Back to School

First we load the car. Boxes and trunks and bags and stuff, endless stuff. It filled the trunk, the back seat, the back window ledge, the floor in back. This is a big car, a '99 Caddy Deville from back when Caddy still made decent sized cars. Next morning the alarm goes off at 5 AM. Urrg. Grapefruit and eggs and bacon and coffee to keep us going. Put out three bowls of catfood for Stupid Beast.
Wheels turn by 6:30, the sun is up, and it being a holiday, nobody else on the road. Youngest son drives on the way down. He is getting better at it, only a few while knuckle moments as he drifts the Caddy around an off ramp posted for 40 MPH at 70 MPH, or hurls the car into a narrow slot between the Jersey barrier and an 18 wheeler at 75. New suspension bits and shock absorbers since last year have improved the Caddy's handling, the car felt better as youngest son pressed it hard.
We make good time and pull up at the Brooklyn dorm at 12 noon. Even find a parking space right by the door to ease the unloading hassle. The Brooklyn cops are still standing alert for the next Al Quada suicide bomber. Fearing an attack on their station, the cops have blocked off a public street to keep the truck bombers at bay. Having manpower to burn, the blocking is accomplished by parking two police cruisers, with policemen inside them, crosswise in Johnson St. These sentry posts are manned 24 7. There have been there since last school year. Anyone one sensible would have discovered that a piece of Jersey barrier is cheaper than a cop car, to say nothing of paying the cops inside the cop car. But this is New York.
Not to let the police dept do all the heavy spending, the NY fire dept is now buying Priuses. There was a nice new one parked in front of the dorm, with "For official use only" and "FDNY" painted on the doors. Priuses are very pricey. So pricey that the gasoline saving over the life of the car doesn't equal the extra purchase price. The city would save money just buying Honda Civics. Hell, they would save money buying Ford Crown Victorias.
To avoid driving all the way back on Monday, I arranged to crash at my cousin's place way out at the tip of Long Island. It's two and a half hours from darkest Brooklyn to Montauk. Cousin's have a nice place actually on the water. They have a deer population that won't quit. Five deer are eating the lawn, not fifty feet from the deck upon which we are having beers. I got some deer pictures, and not to be out done in the wilderness dept I showed them my pictures of bears playing on my front lawn.
Next day we all set off back to Franconia. $68 in ferry tolls gets the Caddy across two creeks and then Long Island sound. We get the 9 am ferry into New London and lead foot it up thru Worcester and over to I93. I get back to the chalet around 2:30 PM. Stupid Beast is over joyed to see me. She gets lonesome without her humans around.
And that's why no posts for Monday and Tuesday.

Sunday Morning Pseudo Science from NPR

This morning someone was explaining that all sorts of otherwise harmless substances were in fact harmful in super low doses. He mentioned parts per trillion, parts per billion, and parts per million. According to this fellow, standard tests for harmful effects are always conducted at high dose levels, and such testing will miss the terrible effects that occur when the dose is very very small. He cited one (just one) example, involving a breast cancer drug that I have never heard of.
Of course, this guy ignores an ancient principle, if a little bit is bad for you, a lot is worse. If you want to make sure something is harmless, feed a lot of it to a laboratory rat. If the rat survives, the stuff is harmless. This principle, and others like it in other fields, goes way back, and makes good sense.
What this guy is really saying is horrible things can happen with undetectably small exposures and we ought to go out and ban all sorts of things. He mentioned pthallates, a plasticizer that has attracted a lot of bad publicity but has passed a number of professional tests for toxicity.

How to tell the Men from the Boys?

Simple. Men have power tools. I just acquired a vintage jointer. It was rusty and shabby but the price was right. WD-40, Scotchbrite pads and elbowgrease got most of the rust off the tables. Wiped it down with paint thinner and a rattle can of machinery gray got it looking nice. Took a belt sander to the wood stand and got the worst of the dirt off and gave it a coat of polyurethane varnish to keep it clean[er]. Removed all three knives and sharpened them with an oilstone and a home made jig. Spent quite some time adjusting the knife heights to get all three of them exactly the same height as the outfeed table. Found a replacement motor pulley, bought a new V-belt and now it runs nice and smooth.
Put it to use yesterday. Jointed all the pieces for a lathe stand I am building. It cuts smooth, no little ripply marks. Takes off splinters, dirt, those tasteful lumber yard markings and the otherwise old and tired wood looks fresh and clean. I should have got one a long time ago.
And it rounds out my mostly Craftsman shop. It's a Craftsman, from the 1940's, solid cast iron. Goes with my Craftsman radial arm saw, grinder, and bandsaw.

NPR solves the Health Care crisis

According to NPR the whole health care crisis comes from paying your doctor. "Fee for service" they call it. They rambled on this morning about how "fee for service" encouraged doctors to do more medicine to make more money. After thoroughly bashing "fee for service" the rant sort of petered out. They never did get around to discussing what might replace "fee for service". Apparently doctors would do medicine out of the goodness of their hearts and starve in the gutter. Somehow I don't think that works.
Only two alternatives to "fee for service" occur to me. We could put all doctors on the public payroll, make 'em GS13 civil servants. They get paid bi weekly whether they do anything or not. This way the doctors all work for Uncle Sam rather than for their patients. Obama would love this. I wouldn't.
Or, each patient pays the doctor a fixed yearly fee for which the doctor treats anything the patient might encounter. Depending upon the fee, this might be a good deal for us patients. For the doctor, it's scary. Sign on too many patients that get seriously ill and you are bankrupt. Come to think of it, this sounds like insurance, only the doctor is assuming the risks rather than an insurance company.
I love NPR, it has so much really wierd stuff on in the morning.

Surprise, you can find useful stuff at Tractor Supply

Tractor Supply, a national chain, opened a medium-box store up here in Littleton last fall. Lured by mail advertisements and coupons, I checked it out last year. At the time it seemed like a boutique for wannabe farmers, full of out door clothing, no-name hand tools from China, and 50 pound bags of dog food.
Til yesterday.
I needed a five inch pulley for a Craigslist jointer. No luck at Franconia Hardware (they had a four inch but no five inch), or NAPA. But the counterman at NAPA suggested Tractor Supply. And lo and behold, Tractor Supply had just the right pulley, American made even, hanging on pegboard next to the shelf of electric motors. A little pricey ($15) but when you need a part you need a part. But cheaper than Internet, with its $10 shipping charges for everything.

Clueless Sunday Pundits

After endless Ted Kennedy funeral coverage the ABCers got to talking about the great CIA prosecution flap. One newsie said that Obama didn't want to prosecute but his hands were tied. Wow. Decision to prosecute always been at the discretion of the prosecutor. Eric Holder, the prosecutor, is Obama's attorney general. I believe that Mr. Holder will defer to the president's wishes at all times. Obama picked him for the attorney general job for just this reason. I ain't gonna believe that Obama is opposed to the prosecution.
I still don't understand why Obama is doing it. Conservatives and independants are dead set against it. CIA as an organization is dead set against it. CIA might proceed to destablized the Obama administration the way they did the Bush administration with embarrassing leaks of classified information. Why mud wrestle with a pig? You get dirty and the pig seems to enjoy it. Is it really worth stirring up this much bad feeling just to distract voters from Obamacare?
The newsies did not discuss those issues at all.

Al Jazeera more objective than CNN or BBC?

Roger Simon, vacationing in Italy, says yes. Which is another way of saying that CNN and BBC are truly awful news sources.