Peak Leaf Season in Franconia Notch

I fired up the Buick yesterday and did some cruising around looking for good leaf pictures. 

Mt. Lafayette from Lincoln.  Winter is coming.

Hard working tree.  This one looked a lot more colorful by eye than it does in this photo.

Lafayette from Peabody slopes.  Note Eagle Cliff in foreground.  Winter is coming.

Lafayette again.  I could not decide which of these two photos was the better one.

Good bright red tree at Mittersill.

Nobody makes campaign promises anymore.

 Used to be, candidates would promise to do all sorts of good stuff if elected.  And, when elected they failed to live up to their promises, we voters and the newsies got all over their case.  Not any more.  Neither Trump not Biden have promised a thing this year.  We cannot trash the winner for reneging on his campaign promises, 'cause he never made any.  With Trump, it's a good bet that he will keep on doing what he has been doing for the last four years.  With Biden, or rather with the people who are "advising" Biden, it's hard to tell.  They have let a lot of far left talk drift out to the electorate, and the electorate has been lukewarm to negative on it, and they have stopped talking about it.  Anything might happen.  I don't see much dynamic leader left in Biden, not at his age.  He could just go with the flow until he dies in office. 

One of the saddest days in WWII.

 France, a great power, at least before June of 1940, owned a powerful navy.  Not quite as big as the Royal Navy, but far bigger than anything Hitler had at his disposal.   With the French fleet under his control, Operation Sea Lion might have worked.  The Germans possessed a very small fleet, and the British had been making it smaller.  They sank the Graf Spee and at Narvik HMS Warspite had steamed up a fiord, cornered and sunk most of the Germany destroyer fleet.  In the summer of 1940, the Royal Navy had better than 100 destroyers, backed up by thirty odd cruisers and half a dozen battleships.

The Germans had practically nothing.  The Royal Navy would have had no trouble sinking anything the Germans had in mid Channel.

On the other hand, if Hitler had laid his hands on the French fleet, he would have had a chance.  The bulk of the French fleet was at Oran in North Africa.  The British send a large fleet to Oran and told the French Admiral Gensoul in command that he had three choices, sail his fleet to British ports, sail to the French West Indies (Martinique) or sail to the United States.  Otherwise be sunk right there at Oran.   The French tried to stall for time.  The British were in no mood to put up with that, they opened fire and sank the entire French fleet right then and there.  You would have thought that after 1000 years of dealing with the British, the French would have understood what they could and could not get away with.  Apparently not.  Needless to say, this ruined Anglo French relations for the rest of WWII, but it did keep the French fleet out of German hands. 

They stopped the world...

 But they won't let me get off.  It must be that nothing is happening, anywhere in the world, except the debate last Thursday and Trump's Corona virus case announced in the early AM Friday.  The TV news and the internet has talked about nothing else. Must mean they stopped everything else, all over the world.  

Or, it means that the newsies prefer writing up opinion pieces and op eds and prognostications which they can do sitting in their offices.  Getting out of the office, talking to people, finding some real stories and writing them up falls into the  newsies's "too hard" basket. 

Best Wishes to Donald and Melania

 I hope Donald and Melania Trump will shake off and survive their Corona virus infection. I wish both of them all the good luck in the world.

Fixing Twitter

 When I tried to log into the twitter web site (www.twitter.com) I was drawing an obscure error message that suggested that the twitter site was down or the internet was broken.  I am using Firefox and the problem is at least partly a Firefox problem.  To fix twitter, get into the Firefox “options” window.  Click on “Tools” on the main Firefox taskbar.  Options is under Tools.  Click on options.  Use the search feature and search for “cache”.  This will find a place/feature/what-do-you-callit named Cookies and Site Data.  And it offers Choices to clear data, manage data, and manage exceptions.  Select manage data.  This will show a list of all the websites that have stored data on your hard drive.  Firefox permits websites to stash megabytes of who knows what.  You need to find twitter and delete all of the twitter data.  I could not find twitter on my first shot so I just started deleting data from every website that seemed worthless to me.  For instance the New York Times had stashed better than a megabyte of stuff.  After some weeding, twitter turned up.  I deleted all the twitter data and bingo, twitter.com worked, I could log in and everything. 

Beaker folk get promoted to Britons

 The Beaker folk have been known to archeology for a long time, 60 years that I know of, and probably longer.  They are known in Britain by the drinking mugs, beakers, in their graves.  These are handsome handleless, pottery mugs, good for 12-14 ounces of beer (modern measure), quite distinctive.  They used to think that the beaker folk were traders, who came to Britain, trading bronze to neolithic natives who were still using flint.  

   The DNA people got to work recently analyzing beaker folk DNA and have declared that all modern Britons are descended from the beaker folk.  The earlier neolithic people who had raised Stonehenge were wiped out by the beaker invaders.  This raises the beaker folk from mere bronze traders to ancestors of all of Britain.  The U-Tube videos putting forth this quite new interpretation are non technical and do not give any of the observations supporting this heady conclusion, but I have not seen any postings of contrary conclusions so they probably have it right.