Chronicle

A 2012 movie.  Three American high school boys are featured.  They are an unattractive lot when the movie opens.  Loud, rude, given to hooting like chimpanzees.  Somehow (pure magic?) they are endowed with real Superman type superpowers.  They can fly, leap tall buildings with a single bound, are bullet proof, everything.  Way cool.
   But nothing comes of it. They remain unattractive anti social jerks. They fail to rise to the occasion and slay dragons, rescue pretty maidens, save the world, or even get a decent suit of clothing. 
  Depressing movie.  Clearly the gift of superpowers does not uplift jerks into defenders of truth justice and the American way.  Which may be true, but I like the DC comics legend better.
    None of the names in the cast mean anything to me.  Camera work is mediocre to poor.  Lots of "shake-the-camera" shots.  Sound is adequate, you can understand most of the dialogue.

Ballast shipped all the way to Mars

Curiosity depended upon dropping ballast weights to maintain it's attitude during re-entry (entry?) to the Martian atmosphere.  The amount of ballast is surprising.   Two heavier weights were dropped to bring the nose up and allow aerodynamic maneuvering.  Then six more 55 pound ballast weights were dropped to level the craft off.  Six times 55 pounds is 330 pounds of ballast.  That's a lot, considering the entire lander only weighed 1924 pounds. 
   I hate to Monday morning quarterback a successful mission, but you would think they would have used some kind of steering fins sticking out in the airstream.  That's a lot of dead weight to blast all the way to Mars.

Words of the Weasel Part 27

"The fiscal effort becomes more difficult because the cyclical contraction is more challenging compared with the base line macro economic scenario of the second [bailout] program."  said Nikos Magginas, an economist at the Nation Bank of Greece.
And this means  what, exactly?

Grexit

Financial world shorthand for "Greek exit from the Euro".  The Economist was doing a long piece about this, listing pros and cons.  They point out that the Greek have borrowed hundreds of billions of Euros and in the event of Grexit, the lenders won't get paid back. And so it might be worth giving the Greeks another 100 billion Euro's or so to keep them running a while longer, and prevent (or stave off for a while) realizing those hefty losses.  True enough.
    What the Economist fails to talk about is the simple fact that the Greeks cannot and will not pay off those loans.  They just don't have the money, and no way they can they get the money,  not before Hell freezes over.
   So we are really talking about when the lenders to Greece have to admit how much money they lost (how stupid they have been).  Surely the lenders (banks mostly)  would like to put off that day of reckoning as long as possible, but aside from some bank officials having to reveal their stupidity in public, it doesn't make much difference.  The money is gone and won't be coming back.  

Water

I received a two page spread from the Mittersill water dept about the purity of my tap water.  There are ten different contaminants listed, levels thereof, limits, and "goals".   Goals are apparently an opening gambit to lower the limits.  My tap water meets all the limits, and in fact, all the goals.  Lotta fancy lab work measuring a few micrograms per liter, or parts per billion.  Paid for with my water bill.  Welfare for somebody or other.
   Then some things, copper and lead, are "calculated" by NHDES whatever that means.  I believe in measurements made using properly calibrated instruments. I don't believe calculations and computer models. They tell you what ever the calculator or modeler wants them to say.  Apparently NHDES thinks we don't have a problem with lead or copper.  I wonder why they think that way.
   My tap water comes from the same place it has for the last fifty years.  Wells, located up the side of a mountain, in uninhabited national forest.  They haven't changed much since the house was built fifty years ago.  Only real change in water quality is the water dept is now adding enough chlorine to make the coffee taste bad.  But money is spent every year for lab work to confirm what we have known for fifty years.
    Dunno how the Pilgrims survived over here, drinking plain old water without all these fancy tests. 

The Coop is so hippy dippy I can hardly stand it

I had to cycle around the veggie section twice to find plain old carrots, as opposed to organic carrots for $5 a bag.  Plain old Molson's Canadian beer is $8 a sixpack, as opposed to $5.50 at Mac's market. Aisles filled with groovy products I've never heard of, all making health claims I have trouble believing. 

Brits fighting above their weight

The Olympics are over, and the scorekeepers are counting medals won, and which nations are ahead.  Seems like us Americans came away with the most medals, followed by the Chinese, then the Russians.  The superpowers.  Britain came in number four, right behind the Russians.  Damn good.  Britain is much smaller than the three biggies, giving it a smaller talent pool to draw upon. Granted they did have a home field advantage, but still, coming in ahead of nearly every other country in the whole world is a damn good show. Rule Britannia.