Coffee, making thereof

I have improved my coffee technique to the point where I can enjoy it black, no milk and artificial sugar needed to conceal bitterness. Start with real ground coffee, instant just doesn't cut it. Need not be a fancy brand, I get excellent results with Maxwell House and Shur-Fine, the local store house brand. Keep the opened coffee can in the fridge, the low temperature slows the evaporation of volatile essences. Use one heaping tablespoon of coffee to each cup (each 8 oz measuring cup, not coffee cup)of water.
Coffee maker must be spotlessly clean inside and out. The flavorful oils of brewed coffee coat the entire inside of the coffee maker and then go rancid if not washed off.
The coffee maker must be cleanable. This lets out percolators, the inside of the perk tube is uncleanable. French presses, Mr Coffee style electric makers, drip makers, and the all glass vacuum coffee makers will make good coffee. The maker ought to be the right size. You don't want to fill up an 8 cup coffee maker to make coffee for just you. Find a two cup coffee maker to make coffee for yourself.
Don't let the stale coffee and leftover grounds sit in the pot, the rancid odor can sink into the inside of the maker and disflavor the next pot. To make coffee again before doing the dishes, rinse the maker with hot water, add a drop of liquid dishwash and fill it with hot water. Let it stand until it's coffee time again. The soapy water will dissolve any stale coffee that might be left in the pot.

Hallelujah , Finally Got the Bastard

Woke up this morning hearing the news on NHPR. Even better, he's dead, shot resisting arrest. This way the US justice system does not get a chance to bungle his trial.
Killing Bin Laden won't end the war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. But it's a solid victory that heartens us and discourages our enemies.

Metrics that don't measure

The Economist ran a long piece explaining what America ought to do to shape up. Included in the mix was a long rant about "infrastructure", and the lack of "investment" (read spending) upon it. To prove the need for more infrastructure they show a graph of commute times for various countries around the world. The US is nearly the worst with an average commute time of 43 minutes.
Trouble is, commute time is a measure of how long we are willing to commute, not of the quality of the roads. When job seeking, the jobs are located in a circle centered up on your house. The longer you are willing to commute, the bigger that circle, and the more jobs contained therein. Improve the roads, and we can commute farther in the time we are willing to spend commuting. So we tend to find jobs farther from home and the commute time stays the same.
We don't need or want more roads. Boston, which suffers as much from rush hour traffic as anywhere, defeated an attempt to add two superhighways into the center of town. The state highway people tried to run I95 right into, and thru, the downtown. This occurred back in the 1980's. The folk whose homes would have been taken to build I95 rallied politically and defeated the construction plan. Boston, left with two ring highways, and four divided highways into the center of town, has all the road the land and the people will bear.
The famous Boston "Big Dig" merely buried the unsightly elevated central expressway in a tunnel. The fabulously expensive project did nothing to improve automobile access, it merely freed up some very nice downtown real estate that used to have the expressway standing upon it.
We don't need any more "investment" in new highways, we have all the road we can stand.

Leadership of the Anglosphere does a marriage

Weather in London was fine, William and Kate got married with all the pomp and ceremony that the British could arrange, and that's a lot of pomp and ceremony. A helova good show, enjoyed by multitudes. Why do we care?
The British monarchy is the ceremonial leadership of the entire Anglosphere, England, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, even India. This is the alliance that won WWII, and has called the shots world wide ever since. The British royals are widely respected, loved, and serve as a focus for loyalty and patriotism thruout the Anglosphere. They have been particularly effective in North America, cementing the loyalty and support of the obstreperous Americans to the larger missions of the Anglosphere.
The Brits may gripe about the cost of running the monarchy, but that's short sighted of them. For less than the cost of operating a single aircraft carrier or army division, they receive unparalleled support. Ask the Argentinians about that.

Right to Work in NH

House Speaker Bill O'Brien on the Neil Cavuto show, here. O'Brien is saying the right to work law passed House and Senate with veto proof margins. The guv'nor has promised to veto it, but O'Brien thinks the legislature can over ride his veto.
Funny, the Speaker never mentions the real reason to pass right to work. We need right to work because most corporations won't open new plants in states that don't have right to work. New Hampshire needs new plants to provide jobs for our out-of-work citizens. Too much of the New Hampshire economy is tourism, which doesn't pay much even if it is scenic and green. Just one good factory would do a lot of good things in a place like up country New Hampshire.

Dodd-Frank Financial Regulation Law

It doesn't regulate Wall St, it regulates anything that Dodd or Frank wanted to regulate. Buried in the 2000 pages is a requirement for US companies to report to the SEC yearly if they use tantalum, tin, tungsten, or gold from the Congo or nine neighboring countries.
Tantalum is needed to make high performance capacitors. Used to be only military electronics could afford tantalum oxide capacitors, while civilian electronics had to make do with aluminum oxide capacitors, but now tantalum is cheap enough for civilian use. Tungsten makes lamp filaments and tungsten carbide teeth to tip saw blades. Tin and gold have been valuable since Phoenician times.
Apparently Dodd or Frank slipped this goody into the financial regulation bill in order to cut off sales by Congo rebels. In actual fact it's cutting off sales from all of Africa. It also requires every company in the supply chain to do mountains of extra paper work, raising costs for all of us.
First I ever heard of it was yesterday's Wall St Journal. Apparently Dodd and Frank knew that a straight "apply-economic-sanctions-to-the-Congo" bill would never pass Congress, so they hid it deep inside their pet financial regulation bill.
Another good reason to never pass any bill too long to read.

Spring at last.

I opened the windows, sat on the deck, and put up the deck umbrella. First time this year.