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TV commercial now running.  Woman comes into the kitchen and opens the refrigerator.  Inside is solid ice.  Solid ice fills the door trays, the shelves, everything.  The woman, barefoot and dressed in a filmy nightgown, takes a broom handle and starts chipping ice out of the the middle refrigerator shelf.  If the lighting had been a little better we could have seen thru the filmy nightgown. 
   Ah, this is an ad for frost free refrigerators.
   Wrong, they are selling jugged ice tea. 

Meet the Press does gay marriage

David Gregory assembled a fine panel of lefty newsies and they talked about gay marriage this morning, Obama and gay marriage, gays and gay marriage, never heard so much talk about gay marriage.
  Does anyone (voters in particular) really care?  Especially as marriage is a matter of state law anyhow? The president doesn't have much control.  Unless he wanted to lead a crusade to amend the Constitution.  Which probably would fail, cause Constitutional amendments need a super majority which just ain't there this year. States are split on it, some have recently legalized it, others (North Carolina!) have recently outlawed it.
   This voter cares about jobs, the economy, and the deficit.  Gay marriage is a distraction from the important issues.  

JP Morgan takes a hit

On Friday  Jamie Dimon, honcho of JP Morgan Bank, admitted to taking  a $2 billion dollar loss.  That's quite a chunk of change.  The Washington regulators, itching to take control of all banks, are howling for yet more regulation to go on top of Dodd-Frank.
  Why?  You would think loosing $2 billion would sting anyone hard enough to prevent them ever doing it again.  Why turn our banks over to the tender mercies of federal bureaucrats?  Anyone think bureaucrats are smarter or more honest than bankers?
   Still secret, is just how Morgan lost all that money.  Presumably they were buying and selling things, and the price moved against them.  Either things they bought dropped in price, or things they sold short rose in price.  But we don't know what those things were.  Stocks? Bonds?  Greek bonds? derivatives?  credit default swaps?  Mortgage backed securities? Sub prime mortgages? something else? 
    Jamie Dimon turned up on Meet the Press this morning talking about it.  He admitted to still being a democrat, which made me wonder about his judgement.  David Gregory was too clueless to ask Mr. Dimon just what things Morgan bank took that loss in.
   Then Gregory turned the show over to some regulators who urged a total take over of banking "to prevent systemic risk".
    By which, they probably mean the risk of a huge bank failing and tipping the economy into depression.  That happened in 1929 and again in 2007.  In 1929 Keynes had not published yet, and the Federal Reserve and the rest of the government let the stock market crash unhindered.  In 2007  the government rushed in, spent $1 trillion to support the losing players, and the market still crashed and we haven't gotten out of Great Depression 2.0 yet. 
   If you really think this is a problem, the answer is simply to break up the biggest banks into smaller banks.  Pass a law saying that the big banks have to pay extra taxes.  Pretty soon all the big banks will spin off enough divisions to make themselves small enough to become virtuous small banks exempt from the extra tax.

Avengers

Went to see it last night.  The Jax Jr theater was pretty full even though this is the second weekend the Avengers has been in town.  For a Marvel Comic movie, it's not bad.  There are some good bits, like the incredible Hulk grabbing the snooty villain by the shirtfront and proceeding to pound him into the floor, wham , wham,. wham.   SHIELD's  flying base looks pretty good when making like a naval air craft carrier and floating in the ocean.  Then the lift fans turn on, water cascades over the hull and the whole thing becomes airborne.  So far pretty convincing.  Then the bad guys attack at 30,000 feet and blow off one of the four lift fans.  You would expect the thing to list into the missing fan, but it doesn't.  The 3-D is OK and it runs for a couple of hours. 
  Not bad, better than the Fantastic Four movies, but I'm not sure why it broke box office records on opening week.  It didn't seem THAT good to me. 

Downton Abbey At the beginning

I missed the early episodes on cable, but trusty Netflix just delivered a DVD with the first two episodes.  I watched one last night.  Pretty good.  Great sets, costumes, scenery.  Mediocre sound recording.  Dialog from a number of characters was unintelligible to me, due to mumbling mixed with strong Brit accents.  Makes the story hard to follow when you can't follow the dialog.   Some plot points totally obscure.  The Grantham's, or perhaps the Abbey, are burdened with "entaille"  some kind of medieval legal deal that causes unhappiness, gets talked about a lot, but I have no idea what it actually means.  Mary Grantham has an unsuccessful date with a young Duke of somewhere-or-other.  Lots of footage of the couple tiptoeing around the third floor servant's quarters in the Abbey, for reasons unkown, unless the Duke is looking for a spare room to have sex in.  Which seems out of character for 1912 upper crust Brits.  The romance doesn't work out, the Duke leaves early, to the annoyance of Earl Grantham, but the reasons for the breakup remain obscure to this Yankee viewer.  Doesn't seem to bother Mary too much. 

Hobbit Movie to play at 48 frames/sec

Way back when, say Thomas Edison's time, movies were taken at quite low frame rates, as low as 12 frames/sec.  That's what made the real oldies move funny.  You must have seen Charlie Chaplin walking funny.  The movie film back then was slow, insensitive to light, and needed a 1/12 second exposure time to get a good image.  By the late 1920's Kodak had improved the film, and the movie makers had improved the lighting and frame rate standardized at 24 frame/sec for theater grade movies.  You need standardization because the same movie is played at thousands of different theaters, each with its own movie projector.  All those projectors need to run at the same speed unless you want the movie to run too fast or too slow as it moves from place to place.  
   The eye is a biochemical device, and by electronic standards, it is slow.  It takes many milliseconds for an image to fade away.  If a fresh image is flipped up on the screen before the old image fades from view the eye sees it as a continuous image.  It was found by experimentation, that if the movies ran at 48 frames/sec  a smooth flicker free movie resulted.  Then some genius experimenter discovered that the projector did not have to advance the film at 48 frames/sec.  He set the projector to advance the film (change the projected image) at half the rate the shutter ran.  Test audiences loved it, and it saved a lot of expensive film.  Speaking as one who has enjoyed thousands of theater movies over the years, I can say the motion illusion from 48 frame/sec flicker and 24 frame/sec film advance rate is very good, realistic, and enjoyable.
   In the constant search for a new gimmick to draw bigger movie audiences,  Peter Jackson is going to try filming at 48 frames/sec for the new Hobbit movie coming out next year.  Stand by for a lot of advertising hype about how much better it will look on screen due to revolutionary technical advances.  But I ain't gonna believe that hype.  I'll go see the flick, 'cause I am a Tolkien movie fan, not 'cause of running more frames per second.
 

Underwear Bombers

Lots of talk about the latest underwear bomb (no bomber, just the jockey shorts).  Looking at it on TV, I don't believe that little amount of explosive could bring down an airliner.  Not enough bang.   It would do grievous harm to the bomber's reproductive organs,  making it impossible to enjoy the legendary 72 virgins in Paradise, but it ain't enough to bring down a Boeing.
   TSA will doubtless use it as an excuse to feel up more passengers.   If you have time to spare, go by air...