Shannara Chronicles

This swords and sorcery fantasy TV show hit the airwaves (cable waves?) back last fall.  I caught a couple of episodes off the cable over the winter before they killed the show.  It made it onto Netflix recently and so I signed up for the total season (just 3 DVD's) to see what it looked like. 
   The name of the show comes from the Terry Brooks fantasy novels, the plot borrows heavily from Tolkien.  The unnamed world is threatened by an invasion of demons, ugly bad guys who look like Tolkien's orcs, but have magic powers too.  .  It stars three characters, Handsome Boyish Hero, Good Chick, and Bad Chick.  Good chick, is an Elvin (NOT Tolkien's spelling of the word) princess. who volunteers/is selected for a mission to save the world.  She starts off carrying a silver flower blossom (puts me in mind of the Ring of Power), with handsome boyish hero and Bad Chick for travel companions.   Destination of her mission is never made clear to me. Bad chick is daughter of a human bandit chieftain and starts out doing banditry.  As time goes on, she falls in love with handsome boyish hero, which does her good, and she stops doing bad, and starts doing good.  What makes the show hard to follow, is that Good Chick and Bad Chick look so much alike it's hard to keep them straight.  They are both brunettes, they wear their hair the same way, they both have very fair completions, they both have superb figures, they dress the same, they both do martial arts with the best of them, and they both are soon in love with Handsome Boyish Hero.  Somehow, after quite a few episodes,  they become friends with each other, rather than fighting it out for the attention of Handsome Boyish Hero.  The only things distinguishing one from the other is that Good Chick is taller than Bad Chick, but Bad Chick is cuter. 
   Anyhow, it was good enough for me to watch all three discs and stay awake til the end of each episode.  If you like fantasy this one is fairly OK. 

Summer home shop project

As always, you need more storage space in a shop.  So last month's project was a combined wall shelving and plane till project.  I5t's made from ordinary lumberyard white pine.  The finish is one coat of Minwax "puritan pine" to give it the light tan color, the natural pine is bright white which seems a little much for a shop.  Plus one coat of poly urethane varnish over the Minwax.  Hanging it on the wall was tricky.  This bit of wall has NO studs in it.  I know, I put the wall board up myself some years ago.  So it is now bolted and lag screwed to the joists.  I started out with three lag screws going straight up, but the last one broke off deep in the hole, so two lag screws will have to do.  Part of the project was to have a place to put my handplanes where they would be handy, and where they could show themselves off.  The shelves are still fairly empty but I don't expect that to last long.  The dadoes in the side are to accept a pair of chisel holders, which I haven't made yet. 

Price Inversions

Seen at my local grocery market, hot dogs $6 a pound,  Chicken $1.29 a pound.  Looks like good old beans and franks ain't cheap anymore. 

Norks finally get the bomb

Took 'em five test shots before it worked right.  The first four Nork tests had yields in the one kiloton area.  That's a fizzle in most people's books.  Where as the United States was able to produce TWO functional nuclear weapons in 1945 with only one test shot.   The Little Boy gun type uranium bomb was so well understood that it was sent into action without a test, and  produced a 20 kiloton yield that devastated Hiroshima.   Fat Man, the far more tricky implosion type plutonium bomb, was tested once in Nevada before being dropped on Nagasaki.  In action, it worked properly, with a 20 kiloton yield, and vaporized Nagasaki.
   Getting a fission bomb to explode is tricky.  You have to assemble a critical mass of fissionables, either by gun style assembly or implosion, and hold it together long enough (nanoseconds) for the neutrons to fission the fissionables.  If the energy released in the first few nanoseconds blows the bomb to bits,  you don't get a 20 kiloton yield, you get a fizzle.
    We let the Norks run off five nuclear tests, and finally they got it together, achieved city smashing yield, and we did nothing to stop them.  

Bring back paper ballots

They cannot be hacked by the Russians.  And they can be recounted should there be some irregularities, or challenges.  And they don't suffer from hanging chads.  We could do it.  There is plenty of time to print ballots for the entire country before the election.  Up here there is never a lack of public spirited citizens to count ballots on election night. 
   And the various ways of cheating on paper ballots have been around for centuries and are well known.  Precautions against ballot box stuffing and other chicanery can be taken. 
   Them voting machines, which are small computers run by software, and we all know how trustworthy software is, can be hacked to change the election result, and there is no way to tell.  No paper record, and nobody can decipher the software, so you can't prove a thing.   All it takes is one party fanatic with access to the machines, and he can do anything, and leave no traces.  And if the election committee is stupid enough to connect their election machines to the public internet, all bets are off. Anything can happen. 

Epipens are only $20 in Europe

And we could have them over here for that price if we passed a federal law allowing duty free import of medicines from any reasonable first world country.  Like Canada, the EU, Japan, a few other places.  First world countries all have regulations on the sale of medicine.  If they rule a medicine OK for sale to their citizens then it's OK for Americans too.  FDA doesn't get to block imports.  If it's legal in the country of origin, the law shall make it legal here. 
   The reason Epipens are selling for $600 here is that FDA shut down all the competitors.  Nothing fancy in Epipen, its just adrenalin in an easy to use hypodermic needle.  No patents, no nothing, but FDA kindly drove all the competitors off the market.  Nice work for Mylan.    

Battles that Changed History

An oldie but a goodie.  First published in 1956 when I was in middle school.  I  saw it in a Harvard Square bookstore, and thought it was so cool.  I begged and pleaded with the parents and somehow I received a copy for birthday  and read it cover to cover.  Pratt starts off with Alexander the Great,  moves up thru Pyrrus of  Epirus (from whom we get Pyrric victory), the siege of Vienna, the revolt of the Netherlands, and ending with the carrier battles of Midway.  Although it concentrates on the military history of Western Civilization, the book is a good introduction to Western European history. 
   The writer, Fletcher Pratt is a helova good writer.  He made his living dong decent science fiction, good stuff that sold, and he knows the periods of which he writes well, gives all sorts of interesting details.  Pratt is a good fun read, and in this book the reader gets at  good abet sketchy  history of the Western world  going back 2500 years.  If you have a middle school child or grandchild, this book would be a class A gift.