Great new stunt!!
I think I'll patent it.

I was munching a few peanuts (Sabritas) and nipping at a beer out in my CAGE (Center for Advanced Gizmological Endeavors) ... the Sabritas were a mix of a small package of the lime & salt variety and a same-size package of the chile type. What I really prefer is the chile & lime but Frito-Lay, which has owned Sabritas for decades, will not sell Sabritas hardly at all in this part of the country, which proves that they are out of their skulls. Anyway the two were mixed in a peanut butter jar and I was alternately making notes in a notebook, sipping beer, and pouring a few peanuts into my palm and tossing them into my mouth. At one point I picked up the beer bottle and poured beer into my palm. If I had more presence of mind I would have sipped what didn't spill from my hand but as it was the startlement had it all on the floor. Clever, eh wot?

This whaling crap is the last straw.
Impeach Oreobama.

Roof Antenna
My Latest Invention

I don't mean an antenna that goes on the roof. The antenna IS the roof. There's a 14 KV power line down the side of the property (though you might have been taught that it's kV, not KV; my position is that the anomaly — of using a small letter k for kilo when the standard is otherwise universally that multipliers larger than 1 use capital letters and smaller than 1 use little ones — is not only stupid {as generally acknowledged} but also inappropriate and improper as continued practice) so I'm kinda goosey about putting up a normal and formal antenna. So I attached a wire to the middle of one edge of the metal roof and drove a ground rod below it, put a tuner between the 706 and the "antenna", and talked to a guy in Calgary a while ago. Cool.

Censorship or Regulation?
I'll be among the first to decry censorship,
and I think I understand the whole thing pretty well. At the same time, I'm neither Old Left, the sort who can't see past their principles, nor New Right, who don't seem to have any. I think the people who put the Constitution together got a lot of things right, and one of them is that the State has a duty to regulate commerce. And let's face it, artistic freedom so often boils down to nothing more than license to produce outrageous movies etc. for purely commercial reasons. Of course any attempt to regulate this swill will be met by fascists screaming about democracy.

I count myself among the membership of the Society for the Eradication of Television (SET); I do not have a TV in the house that is capable of picking up broadcasts of any sort. I do have an old set and use it occasionally for videos about woodworking, Buddhism, etc. Even more rarely do we put in a movie.

I have in my library The Blob and Killer Klowns from Outer Space. The Blob is an early example of art as commerce, or should I say art prostituted for commerce. Steve McQueen, 1958. It's kind of a hoot but also, well, gross ... and it does not tell a story that needed to be told.

Killer Klowns is a total hoot, a parody on The Blob (the opening scene is identical) and on monster movies in general. It is a parody that needed to be done. It's art in my book.

I was in a hotel the other night and had a suite with two TV sets. I did toob for a little while, but GAK!! what drivel!! Television can educate, enlighten, enhance, inform, and I've actually seen it done! Alas, it was rare.

OK. Back to the question. Censorship or regulation? I'm not going to say I have the answer. But I have the question and it won't go away.

Fair and Balanced
Please note that this is a trademark

It's not Butter.

It's not about immigration.
It's about violence on and near the border
and a lot of other places. Arizona is just one of many.

The ONLY way to stop all this stupid violence is to END PROHIBITION.
It worked in Chicago. It will work in Juarez the same way.

And by ending prohibition I mean that the whole drug thing should be considered a public health problem, which it is already, and not a crime thing. Making drugs illegal results in
(1) making everyone who has anything to do with drugs a criminal, which is pointless, and
(2) putting all the controls in the hands of the criminals.

We on the "right side" of the law are ALWAYS playing catch-up and we always will. Decriminalize drugs and regulate just like with alcohol and tobacco. Which by the way are actually bigger problems, or would be if drugs were left alone.

A few of my little "points" for you:
1. Tobacco addiction is harder to shake than opiate addiction. I've known junkies who have quit for years at a time but who are totally unable to get off of cigarettes at all.
2. Drunks on the road is, as you know, a Bad Thing. Pot smokers, on the other hand, if they are too stoned to drive, will pull over and then just sit there and laugh.
3. Cokeheads sit around racking their brains to find some reason to not spend their last nickel on coke. And they can't come up with one. If if it was legal, then at least whole family fortunes or businesses wouldn't be going up their noses.
4. Meth is plentiful because of the economics. If it were not illegal there would not be large amounts of money to be made, and therefore no incentive to risk getting oneself burnt to a crisp cooking up the damned stuff.
5. Were it not for hemp, we wouldn't be sitting here in the "New World" blogging because there would have been no canvas (cannabis) or rope for the big ships, but nobody would have noticed because the ships would not have existed. On the bright side, there would not be a gazillion stupid people in Arizona.

Google "williams audubon hemp" (don't include the quotes) for the world's best history of the prohibition of drugs.

Recycling the Deck Chairs
So you think you're actually doing something?
You're not.

If you want to start doing something to save the planet, STOP BUYING CRAP.

April is Colombia to Hell in a Handbasket Month
Sorry it's a little late for getting the publicity out.

Clam and Eggs — who knew?
(If we had any aracana eggs it could be Green Eggs and Clam)
I woke up this morning thinking about cooking clams. We had a can of clams in the cupboard for a very long time. So I drained the stuff and fried it in butter. Not having done this before, I put it alongside the egg dish instead of in it, but next time it'll go in. We get tired of pig meat, and now there's an alternative.

Tracker, schmacker
Why bother with complicated solar trackers?
Since there is a finite life to solar panels, why not swap out the complexities of making, installing, and maintaining trackers for the extended life of solar panels by not having them always facing the sun full on? Buy a few more panels and put them in an arc, where some are facing the morning sun, some midday, some afternoon. Since (I assume) the life is proportional to the electrical output over time (measured in coulombs) ... one of many things I oughta look up to see if I'm all wet.

Virtual Speechwriter
(If I was O'Bama ... )

I realize the insurance companies gave me a lot of money, but that doesn't make them saints. Not even in my book. They contribute nothing to the health of the people. Nothing. All they do is take.

We have a lot of problems to solve here. For one, most of the money spent in health care is for heroic efforts to prolong the agony of people in their last six months of life. We need to put money into improving health at the beginning of life, and in the middle. Infant mortality is not a pretty picture for a Maternal mortality is up. Obesity is rampant.

Do we want health insurance, health care, or health? Health is what we want. Health care, though it's not perfect, is a way to facilitate health. Health insurance is a way to squander huge amounts of money on people in offices, hoping that some of it makes it out the back door to the health care providers. It's like pushing a rope.

Make the Pie Higher!!
This time it's The Health Pie.

This morning one of my coworkers came in fuming about the "health" thing. For good reason, of course; it's a complete travesty. But you knew that. Trouble was, he was spouting F*x Noose and calling it "Socialist". And insisting that F*x tells it straight. Gak!! Why would anyone think this is butter? Anyway, it seems the F*x likes to call things they don't like "Socialist", having already decided that the word means something worse than death. Gimme a break!! You drive on public roads? That's socialism. You have or had kids in public school? That's socialism. You want help from the government when your unwisely-placed house washes away? Let's not get into that one.

This health plan is not socialism. It's Fascism, pure and simple. Of course F*x doesn't know what that word means either.

The Alphabet Diet
this month I'm on P

I can have Peas, Pork, Porridge, Pistachios, Piña Colada, Pine Nuts, Poultry, Pemmican, Port, Pasta, Pad Thai, Pie, Popovers, Peppers, Peperoni, Pizza ...

I think I'll come back later and put everything in alphabetical order.

September 2009 St. Petersburg
(and to and fro)
[more of the Better Blog than Never department]

So we went to Umeå and caught the ferry across to Vaasa. Nice little ferry. Got on the train at Vaasa and changed at Jyväskylä (did I spell that right?) for Pieksämäki. It was a little arduous finding the little B&B-hotel but when we did, with the help of a young fellow who saw us wandering twice, we were rewarded with a nice sauna. And the next morning, when we had to leave a bit early, our hosts set up breakfast early. I can recommend Hotel Sweet Home to you without reservation (pun intended, sorry).

I like the breads they have in the north, especially Finland. We're talking serious bread here.

The train took us to Kuovola where we changed for St. Petersburg. We were on a Finnish train, and the food was way excellent.

Food in St. Petersburg was interesting. We ate at the same restaurant three nights in a row. It was run by people from one or more of the southern republics. Other meals were random and some pretty good, except for the occasional nearby smoker. There did seem to be a lot of smoking, both there and Finland.

Internet access seemed to be easiest at any of many branches of a bookstore called "Bukvoed" (pronounced kinda like bukvoyed). My guess is the name comes from vocational-educational, but that might be erroneous.

Museums are a subject big enough for a separate post.

After the visit to the Hermitage, we had the opportunity to confound a gaggle of pickpockets. A small group of punks was blocking the sidewalk behind a bus stop shelter, and since I had my passport and stuff inside my clothing, I went right ahead into the squeeze; a young lady was dipping a finger into my right hip pocket and was about to abscond with my handkerchief when I grabbed her arm. She spun away and the gang vanished. That was kinda fun.

2009-09-06
The Kingdom of Cheese

Sunday — Went with Christer by way of the Kingdom of Cheese (Burträsk) to his summer cabin, halfway to Umeå, where we met Hans and his mother and had a nice time, and afterwards picked lingon and blueberries in the woods and put them into a jar which we took with us to Russia; still had some when we got into our hostel room in St. Petersburg. Great munch, along with the Västerbotten cheese we got in Burträsk. That stuff is GOOD.

In the evening Christer took us to Umeå, dinner at McDonald's, for our overnight stay before catching the ferry to Vaasa, Finland. Taxi in Umeå to the ferry was horribly expensive, and the taxi in Vaasa from the ferry to the train station was very reasonable.

Better blog than never department
2009-09-02 Bastuträsk and Skellefteå
Picked up at the train station in Bastuträsk by cousin Christer. He has been staying in touch with my mother for a very long time and stays at her house in Florida when he goes there to buy cars and parts. He and his wife Eva are waaay into American cars and he is apparently the local guru in Skellefteå.
We stayed there for several days including a trip with cousin Eskil (who taught Eva to drive long ago) up to the family stomping grounds somewhere around Ersmark. There we met a bunch more cousins, half of whom were out of work. Before that gathering we had lunch with Eskil and his wife Vera at their lovely place in Kåge.

Better Blog than Never department
2009-09-01 Tuesday
Arrival in Stockholm, seriously jetlagged, on the day that 100-watt incandescent bulbs became illegal.

Mamacita lost her grip on a sweatshirt she had just bought in Chicago (a closeout super deal) while getting off the plane. It did eventually turn up in "hittegods" (lost & found) and they shipped it to her in Denmark, eventually, for more than it cost.

I bought Telia SIM cards for our cell phones; selected that carrier on my cousin's good advice that their coverage was much better than the two others in the north where he lives. We put them into the Motorola W490s that were sold to us at a T-Mobile kiosk as being unlocked. Just plain unlocked. Ha. More on this later. (The difference between a cell phone salesman and a used car salesman? The used car salesman knows when he's lying.)

We were pretty jetlagged. Did I say this already? On the bus from Årlanda airport into Stockholm, due to putting on the seatbelt in the bus, my 490 came off my belt -- hey, no more belt clips, only loops -- hold me to this -- so we were down to just one nonworking phone, except for -- voila!! The Palm Treo 650 that friend Howard had given me. It is a great PDA, rather schizo as a camera (sometimes it tells me there is no camera) and reluctant as a phone. It does work, but after about 8 minutes it overheats or something and just goes bonkers. And it does other things in fits when the phone part of it is turned on. But it was truly an unlocked quad mode phone. But it was such a pain in the zad that I eventually bought a dumb Nokia for the journey.

(Later: The phone did eventually turn up in hittegods at the central station, and that hittegods office won't ship out of the country. I think I'd better call my sister's friend Tony. Later yet, did that, and he retrieved it and shipped is to me. Phew.)

Free Yuri
I find it totally absurd that Yuri Kondratyuk has been omitted from the International Space Hall of Fame at the Space Museum in Alamogordo. You could complain about this via their Contact Us page.

What boggled your mind today?
Mine was the Wikipedia article on The Woodlands, Texas

The Woodlands is a hoity-toity master-planned city near Houston. The boggling was due to this aspect of the article: while many Wikipedia articles have versions in scads of other languages, this one had just four. But which four? Take a wild guess. Give up? They are (in reverse order): Volapük, Portuguese, Dutch, and Haitian Creole.

Revoking Corporate Charters
A talk by Richard Grossman

This was on Alternative Radio just a little while ago. Recorded in 1997, though host David Barsamian didn't mention that at the end of the program (and I didn't hear the very beginning).

You can go to alternativeradio.org to get lots of stuff, five bux for an hour MP3 program, if you can't get it on public radio where you are. Check it out.