Filene's Basement up for sale

According to the Boston Herald Filene's Basement is going bankrupt and the entire chain is up for sale. Another old time Boston landmark dies. I used to buy suits there. You could get a decent wool suit, that even fit right, for a whole bunch less than the price upstairs in the regular Filenes store. Then there was that radio commercial years ago. "Here we are in a heavily fortified pill box at the entrance of Filene's basement. In just a minute the doors will open and we will be assaulted by an army of shoppers...." Can't remember what they were selling (it wasn't Filene's basement) but it was a cool ad.

Plymouth NH Tea Party

Yesterday the Tea Party in Plymouth NH went off without a hitch. Weather was superb, and the turnout was heavy. I estimated a crowd of 200 which is a lot for Plymouth, small town America, with the emphasis on "small". The affair opened with the pledge of allegiance and singing the Star Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful. We had lots and lots of great signs. Numerous local speakers lambasted wild spending, higher taxes, and reckless borrowing. The crowd was all local Grafton County types, of all ages.
I can assure everyone that this was a local Grafton County affair with zip for assistance from outside the county. The TV news has been spreading a story that tea parties are Astroturf from Fox News or corporate interests. Pure malarkey. This deal was organized by, for, and in Grafton County. I know the organizers, in fact I was one of them, and we are all real Grafton County people.

New Camera Kodak Z1485

I am getting with the times, and getting a digital point&shoot to go with my antique 35mm Kodak Retina. The Retina has been out of production for 50 years, although it still works just fine.
I started out at Staples, about the only electronicky place up here. I did the usual thing, fingered all the camera's on display, wrote down the models and went home to consult the Internet as to the merits of each one. There was an Olympus FE310 for $118, but all the internet hits bitched about short battery life. There was a Canon A590 IS which everyone on the net liked.
So next day, back to Staples intending to buy the Canon. Sorry, we are out of the Canon and that model is being discontinued. Arggh. So I settled on a more expensive Kodak Z1485 cause it was somewhat larger, offering more camera to wrap my hands around and offering some control of aperture and shutter speed. It could focus very closely, which is handy for photographing model trains.
So, I tried it out, taking a portrait of yours truly to post on Facebook. That worked out. The self timer does work, although it requires a steady finger on the shutter release. It goes like press the self timer button, then press the shutter release to the FIRST click, and then press it all the way home. Feeling that first click is delicate. The battery powered LCD viewfinder is marginally readable in sunlight. You can do it but you have to squint. If you hold the camera vertically (portrait mode) the review mode rotates the image 90 degrees, so it displays right side up with the camera held horizontally. This undocumented feature confused the bejeezus out of me until I figured out what was going on.
The Kodak supplied software to suck the pictures out of the camera onto your computer is fat, it soaked up 600 megabytes of hard drive. It also installs a plump, always resident, driver that eats up cpu time and kernel memory by constantly asking "did he plug the camera in?". Documentation and human interface have the usual computer geek obfustication. You don't download photos from the camera, you click Tools->CameraBrower->Sync&TransferManager. I still don't know what "sync" is about. Transfer does work. It has a "erase the photo's off the camera after transfer" feature which I don't trust enough to use.
The camera does accept AA batteries, but they have to be Lithium AA batteries, not something you find in the average grocery store. It comes with one NON rechargeable Lithium Battery. Rechargeable batteries and the charger are $26 extra off the net. The camera documentation (and a Google search) failed to reveal whether the camera would charge batteries if plugged into a computer. In fact the manual says nothing about battery charging or battery life. I have been unable to find a battery charge indicator anywhere on the camera. So if you care, you oughta have a spare charged battery in your camera bag.
So far, it does take good pictures. Fourteen megapixels and a 4X optical zoom. The autofocus is effective. It has a video mode, which I haven't figured out yet. It won't play video back on a TV.

Small cars seen as safety risks

Some one conducted a series of head on crash tests, and surprise surprise, the lighter car looses in a head on crash with a heavier car. Obviously we should all drive Sherman tanks.
Or, try using the steering wheel, go hard left or hard right and avoid the head on. Hit a phone pole, hit a bridge abutment, doesn't matter, hitting anything stationary is a whole bunch better than going head on with even a SmartForTwo.
If steering is beyond your capabilities, better go shopping for that Sherman tank.

Camaro redux

Nostalgic column in the WSJ about the return of GM's Camaro. The writer has been fond of Camaro since it cam out in '67. He opines that GM would be in better shape if it had a few cars like Camaro that drivers actually like. I can relate to this. I liked Camaro from way back. It offered as much pizzazz as Corvette for half the price. There came a time in my life when I could afford a Camaro just to drive to work.
Then came a ski weekend. I invited Gigi and her boyfriend to come up to Cannon. Over the phone I heard "Oh I dunno. It's gonna snow this weekend and JD's car isn't too good in snow." I reassured her that the roads would be plowed and the forecasted snow would make the ski conditions especially good. I must have been persuasive and Friday night GiGi and JD and JD's big black Camaro showed up at Mittersill. It got stuck backing into my driveway. Saturday it got stuck entering the Peabody Slopes parking lot. That night it couldn't make the grade on Lehan Road going into mother's place. Even when we popped the rear deck and had two of us sit on the rear bumper to put more weight on the drive wheels. We parked it at the bottom of the hill and walked the rest of the way.
That kinda burst my Camaro bubble. After that demo of totally unroadworthiness in winter, I knew if I ever took a Camaro on a ski weekend I'd never hear the end of it from the rest of the family. It would take years to live down. So. No Camaro.
Too bad. It's still a nice car in good weather. I stuck with front wheel drive minivans and sedans which can pull themselves up three mile hill in an ice storm. And GM still needs some decent cars. I'm currently driving one of the last ones they ever made, a '99 Caddy DeVille. God knows what I'll buy when the Caddy finally wears out. Certainly nothing in today's GM lineup is attractive.

Tea Party, Plymouth New Hampshire. Tomorrow

Been reading a few internet rants about evil, immoral and fattening Tea Parties organized by Fox News. Pure malarky. The Plymouth NH Tea party is organized by purely local folks, with zip for support, publicity, or anything else. I ought to know, I'm doing a part of the organizing, and I'm pretty local and small time. The others in the effort are just as local. Some of them are bigger time than I, but nobody is anywhere close to being a state wide figure, let alone a national figure.
The Plymouth Tea Party steps off at 3:30 in the center of town. Hope to see you all there.

Why require presidential OK to use force against pirates?

According to the TV news, Obama issued the OK to use deadly force against pirates. Should not all US Navy captains be authorized to use any amount of force against pirates, at any time? At least against pirates at sea, attacking merchant shipping. Maybe we can require presidential OK to bombard pirate ports, but any Navy ship ought to be able to take out pirates attacking ships at sea, without checking with the president.