Tools, new tools

The grass was on the warpath, stalks up to a foot high.  Ancient hand mower just wasn't cutting it.  Mowing had become a chore to be dreaded.  I thought about just turning the whole job over to Ken King, my friendly local lawn care guy.  But I have been cutting this little lawn,with a hand mower, for forty years.  Going with lawncare is like admitting I'm getting too old to mow.
   So,  I set off to buy a new mower.  Checked Sears, Home Depot and Lowe's.  Come home with  a brand new Husqvarna hand mower.  $149.  It fit in the trunk of the Mercury, lid closed.  Got it home, read the instruction booklet, (solid boiler plate to repel liability lawyers) put it together and tried it out.
   Outstanding.  Cuts it level, gets every stalk.  It's feather light (lotta plastic).  Before I knew it, the side lawn was all cut.  Pressed on to the front lawn.  That cut like lightning too.  They did something good with the gearing so the reel spins faster than the old style mowers. They replaced the roller with real back wheels so the grass stays upright to be cut, rather than lying down flat and escaping its proper fate.  Puts the honest self satisfaction of seeing a flat level mowed path slicing thru the shagginess back into the chore.
   I could have gotten a power mower for only $30 more.  The guy at Lowes assured me that it would start next spring if I put some miracle additive into the gas tank.  But this baby is so light and pushes so easily and it makes me feel so environmentally sensitive, that its more satisfactory than a power job.

Memorial Day Parade, Littleton, NH

Parade down Littleton NH Main St.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Littleton NH does a small town Memorial Day Parade.  This is a high school marching band.  I saw one young girl marching by in flip flops.   I hope her feet are good and tough.  Used to be the marching units would toss candy to small children.  The nanny state got loose this year and forbade candy as a safety hazard.  Our tax dollars at work.

Decent turnout, all things considered.  We had our US Rep (Charlie Bass) our selectmen, some of our state reps, a state senate candidate (Debi Warner) and a lot of veterans.

ROTC Color guard

Ninth Grader sings National Anthem

John Starr (my brother) delivers memorial address

My brother was the featured speaker.  He is a combat veteran of both Viet Nam and Iraq.  He retired from the guard after his tour in Iraq.  John has done a bit more for the country than I, I just served in Viet  Nam.

The Economist's plan to save the Euro

The Economist, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is a weekly news magazine based in London.  It has good world wide coverage, tells it fairly straight, and thinks it knows all the answers. This week they opine upon a fix for the Euro crisis. Here is their solution.
1.  Create an EU bank regulator that would operate an EU wide version of deposit insurance (like the American FDIC), along with setting regulation about bank capital, winding up the affairs of failed banks, and have the money to "recapitalize" (otherwise known as "bailout")  shaky or broke banks.  Give this new agency control of the existing European bank rescue funds.  Hopefully the EU regulator would shield banks from national government pressure to lend to national government favored industries or buy national government bonds. 
2.  Create "Eurobonds" backed by all the Euro countries.  Unsaid, but understood by bond buyers is that Germany pledges to make Eurobonds good.  Use the proceeds from Eurobond sales to make loans to countries that no one else will loan money to, like Spain and Italy.
"All that is required is for over indebted countries to have access to money and for banks to have a 'safe' euro-wide class of assets that is not tied to the fortunes of one country."

As the Economist sees it, German backed Eurobonds would be as good as American T-bills.  Dead broke governments would not have to clean up their acts so soon.  Out of the goodness of their hearts the Germans extend their excellent credit rating to the rest of Europe.  Angela Merkel is the only person standing in the way of this financial nirvana.  Shame on her.

I got another plan.  Let the stupid banks go bust.  Let the dead broke counties reduce their spending now, rather than after they run out of other people's money.

Blogger's new features

The programming staff at blogger has time on their hands and they recoded the user interface,  the interface seen by us blog owners, not the interface seen by you readers.  Now after posting we see a list of all our recent posts with a count of  the comments and views of each post.  Fun, I can see which posts get the most views,  which I hope means the posts most popular with readers.   Going by this I oughta do more posts on movies, at least I have a higher view count on movie posts than on my political rants. 
   Of course I am wondering how this view count thing works.  How does the software know which post gets credit for a view when more than one post is in view at the same time?  Which is the usual case, few of my posts fill an entire page on Firefox. 

Space-X

Congratulations to the whole Space-X team.  Getting the Falcon to lift off and the Dragon to dock is a huge victory over Murphy's law.  There are a zillion things, some tiny, some large that can break, and it only takes one breakage to scrub the mission, or worse.  The Space-X team  did the required quality control checks, designed out the weak points, worked hard, and succeeded.
    It should be remembered that Elon Musk made a fortune in Silicon Valley, and then plowed a good deal of that fortune into Space-X.  Clearly better use of the money than Uncle Sam would have made of it had Uncle taken it in taxes.  Let's hear it for private enterprise.

Pop goes the tendon

Must be getting old.  I was in the kitchen and I just flipped a bit of crud off my fingers into the sink.  They was a faint pop sound and all of a sudden the index finger was off at a funny angle.  It didn't get better so next day I went to see my doctor.  Got there about nine o'clock. Did some Xrays, nothing's broken, got set up to see a hand surgeon in Concord (hour and a half drive).  Surgeon looked at it.  The tendon that runs over the knuckle tore out of its groove.  Only fix is splint the finger and wait FOUR WEEKS for it to heal.  With the splint in place.  Arrgh.
  So now I am learning to do one handed, all kinds of things that I always used two hands to do.   Including typing. 
   Note to self.  Don't wave hands rapidly.  Something might break off.

Words of the Weasel, Part 30

"Growth".  As used by European politicians.
Plain English meaning.
"Germans give us money."