What do the Greenies have against cell phones?

For last weekend's greenie rally to support climate change, they filmed at least two greenies being challenged to give up their cell phones to save the planet. 
Cell phones?  The chargers pull a measly 10 watts and the battery charges up in an hour.   I buy electricity for 25 cents a kilowatt hour.  That's enough for 100 cell phone charges, about a year's worth.  This is wrecking the planet?  You gotta be kidding me. 
   Let's talk real energy use.  Like my oil burner.  Each fill of the oil tank is 200 gallons, at $4 a gallon, $800 a tankful.  I need five fillups, to make it thru the winter. I keep the heat down to 60, I wear a sweater in the house, I have good tight Andersen windows, and decent insulation.  That's $4000 a year for oil.  Who cares about a cell phone?  That's greenies for you.
  Other amusing item.  All the demonstrators interviewed on TV looked old, like they had been doing peace marches in the 1960's.   Could it be that they just like going to demonstrations?  Doesn't really matter what the demo is about, they just enjoy getting out and putting on a show for the TV newsies.
  

All plastic lawn mower

Here we have Husqvarna all plastic lawn mower after three summers of grass cutting.  I bought  it new  from Lowes back in 2012.  Note the handle is crooked.  That's cause this plastic piece broke while pushing the mower across the lawn.  The bright metal patch is my attempt to glue it back together with epoxy.  Didn't work.  The epoxy failed at first push.

 I was able to find the  users manual and the sales slip. Kudos to my home filing system.  Even found  the illustrated parts breakdown showing the broken piece and giving a part number.  Manual gave a customer service number.  Reached a robo answer machine which asked me to leave my number, they would call back.  Haven't heard from them.  Tried the web.  The Husqvarna website doesn't sell parts and didn't even show my model number.  The dealer finder on the site didn't find any dealers, anywhere at all.  A disti website offered parts, but never heard of my model number or part number.
   Moral of the story, Stick with steel for lawn mowers.  There is no future in plastics. 

My Swiss Army knife has a 3 inch blade

The TV newsies now describe the White House fence jumper as being armed with a knife with a 3 inch blade.  That has become a "deadly weapon".  So what was the jumper carrying? Really?  Just a pocket knife?  a switchblade?  A lock blade knife?   I keep a short lock blade knife in my desk drawer to open the mail. 
   Was this jumper really carrying a real weapon?  Or are the TV newsies making a big deal out of a pocket knife like most Americans carry all the time?

Is the media after NFL & Roger Goodell ?

Goodell and the NFL have certainly been chewing up air time.  Could this be to distract the voters from serious problems, like no jobs, ISIS, outrageous energy prices, Lois Lerner and the IRS, and the likely GOP landslide in November?  
   Football is a rough game, played by rough men.  Up til that video tape of Mr. Rice cold cocking his fiance in an elevator, everybody pretty much ignored players behavior off the field.  Most NFL players are decent men, but the few bad apples (there are ALWAYS a few bad apples) can spoil the whole barrel.  The media, all lefty greenie types who think football is too violent and too red-neck, have decided to cover the warts of the NFL in detail, and over and over again.  So the owners have decided that bad player behavior on or off the field, is bad for business, and bad for team revenues.  So the owners, thru Goodell, have put the word out that bad behavior, he listed a dozen sorts, gets you kicked off the team and out of the league.  This will be effective, the players are players 'cause they love the game, and getting blacklisted will really hurt them. 
   Maybe the media will gt tired of Goodell and the NFLs troubles and get back to something important.

Words of a Weasel Part 35

Heard on Meet the Press this morning, a pundit said "The voters want representatives that will compromise and support bi partisan solutions and get something done in Washington."  I wonder what universe she comes from.  The voters I know want representatives who will vote for the right  way and vote against  the wrong way.  And not allow themselves to be bought off by the other side.
   And a lotta things don't compromise well.  Either we build the Keystone XL pipeline or we don't.  Either we go to war against ISIS or we don't.  Either we grant amnesty to illegal aliens or we don't.  Either abortions are illegal or they aren't.  Either we hike taxes or we don't.  Either we legalize marijuana or we don't. 

98.6 Not too hot, Not too cool

Normal body temperature for people.  Back in the day doctors and mothers paid a lot more attention to temperature than they do now.  As a kid I had to run 100 degrees before Mom would feel I was too sick to go to school. That didn't happen often.
  I notice that a fair number of mammals run the same body temp.  Stroke a cat, it feels warm, just about the right amount of warm.  If the cat 's body temperature was much removed from 98.6 it would feel either cold and clammy, or hot and feverish.  Same goes for dogs.  And horses.  I am guessing that 98.6 is pretty much normal body temperature for all mammals. 
   I suppose there is a scientific bio chemical reason  for this magic temperature, but I don't know what it might be.  I don't remember reading anything about it, and I do a fair amount of reading.
High school chemistry taught me that the speed of chemical reactions depends upon temperature.  Mammals run on bio chemical reactions, and to stay active when it's cold, they generate heat and keep their bodies warm.  An evolutionary trick that reptiles never learned. 

Shopping for boots

Boots to put on the ground that is.  Other than Americans, we have the Iraqi Army, the Kurdish Peshmerga, and some shadowy Syrian rebels.   Our Prez doesn't want to use Americans for political reasons.  The Iraqis haven't fought well since Saddam Hussein's early days.  They put up a good fight during the Iran-Iraq war on the 1980's.  That war lasted 8 or 10 years.  The Iranians had a larger population, a lot of good US equipment left over from the Shah's regime, and a scary level of fanaticism on all levels, from Ayatollah Khomeini right down to the teen age Iranian soldiers who conducted human wave attacks on Iraqi positions.  But when faced with the Americans in 1990 and 2003 they crumped.   Iraqi units didn't fight much, or very hard, and a lot of 'em just deserted under fire.   After a good ten years of rebuilding under American guidance, they aren't even as good they were in 1990.  ISIS was able to brush them aside with ease. 
   The Kurdish Peshmerga fighters have a decent rep.  They fight hard and they don't run.  Trouble is, there aren't all that many of them, and they lack heavy weapons, mortars, artillery, tanks, armored personnel carriers, even trucks and jeeps.  We could help out there, but the  Baghdad government thinks that Kurdistan is still a province of a greater Iraq, and refuses to give  the Kurds any weapons, lest they use them to declare independence from Baghdad.  And Baghdad gets huffy with us when we suggest shipping arms direct into Kurdistan. 
   Then we have the Syrian rebels.  They have little to no rep.  They have been fighting for years to drive out Assad with little success.  They have been able to stay alive, and prevent Assad from offing them all, but that ain't much. 
   And then there are the Iranians.  Lots of 'em, close by, and they have a pretty good rep.  Trouble is, they are bad guys, trying to go nuclear and nobody wants that.  Iran is Shia, and Iraq is split Sunni Shia.  All the Sunni Iraqis would rather die than allow Shia Iranian soldiers into Iraq.
  Bottom line.  There ain't no good boots to put on the ground in Iraq.  (except ours of course).