Piece of Cake

A BBB Masterpiece theater miniseries from long ago. I got the first two episodes on one DVD from Netflix. It's WWII, with an RAF fighter squadron, a Spitfire squadron, none of your sluggish Hurricanes or bombers; Spitfires, the hottest plane the RAF ever flew.
The squadron moves to France in 1939, settles into a French chateau, and fly the Spitfires off the chateau tennis courts. The Spitfires are real, lovingly maintained and restored to better than new condition. The paint is flawless and glossy, waxed and gleams in the sun. Those Spitfires are in better condition than any of the jet fighters in my USAF unit during the Viet Nam war. The squadron officers dress for dinner, mess dress and take lessons in table manners from the squadron adjutant. In my USAF unit, the pilots went to dinner at the Officer's club in olive drab flight suits. Maintenance officers (like me) turned up in shade 1505 Class B uniforms. I don't think we had a mess dress uniform in the entire country.
The RAF squadron has some real turkeys for officers and gentlemen, the most offensive of which would have be court martialed in USAF. One goes thru a dead man's effects looking for money to pay a gambling debt. That would have led to a lynching in USAF.
The sets, costumes, and airplanes are first class. Too bad the rest of the show, plot, dialog, acting, and characterization is low speed. The actors mumble with strong British accents which renders half the dialog incomprehensible to Yankee viewers.

Grass Seed, fine print thereon

I bought a 1 pound bag of grass seed down at Wally Mart, to reseed the big dirt patch the town water guys left in the front lawn after replacing the watershutoff valve.
On the back of the bag, in the fine print I read:

"Warning! Treated seed. Do not use for feed, food, or oil purposes. Store away from feed and foodstuffs. Do not use bag or container for refilling with food stuff. Keep out of reach of children.

"Precautionary information for treated seed.
Wear long sleeved shirt, long pants, socks and waterproof gloves when handling treated seed. Wash thoroughly with soap and water after handling. Remove contaminated clothing and wash before reuse.

Damn. All that for just grass seed. This is the kinda warning they put on Agent Orange.

Warp Drive

A paper has been released reporting faster than light neutrinos. Not much faster, but faster. Speaking as an old Trekkie, bring it on. If this holds up, it may lead to faster than light spaceships, communicators, and a science fiction style future.
Speaking as an engineer with 40 years of practical experience, let's recheck the calibration of their instruments.

Shut down the goverment over corporate welfare?

The Senate just killed a bill to fund the US government for another few weeks. According to the TV news, a bit of corporate welfare, money for green car research, was ommitted and the money moved over to FEMA for disaster relief.
Apparently the democratic Senate is willing to start another "fund the government" showdown over a measely billion or so for green pork. Intelligence seems to have left DC for a long vacation.

USAF's lessons from Procurement Blunders

Cover story on this week's issue of Aviation Week. They are talking about the great tanker disaster which has been running for 10 years. It started with a plan to lease new tankers from Boeing, continued with a high Pentagon procurement official pleading guilty to steering plum jobs to Boeing, an award of the tanker job overturned by appeal, a second bidding for new tankers awarded to Boeing. Talk about incompetent and crooked, it doesn't get much worse than that.
So what did the Air Force learn from this decade long disaster? Well, some high level civilians were fired. The new Air Force secretary Mike Donley tells Aviation Week that the Pentagon has hired nearly 10,000 new procurement civilians, who can now do "should cost" estimates. This is only important on sole source jobs. If there are competing bids, you just take the lowest bid, that's what the job should cost. Sounds like Donley is getting ready to do more sole source procurement.
Then there were some surprising statements by Donley. Such as "We had some conversations with Boeing AFTER then contract award, obviously as the were starting to put together their initial estimates." Wow! Donley apparently isn't aware that he is supposed to settle on price BEFORE awarding a contract.
Or "Working on the requirements process was one of the outcomes there on which we took some action. Limiting out appetite in that requirements process was an important step." No kidding.
The Air Force is notorious for putting fancy gadgets on planes that don't work, cannot be made to work, and are not needed to fly the mission.
Does not sound like Air Force procurement has learned much over the years.
I still remember my first job with defense contractor Raytheon. We had a big two story building. First floor was engineering, labs, shops, storerooms, the stuff to build product with. Second floor was all "contracts", paper pushers to make the government procurement people happy. Raytheon had as many people pushing paper as they did doing the work. That's gotta be expensive.

DADT but what about UCMJ?

The Washington radio was loaded with pieces about "the end of Don't Ask Don't Tell". Interviews with gay ex soldiers, pontificating, story after story. NPR was vastly in favor.
Question: Are we talking about revising the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ)? Back when I was in the service, there was a punitive article making sodomy a crime to be punished as a court martial shall direct. Did they drop the sodomy article out of the UCMJ? The happy talkers on the radio never mentioned this issue. Most of them probably don't even know what the UCMJ is, let alone what it says.
Until and unless the sodomy article is dropped, gays in the military have a sword hanging over their heads. I assume they know this. They will be in trouble if they don't.

Radio still really sucks.

We listened to FM radio all the way down and all the way back. All they have is NPR, goldie oldie and soft rock stations, mixed with a few "all-ads-all-the-time" stations. NPR is OK but they have a one hour news spiel that repeats every hour. You hear it once, and that's enough. What do you listen to for the rest of the trip? We did hear the disk jockey on one station say that this was the first time in her career that a station manager had expressed any interest in music what so ever. This might explain why FM programming is so boring.
Then there was the college station with a student disk jockey who turned the treble all the way down and the bass all the way up to give his voice a deep and breathy sound. Too bad that he came out of the Mercury's speakers sounding like mumble-rumble-mumble and I couldn't understand a word of what he said against the humming of the car and the whine of the tires.