The year of A size post cards

We get a blizzard of ads in the mail these days.  New this year is the A sized post card.  Used to be a post card was 3 by 5 and got a cheaper postage than regular letters.  Now they are 8.5 by 11 (full typing paper size) and made of fine heavy paper.  And I get a lot of 'em.  I was able to light the fire on nothing but the A size post cards that came in over the last couple of days. 
   A size?  Engineering or draftsman jargon for a drawing the size of a piece of typing paper.  We had B size, C size, D size and more. 

Shannara: TV Show

So I watched it again last night.  Not bad.  The cast is good looking and can act.  Sets and costumes are right up to snuff.  However, nobody ever called anyone by name in the whole one hour show.  So I still don't know the stage names of any characters.  I suppose I could look them up on IMDB but I'm thinking the script writers could do better.  They have two decent warrior princesses, but I cannot tell them apart.  They both have long dark hair, wear the same dark leather outfits,  carry swords and ride horses.  
   And it is better than Galavant.

Flint's water. How about some scalps?

Every one knows, at least any one who has done plumbing or taken high school chemistry, that acid eats metals,  turning solid metal into invisible ions dissolved in the acid, like salt dissolving into water. All water pipes installed before the 1980's are metal.  The plastic pipe now used didn't come on the market til the late 1970's.   You cannot allow the city water to become acid, 'cause it will eat the pipes all over the city.  Standard procedures for city water  works is to add enough lye (sodium hydroxide) to acid water to neutralize it.  This has been standard practice for a hundred years or more.  This ain't rocket science. 
   According to the newsies, when Flint switched over to using acidic river water which, for some reason, most likely a screwup somewhere, this was not done, and acidic water flowed all thru the city's water pipes, eating out the metal.  All copper plumbing is fastened together with tin-lead solder and older pipes are pure lead.  Our word "plumber" comes from the old Latin word for lead (plumbum). So, the lead content of Flint water soared up and up.
    Anyhow the newsies were on NHPR this morning wailing about the Flint water situation.  What needs to be done is find the persons who failed to add the lye to neutralize the acid, and prosecute them.  We ought to take at least three scalps, one from the Michigan environmental pollution agency, one from the federal environmental pollution agency, an one from the city of Flint water department. 

Coin Toss? Fair? 64:1 odds of winning 6 out of 6 coin tosses

TV reports that six close Iowa races between Hillary and The Bern were settled by coin tosses.  Hillary won all six.  Is she just lucky or was the fix in?  
Odds of winning one coin toss is 1:2, we all know that.  Odds of winning two out of two coin tosses is 1/2*1/2 or 1/4.  Odds of winning 6 out of 6 coin tosses is 1:2**6 or 1:64.  How lucky do you think Hillary is, really?

And then there were three

Iowa caucus has finally happened.  Ted Cruz in first 28%, The Donald second 24%, and Marco Rubio only 1 percentage point behind the Donald.   Hillary and the Bern split the vote 50-50.  
   Well, at least the Donald didn't win, if he had, and did he win in NH next week, he would have been unstoppable.  He is still there, still formidable, but he is beatable. 
   And I think Iowa narrows the Republican field down to three.   Which needed to be done, and sooner is better than later.

Sentencing reform

Used to be, back in the dim past, say the 1960's, judges had broad discretion in sentencing.  Some judges abused this discretion and let perps off with a slap on the wrist when the community thought the death penalty was warrented.  So over the last 50 years, legislatures have tightened things up with mandatory sentencing guideline laws, which called for very tough sentencing indeed.  The result, the US has more people in jail than every other place on earth.  And more prisons, and more unionized prison guards. 
  We ought to do something about this.  We could start with pot.  We should not be incarcerating people for mere possession of pot.  Although pot isn't good for you, it's no worse than tobacco which is legal in every state of the union.  Up here most adults view pot as a charge of convenience which the cops use to hassle teenagers. 
   Then we ought to remove lying to the cops or the FBI as felonies.  If they want to get you, all they have to do is keep on grilling you, and sooner or later you will say something that does not check out. Bingo, felony charge.  Far as I am concerned, it's up to the cops to get evidence of a real crime, not to cross up the suspect with repeated trick questions. 
   And conspiracy.  That's a vague lawyer's word for hanging out with criminals.  Let's eliminate conspiracy as a crime.  If the perp was doing a crime, fine bag 'em.  But if all you have is that the perp hung out with bad guys, tough, it's a free country.
   And I bet if a bunch of fair minded citizens reviewed all the felonies now on the books, they could recommend dropping half of them.

Galavant: The TV Show

So I watched it.  ABC Sunday night at 8 PM, a really good time slot.  The ABC suits must think it will catch on.  It's strange.  It's a swords and sorcery spoof.  It opens with the kinda ragged looking good guys army confronting the bigger and properly uniformed bad guys army.  For openers a jester, clad in motley, does a song and dance routine in the no man's land between the two armies.   Then we have the warrior princess leading the good guys give a rousing pre battle speech to her troops.  Only the words aren't her's they are the words Aragorn used to inspire his troops before the final battle at the gates of Mordor.  It goes on like this, one gag after another.  Some of them are fairly funny, others fall flat. 
   I think I will watch Supergirl next Sunday.