Manhatten to go with Pork Ribs

Manhatten, a simple to mix American cocktail. Two jiggers of bourbon whiskey, a jigger of sweet red vermouth, a couple of Marachino cherries, four dashes of Angostura bitters. Use a short glass, mix the booze in the glass, and add all the ice that will fit. Very smooth, and you don't want to mix a second one of these.
Goes good with pork ribs.

Pork Ribs, My recipe

Very yummy. Real pork ribs, as opposed to nice tender pork chops, need a bit more cooking than chops do. You want to braise ribs in liquid for an hour or two, and then brown them on the grill or in the fry pan if it isn't grilling weather.
Ribs can be cheap, I picked them up for $1.71 a pound for 1.75 pounds, enough for four. I made up my secret sauce, equal portions of brown sugar, soy sauce, whiskey, and mustard. I ran short of soy sauce, so I added some Worcestershire sauce. Equal parts, say like a quarter cup. Mix the secret sauce in a large mixing bowl, and then add the ribs to marinate for an hour or so.
After a good long marinade, put them in the oven at 375F for an hour and a half. Pour the marinade into the roasting pan so that the ribs are deeply immersed in the secret sauce. After and hour and a half the ribs will be tender.
To develop the flavor, brown them, either on the grill or in an iron fry pan on stove top. I did 5 minutes a side in he fry pan.
Very yummy, and I have left overs for tomorrow.

Upcountry Republican Shindig

The Grafton County Republicans threw their annual Lincoln Reagan Day dinner at the Indian Head "resort" last night. Indian Head is right up into Franconia Notch. It got started in the old days, even before skiing, when people just came up from the summer. It tried to compete with the Old Man of the Mountains with a observation tower and gave a view of a mountain ridge that looked like a humungous Indian staring up at the sky. It still has a nice banquet room with a fine view of the White Mountains.
Everyone was there. We had NH Republican state chairman Wayne McDonald. We had Grafton County Commissioner Omer Ahearn. We had Executive Councilor Ray Burton. We had two candidates for governor, Kevin Smith and Ovide Lamontagne. For the windup speaker we had Senator Kelly Ayotte. Kelly spoke at some length and spoke very well, much better than the politicians speak on TV.
Things got rolling when the bar opened at 5:30. Lots of meetings and greetings. By 7 PM everyone was sufficiently lubricated to sit down to eat dinner. Lots of good political talk. By 9:30 the speeches were all done and people started home. Fortunately it was a warm dry evening, better than other such affairs where we had to drive home in snow and sleet.

Norks in Orbit

The North Koreans have been milking the TV news for coverage of their upcoming rocket launch. If they launch and put a satellite into orbit, they will gain enormous amounts of respect. A rocket good enough to throw a satellite up is good enough to throw a nuke anywhere on earth. Say like into Washington DC.
Fox TV has been calling the North Koreans a nuclear state. That is an exaggeration. The Norks have run two tests, both of them fizzled. Yield was so small that observers waited to detect airborne radioactivity before announcing that a nuclear test had occured. Clearly the Norks haven't figured out how to make a fission bomb that really explodes. They have undoubtedly made some engineering changes to their bomb, but until they can run off a test with the same yield as leveled Hiroshima 65 years ago, they ain't a real nuclear power.
The Japanese and the South Koreans are seriously worried about a North Korea with missiles, and have threatened to shoot it down. This is a gutsy move. If they shoot and miss (fairly likely) they just look foolish and loose more face than if they just send nastygrams to the North Korean foreign ministry.

Does Obama have an Energy Policy?

T. Boone Pickens says "No".
Sorry Mr. Pickens, Obama does have an energy policy. I even know what it is. No drilling, no pipelines, no coal burners, electric cars, high priced gasoline.
In the same article Mr. Pickens admits that he lost his ass in wind power.

Buffeted by the Buffet Rule

Obama is talking up "the Buffet Rule" as his tax policy. Other than it hikes taxes for someone, little is known about it. NPR this morning made it sound like a hike in capitol gains tax. But no specifics. Democrats are talking it up as a "soak the rich" tax, but since there are no details, it is likely to wind up soaking everybody. "Pass it in order to see what's in it."
Far as I am concerned, we need to do some budget cuts BEFORE we do tax hikes.

Survival of the Furriest. Feline Darwinism

Somehow each house cat has its very own human to feed it, pet it, supply a warm dry home, let it in, and let it out. In return the cat occasionally deigns to purr. This is a better schtick than other domesticated animals get, the others have to work for a living or get served at table as food. Cats don't have to put up with any of that.
The other weird thing about cats. Flash photography of humans often leads to "red eye", where the camera sees the eye as bright red. In cats we get "green eye" instead. My digital camera has a red eye correction feature built in, but nothing for green eye.
The first thing (close association with humans) clearly has survival value. The second, green-eye, is not so obvious.

It's all Bush's fault

Obama's General Services Administration (GSA) blew $800K on a junket to Vegas. It's making the TV news and citizens are steamed over it. Obama is trying to say it's all Bush's fault.
That's a hard sell with me. GSA is part of the administration, takes its orders from the White House. There are a few layers of bureaucrats in between the White House and GSA, but the principle is the same. Anything GSA does is either on White House orders, or with White House sufferance. The buck stops at the same place it has since Harry Truman's time. Obama has been in office for better than three years now, plenty of time to remove chuckleheads over at GSA. Since he didn't, he owns it now.

Guilt Trip to the max

TV news is talking up a new study claiming that obese mothers give birth to autistic children. Wow. How to make a woman feel guilty with out even trying. Sometimes it pays to be a guy. Or at least until they do another study showing that obese fathers cause autism. I have no idea as to how valid this new study is, but it's getting plenty of news coverage.
There has been a lot of talk about the growth of autism. One cause the newsies don't cover is soft hearted doctors. Many a child needs some speech therapy or extra reading tuition or any number of special and costly treatments to overcome some weakness. If the doctor diagnoses the child with autism, insurance will pay for the needed treatment. Otherwise parent's have to pay for it. They been talking about an autism rate of 1:83. I don't know if I can believe that one child in 83 is autistic, but I can believe that 1 child in 83 would benefit from some kind of special therapy or training or something.

Facebook broke the photo uploader, again

This is about the third time that the software weenie's at Facebook managed to break the photo uploader. The new and broken one first demands you upload an new version of Flash player. When I refused to do that, I was able to upload with great difficulty selecting photo's one by one. You can no longer highlight all the photo's and have them upload.
And, you gotta watch Facebook. I find my Facebook portrait is now showing up on all sorts of websites all over the internet. It took 5 minutes of clicking to navigate to Facebook's account page and then the privacy settings. Privacy settings has grown, there are now about 100 different setting that you have to make one by one. A whole herd of "apps", nosy little craplets, none of which I had ever heard of before, had some sort of privileges on my account . I zapped them all.
And Facebook now has "timelines" what ever those might be, and Facebook is gonna make 'em public on Income Tax Day, which is coming right up.
If you have anything embarrassing on Facebook, now is a good time to zap it.

It snowed for Easter

Not much, way less than an inch, but it turned the ground white.

Two silly ideas heard on Fox

Silly idea #1. Since gasoline tax revenues are flat or down, 'cause of less driving (when you're out of work you don't drive to work) and masses of electric cars (when did I last see an electric car on the highway?) let's start a "mileage tax" on all cars. Bad idea. if you just have to have more money, raise the gasoline tax. But, the public is agin that idea, and if the public is on the alert, they will be agin a mileage tax too. They didn't say, but I assume a mileage tax would work by reading your odometer when you get your inspection sticker. Actually they do that now, and I don't know what they do with the information.
Silly idea #2, This from Ben Stein. "I don't know what I would have done differently from Obama about the economy."
Well Ben, I can think of a few things. Use the $800 billion porkulus bill to buy real things that would have stimulated the real economy. Instead all the money went to helping state governments meet payroll. Approve the Keystone XL pipeline. Put GM and Chrysler thru real bankruptcy, divvy up their assets in accordance with the law instead of handing them all over to the UAW. Reform the patent office, which has stopped technical innovation in its tracks. Don't waste taxpayers money on black holes like solar, electric cars, Solyndra, and wind energy. These are never going to work, they are just money sinks. Don't do Obamacare, which has raised labor costs by a huge and unknown amount, stalling hiring all over the country 'cause no employer dares hire anyone, 'cause they can't afford the healthcare costs, or they can't figure out what those costs will be. Drop the ethanol for motor fuel boondoggle. Let oil drilling leases in the Gulf, off the east coast and off the west coast, off the Alaska coast and on oil sands in the west. Use Antitrust law to break up the biggest and stupidest banks, AIG, Citibank, BofA for starters. Shut down Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac before they wreck the world economy again. And prosecute their officers. Fund some science fiction projects like hydrogen fusion. Repeal Sarbanes Oxley and Dodd Frank. Shut down the EPA. Stop farm subsidies. Get the Feds out of the highway construction business. Let the states build the roads with their own money. Reform the corporate tax code and regulation to encourage business to operate in the United States. Shut down the SEC, repeal all their regulations, burn their files and prosecute their officers. SEC was started after Great Depression I to prevent Great Depression II. They have failed in that mission, so let's get rid of 'em to save money and free up industry.

Words of the Weasel Part 29

Transparent. Originally a property of glass, like you can see thru it. Now its an all purpose feel good property of various policitical wheeling and dealing. "The negotiations were transparent" is supposed to be a good thing. In fact just about any deal is OK so long as it is "transparent".
Right.
Armed robbery is transparent. Give me some money or I put a bullet into you. Can't get much more transparent than that. But I don't have to like it.

The nanny state comes to Havard.

According to this, Harvard students are required to get permission from the dean to throw a party.
Damn. I attended two different colleges back in the day, and we never had to get permission from anybody to throw a party.
Good luck Harvard students.

USAF to go for $550 million bomber

They haven't figured out what the mission is, or what the thing will look like, or what they are gonna call it, but they have decided on the price. They have decided that it will be sub sonic (good call). Well at least it's less than the $2 billion for the B-2. This price declaration means that it will cost at least $550 million. Once you say how much you are willing to pay, count on the bids coming in right at that number.
The Aviation Week article is full of skeptical observations about USAF's terrible track record on contract costs, starting with the F-35 which was estimated at $35million back when the program started 20 years ago, and is $80 million now. And the tanker disaster, and the lightweight fighter fiasco. Certainly my old service has done more major bungles than successes over the last 20 years.
And there was a lot of wailing from subcontractors about how the cost target would be achieved by leaving off all their gold plated "systems". Unfair they say, leaving all this stuff off the bomber will mean other aircraft have to carry out those missions. Me, I don't have a problem with that. If the "low cost" bomber can destroy its targets, and live to tell the tale, it's done good. It doesn't need to do reconnaissance mapping, or serve as an airborne Internet relay station, or as VIP transport, or do electronic eavesdropping. It just needs to penetrate enemy defenses and hit the target. For extra credit it can get its crew back to base alive.
It's sort of too bad that the greatest penetration aid of all is unusable in the post cold war environment. The nuclear tipped Short Range Attack Missile (SRAM) could reach out 100 miles and vaporize those pesky fighter bases, radars and SAM sites. The B-52's carried lots of them in rotary launchers. Unfortunately we don't use nukes in the 21st century, and plain old TNT doesn't pack enough punch to do much of a job.

A Strong Majority

That's what Obama said on TV. He was saying that the Supremes should not overturn Obamacare "because it passed the Congress with a strong majority".
Yeah Right. Every one knows that Obamacare just squeaked by with a bare handful of votes. When Obama calls that a "strong majority" I, and a lot of other people, think he is telling a falsehood. Very uncool to have a president that tells falsehoods.
Plus, unconstitutional is unconstitutional, doesn't matter how many Congresscritters liked it. The Supremes have overturned plenty of laws since Marbury vs Madison, all of which passed Congress with a much greater majority than Obamacare had.
Which ever way the Supremes go, I hope they can do better than 5 to 4. When the nine top lawyers in the country cannot agree on what the law really is, and the four losers write opinions calling the five winners idiots, it doesn't breed respect for the law or for the Supremes among the citizenry. And that's a bad thing.

Every age rewrites history to its own liking

I'm reading "The Isles, a History" by Norman Davis. He is something of a fruitcake, and spends a lot of words discussing how the mean old English oppressed the noble "Celtic" races, Welsh, Scots, and Irish, going right back to the beginnings of history. But he has some modern myths to propagate as well as serving as a scourge of the Sassenach.
Davis is discussing the Vikings and their impact on England. Which was considerable, at its high point the "Danelaw" covered half the country. There is the interesting question of why the Viking appeared so suddenly out of nowhere. They first struck the monastery of Lindisfarne in 793. Prior to 793 nobody in England had heard of them. Davis says,
"The central puzzle... is to know why, after an age of passive isolation...The answer obviously has something to do with a serious ecological imbalance....Historians refer to changes in climate..."
How PC of Davis, it's all due to global warming, Viking cook fires added to the CO2 level in the atmosphere. Yeah, Right.
More likely, the Viking shipwrights didn't learn how to build a ship seaworthy enough to cross the North Sea until 793. Heh, there is a first time for everything. There is a lot of art in building a sailing vessel that can reach across the wind and beat up into the wind. You need enough keel to keep the ship from sliding sideways under the press of sail. You need a sail that can be trimmed in to fore and aft, and you need the mast placed just right. Too far forward and the force of the wind pushes the ship's bow down wind overpowering the rudder. The far aft, and the opposite happens. The Vikings built the hull from long planks (strakes) and they overlapped the planks and riveted them together. This sophisticated construction ( we call it monocoque today) gave an immensely strong and light hull, but required a lot of hand made iron rivets and a set of really big clamps to force the planks tightly together so they could be riveted.
We have a few ship finds from before the Viking age, (Sutton Hoo for instance) and it is clear that these vessels were pure rowboats, no keel, no mast or mast step. They might have been good enough to cross the English Channel in nice summer weather, but crossing the North Sea is much harder.
As late as 1066, Duke William's invasion fleet had to wait months for a south wind to carry them to England. Translation, the Duke's hastily built ships (we can see them abuilding in the Bayeux Tapistry) were only fit to run before the wind. Tubs like that would never hack it in a North Sea storm.

We got two inches. Most since October's 8 inches

Heavy, very heavy. It looked so wintery last night that I lit the fireplace. And it's April. We ain't supposed to get snow in April.

Let's hear it for CD burners

A videographer backed up all his stuff on the net, using MegaUpload as his backer upper site. A day or two before the Feds shut down MegaUpload at the behest of MPAA for streaming copyrighted movies, this guy had his hard disk crash, wiping out all his videos. He is suing to get his backups back off MegaUpload and onto his new hard drive so he can use them. For this "service" he paid $107.
He would have done better to back up to CD's on his own computer. For real security, he should have stashed the backup CD's "off site", say at his folks place, just in case he suffered a house fire.

It's Snowing for April Fools Day

No fooling. It was 50 degrees and sunny this morning. Now it's snowing hard and down into the 30's.

Suppose the Supremes kill Obamacare?

Suppose that intelligence breaks out over the Supremes and they rule Obamacare totally unconstitutional and null and void? What happens next?
There will be a great hue and cry for Congress to "do something". OK, so what should Congress do?
We ought to address the real health care crisis, wild and crazy spending that's bankrupting the country. The US spends 19% of GNP on healthcare, which is TWICE what any other country in the world spends. For this torrent of money, the country does not get better health than the rest of the world. Real numbers, like life expectancy and infant mortality don't show any benefits from all the money poured down the drain. A good dozen countries have better numbers than the US and spend way way less. If we could bring the price down out of the stratosphere, it would be easier to pay our doctor bills. Let's try the following
1. Interstate competition in health insurance. We ought to allow any licensed insurance company based in any state to sell policies in every other state. Up here we only have TWO insurance companies to choose from, and both of them are expensive. If we had more choices we would get better prices. The insurance companies hate this idea, but we ought to do it anyhow. The commerce clause was intended to give Congress the power to do exactly this sort of thing.
2. Allow and encourage purchase of drugs from any first world country, say Canada. Also England, France, Germany, Scandinavia, Holland. US made drugs are sold overseas for a fraction of the price that US citizens have to pay in this country. If we could legally import any foreign drugs it would cut the price of pills a lot. The drug companies hate this, but we ought to do it.
3. Reform the FDA's approval process. Right now the FDA bureaucrats can jerk drug and device makers around, demand ever more expensive clinical trials, and make the cost of getting a drug or device approved for use prohibitive. The FDA should only test for safety, NOT effectiveness. Doctors and insurance companies will weed out ineffective things far faster than FDA bureaucrats. No ethical doctor will proscribe things that don't work, and no insurance company will pay for such treatment.
4. Protect doctors from the lawyers. No lawyer should be able to sue a doctor who proscribed FDA approved medicine, EVEN IF the FDA later revokes that approval (Vioxx). Lawyers should not be allowed to advertise for plaintiffs on TV (or anywhere else) . Malpractice is a creation of state law, so the states need to do the heavy lifting here. Lawyers hate this idea, and most politicians are lawyers.

Europe bubbling like a pot.

The gloom and doom, end of the world, talk has died down in the MSM after the Greeks gave a haircut to their creditors. It's been a couple of weeks since I last saw a "The Euro is Doomed" article.
But all is not well in Euro land. Today's Economist has a cover story on the coming French bankruptcy. And the WSJ reports that the German central bank will no long accept bonds from Ireland, Greece. or Portugal as collateral for loans. And the European Stabilization Mechanism is only E500 billion. Which is just barely enough to bail out Portugal, but nowhere near enough to bailout Italy or Spain. And the Economist is still calling for "more European integration" by which they usually mean Germany will guarantee/bailout everyone else. The Economist thinks this is a wonderful idea. The Germans aren't on board with it, and the Economist blasts Angela Merkel and the Germans as reactionary stick-in-the-muds every time it hears a German begging for a little air.
We need to pay attention, 'cause we will be next.

The Taxman Cometh.

Alder Brook Sportsmen's Association, a Littleton gun club of which I am a member, had a special meeting last night to approve new bylaws. Seems like our ever hungry town government has voided the club's tax free status, assessed the club property at $86,000, and levied $3800 worth of taxes. That's a lot of money for a couple of acres of scrub land, with no frontage onto public roads, so far out of town it's almost in the next town. $3800 divided among the membership would jack up dues by $100 per member per year. Alder Brook Sportsmen has been around since 1962, and after all that time we suddenly became taxable.
We got a lawyer, who claimed that if we did a load of gov'mint paper work, rewrote the club's bylaws, jumped thru a lot of obscure hoops, and filed paper work with Littleton, Concord and Washington, we could become a tax free non profit 501(c)(3) corporation. Thank goodness we have some dedicated volunteer club officers willing to wade thru this swamp. The new gov'mint written bylaws were adopted by unanimous vote.
If they make life this difficult for a little private club, imagine what a small business, which actually makes money, has to go thru.

The Alarm Cat went off last night

It's o'dark thirty and this high pitched piercing howl wakes me. I get up to inspect, and there is Stupid Beast, in fighting stance, back arched, fur fluffed up, tail fluffed up to a good two inches diameter, defending the front door. I flip on the porch light and I can see tracks in the fresh snow (yes it's still snowing up here). More tracks lead down the steps and across the street. I'm not enough of a woodsman to say what kind of tracks, but they were medium sized, say from a 20 pound animal of some kind. Any how the cat seems to have scared it off.
So I say some soothing words to Stupid Beast and go back to bed.

You don't expect us to read 2700 pages?

So said a Supreme the other day, referring to Obamacare. Well, actually Judge, I do expect you to read the whole damn thing. And pass an examination on the contents BEFORE you judge the case.
The point is, we should never pass a 2700 page law. Give me 2700 pages, and I can find a clause in there somewhere to authorize ANYTHING I want to do. Give a bureaucrat a 2700 page law and you have authorized him to do anything he wants to do.
The court ought to declare the whole damn thing unconstitutional on account of terminal vagueness.

Richard Clarke says US did Stuxnet

Very Interesting. I'm not saying one way or the other. I don't have any facts myself. But Clarke has been around for a long time and is reasonably creditable.

It's still snowing up here.

Less than an inch but enough to keep the ground white. Our hard working town snow plow rumbled by the place early this AM. Not that there was enough snow to be worth it, but heh, we got a brand new town plow truck, gotta make sure it still works.

Why does Hugo go to Cuba for treatment?

As part of the press coverage of the Pope's visit to Cuba, it was mentioned that Hugo Chavez, dictator of Venezuela, was in Cuba for medical treatment of his cancer.
Hmm, Hugo is the dictator of a medium speed South American country, and yet he prefers Cuban doctors and hospitals. Does Hugo really think Cuba's medicine is better than that of his homeland? Or does he fear assassination in a Venezuelan hospital?
Also strange, Hugo, although I call him dictator, still has some political enemies alive at home. Yet he feels his regime is secure enough to keep the lid on, while Hugo flies to Havana for chemotherapy.

Water, barrier or highway?

We look at maps, and we see neat boundaries where the land meets the blue sea. The British Isles, surrounded by water, North America with vast oceans on each side, we look at the map and see a blue barrier against invasion.
Actually, water is a highway. Cargo, passengers, invaders, explorers travel by water. Water transport is cheap, and fast. Until the coming of the steam railroad, water was the fastest way to go, and it's still fast enough to compete against even jet aircraft.
England suffered one water borne invasion after another, starting with Julius Caesar, going thru the Anglo Saxons, the Vikings, and the Normans. Only when the English Crown could field a Navy was the realm properly protected. As late as 1778 Yankee privateer John Paul Jones could put landing parties ashore in Merrie Old England to take hostages.
Prior to the railroad, cities had to be port cities because only by water could enough food be brought in to feed even a medieval city. Ancient Egypt's cities brought their food in by Nile river boat. Same goes for ancient Babylon. With out the Nile and the Euphrates, the cradles of civilization would have suffered Sudden Infant Civilization Death Syndrome (SIDS).
The oldest cultures were based on rivers, because rivers are easiest to navigate, no tides, land is never far away, and you can drink the water from the river. Not til later would navigation of Homer's wine dark sea be mastered, leading to the brilliant Cretan and Greek civilizations. The stormy North Atlantic would not be mastered until Columbus.

Are you a freeloader if you don't have health care?

The TV news, even Fox, is pushing this idea. If you don't have health insurance, then when you do go to the the hospital, you get treated for free, and the doctors jack up their fees on the insured to cover the free health care they give the uninsured. Therefore it's fair and just to demand that everyone buy health insurance. TV newsies have bought into this fantasy, which indicates that they are mostly of low IQ, and poorly educated to boot.
This isn't true. Not even now. If you turn up in the emergency room with out insurance, they treat you and then they bill you. In fact they play catchup and bill you double what they bill on an insurance job. And you have to pay up, there are courts and sheriff's to force you to pay up. They can garnishee your wages if you won't write a check.
If you are destitute, without money, unemployed and homeless, you cannot pay the doctor bill. Nor can you afford to buy health insurance. The only way the truly poor have health insurance is the government gives it to them, free. Or, free to them, but paid for with my tax money. This is an improvement?

It's snowing

They must have canceled spring. After three days of really nice warm weather, it's well below freezing and the ground is snowcovered again. It's supposed to drop below zero tonight.

Hunger Games, Good Flick

Went to see it last night. It's the third night running at the Jax Jr, and so the crowd was medium sized, the true fans saw it on opening night. I haven't read the book, and was seeing the movie 'cause of all the buzz on the Internet. This is a science fiction movie, set on Earth, in the far future. So far in the future that present day countries, institutions, and even personal names are gone, lost in the dim past. It's an impoverished world, with the 99% scratching out a living from the land, and the 1% living in luxury at Capitol. It's all live acting, with little CGI.
For a book based movie, it was very watchable, the plot was understandable, the dialogue was reasonable. Better than the later Harry Potter's, where the plot is unintelligible if you haven't read the book. The sound man did his job on this one and the dialogue was audible, unlike all too many films were the sound is terrible and the dialogue is lost under the score and the sound effects. Give this flick some points for that. The camera man started off with the annoying modern "shake the camera" and "fast cut piled upon fast cut" technique which has spoiled so many movies, but he wised up and used a tripod once the movie gets rolling.
Katniss and Peeta, the heroine and hero, are well written and beautifully acted. They are portrayed as decent, tough, caring, brave young people, thrown into a terrible situation. They are selected to compete in the annual Hunger Games, a "Survivor with live ammunition" type of gladiatorial game, televised for the entertainment of the 1%. The game continues until only one contestant is left alive. With this threat hanging over them, Katniss and Peeta manage to fall in love giving the movie a Romeo and Juliet type of attraction. Heh, if it works for Shakespeare, it can't be all bad. Katniss and Peeta are much more attractive characters than the Twilight protagonists who come across as whiny and flaky. Despite the unfairness of their treatment, and their world, Katniss and Peeta don't whine, they shoulder their packs and move out. Watching the movie, I fell in love with both of them, and rooted for them to win. It's been a long time since I enjoyed a movie character as much.
This movie has been marketed as a teenager's love flick. It's better than that. In fact it's the best Hollywood movie to come out in years. Go and see it.

So why did John Carter flop?

Disney is writing off the $35o million spent on John Carter. They figure the movie will earn no more than $150 million. It's too bad, there will be no sequels. So why? What did they mess up?
The fans have been generally supportive with their Internet reviews. The pro's have panned it from the beginning.
First off, the camera work was bad. Here we are on Mars, with big green men, exotic animals, strange scenery, and we want to see it, take it in. But the camera never steadies down to let us admire the view. For that matter we would like some good views of Dejah Thoris looking beautiful and John Carter looking heroic. In Avatar, we get a good look at the colorful, romantic, and beautiful world of Pandora. In fact Avatar was a National Geographic documentary of the wonders of far off Pandora. And we viewers enjoyed the show. On Mars, the camera never steadies down long enough to enjoy the view, and, what little we can see is dusty and shabby, not red romantic desertscapes under two moons.
Then the movie lacks the deep love between John Carter and Dejah Thoris. In the book it goes like this.
"I understand your words John Carter," Dejah Thoris said, " But you I do not understand. You are a queer mixture of child and man, of brute and noble. I only wish that I might read your heart."
"Look down at your feet, Dejah Thoris; it lies there now, where it has lain since that other night at Korad, and where it will ever lies beating alone for you until death stills it forever." replied John Carter.
No American man from this age of instant hookups, pre nuptial agreements, no fault divorce, and single parent families, is going to make such an irrevocable declaration of love and loyalty to a woman. Not in the 21st century. But oh boy, how we would love to meet a woman worthy of such devotion. This relationship made the Mars books what they are. The movie lacks it, and turns Dejah Thoris into Xena the Warrior Princess. Xena had many virtues, but you wouldn't want to fall in love with her.
In the book, John Carter and Dejah Thoris escape from captivity among the Tharks and set off riding double across the red ocher moss of the Martian desert. Along the way they are discovered and attacked by yet another tribe of green Martians. In an emotional scene, John Carter sends Dejah Thoris to safety over her protests, and takes his long radium rifle, with 100 rounds in the magazine, and another 100 rounds in a backpack, and stands off a charge of mounted green Martians. After expending all that ammunition, he lays into them with the sword. The movie skips the gunfight and cuts the sword fight down to just another passage of arms. They did not show John Carter pulling the strangely wrought Martian firearm from a scabbard on the riding animal, snapping down the bipod legs, and taking a prone shooting position hidden on a ridgeline. We did not see the crosshairs line up on a enemy, and the explosive round blowing the target off his mount. Couple more such shots, and we would believe that a great battle had occurred. The movie skips all this.

MacBeth

So I got it from Netflix. It's the 1979 version with Ian McKellan. Bad idea. No sets, no scenery, just a dark black stage. No costumes. The actors recite Shakespeare's verses in a sing song tone, no life, no warmth. Ian McKellan's black hair is all slicked down with Brylcreem. That greasy kid stuff. And it's all dark, just the actor's faces show in the darkness. No tartans. I mean what's Macbeth without at least a tartan scarf? The three witches don't even have a kettle simmering over a fire.
There must be better Shakespeare than this one.

Harden the electric power grid against hackers

NHPR did a long piece this morning. They talked about regulation, deregulation, and who was in favor of more regulation. Not once did they talk about what to do about vulnerabilities.
What to do is straight forward. Do not use the public internet to monitor or control generators, circuit breakers or other equipment. And do not use Windows computers for any of the same purposes.
Back when we were selling data acquisition equipment to the electric generating industry, I saw a remote controled generator. A big gas turbine unit was humming happily away. They had an ordinary desktop computer running a remote control program. The computer monitor showed an image of the turbine, a little arrow showed it was turning, instrument readings for oil temp, oil pressure, exhaust gas temp, rpm, amps, volts, engine pressure ratio, and more. It was about 10:30 AM, and the power station man sat down at the remote control and ordered the generator to shut down. It was a peaking plant, only run for the morning and evening power peaks, and 10:30 was the end of the morning peak period. A few key clicks, and the big turbine obediently shut down, we could see the RPM and EGT winding down on the display.
The turbine was l0cated a couple of miles away. The controller sent little messages (Start Up, Shut Down) over the internet. A computer at the remote generator listened to the internet and acted upon orders coming in from the net.
All an enemy hacker needs do, is learn the addresses and the codes used and send his own commands to the turbine. If the computer at the turbine is a Windows machine he can load his own code into it and really go to town. First step of such an invasive program is to reject all messages from it's proper owner, and only accept commands from the hacker.
The fix is simple. Connect the remote computer to the control center with a pair of your own wires, hung on your own poles, by your own people. Then the command link is secure against any sort of Internet attack. To gain control the hacker has to climb a pole and splice in a tap. Hackers are swivel chair people, they don't climb poles.
As for Windows, we all know how vulnerable Windows is to anything. The famous Stuxnet program that did great damage to the Iranian nuclear program spread via Windows "autorun" feature. Windows has so many security holes that it's beyond fixing. Computers running Linux, Unix, MAC OS, anything, can be made secure. Windows is so bad that it is beyond hope.

Israelis think an air strike will work

As in Israeli Air Force strikes Iranian nuclear sites. Blomberg News reporter Jeffrey Goldberg has a piece here. He spent some time in Israel, talking to Israeli officials. They talked about a favorable reaction inside Iran, a strengthening of the Iranian internal opposition, and the Iranians not immediately declaring war on Israel. And setting back the Iranian A-bomb project by 5 years. Goldberg writes mostly about the political angles to such a strike.
A weakness of the Goldberg piece is lack of objective data, such as how many nuclear sites do the Iranian's have? And how deeply are they buried? Are they buried under loose desert sand or under hard granite? Can Israeli deep penetration bombs go that deep? Do the Israeli's have enough planes to strike ALL the sites on the same night? Or would they have to fly multiple strikes on successive nights? Do Israel's aircraft have the range to fly the mission round trip, or will they need aerial tanker support? How many tankers do the Israeli's have? In short, would an Israeli air strike actually hurt the Iranian A-bomb project, or would it merely give the Iranians an expensive fireworks display?
And then there is disinformation. Was I running Israel, I'd tell my people to keep the Iranians worried about an air strike, just to make life harder for them. And to encourage Israelis who are under terrible pressure of events and could use a little hope.

Romney wins Puerto Rico

To bad Puerto Rico doesn't have any electoral votes, yet. According to CNN, Romney won by 83%, the best landslide ever.
I hear Puerto Rico has a referencedum on statehood coming up. I wonder how that is going to come out? Used to be, the Puerto Ricans liked the deal they have, no Congressional representation but no US income tax. Has that changed? I haven't seen anything about it in our hard working news media.

Spring It's Grill Day

It's up to 76 degrees. Sun is out, no wind. I rolled the Weber out of the garage and onto the deck. A steak is about to marinate on the kitchen table. Summer cannot be far away.

The Sea Wolves 1980

Great flick (Netflix) It has Gregory Peck, David Niven and Roger Moore. It's WWII in British India. They are all British, and very proper, at least in polite company, the gentleman's club in Calcutta. They all are recruited for a cutting out expedition against a German ship anchored in neutral Goa. There is some really funny work with Roger Moore attempting to seduce a beautiful enemy agent while she is attempting to seduce him. And, proper or not, the British can be ruthless in action. German captives who make just one wrong move get tommy gunned immediately. No "Put your hands up" No "Stop or I'll shoot", just Brrap and blood all over the walls. Both Peck and Niven have great roles, and play them well.
No redeeming social values here, but a good action movie.

How to rein in Rogue Prosecutors

According to Nancy Gertner (former judge and present Harvard Law professor) and Barry Scheck (co-director of the Innocense Project), all that is necessary is for the judge to hold a pretrial meeting with the prosecutors and order them to be good. And, absent this meeting, rogue prosecutors cannot themselves be prosecuted.
Apparently "rogue" prosecution is not actually against the law. It only becomes a crime if and when a judge says it is. If the judge fails to call it, anything goes.
Wow. If only life were so simple. Just hold a meeting and the problem goes away. Yeah, Right.
So what is "rogue" prosecution? Two things, failure to give the defense attorney evidence that might let the defendant off. And giving false evidence at trial. Such as the gun or the grass planted on the defendant by cops, or intimidating the defense witnesses.
The way to deal with either kind is simple, hang the prosecutor out to dry. Not meetings or ruling, let's have a little punishment. Say ten years in slam. Repeat as needed, say once a year. Name some names. I notice the furor over the Ted Stevens prosecution, which doubtless prompted this WSJ op-ed, doesn't name any names. That might actually hurt some one's career.
And, no more of this "It's legal til the judge says it ain't" stuff. The law is written down in statute books, and applies all the time. If it isn't written down, it ain't law.

Signs of Spring (2012)

The radio is warning us to take in the bird feeders, 'cause the bears are coming out of hibernation.
And it's raining, not snowing.

Corned Beef

There it was on the meat counter for $1.48 a pound. Such a deal in an age of $3.99 for hamburger. So I bought one. About 3 pounds. I/ve never cooked corn beef before. I have memories of Mom doing New England Boiled Dinner in a pressure cooker, but they are not fond ones. So I googled for a recipe. As expected, there were a lot of 'em. They fell into two groups, the braise and the oven roast. Most of the oven roast recipes attracted a blizzard of negative comments.
So, we will braise. I opened the package and dunked the corned beef in fresh water for about a half an hour to rinse off excess salt. Corned beef is a tough cut of meat that is soaked in brine to tenderize it. If you proceed immediately to cooking, it will come out VERY salty. Then I put Mr. Corned Beef into a Dutch oven with enough water to cover his bottom half, and the spice packet that comes packed with him. Bring to a boil on the stovetop and then simmer an hour a pound to tenderize it more. If you don't cook it enough, it comes out chewy as an old tire tube. Added carrots and potatoes an hour before it was done. They were nice red skin potatoes so I didn't bother to peel them.
Delicious. And cheap.
Left over corned beef slices and makes tasty sandwiches.

"The President has little control of gas prices"

I hear this bit of disinformation hourly on NPR, and even on Fox. It isn't true. Obama could resume permitting drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. He could OK the Keystone XL pipeline. He could lease oil sands in Colorado. He could issue off shore leases for the Atlantic coast and the Pacific coast. He could start drilling in the "Alaska National Wildlife Refuge" a bit of frozen tundra on the shore of the Arctic Ocean. He could scrap the boutique gasoline blending rules which prevent selling gasoline across state lines. He could stop closing gasoline refineries in the Caribbean.
Drilling does lower prices. The price of natural gas dropped from $12 a thousand cubic feet in 2008 to $3 today. That's a 75% reduction in price in just four years. All done by drilling.
And the price reductions come even faster. Oil and gasoline are traded on commodities markets world wide. Those markets are future oriented. Prices are set by trader's expectations of the price in the future. If suppliers expect to get better prices next year, they don't sell, they wait for next year. If buyers expect to higher prices next year, they will pay more this year to avoid getting ripped off next year. If the markets were convinced that the Americans were serious about increasing production, prices would fall. It would only take a few months for the markets to decide the Americans were serious.

Whither Afghanistan?

Last week's Koran burning and this weekend's shootings have done a lot of damage to US relationship with the Afghans.
There is a reason for US involvement in the Afghan snake pit. The locals are incapable of maintaining civil order. Left to their own devices, they allowed Al Quada to plan and execute 9/11 from their soil. There is little evidence that things are any better after nearly ten years of US liberation. When we pull out of Afghanistan, Al Quada and the Taliban will move back in.
Dispite the terrible events of this month, there is a chance of straightening things out. We should look at the American involvement in the Philippines, which started back in 1898 and lasted thru WWII. We had to suppress a bloody Filipino uprising at the turn of last century, but after 40 years of a decent American administration, the Filipinos took our side, rather than the Japanese side, in World War II.
Of course, for that to happen, we have to stay in Afghanistan, rather than pull out.

Will a 1% change in the unemployment rate matter?

The TV news is full of stories about the improving economy, unemployment rates dropping by fractions of a percent, and it's effect upon the voters. Personally, I think the voters are going on gut feel, their own employment status, the prospect of a layoff, the price of gas and groceries, and their prospects of a raise in judging Obama's performance on the economy. None of those indicators is very favorable. I don't think anyone pays much attention to a fraction of a percent change in unemployment. If the unemployment rate were to drop from 8% to 6%, that would get their attention, but that ain't happening.
Certainly, no one (except democratic activists) really thinks the economy has improved much.

Must be a slow news season

This is the second big talk about solar flares. Probably brought on by new satellites that give nicer images. The Sun has been flaring thru out geological time, and will doubtless continue to do so. It doesn't seem to do anything bad.
The power and phone lines are all hardened against lightning strikes, they shrug off thousands of lightning hits a day. Solar flares don't pack the punch of a lightning bolt.
Could the newsies be looking for an attention grabbing story that isn't a story?

JOhn Carter,I saw the movie last night

It was opening night in Littleton, and I got my brother and my sister-in-law to come along for the fun. There was a good crowd at the Jax Jr. The movie is pretty good. On a scale of 1 to 10, where the original Star Wars is a 10, and the Jar-Jar Binks movie is a 1, John Carter is a solid 6, maybe a 7.
I've been waiting for this movie ever since I read the book as a boy. A Princess of Mars was Edgar Rice Burroughs first published novel, coming out as a magazine serial in 1911. Burroughs went on to write a lot more Martian stories. He didn't invent Tarzan until later. I always thought Burroughs Mars stories were cooler than his Tarzan stories, although I read most of the Tarzan books too.
Tarzan, requiring less special effects, made it into the movies early on, and had a long and successful run, both movies and TV. There was an effort to do a Princess of Mars movie in the 1930's (animated) but it didn't pan out. If it had, it would have been the first feature length animated film, instead of Snow White.
Anyhow, John Carter, the movie, is better than the Tarzan movies out there. So call it a success. Forbes magazine thinks John Carter will make a bundle of money and lead to profitable sequels. The movie is "live action" in that the hero and heroine are real actors, photographed in costume. The background is full of CGI Martians, exotic riding animals, ferocious monsters, fantastic aircraft, Martian cities, and marvelous terrain features such as the River Iss.
The movie takes substantial liberties with Burrough's original text, but that is nothing new. Movies never follow the book very closely. True believer fans will whine about this, but it doesn't bother me much. Had I been directing it there are a lot of things I would have done differently, but I wasn't directing, and so things are as they are.
If you are a Burroughs fan, this is a must see. It's a good action adventure story, lots of action, lots of strange places and creatures, it moves fast enough that you don't notice the two hour length.

Things come to you overnight

Thinking about railguns last night. It suddenly became clear that I had made a mistake. I computed muzzle energy of the conventional cannon as M * V . That's not right. M*V is momentum. Kinetic energy is 1/2 MV**2. So doing it right, the conventional cannon has a muzzle energy of 7,801,736 foot pounds. Which compares more favorable with the railgun at 23,603,200 foot pounds.
Onward to phasers.

Go Mitt, Go

So Mitt comes out of Super Tuesday with a lotta delegates, and six wins, but his rivals, Santorum, Gingrich and Paul, gathered enough votes to keep their campaigns alive. Why cannot Romney win enough votes to crush the opposition?
'Cause Mitt is looking to the general election, a bunch of independent voters, who ain't as conservative as a lot of Republicans. Speaking from hands on experience as a local organizer, the Republican party has a lot of VERY conservative voters, much more conservative than the independents. If Mitt were to go far enough to the right to make the really hard core Republicans happy enough to vote for him, he would drive off the just-as-important independents in he general election.
So Mitt tries to keep the focus on jobs and the economy. Let us hope that enough Republicans can vote for a winner in the general election.

Railguns

The US Navy is working on railguns, electromagnetic launchers capable of fantastic muzzle velocity. Conventional guns are limited by the speed of sound. The projectile is pushed up the barrel by combustion gas. That combustion gas only expands at the speed of sound. Grant that the speed of sound in white hot gas at enormous pressure is much higher than the speed of sound in air, but muzzle velocity in conventional guns is still limited to about 4000 ft/sec.
Railguns have no such limit and can achieve much much higher muzzle velocities. The Navy project is working on 32 Megajoule rail guns. To put that into real numbers, 32 Megajoule is 23.6 Mega foot/pounds. For comparison, the conventional 5 inch cannon has a muzzle energy of 0.185 Mega foot/pounds. The rail gun has 127 times the muzzle energy of the conventional cannon. This translates into amazing range, like 100 miles.
To power the railgun, the Navy is talking about a battery bank. That ought to be quite something. An ordinary car battery (still the best there is for this kind of application) holds only 4560 joules. Each 32 Megajoule shot would totally flatten 7017 car batteries. The Aviation Week article talked about a battery bank good for 20 shots. That's a LOT of car batteries.
Another science fiction project gets funding.