Beat the Press brings on Cohen

In case you hadn't noticed, the democrats have had Micheal Cohen, Trump's long time lawyer and fixer, testifying in front of Congress.  Even Fox News carried the hearings live, for hours.  Today, Sunday,  Chuck Todd on Beat the Press summarized the testimony, actually Todd reran video clips that he thought would hurt Trump the most.  I watched.  Actually, I didn't think that any of the things Todd showed were particularly bad, evil, or even just crude.  Todd showed a clip about Trump knowing about an upcoming Wikileaks dump of Hillary's damaging emails. So?  This is a violation of what?  Then there was a lotta talk about Trump trying to build a hotel in Moscow.  So?  To build anything in New York you gotta pay people off.  I'm sure it works the same, maybe worse, in Moscow.   And more talk about a meeting in  New York with a Russian agent who claimed to have dirt on Hillary to share with Trump.  So?  If I am running for election and anyone turns up dirt on my opponent, I'm gonna listen.  As I heard the story, the Trump people decided that the dirt on offer was fake at the first meeting with the agent  and didn't buy.  Not so dumb. 
   In short, Todd's best picks from Cohen's testimony failed to convince me that anything was out of order.  I am OK with Trump, but I would not describe myself as a true believer.  If the Cohen testimony doesn't convince me, it won't convince any of the Trump base voters. 
   Too bad the MSM wastes all that press coverage on a nothingburger story, rather than informing us of what is really going down in Washington. 

Lost Wax Casting, ancient technology, still in service

The process goes like this.  Make a wax version of the desired part or artwork.  Then cover the wax master  with clay.  The clay was fired (like pottery) to make it hard and tough.  In the firing the wax melted and ran out.  Then molten metal was poured into the clay mold and allowed to cool and harden.  When cool, the clay mold was broken off and you had a shiny new part or art object.  And no mold parting marks.  Aviation Week claims the lost wax process is 5000 years old.
   Today we call the process "investment casting"  and a lot of key aerospace parts are still made that way.  In fact Aviation Week was complaining about a lack of investment casting capacity  slowing production in the aerospace industry.   One key part made by investment casting is the turbine blades for jet engines.  The tougher you can make the turbine blades, the hotter you can run them which gives better fuel mileage, which translates into better range and better carrying capacity.  Modern turbine blades are very tricky, they have cooling passages up the center, they are cast from secret alloys involving a lot of nickel, and who knows what else, and they are cooled slowly and carefully so that they come out as single crystals of metal.  Some one commented "There are nine countries in the world that can make nuclear bombs, but only two, the US and the UK, that can make modern jet engine turbine blades."

USAF manages the KC-46 tanker contract

The KC-46 tanker job should have been a straight forward contract.  Take a well proven airliner which has been in production and flying for decades, take out the seats and install fuel tanks, plus an air-to-air refueling boom in the tail.  No high risk new technology.   Piece of cake, right?
   Well, first the Air Force decided that it knew more about how to wire an aircraft than Boeing did.  Air Force insisted that Boeing re do all the aircraft wiring "to bring it up to Air Force standards".  Good cost enhancer that was. 
   And then, the Air Force wanted a fancy remote vision system, rather than a plain old reliable glass window, to let the refueling boom operator see his boom and steer it into the receptacle of the receiving aircraft.  Now Air Force is complaining that the remote vision system  lacks contrast and looses detail when the receiving aircraft is backlighted by the sun.  (Beware the Hun in the Sun).   For the last two years USAF has refused to accept new KC-46 tankers 'cause of  the remote vision system and 40 brand new KC-46 tankers have piled up at Boeing's  Everett field.  Now, the Air Force has agreed to accept the aircraft, but they will withhold $28 mil per aircraft until the remote vision system is fixed. 
   How to screw up a simple procurement.   Way to go USAF. 
   Note: I am a USAF veteran. 

Green New Deal, or New Green Deal

Speaking as an electrical engineer, let me address one part of the Green New Deal, electric power generation.  We need to keep the power on for customers, all night, and all day.  "Alternate energy" (windmills and solar cells) won't do that.  For example, I live up in the north country where it gets very cold (20 below) and stays cold for days.  My oil burner won't run without electricity.  Should the power go off, my heat goes off, and my pipes will freeze after a couple of hours.  Lots of industrial processes, from traditional ones like baking bread to high tech ones like fabbing semiconductors need the power to stay on while the batch, be it loaves or LSI semiconductors is in the oven.  If the power quits while a batch is in process, that batch is ruined.  Loss of a batch of loaves is a loss of hundreds of dollars, loss of a batch of semiconductors is tens of thousands of dollars.  Plenty of other batch processes will be ruined if the power fails while the batch is in process.
   Solar cells stop making electricity when the sun goes down.  Which happens every evening.  Windmills stop making electricity when the wind stops blowing, which happens less predictably, but often enough. My house is high in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and I get plenty of dead calm days.  In fact it's a dead calm as I write this.  A power system based on solar and wind will suffer frequent power outages, like every night.  Which is unacceptable, except for those who advocate a return to the Hiawatha life style, teepees heated by wood fires. 
   The greenies have poisoned the waters concerning nuclear power.  We have built dams on all the rivers.  Just the middle sized Connecticut river has six power dams on it starting with Moore Dam in Littleton.  If we want the power to stay on all night, we need to burn natural gas.  Fortunately we have plenty of natural gas.  It's becoming a waste product of fracking.  Out on the Bakken they are paying people to take the gas away.  Natural gas is out competing coal in the power generation business.  
   So, Alexandra Occasional-Castro's call for elimination of fossil fuel ain't gonna happen, not unless we put up with power failures on a daily basis. 

Better double check your yearbook, while you are in the school

A 30 year old yearbook is causing Virginia governor Northam all sorts of grief today.  Lesson to all graduates,  better double check your year book page while you are still at the school.  Remove anything that might cause you grief in the future, should you be successful in your career.  I would recommend strongly against gag photos, photos in any kind of costume, nick names, any kind of sexting, any kind of political remarks.  Keep it down to a professional portrait of yourself, honors, sports played, club memberships, good simple stuff that will look good 20-30 years in the future. 

MAGA hats show support for our president and the administration

Which is a good thing.  Americans ought to support their president.   As a symbol, the Make American Great Again slogan was created by the Donald Trump campaign in 2016 as part of his effort to win the election.  The acronym and the hat were created a few weeks later.   The MAGA hat means support of the sitting president, nothing more.
   There has been plenty of opining on the tube about the MAGA hat representing racism, white supremacy, un-Americanism, Satan worship, and other malarky.  That's all a crock.  We elected Donald Trum p to be our president in 2016.   To see high school students wearing MAGA hats is a goodness.  The current administration, under attack from the media and the democrats, needs all the support it can get. 

900 year New England temp record meets Shannon's sampling theorem

A post in Phys.org claims to have used a new method to find and plot the temperature recorded in the bottom of a deep Maine lake.  They perform some unspecified analysis of a chemical that I have never heard of to determine the temperature of long ago.  They don't explain this bit of chemistry at all.  They claim to have taken 136 measurements over some 900 years of lake bottom sediments.  And they claim to have discovered previously unknown temperature variations of 50-60 year duration.
Good paper,  the authors feel they have made a breakthru.
I think they have not taken enough samples.  Temperature in Maine can get up to 90F in the summer, I've been there, I know, and Maine winter runs 20F with cold snaps down as far as -40F.  And  this temperature variation, 70 to 130 degrees, happens quite regularly, summer and winter happen every year.  So we only take 136 samples over 900 summers and winters.  Suppose our samples hit mostly summer for a few years?  Bingo, a heat wave wave, global warming strikes early.  Suppose our samples only hit winter for a few more years in a row?  Bingo, a mini ice age.  
   To do this right, you have to take at least two samples for every year.  That's Shannon's Sampling Theorem, you have to sample twice in the period of the highest frequency  in the signal you are sampling.  If you don't take enough samples, you get aliasing.  That is what causes the wheels of the stagecoach to start turning backwards as the stage gathers speed on the way out of Deadwood.  The movie camera samples the wheels 24 frames per second.  When the wheel spokes move too much in between camera frames, the wheel appears to move in reverse. 
   This paper claims to find 10  different 50-60 year periods of heat or cold.  Since they are not taking enough samples, they could well be seeing an alias.  Their samples  just happen to hit summer for a long stretch of years, or just happen to hit winter for a long stretch of years.  That's aliasing, and will show you imaginary hot spells and cold spells.  Just as imaginary as the stagecoach wheels running backwards.
  About the best you can do with this under sampled data is divvy it up into convenient slices, say 100 years each, and take the average over each 100 year slice.  Then you can look for temperature changes from century to century. 

Microbrewers hung up by the Shutdown

According to today's Wall St Journal, micro brewers need approval from some federal bureau or other before they can market new brews or new labels.  The brewers have thousands of gallons of suds sitting in tanks, waiting for that bureau to come back to work and do their paperwork.
   Sounds like a severe case of micromanagement to me.  I don't see why brewers, or any other company, except maybe drug companies,  need federal bureaucrats to approve labels, recipes, packaging, or anything else.  If the customers don't like the new recipe or label or whatever, they will stop buying the product.  That ought be enough to keep the brewers and other companies  making good stuff. 

Drug Pushing Robo Callers and the Opioid Crisis

I am getting a phone call every other day now.  It's a robocaller who starts out asking if I am feeling any pain, and goes on to point me toward a pain clinic that will prescribe any kind of happy pill I might want.  I wonder how many opioid addicts get started by such drug pushing robocallers.  For that matter how many opioid addicts get started at those pain clinics, like the one that opened up here in Littleton a year or so ago?  Anyone have any numbers on this?

Near Money and the federal deficit.

Money goes back to King Croesus of Lydia, 595-547 BC.   In his time money was precious metals (gold or silver, sometimes copper) stamped into coins of uniform size and purity.  Coins made commerce easier, you could do a deal by simply counting the coins,  prior to that,  you had to find a balance and a set of trusted weights and weigh the gold or silver in order to do the deal. 
   In those days there was not much that could be done to alter the money supply, short of a silver or gold strike.  The Athenian fleet that crushed the Persians at Salamis was built with the proceeds of a rich silver strike on Athenian soil.  More commonly kings would debase the coinage by adding lead to the silver or copper to the gold.  But they could not debase the coinage so far that the coins looked funny, which was probably in the order of 50%, which is the same as doubling the money supply.
   Paper money was invented in the middle ages, after Gutenberg invented printing.   The obvious benefit was there was no shortage of paper and the king could print as much money as he needed to meet payroll when times were tight.  The drawback to paper money is a lot of people distrust [ed] it.  As late as the American Revolution the printing of Continental dollars to finance the war was controversial and there is language in the Constitution forbidding the states to "make Anything but Gold and Silver coin a Tender in Payment of Debts"
   Paper money finally won, certainly because huge amounts of money were needed to run the huge new economies that came out of the Industrial Revolution.  There just isn't enough gold and silver to make the vast modern economies work.  We also learned that printing too much money reduces it's buying power.  When I was a child ice cream cones were 5 cents, comic books were 10 cents, and gasoline was 28 cents.  Now ice cream cones are $2.50, comic books are $4-$5, and gasoline is $2.80.  In short the buying power of the US dollar has gone down by a factor of ten over my lifetime. Any money in bank accounts is only worth a tenth of what it was worth 60 years ago. 
    Now we come to my college economics course,  using Samuelson as a text,   Samuelson wrote about "near money" by which he meant government bonds.  He wrote that issuing a bond was just about the same as printing new dollar bills.  Consider the US T-bill.  It is backed by the full faith and credence of the United States, the most powerful nation on earth with an enviable record of never welshing on its debts.  There is a bond market, where the bond can be converted into real cash on any working day,  Holding a bond is nearly as good as holding cash, plus you earn interest on the bond.  So Samuelson called government bonds "near money". 
   Now we get the point.  When the federal government is short on money, ("runs a deficit") it sells bonds  to raise the cash to meet its bills.  Which is just about the same as printing dollar bills.  It's inflationary,  Printing money is why the value of the US dollar has dropped to a tenth of what it was when I was a child.  Printing "near money: works about the same. 
  So far, despite humongous deficits run up by Obama, and the humongous bond sales to make payroll, the inflation rate has remained under 2%.  Dunno how that  happens, but is has. 

"Technology" in place of a real wall

We tried that once.  I was in Thailand back during the war.  We tried to close the Ho Chi Minh trail.  It was a real foot path, running from North Viet Nam, down thru Laos, to South Viet Nam.  The Viet Cong got all their supplies back packed down the trail.  It took a lotta comrades with back packs to equal what we brought to our troops using a single Army truck.   The trail ran under triple canopy jungle all the way.  You could not see it from the air.  The jungle canopy was so thick that when we dropped 1000 pound bombs we could not see the leaves even ripple when they exploded on the ground. 
   So, we dropped sensors up and down the trail where we thought it ran.  We brought in a squadron of big four engine C121 Super Constellation  recon aircraft to fly up and down the trail reading all the sensors, which were mostly microphones.  The plan was to have the Connies call in air strikes when ever they detected anything on the trail.  All they ever picked up was some monkeys, screaming at each other, and some water buffalo crashing thru the underbrush.  Never detected any comrades for us to bomb. 
   Now I am hearing Democrats on TV saying that "technology" is better to secure the southern border than a plain old wall.  Every time I hear that it reminds me of closing the Ho Chi Minh trail with "technology". 

Beat the Press goes up against the Shutdown

Host Chuck Todd spent much of his hour ait time wailing about the government shutdown.  Strange.  They have been shut down for two weeks and I haven't missed them at all.  My mail is getting delivered.  I don't expect a refund check from the IRS, so they can stay shut down forever far as I am concerned.  I don't fly much so I don't care about the TSA. 
   Far as I can see, things are working with some 800,000 civil servants off the job.  Maybe we could keep on that way and save some taxpayer money.  These people get paid far better than they would in the private sector, far better than most of my constituents in Coos county, they have first class medical benefits, first class pensions, and they are all democrats.  My sympathy for them is limited.  If they run out of money they can go out and get a real job in the private economy. 
   And, if the Congress had done their duty earlier this year, and passed the federal funding bills like they are supposed to, the government would be open right now. 

The Last Kingdom 2015

It is a TV series for 2015.  I netflixed the first disk.  It is a historical drama, Vikings vs Saxons in 900 AD England.  I watched episode 1.  I don't think I will bother with the rest of them.
   They hired the worthless cameraman from Game of Thrones, the one who turns the lights out on set before filming.  Some black on black scenes, and all the scenes so poorly lit I could not tell one character from another.  Plus everyone dressed alike,  identical outfits of furs and grey homespun.  We see the protagonist start off as a 12 year old Saxon heir to an important Saxon noble family.  He gets captured by and raised by the Vikings.  We see him as a 12 year old, and suddenly a time jump and he is a young man.  Uhtred serves more as a target for abuse, both from his Saxon family and his Viking adoptive family than a real protagonist.  If Uhtred has a mission to accomplish, or a quest to go on, you couldn't prove it by me.   His relationship with a girlfriend is pretty tentative, we never hear the girlfriend's name.   

Beware *.mov files

A new piece of malware places files with names like AB1234.mov on your hard drive.  They are badness, and clicking on them, to see what is in them, crashes my XP computer.  A quick search with Explorer found 11 of them.  I zapped them all.

Aquaman 2018

Saw it down in Lincoln last night.  It's long.  2 & 1/4 hours.  It doesn't move very fast.  Lots of really pretty CGI work creating Atlantis under water.  Lots of combat, chases, smashing and crashing.  Much of the movie is underwater down in Atlantis.  The underwater bit is convincing, the actor's hair waves gently in water currents, they float in the water, feet not touching the floor.  Lots of battle scenes, actors riding huge unlikely sea beasts.  When the sea beasts take enough hits from energy weapons they burst into flames, under water, which is a little confusing.  There is a plot,  Aquaman must retrieve a lost magical trident.  We only learn this halfway thru the movie.  Aquaman's girlfriend Mera has really outstanding bright red hair.  Brighter and redder than anything I ever saw on stage or in real life.  I kept wondering how they did that.  Was it a superior hair dresser?  A wig?  Digital retouching  with a professional movie maker's version of Photoshop?  It was striking no matter how they did it.  Nicole Kidman played Aquaman's mother, starting by falling in love with Somebody-or-Other Curry, a Maine light house keeper.  She is as cute as Mera.  Nobody addresses anyone by name in the movie, I had to go to IMDB to find the stage names. 
   The camera man did turn the lights on, and all the scenes were watchable, no black on black mystery scenes.  Sound man was adequate but not great.  The guy who did Spiderman was better, but I caught most of the dialog.
    Lots of hand to hand combat, fighters tossed each other tremendous distances, landing with a hard crash that ought to have killed an elephant, but everybody bounces right up and goes for another fall.  Atlantians (except Aquaman) wore armor and carried energy weapons.  Aquaman was into tridents and the bare chest look. 

Beat The Press does global warming today

Host Scott Todd started off the Sunday show by saying, "We are not goi9ng to discuss the science (that is settled) or give deniers a voice"  Translation "Ye shall believe in Global Warming and why are you not sacrificing to it?"  Well, I believe in thermometer readings.  Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS for short)  maintains a database of every temperature reading going right back to the invention of the thermometer.  I downloaded the whole schmeer.  It was old fashioned, data in fixed length 80 byte records, no separators, clearly a file going back to punch card times.  I wrote a simple data swabber in C to convert the old GISS data into comma separated variable format acceptable to Excel.  Plotted in Excel, the data shows that global warming leveled off 19 years ago.  Not a peep since 1999.  So, no I don't believe in global warming since it doesn't show up to thermometers.  I am an engineer, I believe in instrument readings. 
   The show went on.  They gave Governor Moonbeam a lot of air time. He spent it ranting against Republicans who fail to sacrifice to global warming.  The gist of the show, we need a good stiff "Carbon tax" to curb the burning of fuels.  And politicians who fail to vote to tax their constituents to support the holy cause are sinners.

HIding "Libraries" in Win 10

Micro$oft decided to clutter up Explorer with the concept of "Libraries".  They musta had a lot of software weenies hanging with nothing to do.  A library shows up in Explorer and looks pretty much like a file folder.  Win 10 comes with four built in libraries, Documents, Videos, Pictures and one other.  Although a "Library" looks like a file folder, it is not really a file folder, it's a collection of shortcuts.   If there is any use for "libraries" I have yet to discover it. 
I was able to clean up my explorer display by going to "View" and then "Navigation Pane" (far left and lower down)  Uncheck "Libraries" and bingo, most, maybe all of the duplicate file entries go away.  Making it much easier to find files.  Since Micro$oft assigns ALL your files to one of the four "libraries" it blesses you with, then ALL your files show up TWICE in Explorer, a PITA.

Now, if I could find a way to make Explorer search the ENTIRE hard drive, I might really have something.

Game of Thrones Season 7

I think this show is wearing out.  Too bad, it has been fun.  They killed off too many of the interesting characters.  About all we have left are Denarys and Arya.  The camera man is still on his turn-the-lights-out kick, producing totally black scenes, and a lot of scenes so poorly lit I cannot identify the characters in the scene.  The sound man isn't doing very well.  I cannot catch a lot of the dialog.  They would do much better with the soundman from the newest Spiderman flick,  I could understand every line of dialog  the spidermen spoke.  Why cannot Game of Thrones do as well?  So far in season 7 they are bracing for the attack of the White Walkers from north of the wall.  John Snow is trying to cut some kinda deal with Denarys and her dragons.  Some great scenes of flying dragons spouting fire on enemy infantry and barbecuing them all.   We don't see much of Denarys' Dothraki horde, although she has finally gotten them to Westeros. I got a couple of more episodes to watch, but so far nothing much has happened.  Things move slowly.  

Half the history books look like political rants

I am Christmas shopping at Gibson's bookstore in Concord NH.  They have been in business a long time, and now occupy a fine big new building right on Main St.  Good stock.  Lots of books.  I am browsing the history shelf.  It struck me that at least half the books called history had titles and dust jackets suggesting either a political rant or a strong lefty slant.  I wonder where the schools are going for textbooks these days.  No sign of Morison and Commager, the college level go to US history book when I went to college.   Or Bruce Catton.  Or Shelby Foote.  Or Winston Churchill.

Buck passing, finger pointing, and Gov'mint shutdown

Congress is supposed to fund the federal government by passing appropriation bills, one for each department (defense, state, treasury, HHS, etc).  Congress did manage to pass a few appropriation bills this year, but appropriation bills for a lot of paper pushing departments never got passed.  And so they are furloughing their civil servants just in time for Christmas. 
   Let's blame that on footdragging by the Democrats and obstructionism by right wing Republicans.  But if Congress had done its duty, we would not be having a shutdown right now.  The Democrats like to wait til the last minute and then pass a "continuing resolution", one giant bill funding the whole federal government.  The one giant funding bill is so big that nobody understands it, anything goes into it,  and there are plenty of hiding places for juicy pieces of pork.  Where as an appropriation bill for just one department can be understood (with a lot of study) and once understood, can be changed to give Congress some control over what each department can do.
   This time the TV tells me that 75% of the government has been funded, and thus stays open.  Only 25% is shutting down.  The list of shutting down departments they flash on the TV screen seems to be mostly departments that don't do anything for citizens, and which we could do without, for ever.  It's a little tough on the civil servants who are gonna miss a pay check at Christmas time.  On the other hand, civil service jobs pay better and have better benefits and retirement than private sector jobs.  And civil servants are mostly Democrats. 

Congress lacks the stones to vote to keep the government open

Both House and Senate, facing important votes to keep the government running and fund President Trump's border wall, have failed to vote on the bill[s].  Instead they have been conducting meaningless "procedural" votes.   The one in the Senate has been stalled, killing any Senate business for 4 hours now.  A real vote is a vote to pass or kill the bill on the floor.  Procedural votes don't do that, they soak up time, they give legislators the opportunity to vote one way on the "procedural" vote and the other way on the real vote, so they can tell their constituents  both yes and no, I voted for it on the procedural vote and against it on the real vote. 
  If the government shuts down, blame it on totally opaque Congressional procedures that failed to bring the needed legislation to a real up or down floor vote.   Lack of stones.

Wall Street Wails over 2.5% interest rate from the Fed.

The Fed bumped interest rates up by 0.25% to 2.5% overall.  The Dow Jones dropped 400 points and every pundit is crying that the Fed is killing the recovery and throwing the country back into Great Depression 2.0.  Right.
   6% has been considered a proper interest rate, going back to  medieval times.  I remember my first house mortgage at 7 and 1/8th, way back in the 1970's,  thinking at the time that I had a pretty decent mortgage rate.   Far as I am concerned all the weeping and wailing  over 2.5% is coming from modern snowflakes.    Bring on that global warming and melt those crybaby snowflakes. 

Spiderman, the Spiderverse

Saw this yesterday in Lincoln with youngest son.  Its long.  It moves slowly.  The animation and art  work is good, fine images.  Give the video folks a few more years and we will not be able to tell live actors from CGI actors.  Aunt May is very convincing, in a few more years they will be able to slip her into a live action movie and we could not tell that she was not acted by a human.  Sound man does good, I could understand all the lines.  Camera man (CGI artists?) done good, all the scenes are properly lighted.  It's animation all the way, no live actors at all.  
    Miles some-thing-or-other, is the teen age protagonist.  He is drawn as black or Hispanic.  He serves mostly as a punching bag thru out the film.  He doesn't seem to have a mission, he doesn't do much, he gets dumped on, he seldom  acts for himself.  He has an impenetrable relation with his father (a cop) and an uncle who alternates between family member and masked villain.  The artist doing Miles should have made him cuter, more like the ultra cute but nameless Spider girl.
   Plot is strange.  Some kinda inter dimensional door opens and Spidermen (and girls) from a dozen strange dimension turn up, including Peter Porker.  
   Only diehard Spiderman fans need to see this flick.  It's too long and slow moving for  kids.

Bimbo payoffs are now campaign finance violations???

Paying off a bimbo to keep her mouth shut is kinda slimey, and NOT an indicator of good moral character, but it ain't a campaign finance violation.  Even  Alan Dershowitz  agrees with me on this point.  Why this Cohen character, former fixer for Donald Trump, is pleading guilty to a campaign finance violation 'cause he cut the check[s] to one or two bimbos is a mystery to me.  You would think an experienced lawyer/fixer would put up more of a fight in court.  And for that matter,  I'd expect Donald Trump to do more than he has to keep an old buddy/fixer out of jail. 

Congressional Hearing on Google reveals smart phones report your position, every minute

Scary,  Testimony in front of Congress this morning claims that Android cell phones report their ( and their owners) position about once a minute.  I only carry a cheap dumb phone.  I wonder what it is reporting, and to whom it reports to.    The idea that the government, the cops, NSA, FBI and who knows who else can know where I am, minute by minute, is scary.  I certainly am not gonna update to a smart phone. 

NH Senate Organization Day

Second day on the job.   Left the house at 7 AM.  Got to Concord a little past 8 8AM.  Since they had not assigned me a State House parking space, I parked in the shopping mall and walked up.  It's only a couple of blocks. 

   We met in the newly refurbished Senate chamber.  Lovely corner room, with lots of nice big windows on two walls.  Lots of sunlight.  All the elaborate wood work had a fresh new coat of cream colored paint, new carpet,  half the murals had been cleaned.  Governor Sununu swore us all in. First order of business was to elect Donna Soucy of Manchester as the new Senate president.  She was nominated and then we did a voice vote.  All aye's, no nays.   Then we re-elected Tammy Wright as Senate clerk, same procedure  just one nomination followed by a unanimous voice vote.

    Then we got down to a substantive vote for the Secretary of State.  We moved into the house chamber, they had seats for us in front.   Bill Gardener  is the incumbent, has been for better than 40 years.  He has kept NH scandal free, no Florida style disasters.  He favors the use of paper ballots, which I agree is a good idea.  They cannot hack  paper ballots over the internet.  Colin Van Osten  was the challenger.  A lot of democrats like Van Osten because he looks likely to enfranchise a bunch of democrat leaning voters that Gardener won't.  After nominating speeches, followed by seconding speeches,   we voted by paper ballot.  When those were counted, we had 208 votes for Gardener, and 207 for Van Osten.   That caused a tizzy, the Speaker declared the margin too thin and we would have to vote again.  This set off  an hour of  motions and speeches  and citing of  "rules".  Then we did a second paper ballot  and Gardener squeaked by 209 to 205.

    By then it was 4 in the afternoon and getting dark.  The bankers threw a free beer and munchies event across the street at Tandy's.  Naturally I stopped in, I never turn down free beer.  Spent about an hour, chatting with a whole bunch of people.  Got on the road home at 5 PM.  It was pitch dark by then.  Traffic going north on I93 was heavy, but it kept moving right along at 70 mph.  Got home a little after 6PM.  Cat was overjoyed to see her human back safe and sound. 

Ivanhoe 1952 Taylor and Taylor

Too bad Hollywood has forgotten how to make movies as good as this one.   It stars a young Elizabeth Taylor as Rebecca of York.  The movie is a love triangle with Joan Fountaine (Rowena) and Elizabeth Taylor (Rebecca) competing for the attentions of Robert Taylor (Wilfred of Ivanhoe).  Elizabeth Taylor is ultra cute, has good lines, speaks them well, and nearly snags Ivanhoe away from Rowena.  Robert Taylor plays a fine knight, brave, chivalrous, and a stout fighter. The movie is based on a historical novel by Sir Walter Scott, published way back when, sometime in the 19th century.  It is set in the 12th century and revolves around ransoming King Richard Lion Heart from the Austrians and preventing his brother John from taking over England.  The history isn't bad, a few names have been changed but most of the stuff in the movie really did happen.  Richard's minstrel Blondell did actually go from castle to castle looking for Richard.  In the movie Ivanhoe gets Blondell's job, but heh it's a movie, a little poetic license is perfectly legitimate.  We have real jousting, on horseback and with long lances.  The knights wear period correct chain mail rather than gleaming plate armor which didn't come in until a couple of hundred years later. We have a castle stormed and taken by Robin Hood and his merry men.   We have King Richard returning in time to save the day in the last reel.  It's in Technicolor which always gives the best red rendition and good color saturation.  The costumes are good looking, and everyone wears a different color, so we can keep track of who is who.  Sound is excellent, I can understand every line.  In it's day Ivanhoe won three Oscars, and was nominated for four more. 
    Netflix has it.  Enjoy.

TV Newsies starting the 2020 presidential campaign right now.

I'm watching Beat the Press on NBC with Chuck Todd.  He said some nice words about President Bush, now deceased, and then moved on to prognosticating about 2020.  First of all, I am tired of election horse race talk, we have had too much of it for the last two years.  Second of all, nobody knows what's gonna happen in 2020.  Pure speculation, and I am tired of that. 
   Surely something real happened somewhere in the world worth a little air time?