the true opposition. As an aside, this was one of the good points about having kingmakers like Richard Daley and others of the "smoke filled room" era: they knew who the opposition really were, and they made sure that the party didn't waste too much time and effort on internecine warfare.

Sissy Nation strikes again

I just checked my email, and there, sitting proudly in my inbox was an urgent post from TrueMajority.org. It seems that TrueMajority is appalled (with reason) by what is transpiring in Tibet of late. Anyhow, they want me to sign a petition to be delivered to the Chinese government calling for China's President to at least hold talks with the Dalai Lama. However, the letter they plan to deliver was obviously written by a true Sissy. The letter (in its entirety) says:

"We call on the Chinese government to live up to its international obligations and respond to the Tibetan protests with peace and nonviolence. President Hu Jintao, we call upon you to open up a direct dialogue with the Dalai Lama to work toward a long term solution."

What I want to draw your attention to is the part which asks China to "...respond to the Tibetan protests with peace and nonviolence." Yeech!! How wussy can you get? Jesus! Why not hit 'em where it really hurts...the pocketbook. "Stop beating up on the Tibetans or we will boycott all products made in China. Your economy will crash and you will have a billion angry peasants of your own to worry about." Of course, that would mean that Americans and Europeans would have to suck up and stop purchasing shit made in China, and that would probably throw a crimp into our economies also. On the other hand, manufacturers who were quick off the mark and moved their production lines to other cheap labor markets could score big.

Deliver that note to the Chinese, and all you do is risk a few cases of apoplexy caused by them laughing too hard. Sheesh!

Stoopits and the American Dream...

I was at work last night when one of my cashiers started to laugh. She was reading (usually a no-no, but business was really slow...) a new book, Sissy Nation (which sounds pretty cool and is something I think I want to read) so I asked her what was so funny. Well, she proceeded to read me two exerpts, which made me both laugh and wince. The first was basically how the author, John Strausbaugh, defines "sissy" and the second is about the term "Stoopits". Well, a nerve was hit, a button pushed, and I had to buy this book.

Having purchased said tome, let me quote for you the first 4 sentences of this book, and then you tell me if it doesn't strike home. Page 1, line 1:

America has become Sissy Nation. A culture of fat, soft, stupid, fearful, whiny, infantile, narcissistic, fatalistic, groupthinking victims. Once we were warriors. Now we're just worriers."

Strausbaugh goes on to state that by "sissies" he does not mean "girly man". Rather, he defines "sissy" as "...lack of courage and conviction, spine and balls". Later on in the first chapter, he writes "There's an episode of Star Trek where members of a mildly retaded alien race, let's call them the Stoopits, bumble around the galaxies in spaceships they can barely pilot, buying or stealing what they need from smarter species. I've always taken it as a metaphor for us. It won't be long now before American is Planet Stoopit."

That part about bumbling around in "spaceships they can barely pilot" immediately made me think about traffic in the fair Garden State. I would swear that the above description applies to a majority of the drivers on New Jersey's roads; they are piloting vehicles they can barely handle.

Ah well, like I said, I have purchased this book, so you, gentle reader, can expect a number of quotes drawn from said book that will serve as my starting points over the next few weeks (months?). When you think about Stoopits, we can start by thinking about l'affaire Spitzer and then yesterday's bailout of one of Wall Streets largest brokerages, Bear Stearns. *sigh*

I am impressed...

In an act of pure whimsy, I signed up for a free course at Sony's My 101 on Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. Turns out, however, that I've already learned a couple things I didn't know and that I've been mildly inspired. Seems da Vinci's notebooks, those that still exist, are the surviving pages of a journal he kept for over 40 years. During that time, he averaged two pages per day. Now, sometimes those pages only held a single sketch or a couple lines of text, but other times the pages were crammed with everything from grocery lists and daily to-do lists to profound insights into how things work and why.

So, Leonardo's work covered some 40 years from his late 20's through his late 60's. If I start try to emulate him, at least in keeping a journal, he'll have about a 30 year (shut-up, "serpent's tooth" *grin*) head start on me, and I don't see me actually getting two pages a day done...But maybe I can average a page a day of some sort. Some of it will be here, and some will be hand written in real ink on real paper, some will be on my other site (still unnamed, s.t.), some will be sketched (I hope) and some will be in spreadsheets. My hope is that by making a commitment I will actually post here at least a couple times a week. Who knows, I may actually build up an actual online following...

And this counts as a page...

It goes on...

It is now over a week, and there is still water in Mom's basement. This house is beginning to wear on me! Now, as of Wednesday, I had the water down to about 3/4 of an inch, but I was working on Thursday during the day, so I couldn't get up there. And then Thursday night/Friday morning in finally snowed here in Central New Jersey. So, I spent Friday using my new snowblower which I was gifted with for Christmas. (It works great...I cleared out the driveway and walks in about 1/2 the time it usually takes me to shovel...and with far fewer complaints from back and arms...). Then I got to help a small person build a snowman which made the winter whole. However, the one thing I didn't do Friday was go check on the water in the basement.

So, Saturday (yesterday) I go up and find that there is now about 4 inches of water down there. Not only that, but the hoses attached to the pumps were frozen solid. After another trip back home for one of our hoses, I got it going again. On the way home from dinner at Tom and Georgina's we detoured so I could turn the pump off. I was gratified to find there was only about 3/4 of an inch of water down there. But, I'm not going to get up there again until Tuesday AM, which means, I'm afraid, that there will be another 3-4 inches of water down there as all the snow begins to melt. I am truly getting tired of this.

Sigh...so it's been about 2 months...

I know, I know...how can one develop a readership if one only posts occasionally. And I understand that once every two months or so isn't even occasionally. I have posted a little more than that over at my top secret blog (read totally anonymous so I can really say whatever I want, no matter how...ahhh...inappropriate), but even there I have been less than prolific of late. You know, I've been writing on the Internet in one form or another since 1991...I think my 17th anniversary was in January...but I have never touched the zeitgeist necessary to develop a decent readership. I know...there are a couple of you out there who check in from time to time...and my daughter gets a feed, I think, but that's about all I have been able to build over 17 years.

Aside: Growing old sucks...You get aches and pains where there were none before. It is your body's subtle (as a sledgehammer) way of letting you know that the clock is, in fact, ticking. Right now I have a sharp pain near the knuckles of my fourth and fifth fingers of my right hand. My pinkie hurts when I type. Like I said, growing old sucks...End aside

It is now about 12:45am, and I have been going since 7am what is now yesterday morning. And I have to be up and ready for my granddaughter at 7:25am this morning. And why do I have the duty tomorrow, you might ask? Well, let me tell you: My wife, who usually has the granddaughter duty at that time of day, is upstairs, in bed, with a good case of pneumonia. Not only is she down for the count, I am trying to get the inch plus of water that currently is lapping around my mother's basement outside where it belongs. However, doing that entails numerous trips up to her house (which is about 12.5 miles away) because she is no longer capable of going down into the basement to check on the pump. So, that means I can't leave it running until the water is down to about 1/8 inch...

Another aside: So, the pumps the plumber put down there on Saturday turned out to be pretty worthless...one of them only works sporadically--very sporadically and the other just doesn't move all that much water...so I went out and bought a 1/4 horsepower Rigid pump. In the instruction packet, it says that the pump needs 1/4 inch of water to prime itself...that it will remove water down to 1/8th inch of the surface upon which it (the pump) is sitting and that it should be unplugged when the water level is at 1/2 inch. My question has to do with which one of those numbers is reliable. The outside of the box mentions the 1/8th inch number, and that is why I bought the damn thing. However, it could be that the 1/2 inch number is actually the relevant one, and that would suck big time. If this pump can't bring the water level down to under 1/2 inch, that means I'll have to get rid of the rest of the water using the wet/dry vac, and that would not be a lot of fun.

So, as I was saying, I have to be there when the pumps are running...or at least I have to be able to get there within a few minutes to check on the water level so as not to burn them out by running them without enough water to cover the impellers. This is beginning to burn both my energy and a lot of gasoline (25 mile round trip 3 or 4 times a day). Thus, between work, keeping up this house, acting as general contractor for the restoration of Mom's house and all the other stuff I get roped into doing, I have little time and even less energy to devote to writing online. And the thing is, writing is one of the things I really enjoy doing. All I can do is hope that external circumstances change enough to allow me the opportunity to start devoting time and energy to this avocation as well as the other things I enjoy.

What are they thinking, Part 3

So, I'm driving along today, on my way up to my Mom's to do some more overseeing of the reconstruction, when I ended up stopped at a light behind a guy driving a bright red Corvette. I immediately leapt to the conclusion that he would be off the line when the light changed like a shot, and I could get ahead of that Annoying SUV parked in the left lane. Instead this guy creeps ahead when the light changed. He was going so slowly that little old ladies in those powered mobility scooters were passing him; kids on roller blades were passing him. He was not going fast, in other words.

So, my question is, "Why did this guy lay out big bucks for a relatively uncomfortable car?" I mean, the Corvette is not, by any means, a luxury car: it is a fast, muscle car. It's got tons of power and it goes very fast. If you aren't going to tweak it at lights (when you have the chance) or on relatively traffic free back country roads, then why buy the damn thing? One thing it is not is a luxury car. I guess it all comes down to it being another case of somebody having more money than brains.

Snow Globes

The other day I was looking at some of the "seasonal gifts" being sold by my employer. One of these gifts is a Disney motif snow globe. I thought to myself, "Cool!" because I remember snow globes from my youth. The ones I remember from my Grandmother's house were usually the size of a softball, heavy glass and they had either snowmen, a country scene or a "Night Before Christmas" scene. You shook them up, set them down, and then watched the snow fall for a few minutes. All in all, they were pretty magical.

Now we get to what passes for a snow globe these days. The variety we are selling (and I have to think that this pretty much represents what is available these days), have some sort of white chunky stuff for the snow in a plastic globe. And, when you shake them up, you get to watch the "snow" fall for an soul satisfying 15 to 30...seconds. I don't think any little kids are going to grow up with fond memories of this.

In miniature, this is what is wrong with our society. There is very little pride of workmanship or creation any more. Today it is all about getting the money. Make it as cheaply as possible and sell it as dearly as you can. Gimme the money. And this is why, even when one makes it near the top of the income pyramid, there is no joy. Unless you are right up on the pinnacle of that pyramid where you can afford to pay hugely for one of those few true craftsmen/artisans left, the stuff you buy is no different from the stuff the rest of us buy...and most of that is crap.

I have watched huge buildings, that purport to be "homes", being built in the rich part of this county. For the most part, they are being built using the same materials and the same workmanship that one finds in those developments of MacMansions which sprout in former cow pastures seemingly overnight. In other words, the rich guy is building bigger, but not much better. Then that rich guy then gets to drive his big SUV over roads and bridges that are more and more rapidly falling into disrepair. It does not add up to an increase in the quality of life; at least it doesn't to me.