Face the Nation foot in mouth

Face the Nation was stirring the Penn State pot yet again.  They were fricasseeing the University president over the Jerry Sandusky affair.  The moderator asks the Penn State guy "Do you think this whole affair was the fault of to great an emphasis on football?" 
   Well, actual no I don't.  Penn State hired a child molester, that was mistake #1.  And when the crimes came to light, the molester's boss (Joe Paterno) didn't report them to the police and covered things up.  That was mistake #2.  These mistakes could have been made in every department of Penn State, or any other university.  It happened that the athletic department is guilty this time, but that's just bad luck, it could have been any other department.   

Olympic Uniforms

The opening ceremonies went on so long that I went to bed before all the athletics marched in. So this morning I looked at still pix on the USAToday site.   The US uniforms, berets and all, were excessively undistinguished.  So was the rest of the outfit.  However there were worse.  The Brits turned up with the girls wearing Mother Hubbards...  The US Olympic committee needs to find a fashion designer with a sense of fashion. 

Class Action suit against NetFlix

Someone sent me an email about this.  According to the email, Netflix was keeping records of who watched what movies.  Didn't say Netflix was selling said records to telemarketers (yet) but surely that was coming.  Assuming this is real, and not a scam to get me to click on virus spreading  URL's,  it's breaking news to me.  I'll have to check around the web to see what's what. 
    If someone has huge amounts of time, and nothing better to do, and they review my movie watching habits, I should be OK.  Other than a taste for children's movies, my movie picks are depressingly ordinary, westerns, soap opera's, action and adventure, plain old Hollywood flicks.  I did watch a couple of Shakespeare plays this year.
   The email didn't say what happened to Netflix  "suggest a movie" features, which were supposed to suggest movies to watch based upon your stated preferences and viewing history, not that it ever worked very well.

Photos from WWII

I'm looking thru the photos in a coffee table book "The DC-3".  I'm struck by the number of photos from WWII, showing DC-3's at a variety of Podunk airports, loading or discharging passengers.  Somehow, in the depths of an existential war, the American economy can produce civilian air service into tiny burgs way out in the Great Plains. And do it with modern state-of-the-art aircraft too.  No beat up biplanes or wrinkly Ford tri-motors,  the Douglas DC-3 was top of the line in 1942.

Thunder & Lightning harmful to cats

At least that's what my cat thinks. We had a really spectacular thunderstorm last night.  Continuous lightning flashes, rolling thunder, heavy rain.   Cat burrowed under the bed covers, deep under, and stayed there all night.  Apparently being under the covers is superior to being under the bed.

We had our biggest and best Tea Party meeting

There is life in the old Tea Party up here.  Lots of people showed up.  There will be some heavy duty political action this fall. 

Government Issue Zip Gun

  It was 1942, a low point in WWII  for us.  Following pleas for arms from European resistance movements, the Americans designed and manufactured a million zip guns.  They were incredibly crude, single shot, made of sheet stampings by the GM Guidelamp division.  The barrel was a piece of steel tubing, unrifled.  It was built to fire 45 caliber pistol rounds, which gave it some punch.  The pistol only cost $2.10 in WWII money.
    Contract for 1 million pistols was let in May, Guidelamp tooled up and started production in June and delivered the 1 millionth pistol in late August.  That's lightning quick.
    Reception of the "Liberator" pistol by Army field commanders (Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Stilwell) was chilly.  They were opposed to airdropping the weapons to the resistance.  Reasons were not given, but can be imagined.  No Army general is going to like the idea of  firearms in the hands of civilians, for fear of friendly fire accidents during invasion, and fear of Nazi reprisals against resistance fighters.  Only a few reached European hands.  The guns sat piled up in warehouses until the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of CIA, got a hold of them.  The weapons were shipped to the Pacific theater passed out to Chinese and Filipino resistance groups fighting the Japanese.
    Although the Liberator was nothing much, when viewed as a firearm, it did work, and it was a better arm than a switchblade knife or a walking stick.  The design was ingenious to get the price down so low and manufacture so simple as to permit  stamping out a million of 'em in merely ten weeks.