Let there be light, again.

  Last week I flipped on the living room fluorescent lights.  The lights instead of lighting, did their end-of-life thing, blinking and glowing and refusing to light up.  So I went down to Franconia Hardware to buy new tubes.  The existing tubes were showing black burn marks on their ends.  Awfulness.  Mike Ford down at Franconia told me they had stopped making real fluorescent tubes three years ago.  Some how I missed that bit of lefty-greenie aggression.  I'd heard about the war on 100 watt light bulbs, but some how I missed the war on  40 watt fluorescent tubes.  The new tubes are only 32 watts, a fantastic saving of eight whole watts per tube, but they don't work in the regular fixtures. 
  So I went out to a real electrical supply house to buy four new dependable new style fixtures.  $32 a fixture, less tubes.  He only had 3 fixtures, when I needed four, but he promised to deliver up to my place the next day. Not too shabby.  
  So next day, I started in replacing four fixtures.  It was a fine summer day, in the 90's. Good daylight  so I could see what I was doing.  I'm old school, I still use a Yankee screwdriver instead of those cute battery drill-drivers. Got the first two old fixtures down, got the new ones up.  What with one thing or another, it was 3:30 when I was done.  Decided to leave the other two fixtures for  tomorrow. 
   The new lights are nice and bright, and whiter than the old "cool white" tubes.
   By tomorrow evening the whole job ought to be done.  

Is paying for RU 485 the end of the world?

Lots and lots of talk about the Hobby Lobby case.  Lots of outrage.  But all the case says is that small family owned businesses whose owners object to four (out of twenty) contraception drugs as abortion drugs don't have to pay for them on the company health plan.  Employees can pay for them out of pocket, or, find another company to work for. 
  Is this that big a deal?  What does everyone think?  The TV newsies are really talking this one up. 

Congress rating drops to 7%. Gallup Poll

That's pretty bad.  That's rewrite the Constitution bad.  The war drums are sounding in the hills.  Have you heard the Convention of States talk?  That's a call to a second Constitutional Convention, to rewrite the Constitution. Congress needs to do something before it gets rewritten out of existence.
A lot of this ire comes from voters who don't get their bills passed, or who see bills they dislike passed (Obamacare for example). 
If Congress wants to survive, it needs to connect with the voters.  The leadership needs to have some full time flacks to get the word out.  We voters want to know what was in the bill, and why the party supposed it or opposed it.  We want to know when a bill is killed by arbitrary action, by Harry Reid or who ever.   I heard some House member say the House had passed seven bills to revive the economy and the Senate had trash canned them all.  Sounds good, but that's the first time I ever heard that, and the Congressmen didn't  list the bills in question. 
   The newsies don't cover this.  Most of them don't understand much, few of them will do the hard work of research, it's easier to just pontificate.  And their editors would prefer to run "lifestyle" stories.  Even the Wall St Journal is pushing a slick paper insert that is mostly about selling fancy clothes and houses.  Like I care where to buy $400 a pair shoes. 
  But a good Republican or Democratic flack could  explain  his party's angle on each bill, make it interesting, and circulate it around the blogosphere, to the few print publications that still do real news, to Matt Drudge, to Glenn Reynolds, and even to the newspapers, even though newspapers are pretty much a lost cause these days. 
   We voters might think better of Congress if we knew what was going on. 

We need some scalps

Great Depression 2.0 started six years ago.  I know there was some malfeasance, skullduggery, and just plain stupidity in the big banks.  That crashed the world economy and threw millions out of work. But nobody has gone on trial let alone gone to jail. 
The IRS scandal.  Lois Lerner got retired, she keeps her pension.  Nobody else has been prosecuted or gone to jail.
The VA scandal.  The head of VA retired.  Nobody else has even got their name in the papers, let alone prosecuted or jailed. 
   I say Obama is going easy on this slime.  The banks, the IRS and the VA would work a lot better after jailing their top three levels of management.
   Even GM canned 8 people over the ignition switch disaster.  Are we saying that GM is more hard core than DOJ?

Google Maps

Now that they stopped printing road maps, Google is how I get from here to there if I haven't been there before.  They updated the software recently.  The map page looks different.  They managed to loose the useful "Center Map Here" function, so useful for expanding the map about your destination.  They fixed the "waste a page of paper every time you print a map" bug. 
   Not to trust Google's travel time estimates.  On my recent trip to the Cape, Google estimated 4 hr 37 min.  It really took 6 hours. 
   Be wary of letting Google plot your course.  Now that Google's knowledge of back roads has improved, it will route you over very obscure back roads.  On a previous trip it routed me over a back road which was impassible due to frost heaves and axle smashing potholes.  Fortunately I had enough local knowledge to not let a web site lead me down the garden path, or down Rte 116 to N. Haverill. 
   One final whine.  They ought to print the maps with a white background.  It wastes a lot of expensive color ink to color an A-sized map tan all over. 

Driving to Cape Cod

An old and good friend, a fine young man I have known since he was a young boy, got married on the Cape this weekend.  I was invited.  So I gassed up the Mercury, consulted Google maps, and set off for the Cape on Friday.  Weather was fine.  I reached Rte 128 in only two hours.  Then the fun began.  In the past I have driven straight thru downtown Boston on I93 at mid day, no sweat.  Not any more.  Traffic was stall and crawl from Melrose (north shore) until I got to Rte 3 (south shore). 
  For the one hour traffic jam I was treated to flashing electric signs every mile or so.  They flashed "Fire works Illegal. Penalty Fines and Jail".  Looks like the state fire marshals (who hate fireworks) had got the funding for a massive anti fireworks publicity campaign.  It was the first time I'd had a sign threaten me with jail. 
   Traffic loosed up on Rte 3 until the Sagamore bridge of ill fame.  Built in the 1930's, and only four lanes wide, Sagamore has been a fearful road block since I first drove on the Cape in the early 1960's.  Half a century later, it's still bad.  Very bad.  They are repainting it, again, and the arch is all covered up in scaffolding/spray paint containment masking. 
   The wedding was in Truro, far out on the Cape.  Funny, they have signage for Hyannis and Barnstable and Wellfleet and P-town, but nary a sign for Truro.  I guess the Truro town fathers failed to pay off the state highway signs people. 
   The wedding was excellent, out of doors, at a shore place that the bride's family owned.  All the groom's numerous family turned up and lots of reminiscences ensued.  Dancing went on past midnight.  Best party I've been to in years. 
   Trip back was uneventful. Set off at 10:30 I had to fill up the Mercury on the cape ($3.83 a gallon, $58 for the tank). There was only a 15 minute backup to cross the Sagamore bridge (this at 12 on Sunday)  The wipe-out-Rte-128 campaign has been successful.  Coming north on Rte 3, nary a sign to get you onto 128.  Fortunately I know the code numbers, I-95 West = 128, and had no trouble.  
   Stopped in Concord at 3 PM for a Big Mac and fries.  McD's is on a bossiness kick, with new signs on the doors refusing entry to any food except McD's food, and more signs inside warning against loitering, and tables must be vacated within 30 minutes. Gives a real welcoming touch.
   Checked out Gibson's bookstore in Concord.  They just moved into a fancy new building, lots more shelf space, a coffee shop, nice carpets, all the trimmings.  I hope it works out for them.  On a fine Sunday I was able to park on Main St, right at their front door.  I was the only car parked there.  They had a few other customers, but I'm  worried about  sales volume and continued survival.  It's tough being in retail. 
   Made it back at 5.  Stupid Beast was pleased to see me, after a three day absence.  I had left plenty of food out for her which she had hardly touched. 

So who is the real dummy?

The story going round the internet has the inventors of a self driving car doing a demo in DC.  They get Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District's sole non-voting Congress person, to take a ride.  She gets in the car. "Ohh, what does this do?" she says.  This is a large red button marked "Emergency Stop".  She pushes it.  Emergency Stop worked, the car didn't move, and in fact they were unable to get it to move again  End of demo.
   Most internet pieces poured scorn on Norton for being so dumb.  Speaking as an engineer, that button is broke.  Emergency Stop in a self driving car is supposed to let the passengers stop the car if they see the auto driver doing something scary.  It isn't supposed to cripple the car for good, leaving it stopped in the middle of the street.  I'd call the designers of the car dumb.