Learning the Hard Stuff

To drink that is.  We are talking distilled liquors which are sold at 80 to 90 proof.  For those just getting into drinking hard stuff, a proof point is one half a percent of the alcohol content.  100 proof is 50-50 grain alcohol (ethanol) and water.  A jigger of the hard stuff has the kick of a 12 ounce can of beer or a small glass of wine. 
   Of the hard liquors my favorite is whiskey, which comes from four important places, Scotch from Scotland, Canadian from Canada, Bourbon from Bourbon county Kentucky, and Irish from Ireland.  They are all good.  When you first try them the fierce bite of the alcohol will numb your taste buds and you won't notice much difference between them.  With some experience you will find Scotch has a sharper tang to it, Bourbon is sweeter, Canadian is somewhere in between, and good Irish whiskey is just very very smooth. 
    I drink my whiskey with ice and club soda (Scotch and soda).  A jigger (or two if you are hard core), an 8 to 12 ounce glass filled with ice, and fill it up with club soda, and you have a very nice drink.  If you are hard core, you can drink your whiskey straight, just ice, no club soda.  If you are really hard core you can drink your whiskey neat, no ice. 
   You can buy quite decent whiskey for $15 a "half gallon" (actually 1.75 liters today). And you can pay a good deal more.  In the quite decent class is Old Crow bourbon, Canadian Club, and Clan McGregor Scotch.   A notch up is maybe Ballantine Scotch, Wild Turkey bourbon ,and Seagram's VO Canadian.  My sainted (and now deceased) mother drank little else  besides VO.  I can enjoy the pricier whiskeys but I don't normally spend the money to buy them.   

Cannon Mountain Ski Weather

We got 8 inches of fresh snow on Friday.  That will make all the trails super good.  I wanted to post this earlier on Friday but the cable went down, knocking out my broadband and my TV.  Cable just came back. 

Everyone should vote in the NH primary next Tuesday

The primary is this coming Tuesday. Everyone should go out and vote. New Hampshire has a lot of fun doing the First In The Nation (FITN) primary. We also get a lot of good publicity, we get increased clout down in Washington, and all those candidates and news people help keep New Hampshire green, they bring money. The way it is now, all presidential candidates have to pass muster with New Hampshire voters. This is a good thing. Let's keep it up. To do so we have to show a good turnout. We want to avoid a catastrophe like Iowa. I am sure that Secretary of State Bill Gardner and countless poll workers (unpaid volunteers mostly) will do their usual good job. As American citizens, our duty is to go to the polls and vote.

Iowa still cannot count. and it hurts

At this point they are all claiming victory.  They all put a good deal of time and money into the Iowa caucus and what did they get? Diddly Squat.  Wanna bet nobody does much campaigning (and spending) in Iowa in 2024?  And apparently this is all the fault of the Democratic party, both national and Iowa.  Takes a lot of workers to mess things up so badly.

Iowa has forgotten how to count

It's after 8 AM on Tuesday and Iowa still hasn't counted up Monday's caucus results.  The Bern released his own count, which shows him winning, but even the Bern admits it is only a partial count.
NHPR radio said that better than 1000 precincts were instructed to punch their results into a smart phone program.  Apparently said smart phone program stopped working (or never worked).  So the 1000 precincts were expected to telephone results into state HQ.  Resulting in busy signals, hour long waits for an answer, and a massive arithmetic challenge at HQ.   Smarter would have been to have the precincts call the results into county, and have county add them up and call the sums into state HQ.  Fewer phone calls and less adding up that way. 

College is too damn expensive

I paid tuition for all three of my children.  They all graduated.  It was expensive.  Like $8000 a year, per child.  It's worse now.
  Big part of the problem, Uncle Sam will loan a student all he/she needs.  If the colleges find things are a little tight this year, they just hike the tuition.  Uncle will pay.  The students will sign, they are so deep in debt that another couple of K doesn't sound so bad.  Students are graduating with $50K debts that cannot be dumped via bankruptcy.  Lot of 'em are putting off marriage, home buying, child raising, everything, until their student debt is paid down.  This might take 10 years.
   Colleges could cut costs.  First off, lay off ALL the administrators.  Administrators don't teach, don't do anything connected with education, but they draw their very handsome pay regularly.   Then lay off the janitors and the buildings and grounds folk.  Have the students sweep the halls, mow the grass, shovel the snow, set the tables, wash the dishes, what ever.  We did that at Westtown school, it worked out well.  Lay off the IT department.  Have the computer science majors keep the school computers humming. 

Massive turnout at Trump campaign events

Watching the crowd at Trump's NJ rally the other night.  NJ is a blue state, but Trump filled the sports arena and had crowds who could not get in watching on big out door TV screens.  Can they really impeach a president with that kind of intense political support?  And so much of it? 

Winter Hot Rod

I need one.  My Buick is up to 90K miles and might not make it to 200K, you never know.  I will be looking for another car in a few years.  I would like to get a hot rod, Mustang, Camaro, Challenger.   Except all of those are terrible snow cars.  They cannot pull up three mile hill, they are totally squirrely after the first flake hits the asphalt.  They are so bad the people laugh if you turn up driving one at a ski resort.
  A good snow car has 50 50 weight distribution, same weight on both the front and back wheels.  And four wheel drive.  And limited slip differentials fore and aft.  And a manual transmission so you can rock the car back and forth between 1st gear and reverse gear to get unstuck. And door handles big enough to get all four fingers around them, even wearing gloves to tug open a frozen door.  Good strong defrosters, fore and aft.  No turned up rear edge of the hood that makes a snow dam around the wipers.  Windshield washer container big enough to take a whole gallon of windshield washer fluid.  Good snow tires.  Good solid way to mount the ski rack.  Battery mounted under the hood in case you need to jump start it, or jump start a friend.  And an outside thermometer so we can tell if that dark spot up ahead is black ice or just a puddle.
  You would think a good sporty car that was good in winter would sell.

Watching Chuckle the Schumer on TV

Chuckie was summing up the Democrat case for impeaching Trump.  He spoke at length.  He never mentioned a specific act of Trump's worthy of impeachment.  He did a lot of bad mouthing, name calling.  He kept saying "lots of facts" and "proves beyond the shadow of a doubt" and other such platitudes.  Schumer never said "Trump did thus and so, on such and such a date, as proved by this witness or that document,"  That makes me think the democrats don't have anything on Trump, except for hatred. 
    It might be that Trump pressured  the Ukrainians to dig for dirt on the Bidens. Trump denies it, the Ukrainians deny it and who do we believe? Maybe I don't approve and maybe I don't believe.  But compared to Abraham Lincoln (suspended Habeas Corpus ) and Franklin Roosevelt (placed Japanese Americans in concentration camps)  pressuring an ally to dig up a little dirt is petty change.  And I still think Abraham Lincoln was a great American President.  And, despite the fact that one of my oldest and dearest friends was born in an American concentration camp, I still think Franklin Roosevelt was a great president. 
   So when I hear Chuckles deriding Trump as an existential threat and worst president ever, I tune him out.

More Adventures in TVland

Yesterday, as I was watching the TV, the digital audio output, which drives my stereo and gives nicer sound than the tiny speakers crammed into the TV set, died.  Cut my sound to a whisper.  PITA.  This morning I messed with it, cycled power on the digital audio gizmo, and powered up the TV, and magic happened.  The digital audio sound was back.  Hurrah.
   I think power cycling the digital audio gizmo was what did the trick.  Might have been just turning the TV off overnight but I don't think so. 

In Harm's Way, movie, 1965

In Harm’s Way, an oldie but a goodie.  I just finished watching it (again). It is World War 2, in the Pacific with John Wayne as tough and competent Navy admiral Rockwell Torrey.  We have a lot of action, Admiral Torrey is sent out to capture a couple of key Japanese held islands and turn them into US Navy bases.  We have a parachute assault, by US marines to take to first target.  Followed by a sea battle featuring a PT boat attack on the Japanese fleet followed by a broadside to broadside gunnery duel between the heavy ships.

   Torrey spends much of the movie forming a relationship with Maggie Haynes, a tough Navy nurse, played by Patricia Neal. She is reasonably good looking, although I would not call her cute.  She likes what she sees in John Wayne and works to catch him.  For cute, John Wayne has a son, just graduated from college, just into the Navy as an ensign.  Played by Brandon DeWilde, Jere Torrey is young, blond, slim, and cute.  Jere is establishing a relationship with an equally cute young Navy nurse.  She is Annalee Dorn, played by Jill Hayworth, and has her hands full coping with Jere who is pushy.  She manages him with a firm hand.  Jere was raised by his mother after she and Rockwell split when Jere was only four.   Initially Jere takes his mother’s side in the marriage split, but over the course of the flick he comes to appreciate his father.    The movie moves right along, good pacing.   Each scene contributes to the story and lasts long enough to get its point across. 

   The movie is based upon a novel of the same name, written by James Basset and published in 1962.  Much of the action in the book and the movie is based on real WW2 events, but loosely based.  The movie was made in 1965.  A reasonable number of WW2 aircraft and ships were still in commission in 1965 and were placed at the disposal of Otto Preminger and his crew.  The costumes and uniforms are realistic WW2 styles.   The whole movie gives the flavor of 1943 very nicely. 

    The movie is in black and white.  That was the custom for war movies back then.  Probably because we were all used to watching black and white newsreels, which were always played in movie theaters before the main attraction.  Since the movie was made back in the 1960’s, the technical work, lighting, filming, and sound is all superb.  You can hear and understand all of the dialogue, something I cannot do for modern movies.  No shake-the-camera shots, no turn-the-lights-out scenes.

  All in all, a good flick.  If you haven’t seen it, you can rent it from Netflix.

Censoring social media, how to do it

Been a lotta talk about censoring Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter, and some others for allowing fake news, antisemitism, far left, far right, Islamic terrorist, and lots of other postings.  The talkers so far are pushing for  the social media site to censor posts they don't like.   In addition to free speech violations, there is no way that the bigger sites can have enough censors to even skim postings fingered by some kind of AI software.  Let alone think hard about the fringe cases.  And the people they can hire as censors will be mostly lefty democrats.  The situation has gotten so bad that advertisers are cancelling ads. 
   We ought to use free market incentives to get the worst stuff off the air.  Break the bigger social media companies in half, and let the two half compete with each other for viewers, posters, and advertisers.  We have Sherman Anti Trust, and a whole department of lawyers to enforce it.  Far as I am concerned, any company with more that 50% market share is a monopoly and ought to be broken up into smaller companies.  Just for being too big. 

Cannon Mountain Ski Weather

We got 8 inches of fresh powder yesterday.  It is clear and sunny and ZERO F this morning.  Skiing ought to be fantastic this weekend.

Hacking US voting machines

Another piece about this on Fox News tonight.  Fox urged buying new and less hack prone voting machines.  Wanted voting machines to output a paper trail for use in case of recounts. 
   Actually, we need to scrap all the voting machines and go back to paper ballots.  A voting machine is just a desktop computer running a "look-at-me-I-am-a-ballot" program.  They can all be hacked in all the ways computers can be hacked.  At least a dozen different ways occur to me.  It was suggested to have the voting machine output a paper trail (print out a ballot showing how the voter voted).  This doesn't do any good.  Hack the voting machine's code and you can make it print out anything you want.  And the voter doesn't get a chance to review it and take action if it isn't right. 
   Paper ballots can be saved in case of recount.  Paper ballots cannot be hacked over the internet.
Let's go low tech.

Law schools are hurting for students

Lengthy piece somewhere on the internet whining about the troubles of law schools.  They are not getting the enrollment they enjoyed only a few years ago.  To weather the lack of students they are raising tuition.  The students, all taking out student loans, can just take on more debt. And they are laying off faculty.  The writer went on at length about how terrible laying off faculty was.  Not a whisper about laying off any administrators.  Administrators don't teach, they do nothing to get students in, thru, and graduated, they just draw their generous pay.  Most of 'em are making 6 figures. Most colleges have as many administrators as they do real teaching faculty. 
   Sounds like law students have figured out that most of 'em just get to do house closings after they graduate.  Not so exciting.  Instead of law school they are going for MBA's. 

Roast a Chicken. Here's how.

A roast chicken dinner is festive, suitable for company,. and easy to do, in fact, foolproof.  Here is how.  First buy your chicken.  You get a choice between 4 pound fryers, and 6-8 pound roasters.  The fryers are tender and tasty.  The bigger roasters are mostly old laying hens that have stopped laying because of age.  They are chewy.  A fryer will serve six people, no sweat.  Used to be, both fryers and roasters came with giblets, now a days they are leaving out the giblets.  You want giblets to make gravy.  The plastic package will sometimes tell you if you are getting giblets or not.
  I stuff my chickens with ordinary supermarket stuffing mix, which is mostly bread crumbs.  I like to jazz the stuffing up with some chopped onion, some chopped celery, the chicken liver, some grapes in season or raisins out of season, some chopped apple.  Put some oil in a big frying pan and saute the chicken liver, and the onion.  Chop the chicken liver after you saute it.  Then press on and do the stuffing mix in the same pan.  The directions will call for bringing water and some oil to a boil and then adding the dry bread crumbs.  You might want to adjust the amount of oil to account for the oil you used to saute everything but that isn't critical.  Fill the chicken with the stuffing and then tie the chicken's legs together to keep the stuffing in.
   Roast in a 375 degree oven for 20 minutes to the pound.  The chickens all come with little plastic "bird watcher" thingies that pop open when they think the chicken is done.  Time is not critical, an extra 20 minutes won't hurt anything.  Baste the chicken with either the fat that cooks out of the bird or some olive or veggie oil.  Baste every 20 minutes or so.  Get a head start on basting by rubbing the chicken down with oil before putting him in the oven.  On the top of the stove, put the giblets into a pan, full of water, with some Bell's Poultry Seasoning.  Bring to a boil, back off the heat until you get to a low boil.  Let them cook until the chicken is done.
   When done, remove the chicken to a serving platter and let it rest while you make the gravy.  Add as much flour to the roasting pan as the grease will soak up.  Then add all the water from the giblet pan.  And perhaps some more,  you want about a quart of gravy.  Put the roasting pan on the stove top and set one or two burners to medium.  Then just stir until the gravy thickens.  While that is happening chop the giblets up fine and add them to the gravy.  With a couple of forks pick the meat off the neck and add it as well.  Season the gravy with some Bell's Poultry Seasoning and a little salt.  Taste and adjust.  Go easy on the salt. 
  You are done, call the guests to the table.  Don't forget the cranberry sauce. You can serve a green veggie and some rice to go with it.  Traditionally white wine is served with poultry, but you can do what ever suits your fancy.
   You can do turkey or Cornish game hens the same way as chicken.  

Foreign students are good deal for America

America has something like a million foreign college students.  Invisible benefit to us, most young folk have a good time doing an American college education.  I think the vast majority of them carry away a nice warm feeling about America after graduation.  And its a good bet that a lot of 'em will wind up influential citizens back in their home country.  In short, as we offer a good college education we are also making friends around the world.  This has got to be a good thing.  Plus foreign students help keep America green, they send money. 
   So let's not hassle them over visas.  Let's make it easy to enter America.  And for that matter, lets make it easy for them to stay here, even after graduation.
   Of the million odd foreign students, a third of them are Chinese.  There has been some rumblings in the media, and some FBI investigations, all concerned with Chinese intelligence agencies using Chinese students as information sources, or worse.  We are now presenting Chinese students with a hostile stare rather than a friendly greeting.  Let's not drive Chinese students away thru plain unfounded suspicions.

Soup has too much salt

The ordinary supermarket canned soups, Campbell, Progresso, and others all have so much salt they taste too salty.  The doctors mostly think salt is bad for you but I am not on that bandwagon.  I figure when it tastes too salty, it is too salty.  Only reason I can think of for the makers to add so much salt is to cover up for some fresh ingredients that are not as fresh as they ought to be.  In fact  ingredients that are on the verge of going bad.
   And the bouillon cubes are just as bad as the canned soups.
  Yummy. 

Did we get Soleimani like we got Adm Yamamoto?

During WWII we broke the Japanese radio codes and read their messages.  We came across Adm Yamamoto's planned itinerary of an inspection trip to the forward areas.  We sent a squadron of P-38 Lightening fighters to intercept him.  They shot down Yamamoto's plane killing the admiral in the crash.  This removed Japan's best admiral, the man who planned and executed Pearl Harbor, and the only senior Japanese leader who understood the United States.  A carefully arranged plan based upon solid intel.
    Was the hit on Soleimani like that?  Did we have the necessary intel?  Or did we just get lucky, putting a Hellfire anti tank missile into a suspected Iranian headquarters, or safe house or whatever and Soleimani just happened to be there at the wrong time?  Someone knows and so far has kept his/her mouth shut to preserve the secrecy of our intel operations.  We will see how long that lasts. 

Cannon Mountain ski weather

Today, 5 Jan, Cannon got 2 inches of new snow.  It's still falling.  It's 27, maybe 28 F.

Counter Cyberattacks with lawyers

Since Friday's Iranian dustup, which snuffed Suliemani, the newsies have been warning of cyber counter attacks from Iran.  If that happens, and if they put anything important down, we have a vast surplus of lawyers sloshing around the country looking for something to do.  We should sic 'em on the companies careless enough to fall to cyber attack.
   There is no excuse for a company to fall victim to a cyber attack.  Straight forward simple procedures will keep Iranian hackers from putting out the lights in the US.  Some rules follow
1.  Never use the public internet, or the public phone system to remote control or monitor anything.  If you just have to have remote control, string your own fiber optics.  In most cases this is the power company, which owns their own poles and has their own line crews to string new fiber optic cable.  This way you have to climb a pole and splice in an optical signal splitter to tap into the control signals.  Hackers don't climb poles.  If they cannot get to the target over the public internet, sitting comfortably in their offices, they don't go there.
2.  Don't run Windows for anything important.  Go with Apple or Linux or anything other than Windows.  Windows is like Swiss cheese, holes every where.  Windows does autorun, any media (floppy disc, CD, DVD, flashdrive) plugged into a Windows computer is checked for  music and code.  Music gets played. code gets run. Malicious code gets loaded onto disk and run.  That's how we spread the Stuxnet virus onto Iranian computers controlling centrifugal uranium isotope separators.  Stuxnet ordered the centrifugal separators to run full speed until they self destructed.  We put the Stuxnet code onto flashdrives and scattered the flashdrives over Iranian parking lots. Sharp eye Iranian workers spotted them on the way into work, picked them up, took them into work, and plugged them into work computers.  The centrifugal isotope separators started blowing up shortly there after.
  Should Iranian hackers knock out anything we care about, we should sic our vast surplus of lawyers on the stupid company.  They ought to be able to sue them, and get convictions for pure stupidity.  The thought of an army of hungry lawyers suing them down to their socks ought to stimulate even Dilbert's pointy haired boss into action.

So we snuffed Iranian big wig Sulimani (sp?)

I never heard of this guy before today.  But the TV newsies are claiming he was a big deal, and snuffing him will cause a war with Iran.  Far as I am concerned Sulimani was just another Iranian terrorist, and we did good to kill him.   It should send a simple message to the Iranians, namely "Mess with the American and they will mess with you".  Are the Iranians smart enough to take the hint?

Let's keep private health insurance

Something like 3/4 of Americans have pretty decent health insurance thru their company or their union.  I enjoyed it for 40 years.  It covered everything, and it covered my wife and my three children.  I'd still be on it if I had not retired and gone onto Medicare.  
   I am listening to most (all?) of the Democrats calling to kill private health insurance and force us all onto "medicare for all" or "single payer" schemes that do not exist yet.  So we have no idea what we are getting into, but anyone who has ever had to deal with departments of motor vehicles to register a car has the deepest suspicions.  Most of us want to keep our private health insurance.
  I will grant that the self employed who have to go out and buy individual family policies are getting screwed.  We could fix that.  All it would take is a law requiring the insurance companies to sell the same policy they sell to big companies, at the big company price, to ordinary citizens.  Probably a federal law.  Having the 50 states each enact such a law, good only in state, would be extra messy.  And welfare for lawyers.
   Somehow I don't think the Democrat approach to health insurance this year is going to get them elected.

Keeping the narative alive. Trump Impeachment version.

As long as Nancy Pelosi keeps sitting on the Great Impeachment Show (GIS) paperwork the newsies keep the subject alive.  Should she send the paperwork over to the Senate, the Republicans will do their best to finish it up as quickly as possible.  They have the votes to do it.  Then GIS is done and gone and we can move forward. 
   Chuckie the Schumer  and some other Democrats are complaining that the Senate won't call this witness or that witness and it's all unfair.  Jeez.  If they had such terribly important witnesses they should have had 'em testify during the months long House version of GIS. 
   Could it be that the Democrats like it this way?  As long as GIS is in town they don't have to do any real lawmaking. 

Keeping consumer spending alive and well

Consumer spending is 70% of American GNP.  That's a lot and it is what keeps the US economy humming.  And consumer spending has its ups and downs.  When it is up, things are good all over.  When it is down people are thrown out of work, business profits disappear and gloom covers the land.  The financial pundits at least understand this, and they have devised theories to account for swings in consumer sentiment and even indexes of consumer sentiment that claim to predict consumer behavior. 
   Most things consumers spend money on are discretionary.  They don't have to buy a new car, at least not this year.  They can postpone buying a new house.  They can put off home maintenance projects like new siding, remodeling the kitchen, or reroofing.  They can skip back to school buying and send the kids to school in hand-me-downs.  They can put Santa in the closet and put the Grinch in charge of Christmas buying.  About the only things consumers absolutely have to buy are groceries, utilities, and the rent.  When consumers feel stressed, they cut back spending as much as they can, which sends the larger economy into a tailspin. 
   A powerful driver of consumer spending is the job market.  If the consumers fear loosing their jobs, they will cut back everywhere they can.  If they feel their jobs are safe and secure, then they are willing to spend on stuff.  Obama and Obamacare made everyone fear layoffs which kept GNP growth down around 1%.  With Trump everyone feels secure in their jobs and we have GNP growth up around 3%. 
    Not to panic the American consumer.  Bad things happen if you do.

Effective new car advertising

They been running this one on Fox News several times a day.  Beige SUV pulls up a steep driveway and stops at the front door.  Scene has the color canceled out for a nice arty black and white look. Woman gets out, opens front door , enters her house to find it is a mess.  All the children are in the living room playing mess making games.  Room is super untidy.  Woman backs out the front door, gets back in her SUV and reclines the driver's seat. Closes eyes.
Message to us car buyers, our SUV interior is more comfortable than your child infested house.  And, you Mom get little pleasure from your children and you don't like keeping house.  So buy a Lincoln SUV to get away from it all parked in your driveway. 
   I think it might have been a Lincoln Navigator but they never mentioned the product name on air. 
   This ad is REALLY going to motivate me (a guy) or any chick I ever knew to buy a Lincoln Navigator.  Or any other Lincoln SUV. 
   Can you say "Turnoff"?

Bipartisan means everybody gets lots of money.

The house needed both Democratic and Republican votes to pass the federal budget and avoid yet another federal government shutdown.  So, the Republicans got a big boost (maybe $100 billion) in defense spending, and funding for the Mexican border wall.  Democrats got $75 million (chicken feed really) for a gun control study group.  At least that is all I have heard about.  I daresay a good look at the budget will find more spending and a good helping of pork.  But the newsies are all hypnotized by the Great Impeachment Show (GIS) so we don't really know what all got slipped into the humongous federal budget.  Plus the entire budget is so big and complicated that the newsies would not understand it.  Few newsies can do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, even with a smart phone to help out. 
   We should not be passing great big fund everything bills.  Those are just to big and complicated for anyone the understand what is really going on.  We ought to pass one funding bill for every Federal department, defense, state, treasury, homeland defense, education, health and human services, and so on and so on.  The smaller one department spending bills are small enough for one person to understand and tell us voters what is really going down. 

Not impressed with Democrat debate

Timing was not ideal, coming as it did while the smoke was still settling from the Trump impeachment.  They were all eloquent, spoke well (except maybe Biden).  They all supported far left ideas, of the more free stuff sort.  Free college, forgive college debt, medicare for all, and a bunch of other stuff that I forget.  Some of 'em even talked about new taxes on "the rich" to pay for all that free stuff.  All of 'em claimed that the US economy was unfair to just about everybody while the Trump boom is in full swing.  At least the PBS anchors doing the questions were pretty good, the questions were tough and relevant. 
   Side issue.  Where does the impeachment go from here?  They say the Senate cannot deal with the issue until the House (Nancy!) submits the paperwork.  Which sounds reasonable.  Nancy adjourned the House, won't be back until after New Year.  So The great Impeachment Show (GIS)  goes on, and gets yet more TV coverage.  Could this be Nancy's plan, drag things out as long as possible?  Certainly the Senate would try to finish the impeachment off as quickly as possible.  Then it's gone and we could move on to real public business.