Pluckery: My lawn against dandelions

 My majory objection to dandelions is they kill a lot of grass.  The dandelion throws out a tight circle of leaves, maybe 5 inches in diameter, thru which no blade of grass can live.  Dandelions are annuals, so when they die in the fall they leave ugly brown holes in the lawn.

   I used to deal with dandelions by just plucking them.  No herbicides, no agent orange, just bend over and pluck.  Kept my lawn green this way for years.

   Now the bee keepers and insect lovers are running TV ads claiming that dandelion blooms are the only source of food for honey bees early in the season.  They are making me feel guilty about plucking them.  So now I wait until the flower closes up and converts to the puffball seed spreading version.  Bees get their pollen and I get my green lawn. 

To mask or not to mask?

The country is facing a lot of serious problems, a surge of illegal immigrants on the southern border, corona virus, China, North Korea, pipeline shutdowns and gas lines, multi trillion dollar spending bills, and more.  So we are spending time, political capital, and TV airtime talking about masks. 

   All the masks really do is keep your sneeze or cough from spraying a cloud of tiny droplets into the air.  If you are infected with Corona virus, the sneeze of cough will spread it to others.  If you have been vaccinated you cannot spread it.  The vaccines are 99.9% effective according to numbers published on TV.  So wearing a mask after you have been vaccinated doesn’t do a thing.  However not everybody believes that and they feel better if everyone wears a mask.  So I wear a mask just to make a lot of people feel safer.   

   We really ought to stop yakking about masks and get on with the serious business.

So Hamas and Israel agreed to ceasefire

They certainly have had enough fireworks to last a long time.  Fox had a piece this morning showing just incredible damage in Gaza.  Streets piled head high with debris from bombed high rises.  I have little sympathy for Hamas.  Firing so much as a single .22 across an international border is an act of war.  Hamas fired a lot more than a .22 into Israel, it was lots of rockets.  The Israelis retaliated.  Despite all the destruction in Gaza I doubt that Hamas learned anything.  They are stuck on stupid. 

The TV is talkng about UFOs again.

 

I have seen a UFO.  It was at least 50 years ago.  I was driving north thru Franconia Notch NH. It popped into view thru the car windshield, zipped across the Notch and disappeared behind Mt. Lafayette.  It was perfectly round, about the size of the sun or the moon and shining white brightly.  It was only in view for a matter of seconds.

   Some years later I was on active duty in USAF.  I was on the flight line the night we scrambled the alert birds, nuclear armed alert birds, after a UFO that showed up on SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Environment) radar.  We were pretty sure it was a UFO; it was going supersonic at fairly low altitude going right over Duluth.  Had it been a real solid object it would have generated a sonic boom right over town and the base switch board would have lit up with outraged calls from citizens.  We didn’t get a single call that night.  Our F106 fighters could do mach 2 which should have been enough to catch it.  The pilots didn’t catch sight of anything, either by eye or by radar. 

   Next day, checking up on things, we found that a new radar had been wired into SAGE the day before.  Checking found that some wires had been crossed, causing the data from the new radar to be 180 degrees off.  That was fixed, and we never saw another UFO on SAGE

Battery powered cars.

I am about to drive down to see my daughter in Maryland.  It’s 400 miles.  My gasoline powered 2005 Buick can make this trip on one full tank of gasoline. 

We have the lefty-greenies pushing battery powered cars for all.  I got some questions for the greenies

1. How far can I drive on one battery charge?  And how far on a three year old battery?
2. How long does it take to recharge the battery from flat?
3. How long does the battery last?  4 winters?  More?
4. How much does a replacement battery cost? Labor costs to replace?
5. If I want to buy a used battery car is there anyway to see how much battery life is left?

Quiet Diplomacy. AKA Doing Nothing

Biden is promising to do "quiet diplomacy" other wise known as doing nothing in the current Israel Hamas almost war.

Good luck to Israel

I hope they have plenty of those Iron Dome missiles.  I see Israel firing lots of them on TV .  It would be a shame if they ran out.  

Israel took out a building in Gaza that had an ABC news office.  ABC has bitched about this on TV.  Tough cookies.  Why does ABC have an office on Palestinian soil?  Plenty of places in Israel, which is safer.  The reporters can drive to Gaza to get stories, it isn't all that far.