all dead

Reading the Bernie Madoff story on yahoo just now. Also watched the ABC video of folks who "lost" their never-gotten gains. For Madoff, the cash he kept would be considered ill-gotten gains?

The other folks are suffering because their greed didn't work out right. Madoff will suffer in the fed pen for his greed.

Then I did a little Madoff math to entertain myself. I love a puzzle like that--there's no way that everybody lost everything. Anybody that cashed out before the end did just fine. Madoff lived the high life. But there's nothing he could have bought to account for the money he took in.

$171,000,000,000

being all gone now. Some of that $171 billion must be laying around liquid somewhere.

...but that's not what this post is about.

So I scrolled back up, and noticed the top yahoo searches right now:

billy mays .. michael jackson .. neverland ranch .. gale storm

They're all dead. Even the ranch. Bernie might as well be; he'll die in prison.

Rest in peace, y'all.

And the rest of you all should get a little bit of life while you can. Look up something that's still alive. Do something.

Spitzer, Ensign, Sanford, another WWWWW&W day & the hits keep comin'

If it's Wednesday it must be Wretched Wrepublican Wandering Weenie Wrevelation & Wresignation Day. (God help me, how schadenfreude tempts me.)

This makes TWO Wednesdays in a row that a Repuglican boy in high places had to fall on his sword. For unauthorized swordplay.

So this week it's the Governor Sanford show in which the leader of South Carolina tearfully confesses. He then spanked himself on the wrist and resigned from his leadership position amongst Rep Govs. Watch his act on C-SPAN, once it's racked in the archives. BTW, the woman regarded as his anointed successor took his pic and endorsement off her website today.


Not that Sanford.

Here's the pic that's no longer on her website:


Last Wednesday Sen Ensign, (R-NV) gave a small mea-culpa. He was a member of Promise Keepers, a men's Christian group that espoused devotion to family and marriage. This Mr Clean called for Clinton to step down and chided Sen Craig for airport potty footsie. So he resigned--not from the Senate, but merely from his leadership position [head of the Republican Policy Committee].

Oh I can't wait until next Wednesday. Oooo, maybe it'll be exprez daddy-Bush confessing. I'm sorry, that's like mentioning your parents have sex. Well, they did.

Flash (oh, I didn't say that) back to last year, and it was a Wednesday March 12 that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer spilled his beans. And quit his job. Wonderful Wednesdays.


An even uglier image, Newt Gingrich's multiple affairs. He confessed his recidivist sins to a conservative audience, however, on a Friday in 2007.

What is it? Do these repressed snarky nay-sayers represent an irresistible challenge to the "other women" of the world? Are they simply wild men once their rigid (oh bad word) reserve is penetrated? (ok, I'll stop now) Maybe once they've flung caution to the wind they simply become animals. Wild animals.

Oh, of course, they are animals. We all are.

MS fit. Snark, snark.

Don't get me going on a rant about Micro$haft, or little Bill Gates. Oh well, just a little fit. I'm entitled; I bought Windows when it was just 'Windows' in 1987.

I've spent too much time over the last 20+ years grousing about how they goobered up a good product when they left Windows 2 (decent upgrade! the only one!) to go all GUI and Mac-ish with Win3. Downhill ever since.

This bing thing. Who cares? Too late. Bite me, Bill.

Here's a good comparison of search engines from Berkeley (bing's not on it).
They compare three: Google, Yahoo, and something else. Isn't it that way for most people? We use Google or Yahoo; everything else is also-ran.

Here's a list of search engines by a natural-born librarian*--the heroes of the world, god love 'em--that has 60 search engines by type, then by name (no bing here).
The source's header:

*more on this fabulous website later

bing. Bah. Bite me. Bing Bell, funny.

bing.
Izzat supposed to make us think of Bingo, as in "you got it!" Not me.
Bing it on. No, don't bing a thing. Bing gone. Shut up, keep stub-bing your toes.



bing makes me think of Sheriff Bing Bell ("will somebody get the door?") in Evil Roy Slade. Definitely an inspiration for Blazing Saddles, the Mel Brooks movie. I gotta watch those movies. (Whew, Evil Roy is on VHS at a suburban library. )

And please, before I get a throb-bing headache, throw bing under the train.

Oh mama, that's another good movie...

No, Chucky, discrimination still happens to USA women

Yes, I read a lot of crap, from both sides. Like this from Conservative Review in today's inbox

Obama Surveys the World

Hovering on High: Obama Surveys the World
by Charles Krauthammer

(In which Chucky boy whines about Obama's attitude on the recent road trip, blah blah. When he got to this quote, I had to pitch a fit. )

"...[quoting Obama] 'meanwhile, the struggle for women’s
equality continues in many aspects of American life.'

Well, yes. On the one hand, there certainly is some
American university where the women’s softball team has
received insufficient Title IX funds — ..."

Charles, sweetie, no no it's a little worse than that. So dismissive, so clueless, you poor thang.

See the Lily Ledbetter Law signed in January--Obama's first bill signing. Its namesake is the pensioner in her 70's who got tipped to a career's-worth of pay discrimination as she retired. A fellow employee showed her what the other supervisors, all male, were paid.

She took it to the Supremes. Got turned down because she didn't file when that pay discrimination--which she DID NOT KNOW about--was happening. That's Catch 22 on steroids!

So, for the rest of her life, she'll continue to get bit by Goodyear's pension plan paying her less than her retired male peers, because she made less than they did cumulatively over a lifetime of work.

Chucky babeeeee, see beyond your tidy little whitey-male world and realize privilege is not universal, but merely yours. For the time being.

------------

PS, this blog was submitted as a comment to Chucky. Whaddaya think it'll be published?

Read Bonnie Erbe's blog on the Ledbetter Law from US News & World Report.

tv revolutions & Chinese stuff

We went digital today, in tv broadcasting technology.
I remember life before tv.

The oldest tv station in Texas is here in Fort Worth, KXAS-ch 5 (neé WBAP). It went on the air when my friend David was one day old. I was born 12 days later. We're all 60. Born in 1948.

Four years later tv came to my home town of El Paso--KROD in December 1952 then KTSM three weeks later. Why the gap? The FCC froze applications from 9/30/48 through 4/14/1952*. You'd think it's because El Paso is small and remote, but apparently they were rarin' to go, if KROD could get on the air in eight months in 1952.

The first time I saw one was at the Cichettis' house. Round screen in a box. We didn't have a television set until I was in school. It was a media center, with a drawer that had a turntable in it. Big piece of furniture that showed you tv and played your records.

The next revolution was color. Pretty magical. I was grown, outta college and moved here before I encountered UHF stations. Cable didn't arrive until the 80s, probably because it was hard to sell the need for cable here in a top-5 media market with plenty of free broadcast tv.

Get to China
OK, now the Chinese stuff. The fancy Radio Shack antenna didn't work, gotta take it back. I captured all the digital stuff with rabbit ears--original equipment on a 10-yr-old tv.

The Zenith converter boxes, highly recommended, work well. Made in China. Ditto the antenna that's going back.

Now I wonder if any of the converter boxes are made anywhere but China?
Probably not. Oooo! Where are the cable boxes made these days?

I have two elderly cable remotes, both Scientific Atlanta. Elder one made in Korea, newer one "assembled in Mexico". These relics are decades old. Bet today's models come from China.

*Mike Shannon's Dallas-Fort Worth TV Station History http://www.knus99.com/tvlist.html

China gets Hummer

Fiendishly well-suited to each other. Reminds me of the bride of Frankenstein.
Except Elsa Lanchester was sorta cute.
Hummers are not.

Check out comments to Mike Thompson's excellent cartoon at Detroit Free Press.

We see way too many Hummers on the road here, where the west begins and fantasies persist. I remember seeing my first stretch hummer coming out of a hockey game in Dallas several years ago. Yeah, wretched excess is redefined.

Back home in El Paso a couple years ago I saw no Hummers on the road (as a POV--that's Personally Owned Vehicle in army-speak). Maybe that's because the real HumVees are at Ft Bliss. It would be so embarrassing to be a civilian driving a Hummer and playing your army fantasies in El Paso, when the real and deadly serious army lives there, too.

Well, you'd think.

my foster child is playing with a syringe

Chill, y'all.

My "child" is a 6-wk-old kitten. The syringe is from an ink-cartridge refill kit. Needle detached. Cute kitten.

Like the modern maxim about everything's a nail when you only have a hammer--everything's a toy when you are a kitten.

Fit #2: invisible cities...

...in Tarrant County, Texas.

Arlington
My local rag had a good editorial about that new stadium in Arlington--Jerry's World. Seems that last weekend during the inaugural dry run (or is it dry heave since the concert was by George Strait*), they kept calling it Dallas.

"But why did some of the entertainers welcome the 60,000-member audience to Dallas? Why did the announcer welcome them to Texas Stadium, the home the Cowboys left, which is in Irving?"

Stadium = in Arlington. Arlington = in Tarrant County.
Dallas = in Dallas County.
New stadium ≠ in Dallas. http://stadium.dallascowboys.com/

*Get ready for more gagging. The next act in Cowboys Stadium is the Jonas Brothers.

Fort Worth
Same thing last year, coming back from a trip to the east--where most people still believe there IS an edge to the earth and it happens somewhere east of the Mississippi--I heard this nonsense from a pilot and a stewardess.

Yes, I know she's a flight attendant, but we were both old enough to remember when she was a stewardess. The pilot kept announcing we were headed for Dallas, ETA Dallas, weather in Dallas, blah blah Dallas. We weren't; we were heading to DFW Airport.
D = Dallas, FW = Fort Worth.
DFW Airport = Dallas-Fort Worth Airport.

As I "deplaned" I told her how relieved I was that the pilot mentioned both cities finally as we landed. "Because I'm going home--to Fort Worth. Until then, I thought I was on the wrong plane, headed for Love Field" (in Dallas, code DAL). She vapidly said, "Oh yeah, Southwest is there and some others now? American?"

Yeah, Love. That's the field in Dallas.

a couple of fits

OK, now I'm in the mood.

#1. The senate race in Minnesota.
AKA Coleman vs Franken, if you wanna get legalistic.

WTF, how can that keep dragging on? Is it the tiny margin of defeat that Coleman suffered that keeps him scratching for more phantom votes? For once size doesn't matter. Suck it up, bozo. If you lose by just ONE vote, ya lose. And you, former-senator Coleman, have lost. Deal with it.

The latest grubbing for votes story was as recent as yesterday. Putting "Coleman Franken" in the popular search engine yields 2,140,000 hits.

As if my junior senator Cornyn the Militant Toady couldn't get any worse, he does. By pronouncing this case could drag on forever.

Al's OK. I'm no big fan, but the man won the seat. Let him take office, and let it be before the Senate works on Sotomayor's confirmation. Puhleeeze.

We DO import wind turbine blades

Last night at a dinner party a friend--whose uncle used to be harbormaster for the Port of Galveston--said he sees the blades stacked on the wharf often on visits to Galveston. Yes, huge.
And then a blade gets on a truck and heads up I-45. A few loads of those really snarls traffic.

photo by tigone

"Bulker [bulk freighter] CATHRIN OLDENDORFF with a deck cargo of wind turbine blades, estimated to be 33m (108 feet) each in length. Galveston, Texas, January 27, 2007."

I'd estimate I agree with the length. Because they were longer than two rail cars, which are 40ft [to accommodate a 40'container] when I saw them on Saturday.

My f/Friend Fred tells me that the world-beater wind farm project T. Boone Pickens is building up by Pampa features blades from a Danish company that sources the manufacturing in Vietnam. Good money, Vietnam!

So I went looking to see where these things are made. Answer: everywhere! Whoa, talk about helping the developing world. That's good. What could be easier? Got breeze? Got power!

Thank goodness people like T. Boone got money to put the wind farms on the grid.

Wind-turbine blades are huge

See the train in the trestle in this pic? Today I drove under it and there was a parked train full of blades for wind-turbine electric generators. One blade spanned the street. It's a 6-lane divided street. It was about 2 1/2 miles of train with those blades, which are apparently twice as long as a standard rail car.


View Larger Map

The blades could have been as big as this prototype of a huge one. Maybe even bigger.

The website* describes it as:
GE Wind Energy's 3.6 megawatt wind turbine is one of the largest prototypes ever erected. Larger wind turbines are more efficient and cost effective.

These were NOT made in China. Trust me, they are waaaaaay too big to fit in a container.


* http://www1.eere.energy.gov/windandhydro/wind_how.html

Pix of Hudson cars

A 1949 model, top left



At left is a 1953 Hudson Hornet.

Come to think about it, maybe it was a Hornet. Whichever it was. the car was brand new in 1949 when they took me as a one-year-old to visit relatives in Wyoming. In winter.

Time to grow a thumbnail = 6 months

Finally I have cut the last piece of my squashed thumbnail off. I shut the tip of my thumb in the car door (SVT Focus) Thanksgiving week. It was purple a long time. It's also been a long time since I've done that.

Last time it was in my aunt & uncle's car--a 1949 Hudson Commodore--and I was a toddler. It looked like this, black also.
http://www.hudson-cars.com/1951-hudson-1.html

My WWWW bracelet

Last weekend I made a bracelet with black beads and four white ones with the letter "W" on them. No, I didn't make a typo with the beads; it's not a WWJD bracelet. But it kinda looks like one.

A bag of all "W" beads at Hobby Lobby was cheap. I proudly wear my WWWW bracelet now. Wore it to court and made sure it was visible, just in case it might be mistaken for a WWJD model.

What does it mean? Quakers will get this one. It stands for What Would Woolman Wear.

John Woolman had a revelation that slavery was wrong, and henceforward he sought to eliminate products that involved the use of slave labor from anything he purchased. That meant foregoing clothing dyed with indigo grown by slaves in the Carribbean. With off-white clothing he stood out in a crowd. Part of his witness against slavery. He had more than that, but the clothing was his hallmark.

Don't buy Chinese. Really.
What my WWWW bracelet means to me is a reminder to look to the conditions that produce the goods I consume. For years I've been careful to NOT purchase anything made in China. Selfishly because China's slave-like wages put my Indian-import company out of business ten years ago. Then it put my start-up company with a made-in-the-USA product out of business a few years later. Altruistically because our dollars flowing to China only help keep people enslaved there.

Sometimes it isn't possible to avoid buying Chinese. Look at the labels when you go shoe shopping (everyday sensible footwear).

I can throw a really good fit over this situation. More later.

Too funny to edit

For the next couple weeks I will have a foster kitten here. Previewing the first post I looked down and realized she was standing on my 10-key accessory. So I'm leaving her addition to the title. She wrote the 63+63+63+63+63+63+

Now that I've seen my blog, I need to revise the layout so it's readable. Make it plainer. I hate reversed-out type for body copy. It's gotta go. At least I've overcome fear of blogging.

Next maybe I'll work on a profile.

Not a good fit63+63+63+63+63+63+63+63+63+63+63+63+63+63+63+63+63+63+63+

This week I was not a good fit for jury service. It was a fender-bender mental-anguish case. I was #49 out of 60, mathematically not even a contender. Later I shared the questionnaire with an attorney friend, and she said my liberal answer to one of the questions* would have got me struck by defense anyway.

What astounded me was the size of the panel. Twenty years ago that would have been enough for a serious criminal trial, not a nebulous civil issue. Thirty years ago I was on a panel of 42 sent to determine sentence after a guilty plea in sexual assault of a child. In that one, the judge excused people whose life histories made the subject uncomfortable.

Chatting with a long-time attorney during one of the breaks, I remarked about the size of the panel. Right after I said how repelled I was to hear some folks voice their prejudices about damages awarded in these cases. Such inflexible and intolerant youth. Some of the most vehement were too young to be so entrenched. One boy remarked he wasn't “there to make a millionaire.” A woman mentioned “frivolous” lawsuits.

The attorney said it's just a measure of how people have become so conservative here** and bought into the propaganda of “frivolous” lawsuits that right-wing fearmongers have been selling so long. He said the judge might strike enough of those people whose minds were already made up that my number might come up.

If we have trivial lawsuits, it's the judges' fault. They should never let such things come to trial. Sometimes they do it on purpose so they can rail against “frivolous lawsuits.”

And look at the money they are wasting. Sometime in the last couple years jurors' pay here** went to $40 per diem. Formerly $6/day. So they wasted 47 people's time and our tax money ($2162 for the rejects) attempting to get 13 people who might be able to hear facts and render judgment. So someone could have their day in court--a foundation of our government.

Pity.


*the question: “Do you have think (sic) that mental anguish or physical pain damages are less important than damages for loss of income, medical bills or other tangible damages? Yes No Please explain your answer”
my answer: “Suffering exacts a toll, too.”

**Tarrant County, Fort Worth Texas