Atom Smasher Throws a Rod

Paging bc. We are taking up a collection to send you to CERN. Make us proud, cosmic gearhead dude.

From last kit: ScottyN, good on your run.

Happy blessed cooler days of fall. Let the leave die off-drop-decay begin.

Well, at least this isn't some kind of systemic design problem such as the ones that have haunted colliders in the past. Still, it makes me wonder how long it will take for all the glitches in such a huge and complicated device to be discovered and worked out. If the date for full operation gets pushed back too far I might have to cancel my order for the hand-painted commemorative plates.

CP - I personally, am quite happy to let those leaves remain where they are for just a bit longer. For I know that all of them will end up in my back yard.

Reposting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/opinion/20blow.html?hp

"It turns out that the Republican enthusiasm for Sarah Palin is just as superficial as she is."
.........................................................

Unfortunately, it is the gut response "I just like her" that is most likely to prevail on November 4th.

Posted by: Shiloh | September 20, 2008 9:45 AM

I think "I just like her" is an attempt to put a positive spin on ingrained prejudices that are not PC.

CEOs in charge,
Charged Electrical Orbits
run rings around me;
at the edge of a black hole
I've got the shakedown street blues

Me too, RD. I am not ready for cool weather. In the division of labor in our house, leaves are not my problem. I just love summer and I'm always sorry to see it end.

I've got nothin' on the LHC. I just don't get it, I'm sorry to say. I hope I'm not summarily drummed out of the boodle for saying that.

"SnowJob SquareGlasses" I bet you can guess who, even without referring to the link from whence it came.

G'morning boodle. Busy day ahead with Mr. F cracking the whip on fall clean up activities. Romantic discussion over coffee this morning revolved around the economy. With things going the way they are-my unreasonable emotional attachment to the land on which Chez Frostbitten sits, and his insistence that it be built without a mortgage, are being revealed as our #1 plan for being able to live on his military retirement alone. Now if that worthless mayor and city council would quit raising property taxes we'd be set.

If Joel goes to Geneva, I trust he will give equal time to the people in signboards that say "Repent. The end is coming." At the very least, he should include interviews with "last days" advocates like those in Sarah Palins church. The scientific press is not always fair. Consider The Velikovsky Affair," that shut out the guy who wrote volumes to explain his signboard:

The scientific press generally denied Velikovsky a forum to rebut his critics. Velikovsky claimed that this made him a "suppressed genius", and he likened himself to Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake for preaching heliocentrism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Velikovsky

Good morning, all.

Joel, it's too bad we didn't get the audio of that announcement from Geneva. I'm imagining a scientist on the scene, speaking excitedly in French scientific jargon after inhaling a bunch of helium...

CP, sounds like it's just a magnet coolant leak resulting from a bad electical connection and a bad transformer. I can fix, no problem. Give me some time and money and my Leatherman and my aircraft-quality duct tape, and I'll have it ready to go in no time. Might need some hose clamps, a length of coolant hose, some extra wire of the correct gauge, and some extra Prestone, just in case.

When you're building the biggest, most complex and most powerful one-of-a-kind handbuilt hotrod of a scientific instrument ever, you have to expect problems when you turn it over for the first time. There's no Heathkit instruction sheet, engineering manual or spec table that's going to tell them exactly how to do this, so they're proceeding cautiously and shaking it all down slowly (except for the parts that travel at significant fractions of the speed of light).

This isn't a mass-produced toaster or Toyota we're talking about here.

Joel, I don't think this is the equivalent of a thrown rod. A machine turning at 7 GeV and tossing a rod would send it out through the engine block and into like, the Atlantic.

I've had similar problems when shaking down some of my handbuilt hotrods. Sometimes something as simple as not tightening down a hoseclamp enough causes it to pop off under pressure when getting it up to temp in the garage for the first time or two, sometimes you don't find it until you're running it hard for the first time. With what, perhaps millions of connections in there, even a one-in-a-million chance of something being wrong... well, there it is.

Might make a big mess, but electrical shorts (there's an interesting image) and coolant leaks are typcially simple problems to fix if you've engineered them adequately.

And scientific physicists have probably overthought the engineering of the LHC more than any other device in human history.

But back to your suggestion, CP, I'm ready to go anytime they want me.

Oy, have a lot of errands and work to do today, but I'll check in later.

bc

I agree Kim and RD, as pretty as fall is around here, it signals winter’s coming. Dark mornings, bare trees (“bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang”), and cold - ugh. I love summer no matter how hot. And I understand nothing about that collider, except that if what it does kills us all, it might be preferable to slowly starving to death from the total collapse of the world economy.

Friends are coming for dinner tonight and I’m scrambling to get everything prepped ahead of time. The refrigerator is making a funny noise when it shuts off, I hope this doesn’t mean what I think it does.

Funny to see the Battle of Gettysburg on the online front page today. Isn't there more recent news they could be covering?

bc writes:
"This isn't a mass-produced toaster or Toyota we're talking about here."

Well, if people aren't buying Toyota Tundra trucks because of high fuel prices, what to do with the workers? The San Antonio Express-News reported Friday morning that Toyota employees will be involved in a huge project to clean up local parks.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/Toyota_eager_to_clean_up_citys_parks.html

First two grafs:

In a sign of community cooperation, the Toyota Motor Corp. manufacturing plant and seven of its on-site suppliers will work together on a two-week, citywide cleanup project.

The goal is to plant trees as well as paint over graffiti, clean up brush and pick up trash at 17 parks and city facilities. Some 340 people will volunteer more than 17,000 hours of labor valued at more than $270,000, according to a city estimate.
***

Now, what to do with those temporarily idle Swiss physicists? May be there's an Alp whose slopes need to be cleaned?

With temperatures approaching 0 Kelvin (-273 Celsius and -459 Fahrenheit) it's colder than Alaska and Northern Canada inside the collider, which is probably sucking the coolant out of Bad Sneakers refrigerator. A global HVAC crash may be preferable to a black hole and will give yello lots of work. Maybe the LHC can be used reverse global warming after it proves or disproves current theoretical physics.

As far as washingtonpost.com front page coverage, I enjoyed seeing the picture yesterday afternoon of the rusting Confederate ship now better exposed on Alabama beach sand, thanks to Hurricane Ike.

Reminds me of our Tuesday morning at Tahoe. We decided to drive around the lake that first full day we were there, and our first stop was at Kiva Beach, where we were married 23 years ago.

We walked over from the Tallac (mansion) Historic Site to the spot where our nuptuals occurred, only to see U.S. Park Service workers engaged in activiites around an exposed foundation--a foundation I had never noticed before and perhaps 200 yards from where we tied the knot.

Turns out it was the kitchen foundation of "the finest casino in the world." That was back in 1900, and the casino, being on the California side of the lake, was often raided, but proprieter Lucky Baldwin always seemed to have advance notice and was able to hide all the gaming equipment. Some life Lucky Baldwin had--here's some of his biography, and his life story even includes an Indian attack, Japanese entertainers, Kentucky Derby winners, Tarzan and Fantasy Island:

http://everything2.com/e2node/Lucky%2520Baldwin

"I'm imagining a scientist on the scene, speaking excitedly in French scientific jargon after inhaling a bunch of helium..."

Is Jerry Lewis available for the role?

:-)

Insert "to" between used and reverse.

Repost from last boodle, I'll check back in later.

Morning all. I'm snoopervising Mr. T, who rented a manlift this morning and is cutting big limbs out of the willow oaks. We had a large limb break and come down a couple of weeks ago, so he decided it was time to do the job properly on both trees that need it. He's enjoying himself. I'm moving the debris out of the way. I think he was okay with the fact that the person he called never came to look or give him a price. He's doing it more cheaply himself, as well as having a fun time on a lovely, cool Saturday morning.

So far, the only casualty has been a cap knocked off one of the fence posts. No damage, it can be glued back on. I made sure he didn't hit my sasanquas or my grandmother's rhododendron.

Um, bc, "electrical shorts" would probably cause coolant leaks.

I'm just going to be pedantic here for a minute. Transformers don't cool anything. In fact, they tend to be rather hot. They convert electricity from one voltage to another. The failed transformer feed power to the cryogenic system which did the actual cooling.

Also, you don't buy transformers by the pound, so the the '30-tonne' description is a bit useless. It was a 12 mega-volt-amperes transformer which is rather large and not an off-the-shelf product you can call McMaster-Carr for. It seems they did have a spare laying around somewhere.

I sure hope that helium system is still under warranty. Dealers charge a fortune for parts.

If Shiloh can throw Velikovsky into the mix, then I can throw the oil prices into the economic meltdown. But I won't.

Velikovsky was just enough of a punctuated equibriumist, before it was cool, to almost garner some retro-respect , but not quite, in my view. Far from it, actually. He had too many planets flying around with unexplained orbital stop-and-goes, apparent elliptical orbits changed into near-circular ones with no explanations, no modern grasp of chaos to sort anything out in his wild speculations, and no real attempts to just do any Newtonian mechanics at all. Plus he tried to base a whole bunch of it on Biblical leaps of faith involving Egyptology and the Exodus, and modern scholars doing a lot better research than he ever did can't even FIND a historical Exodus.

It was neat to read the article, though! I read Worlds in Collision when I was a kid.

I remember back when the Space Shuttle was being developed and they kept having a devil of a time getting those re-usable rocket motors to work right. As I recall there were a couple of quite impressive explosions.

At the time I remember wondering if there is a theoretical limit on how complex of a machine mortal beings could make given realistic rates of component failure. It seems that, even with redundancy, there is a point where the mean time between failures must approach zero.

Now, of course, they finally worked the kinks out of the Space Shuttle (pretty much) and I am confident they will do so with the LHC as well. But I still worry about that complexity limit. One day I am concerned that we will have gone about as fer' as we can go. Unless, and this is probably what will happen, the machines start to make themselves.

Jumper - Gould once made the same point about Velikovsky. Sure, his theories were nonesense, but the underlying philosophy was sound.

"Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation." - John McCain

Maybe a moment of reflection on the fate of the big unfinished ring under Waxahatchie, Texas. Maybe it could become Bush's retirement bunker, unless it's all been turned over to mushrooms.

I dunno about complexity, RD. I have serious doubts about how many people we have left in this country who can built an old-style pocket watch, or even invent something as cool as THIS flying shuttle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_shuttle

anon-thanks for posting that quote. Reminds me to ask the boodle-does the idea of "innovation" in anything having to do with your money creep you out just a bit? Innovation as in a new invention like a debit card, or online banking, makes sense because at least to me there is a thing, a new widget perhaps, that makes the new process possible. Innovation as in a new "product" or way to package a bunch of "products" that really aren't things or widgets doesn't seem like innovation at all. I can see innovations in health care leading to something like an Iowa Electronic Market. A bunch of innovators are sitting around a conference table-"Let's see if we can make money short selling predictions of the rate of obesity related diseases in different markets (aka demographic groups)."

This week has underscored - yet again - what I learned in grad school about some services being good for the public sector, where profit isn't an appropriate issue, and others for the private sector, where greed is good and should rule. The blurring of the lines always gets us in trouble.

Health care is definitely one of those public goods that is messed up with private greed. I wish I knew the answer. In the middle 90's, ambulance companies were created by the scads to provide prehospital care. The model didn't produce profits, and most of them went away. It's a mess we deal with every time someone calls for an ambulance.

Today most geologists combine catastrophist and uniformitarianist standpoints, taking the view that Earth's history is a slow, gradual story punctuated by occasional natural catastrophic events that have affected Earth and its inhabitants.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophism

Uniformitarianism is a generalisation of the principle of actualism, which states that present day-processes (astronomical, geological, paleontological,...) can be used to interpret past patterns. The principle of actualism is the cornerstone of paleoecology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniformitarianism_(science)

Punctuated Equilibrium has also played a role in social and political theory, particularly in policy studies, as one of many cross-overs of evolutionary theory into social theory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium
...................................................
Which brings us back to my equating the signboards of Velikovsky and Palin. Exposing crackpot theories, even when they are philosophically or theologically sound, is a better way to show them for what they are - rather than ignoring them or shutting them out.

Scientists have to have something to do. The more specialized the focus, the more bizarre even funny it seems to a civilian such as me who sits on my patio wondering why the grass grows so unevenly in the backyard. However, we've had a telescope in the upper treehouse (yes there is a lower treehouse, too) off and on for years to speculate, among other things, on the workings of the universe at least from our rather limited perspective. If all this big pipe underground stuff wasn't at least a fanciful diversion, if not a serious one, then we'd all get bogged down in our personal fears of what Joel once so eloquently referred as eating crawdads and random turkeys in some tar and pitch summer home on the bayou, should such places continue to exist. Maybe if this mad-scientist experiment works, then world peace will follow and our friends in Texas will stop building homes begging to be washed away in a couple decades, and the financial genuis bar will meet one on one and solve all present and future problems...

I like your thinking, lisa h.

Beautiful day here today. Strolled the farmers' market and then the grocery store. Got the windows open and enjoying a delicious lunch.

Daughter is going to her first homecoming dance tonight. No date; a bunch of friends are going all together. They're meeting at one house to have dinner and all go to the dance together. She's been looking forward to this for years. I'm not sure if I'm ready.

yellojkt, I noticed that transformer/cooling item issue as well, just decided to ignore it.

But I did make a very geeky techie jibal reference to and to Joel's 'thrown [connecting] rod' by describing the LHC as "turning" at 7 GeV.

But you knew that.

Forgive my additional drooping pedants, which in fact happen to be electrical shorts.

At least they don't have pleats.

Frosti, if there weren't financial innovation, we'd all be bartering services or trading big round rocks with holes in them or something.

As many have pointed out, money is the system of the world, and I guess as long as the world is advancing so are the ways we consider the concept of money.

Now to the points of human creativty and complexity, I consider very complex structures or systems such as the global financial economy, the space shuttle, the LHC itself, computerized information systems and the Internet, etc. as amazing creations and developments, but there are even more amazing levels of complexity on the horizion as we look at - and begin to manipulate things at a more basic level.

The revolutions in biotechnology and the maipulation of genomic sequences, nanotechnological engineering, and quantum computing offer more sophisticated ways for humans manipulate matter, energy, information and life itself to suit human wants and needs.

As I often say, hopefully our wisdom will keep pace with our cleverness.

bc

Even my limited understanding astronomy caused me to reject "Worlds in Collision" as 'unsound' back in the early seventies. I was happy to read in Sagan's 'Broca's Brain' that the rest of the "science" in WiC was a crock too.

As theology seems to me to be unsound from the get go I'd like to know how one would recognize sound theology.

At least when trying to understand the earth geologists could have some confidence that there actually is a Geo and had something to check their hypothesis against. Theologists are not so lucky or constrained.
Just makin' it up as they go along. Lucky things, even luckier as your modern post-modernist anything.

Theology is not removed from the needs of internal consistency and reason. True theologians are keenly aware of the importance logic. It's just that the underlying premises of theology are accepted on faith. Indeed, the ability to accept premises that cannot be proven is viewed as a central virtue.

Now, in science premises are not supposed to be accepted on faith. They are supposed to be tested. This is the crucial distinction between science and theology.

Which, to pivot back on topic, is why the LHC is so important. Many of the theories popular in modern physics are, unfortunately, based on untested premises. The arguments between competing premises rely on fuzzy concepts like "elegance." The LHC is supposed to change this sad state of affairs by confirming or denying competing premises through experimentation - thus moving physics firmly back into the realm of science from which it has drifted.

For Boko, on the quest for sound theology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point_(Tipler)

String theory adherents may disagree with Omega Point theory, but mankind's quest for God will continue, however transcendent the search, and sound theology will evolve with knowledge. Even Higgs bosun, gdammit, may not be conclusive.

I must admit that reading Teilhard de Chardin, Ernst Mayr, Velikovsky and other theorists as an undergraduate did tend to muddle my thinking and that it took Alan Watts and Zen to clarify the muddle, to the degree that it (or if it) has.

Not being mean, RD, but what popped into my mind on reading "importance logic" was:
theological arguments must be logical because they are important :-)

It's an utterly glorious day here. Hope the same for you!

bc-I should have been clearer. It's not true financial innovation I question, it's my government confusing a shell game for the innovation that deregulation encourages that worries me.

Yes, DNA girl, it is part of my special gift that my typos are inevitably more enlightening than my prose.

Please reference the phrase "Simple Regurgitate" as a case in point.

Thanks Padouk, now I understand.
"It's just that the underlying premises of theology are accepted on faith."
Just like economics!

Get the hook.

Theologians ultimately work off some original complex of divine revelations as well as the ongoing pattern of experiences in the life of a particular religious community. (If you don't have a religion yourself, just add the word "putative" where appropriate.) Ideas come and go and are progressively refined, just as in any other field. Theology isn't science, yet if done right it has integrity. On the other hand, if you don't belong to a religion, and can't entertain the idea of doing so, then it makes little sense to pay any attention to theology except in a journalistic sense--as a factor affecting other people around you.

Did y'all see this in the Post last week about researchers discovering the "backfire effect" that refutation of misinformation only strengthens conservatives' belief in that misinformation?

Here's a excerpt...

"Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.

"A similar 'backfire effect' also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/14/AR2008091402375.html

More from the article that shows that the Obama campaign's techniques may have to be changed...

"Reifler questioned attempts to debunk rumors and misinformation on the campaign trail, especially among conservatives: 'Sarah Palin says she was against the Bridge to Nowhere,' he said, referring to the pork-barrel project Palin once supported before she reversed herself. 'Sending those corrections to committed Republicans is not going to be effective, and they in fact may come to believe even more strongly that she was always against the Bridge to Nowhere.' "

TBG, I have not yet received an email from you about where to mail my check for the wonderful shirt...it is highly possible I flubbed it and didn't fill out the form correctly!

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/10/true-enough-the-scie.html
True Enough: the science, history and economics of self-deception

In psychology, cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling or stress caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a fundamental cognitive drive to reduce this dissonance by modifying an existing belief, or rejecting one of the contradictory ideas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

I just don't get it. What's so hard about designing a gizmo where things smack into each other? I work for the Dept. of Transportation: we have entire agencies where they design stuff that crashes into each other all the time. You don't hear *us* whining about transformers.

---------------

KPage (from the last Boodle): you're entirely right: this entire economic meltdown was completely predictable and foreseeable, and was in fact predicted by a fair number of people who were (what a shock!) ignored. This thing is simply Wall Street's 9/11, and happened on Bush's watch, just like Katrina and the other 9/11. This clown is gonna have one helluva legacy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhCtVq5iIa0

Transformers also have the job of destroying the evil forces.

Hey everyone --

I just ordered birthday presents for two friends who will turn 60 this fall -- one at the end of October and the other in mid-November. All I can say is, it's about time, you know! I'm been waiting and tapping my foot (the one on the leg with the good knee) for the longest time.

It has been my view that the best -- very best -- gift you can give someone is a book. And so I have ordered from Olsson Book and Record (which has, alas, downsized the number of stores it has) 1 copy of probably the *very best* book ever, ever, ever, ever written ("One Hundred Years of Solitude", by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa) for one of my friends. I read it over 35 years ago, and I need to dig it out again. I'm ready for another go-round with that mystical group of people. The other book I ordered is one I'm deeply into now, myself. It's called "The Wizard of the Crow" by an exiled Kenyan author who is teaching at UC-Irvine (I think). His name is Ngugi Wa'thiong'o. The book is close to 800 pages, but I'm finding that it is a very fast read, and I really can't put it down. Strangely enough, I'm finding that this book reminds me of the other, older one. They are both quite surreal and have somewhat similar themes.

Do give these books a try, if you haven't already done so.

And, with that, I think I'll fly away holding onto the sheets.

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/11/14/thiong_o/

This Wizard of the Crow review recommends the book.

CB.. no.. you haven't lost it. I will send out the invoices in the next couple of days and will announce it so folks can check their email.

The shirts were ordered yesterday (woo hoo!). They are $10 each.

Thanks!

RD summed it up well, Boko. If you're following a religion where the founder preached charity and helping others, as well as a book that mentions how a just and upright (Job) suffered horribly...

then sound theology means you don't subscribe to a model where good people NEVER suffer and everybody that suffer must be bad, therefore you never have to give a flying ford about them.

Sound theology begins with understanding the basic precepts of the religion. It is usually based on long scholarship. If you come up with a dramatically different conclusion to centuries of mainstream scholars who have studied the bible in their original languages, it's more likely you misunderstood something than THEY did.

It's not impossible that you caught something they missed, but given how culture strongly influences the understanding of language, you had better be a real scholar of the period in which the original precepts were laid down.

(And yes, this is why I prefer Catholic theology to Protestant, even if I may disagree with how it should be applied to modern life.)

You might have noticed me praise somebody for sound theology once, Boko. I meant he understood what the religion taught, and connected it to what he believed in. There was no hypocrisy inherent in what he said.

Speaking of gods and goddesses, there's a pretty piece on the amazing temples of Tamil Nadu, India, in NYT today:

http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/travel/21journeys.html

TBG, so that study means we're doomed, right? Just reinforces what I've always thought - conservatives are closed-minded, illogical beings (with a high startle reflex). Sigh.

Oh and it's got theological p0rn...definitely worth a peep :-)

http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/travel/21journeys.html

Hi everyone!

It has been a busy school year so far. I've also started canvassing neighborhoods w/ the county Democratic Party. My first time ever, now that I'm a citizen. My 7-yr-old daughter is coming with me tomorrow. So, I have not had much time to visit this place. But, after clicking on the other link to the NYT, I found this one. Interesting.

http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/17/moo/index.html?ref=opinion

Mostlylurking, I don't think it means we're doomed. Committed conservatives weren't likely change their votes in any event.

ftb, I loved "One Hundred Years of Solitude" but reactions of other people are ... um ... mixed. I remember thinking "What's this family tree at the beginning of the book for?" Then referring back to it every five pages.

Steve McNutt takes on the liberal latte drinker stereotype-

"I knew if I was going to find the perfect latte-drinking liberal, such a person was as likely to be in Takoma Park as anywhere else in this country, but you can’t just walk up to strangers and ask if they are members of a latte-loving freak show and expect to get an honest response. People are too smart to answer yes to that kind of question. Taking the Club for Growth ad as the definition of ideological purity, I designed a simple (slanted) poll..."

read the rest of Frothing at the Latte here:
http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/politics/frothing_at_the_latte.php

lisa h, brilliant post!

KPage, mudge is right. A meltdown was seen as far out and bright as a meteor. As with meteors, you just needed to know where to look (Astromom, ScienceTim, does that analogy work?).

DotC, London is in pretty much the same shape NY is (referring to your post in the previous kit). France, Germany, not as much (with the exception of KfW, the German bank which didn't cut loose Lehman's lines of credit and ended up lending them hundreds of millions after Lehman had declared bankruptcy).
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080917/od_afp/usfinancebankgermanyoffbeat_080917162138

CERN rap:
http://www.vimeo.com/1431471?pg=embed&sec=1431471

I know what you mean, Fifty. But I finally figured out the equation -- you know what generation you're in *only* by the names of the women. How cool is that?

And if you loved "One Hundred Years of Solitude" I know you'll love "Wizard of the Crow" -- enjoy!

I read 100 Years when I was in middle school, right before Garcia Marquez was awarded the Nobel. I found it a bit weird, but when you live in Colombia, most of it kind of makes sense. The guy who made little gold fish...my grandmother had a little articulated gold fish with emerald eyes. I had loved it as a little kid. After reading that book, it creeped me out to see her wearing it.

Fun book, though. That long-drawn out execution of Aureliano Buendia and the trail of blood gave me terrible nightmares for a while, too.

After that I enjoyed books with family trees at the front. Read several gigantic Russian novels in high school.

That reminds me, a bea c -- I want to find my copy of Dr. Zhivago and reread it. I last read it in high school, I think, which was more than 40 (*gasp*) years ago.

Another very good read is The Forsyte Saga (speaking of family trees). Excellent.

bc,
See, you took umbrage at the poor automotive metaphor. Maybe "breaking a fan belt" or "the Check Emgine light came on" is a better less hyperbolic description of what happened.

The original CERN press releases make it clear that the transformers brought power to the cooling system. Journalistic abridgment eliminated the nuance long before it got to Joel.

Since we're doing book reviews, I want to do one for a book I haven't finished yet -- the latest James Lee Burke crime novel featuring his long-suffering hero, Dave Robicheaux. It just recently came out in paperback. It's about 500 pages, longish even for Burke, and I'm only about 160 pages into it. It begins in New Orleans two days before Katrina hits, and so far seems it will run a few weeks after; they've already been hit with the second one-two punch, Hurricane Rita. The descriptions of what Katrina did to that city and its people, and how Robicheaux and his colleagues deal with it is stunning and amazing and heartbreaking. As always, there are a couple of plots and subplots running their parallel tracks (they usually come together somewhere down the line. Robicheaux's ex-partner, the tragi-comic Clete Purcell (think a non-funny John Goodman, who is THE only actor who could ever play Clete) is featured, as he usually is.

If you like crime novels and "mysteries" (there is never a question about "who did it" in a Robicheaux novel; they are always about the psychology of people), but aren't a James Lee Burke Robicheaux fan, you really ought to be. Among other things, he one of the few series writers who just always gets better and better, and never "phones it in" toward the end of his career/series. There must be 15 or 20 of them by now, but you can pretty much enter the series anywhere you want. Just grab one from the library or the used paperback story; there's always plenty of them around. Great stuff.

Also, I saw an old (about 10 or 12 years, maybe) movie the other night I liked, called "Keeping the Faith." Ben Stiller is a young rabbi and his best friend, Edward Norton is a young priest; they go all the way back to elementery school together, along with Jenna Elfman. When they reconnect with Elfman after she's been away for 16 year, they both fall in love with her. Stiller's problem is she's not Jewish, and his synagogue will fire him if he marries a shiksa (and incidentally rejects the dozen or so Jewish girls his congregation is trying to foist off on him). Norton, as a priest, meanwhile has a few issues of his own, obviously. Hilarity does NOT ensue; nevertheless, it is a smart, funny movie with lots of good stuff in the margins. (Norton and Elfman got some second-tier award nominations; Norton and the scriptwriter both won awards.) I like Edward Norton in almost everything he does, but like him best in when he's not in his "dark" mode, as here. He should do more light stuff.

OK.. Money requests have been sent via PayPal for the Mega BPH t-shirts to all of you who ordered them.

I've never used PayPal to request money before, so I hope this works!

If you ordered a shirt and didn't get an email requesting money for it, please let me know by writing to boodler [at] mac [dot] com.

THANKS!

"Keeping the Faith" is a special movie. Not a gut-buster, but pleasant with a powerful message. I loved the "God-Squad" concept. And, of course, there is Jenna and her vibrating cell phone.

Alas, I had to bury another power tool today.

My trusty old Black & Decker jigsaw, which I've been beating the guano out of daily for the last six years or so, started smelling of ozone this morning and was acting out of sorts. Well, it kicked the bucket a couple hours ago.

*sigh*

But since I was in the middle of making a replacement foot for a chair Mrs. M. picked up for $5 at a garage sale that would sell for $100+ with all four feet intact... I had the perfect excuse to go Man Shopping. (and no, I was *not* shopping for men -- I was shopping in a man-like way for a manly power tool)

So 15 minutes after entering the parking lot of Ye Olde Big Box Hardware Shoppe, I had my new jigsaw safely secured in the passenger seat and was on my way home. A new personal record, btw... I've been known to walk into that store and not come up for air for weeks.

Anyway, though I hated to put my old saw to rest, the new one is loverly. More power. Less noise. Much easier to manage. Same brand as the old one and about the same price -- under $50.

Now if only my sander would finally give up the ghost... the little trooper's been buzzing away but has developed a nasty cough and shimmy/shiver and has definitely seen better days. And they're having a sale at Olde Big Box, y'know... I'd be *saving* money by buying a *new* sander.

Mrs. M. uses the same logic on me, so it's only fair.

"The Collider Mutiny" is a new film about a trial in which Captain Quark brings charges against his unlicensed bosun, Mr. Higgs, and executive officer Lt. Yukawa whose interaction caused the strange and unstable Captain Quark to lose his charm. I won't reveal the ending. The film is in Technicolor.

Do it before the sander dies. It's a business expense anyhow and you save money too.

Shiloh, that sounds like a real page turner. Does somebody walk the limit of the Planck?

Curmudgeon, I caught that on cable once and watched as much as I could, and was disappointed that I hadn't been able to see it all.

I completely agree that "Keeping the faith" is a fun movie, and it was fun to see Ed Norton play a priest instead of a priest-killer.

Walking the Planck is a constant potential problem inherent in a subtle homo-erotic theme in the film because Yukawa assumes a coupling between Higgs and Quark that comes out at the trial.

You know, sometimes it really is all about context. I read the phrase "Atom Smasher Throws a Rod" and I keep wondering if Madonna is somehow involved.

Think about it.

Puns are considered the lowest form of humor.

It's a musical, right?

Let's get physical, physical,
I wanna get physical...let's get into physical
Let me near your body, quark
do it in the dark
Let me near your body, quark

Funny you should mention that RD. A-Rod was offered the lead in "The Collider Mutiny" but he wouldn't play, and Madonna is cast as a sexy fermion with leption tendencies.

That's funny Mudge, "the tin roof blowdown" is next in line in my reading list. I finished Bones and Silence (a Pascoe and Dalziel by Hill) before dinner. My usual energizer bunny number was getting to me so I put an hour aside for reading in this mild pleasant afternoon. After hasseldorfing a chipmunk from the pool of course. The Very Large Puppy alerted me to the chipmunk. I suspect that lifeguarding duty wasn't what the VLP had in mind about the drowning chipmunk though...

*standing, head bowed, for a moment of silence for Martooni's old Black and Decker. Farewell, old friend, farewell.*

Hey, it's a guy thing. A lot of you ladies probably wouldn't understand.

For those who love subatomics in particular:

http://www.particlezoo.net/shop.html

Oh, yes FTB. Dr. Z. is a favorite of mine. Every time I read it I wish I spoke Russian. The prose is so beautiful even in the translation. There is a beautiful description of snow and frost on trees when Yuri and Lara are together and Yuri gets up to watch the wolves in the middle of the night.

I read the Forsyth Saga after watching the PBS production a few years ago. I want a house like the one Philip Bosinney built. Both the description and the TV version were so airy and full of light. Like in The Witching Hour, the house needs to be listed as a character in the book.

Right now I'm in the middle of the Harry Potter books, about halfway through the fourth one. I don't have much time to read, but I'm determined to finish them. I'm absolutely hooked. I find myself chatting about spells and potions with students in the hallway. I'm loving it.

Speaking of books, I am in the middle of a gem called "The American Home Front 1941-1942." It's the last published book by Alistair Cooke, although it was written during the Second World War.

Mudge, I know just what you mean.

Soon after my wife and I got married, my father-in-law gave me a B&D circular saw. We had some great times together. There was the closet retrofit of '89. The outdoor shed of '95. And, of course, the nascent bunny bunker in '97 back when it was just a playroom.

Then, one day, it stripped a gear and had to be put down.

Sorry. I promised myself I wouldn't cry.

Big boy toys. They ARE amusing, as are the big boys when they play with them. Witness the manlift that came to my house this morning. We couldn't wait for a tree professional to come do the work, it was cheaper and more fun for Mr. T to do it himself. Okay!

He just purchased a table saw, simply because he wanted it. Works for me, didn't come out of my funds.

a bea c, enjoy Harry Potter. It's good escapist literature, and there's nothing wrong with that! The Geekdottir got me hooked on Harry, and I reserved a copy from Amazon for each book as it came out. We had to negotiate who got to read the book first.

I've read Harry Potters 1, 4, and 7. It drives the Potterheads nuts to hear I read them out of order.

Excellent column today in the San Francisco Chronicle called "Gov. Palin more a token than a feminist"

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/20/INAI130HCV.DTL

Would it seem like bragging if I said I was at a mega-yard/estate sale today where the deceased had been a hoarder of many things, but principally tools?

All kinds of power tools and all the attachments, all kinds of garden tools, Christmas things, lamps. . . multiples and dozens of kinds of everything, mostly priced to sell. I bought 3 different sizes of flush cutters, a few wrenches, files, a black iron hall table, sterling plated platter, pliers and 2 pitchforks in different lengths to aid in gardening (very good quality, $1 apiece). A significant number of the gardening tools are bona fide antiques, which doesn't bother me because I still use my great-aunt Ida's garden tools. It's taken the family every weekend since last April to gather everything together.

They said whatever was left next weekend would be deeply discounted, so I'll go back to see if the workbenches are still there. Nice and sturdy, buffer and drillpress worthy (for jewelry making), but I didn't feel like paying $70 for 2 of them today. Maybe there'll be axes left and they'll be less than $5.

Or perhaps I'll succumb to the charms of one of the 3 identical stainless steel fish poachers, each unused, still in its box.

Have I elicited imagi-frenvy in the tooltime set? :-)

That was cruel, I'm sorry.

Yes, it was.

What kind of pliers?

Zenith.

Slip-joints? Needlenose? Lineman's? Rubber/plastic-coated grips?

Channellocks? Vise-grips? What were they wearing?

Quick search on types of pliers. . .

Slip joints. They had needlenose, I have 3 of those already. There were coated grips, lineman's, channellocks. He liked multiple instances of the same type, all were sorted by type.

My dad and grandfather had a construction business, but I've never seen so many screwdrivers in my life.

Mudge - I've been chuckling as I backboodled and now your latest posts made me break out in laughter!

Hubby and I went to see Burn after Reading tonight. I was looking for hilarious and found amusing. I am not a Brad Pitt fan, but he was really funny. We are ending our rollicking night watching David Ignatius interiew Brent Scowcroft and Zbig(sorry, I give up) Brezinski on c-span. Nobody ever said that we don't know how to party.

RD- thank you for your 8:45...

Mudge - I liked Keeping the Faith as well, but I don't think it's as old as that?

frosti - 6:33 What a great article! I worked at the Washington Adventist Hospital for many years. The WAH is in the heart of Takoma Park. Geez, it was easier then...

Got 2 vise grips too. I didn't realize they qualified as pliers.

Going to bed, been up since 5.

Vaya con queso and fondue.

I might get myself fired this week. I just blogged about a conversation with the meanest teacher at school

http://blogs.glnd.k12.va.us/teachers/bcantor/2008/09/20/do-you-believe-in-them/

Yello, if you are reading HP out of order, you ruin the suspense. I still haven't figured out if Crouch is good or evil. PLEASE DON'T TELL ME!!

You're right, Kim. IMDB says it was released in 2000. So only 8 years old.

Capt. Quark?

Doesn't anyone remember the "Quark" TV series starring Richard Benjamin as Captain Adam Quark? IIRC he plays the skipper of an interstellar garbage truck.

I haven't seen an episode of it in 30 years, but I do remember being amused by it.

Having said that, I think "The Collider Mutiny" is a strange but charming idea and I'm surprised more people haven't lepton top of it yet. Perhaps it's no matter. You'd need to film it with some local flavor though, depending on how you want to spin it. The bottom line is that you could field a screenplay using a standard model with some subtle color, but don't put me down for a copy, as I'm not a good charge to gauge the story's symmetry, and I'd just get gluon it anyway.

Jigsaws are cool, but I do likes my Sawzall. A friend of mine has one with two counter-reciprocating blades, I felt a tinge of jealousy when I saw how fast he could cut through automotive steel with it.

But only a tinge. If you make a mistake with that thing, it's over before you know what happened.

bc

LSU beat Auburn!!!!

Yay!

a bea c... good for you for telling it like it is. I sure hope it's not you who gets fired.

Hey... are you going to be able to drive up I-95 just a bit to the Mega BPH on Oct 4?

Crouch? The answer is yes.

I like my DeWalt cordless jigsaw mostly, but I'm unimpressed with the keyless/screwless blade chuck (or is it a clamp? A mandrel?). Anyway, it has a pesky tendency for the blade to just pop out. I'm sure it's operator error, which just makes it more annoying. I can't imagine that a cordless saw would fulfill Martooni's production-level needs.

Oh, wait.

You mean BARTY Crouch?

Never mind.

I am not sure.

It seems the Mega BPH has sneaked up much faster than I expected.

I'll let everyone know in a few days.

Gosh, the gnome is reading book 6 of Harry Potter to me right now!

They're all scary fun and they come with a serious black dog, cats, birds, snakes, kids and even more critters too!

But no bunnies, except the ones changing themselves into hats and back again in that pet shop once. Bah.

*faxes a bite to StorytellerTim's ankle for a bea c.*

Cough, cough.

Dogs do enjoy a good story like anybody, you know. Just make sure there's lots of action!

Look at this:

http://www.bideawee.org/programs_&_services/learning_centers/reading_to_dogs.php

Interesting story on the upcoming debate:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/19/AR2008091902807.html

http://www.vimeo.com/439149
All movies shot in Neutrinovision:

Cosmic Particles. Cosmic Charlie.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7659021174892972211&ei=N-fVSKmGEZTEqQKsgf3dAg&q=cosmic+charlie&vt=lf

Some answers to the questions you might have on the financial bailout plan :

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/business/21qanda.html?ref=business

dbG and mudge,
The next time the two of you are going to carry on like that, get a room. Innocent eyes can find this blog.

bc,
I remember an episode or two of Quark. Too painful to watch. According to Wikipedia, it's coming out on DVD next month. Preview clip available on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001DHE9GA

The Quark preview reminds me of why it was so forgettable.

Very well said, a bea c! *applause*

I have a feeling bc would agree with me and NukeSpouse that "Ghost Town" is a Really Good Movie. (Where have I heard that phrase before?)

In a rather sad counterpoint to last night's "Great Books" discussion:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/20/AR2008092002631.html?hpid=topnews

*SIGH*

And in the ongoing "hack at your nose even after you've spited your face" drama...

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/09/20/womens_group_condemns_now_endo.html

*SIGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH*

At least I'll have another good jog this morning. And football this afternoon!

*thoroughly-enjoying-this-not-quite-fall-weather Grover waves* :-)

*SIGHHHHHHHHHHHH* The Great Bird of the Galaxy is missing a feather today...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/nyregion/21winston.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

I knew I'd read columns about the fragility of the latest Wall Street boom, but since I'm senile, I couldn't remember where or when or, yano, complicated stuff like that.

I'm skeered of power tools; well, saws, anyway. Taming the mesquite on my place is an aerobic activity ... and one that typically results in blisters (not to mention puncture wounds -- I hate mesquite).

One of these days, however, I'm going to have to rent a chipper to demolish the nine hundred yards of trunk and bough that have accumulated over the past 2 years. ::shudder::

On the subject of mysteries, does anyone here read Don Winslow? I'm mad for him. "A Cool Breeze on the Underground" is a swell tale.

Maureen Dowd wrote (or had old flame Aaron Sorkin write for her) a conversation between Jed Bartlet and Barack Obama.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/opinion/21dowd-sorkin.html

My behind the scenes gossip on the Dowd-Sorkin connection:

http://dowdreport.blogspot.com/2008/09/west-winging-it.html

Makes me nostalgic for 'Studio 60' and yellojkt's summaries.

Good morning, everybody!

My daughter is so excited about canvassing with me today she got up, got dressed, and filled up her water bottle before six. It is tough to explain this campaign to her, but she's decided Obama needs to be president so kids without money can get medicine when they are sick. I won't argue with that.

Whatever the outcome of the election, she's learning something important.

Mornin' all...

Thanks for the condolences Mudge, RD and all. Last night I wrapped the old jigsaw in a clean shop rag, placed it in the box the new one came in, said a few words, saluted it with a beer and then carefully placed it in the dumpster. Godspeed, old friend... Godspeed...

Slyness... nothing lifts a man's spirits like renting a Man Lift or other Very Large Power Tool. I've been thinking of renting one of those Bobcats for a day just for the heck of it. Two swipes of the bucket and our garden would be tilled under for the winter and I'd have the rest of the day to cruise up and down our street offering rides to the neighborhood kiddies.

Speaking of Man Lifts... I need more coffee.

Peace out, babies... enjoy your Sunday.

Yello, oblivious, I'm completely oblivious. *Now* the "what were they wearing" comment makes sense to me!

dbG,
Power tools are one of the few things I don't fetishize, but you gave a lot of boodlers out there some real excitement.

For the distaff side, I read an internet rumor last night that they are making a Pride and Prejudice musical.

Morning all.

You must check out Caitlin Gibson's excellent "XX Files" article.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/12/AR2008091201911.html

Also, note the resemblance of her pic to the "Lena Image" known to all image processing folks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

Yeah, that's what I was doing with all those Playboys. Testing image processing algorithms.

Good, happy morning, everyone.
Been extra careful checking my machine this morning. Don't want no failures with no stinkin helim colliding transformers. I will write a firm, whinning letter to the Fermi successors in Lasagna, Switzerland.

Meanwhile, the non helium financial meltdown has hit the book business badly. My publisher told me that she got only one order last week for three books. The three being for one author.

My favourite performance in Keeping the Faith is Milos Foreman's older priest.

Come to think of it, he has a very listenable voice. Gotta put him on the list.

g'morning boodle. Sorry I missed the late shift. Good link from rainforest with a summary of what the various bailouts could cost. Dovetails nicely with this from Bruce Bartlett (Not to be confused with Sorkin/Dowd's President Bartlett piece) about how both McCain and Obama need to rethink their economic plans. Either way, we can't afford them anymore.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/19/AR2008091903185.html
Mo Mo-no matter who wrote the Bartlett/Obama conversation it was both pitch perfect, and good advice.

Off to a long day of chores best done in warm weather, and this may be our last 75 degree day for a while. Mr. F broke out the new power washer yesterday and got the garage done, now it's time to do the house.

Add me to the list of Keeping the Faith fans. It's one of those little gems you can sometimes stumble on when "there's nothing good on."

Best line from the Dowd/Sorkin column:

///The people who want English to be the official language of the United States are uncomfortable with their leaders being fluent in it.///

That explains a lot.

Yes, Foreman was an interesting surprise in that movie, dr.

'Morning, Boodle. Happy Sunday, for those of you who worship in the morning, and to those of you who begin worship at about 1 p.m. on Fox, CBS< Espn, etc. I suppose some of you may even have a direct connection to the almighty, by which I mean a subscription to "The Ticket." I don't, alas. I like to keep a little sense of proportion. (Also, my wife wouldn't let me, by a country mile).

yello, I DEEPLY resent the inference that dbG and I were involved in anything....uh... OK, we were. Sorry.

A heavy cooking weekend. We're having company for dinner this evening, and yesterday I made a big batch of shrimp ceviche, which has been marinating all night. I taste-tested it a while ago, did a little tweaking. Oh yes. I will fax leftovers, if any, tomorrow. (Or maybe not.) We also went major meat-shopping at Nick's of Clinton, our local high-end butcher shop. They had New York ribeye strip steaks on sale for an incredible $3.69 a pound. The trick is you have to buy either a half or a whole section, and they'll trim it and cut into steaks at whatever thickness you want. A half usually gets you seven or eight one-inchers. But at that price, I couldn't not get a whole one, which yielded 15 steaks. Yum. Also got 10 pounds of hamburger for $20, as well as chicken breast halves (bone in) and some thighs, for dinner tonight. They're going on the grill, but I've already prepped them using my secret formula (per Cook's Magazine) for getting extra-crispy skin. So that's the dinner menu: ceviche appetizer, Greek salad, grilled chicken, and my specialty diced red potatoes semi-O'Brien. And yesterday my wife made the dessert: a cake called "pigs-and-pokes," or something cutesy and s'uthe'n like that, but it's basically a yellow cake with pieces of shredded pineapple and mandarin oranges in it, with some sort of whipped cream/pudding topping that also has pineapple in it. I can't wait.

I may have to go sample the ceviche some more. I think I hear it calling out to me.

Mudge,

Good thing I'm invited to a free lunch, or I'd be sending threatening anonymous letters to you. Ceviche and cheap steaks, what a way to go. Last night I was prowling for stray cats.

Good Morning All
I am looking forward to watching a little football later in the day.The Ravens play the Browns at 4 and I am hoping it is on the TV.I am at the mercy of the DC TV stations and they are covering today's game.If not I may have to drive to MD and watch it somewhere there.

I would say there are a couple of good matchups today.
Steelers vs Eagles for penciltucky bragging rights
Skins vs Cardinals It is tough to figure out which teams will show up for that one.
Dallas vs Greenbay I always got to root against Dallas no matter who they are playing....except maybe the Steelers....
Colts vs Jaguars I guess the Jags were a popular pick for the Superbowl,tough starting 0-2 and needing a win in Indy to avoid 0-3,but they seem to have Indy's number.
Brown vs Ravens...who knows I just know it will be a Glorious day for Football!!!

Finally Congrats to the Tampa Rays for making their first ever playoffs.I just hope they can hold off the Bosox and win the east(sorry Scotty and Maggie)

This op-ed piece on Wall Street complicity is very good: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/19/AR2008091902808.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Good morning, all.

But just barely.

Wow, I hadn't thought about Joan Winston of Bjo Trimble in years. Decades, really.

Sad to see Joan warp on out; she did a lot for dorks, er, *folks* like me back in the day.

yello, glad you remembered "Quark," and no, I'm not going to look at the video preview of the DVD. I think it'll be better that way.

Mudge, please fax me some of that ceviche, man. I love a good one, and please don't spare the lime.

I made a big pot of chili this morning for Football Sunday, with ham and sausage and lots of garlic in there for good measure - smells great now, and will simmer for a good long while before kickoff.

I agree that Pitt vs. Philly is the game of the weekend, and can only hope that the Cardinals don't break Washington's heart in the last minutes as they usually do.

bc

I got nothin'. No newspaper today; neighbor stole it. Will retrieve now. My remote-control-holding device will be finished soon. Coozies, spray painted to obscure the obnoxious mal mots on sides, affixed to a pole, so all my 10 remote control devices, and calculator and phone, will have a home beside the coffee table, not scattered atop it. Photos de rigueur when done.

Jumper... you remind me of this--one of my very Onion articles of all time...

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39226

SCC: very *favorite* Onion articles...

Anybody know what kind of insect bite might produce a large (half-dollar-size) red welt/ring but with a white center (1/8-inch to 1/4-inch)?

Except for the white center that sounds like the classic 'bullseye' tick bite. Might want to have that checked out. You'd hate to lose a leg to Lyme disease.

Here's a link with a picture for those inclined to self-diagnose.

http://www.righthealth.com/Health/%3Cimg_Alt%3D%22Lyme_Disease%22_Src%3D%22_adam_graphics_tnail_19617t.jpg%22_Border%3D%220%22%3E%3C_img%3E%3Cbr%3E%3C_br%3ELyme_Disease_/-od-definition_adam_2_19617-s

Is this a first? The media chastises the media on "soft" interviews of the Palins.

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-onthemedia20-2008sep20,0,2749199.story

Maybe that isn't a rebuke as much as a "look at this."

Mudge, spiders, even wimpy ones, can raise a lump where the venom diesperses and your cells respond. Put ice on it. Then make a paste of meat tenderizer, smearing as needed.

Did your honey-doings of yesterday take you into the recesses of the garage or in the crawl space?

Yee-ha!

TBG, I think it's accurate to call that a very Onion article. Or maybe a very Onion-y article?

I've been avoiding work all day (dicking around, so to speak...snort!), so I decided to catch up on Charlie Brooker's rambles. Here's one that'll make some of you laugh. Others may be offended.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/15/beauty.fashion

Made me laugh, DNA Girl. Thanks!

TBG, for an extra giggle scroll through a few comments to the one from "spark"

Snort, DNA Girl...that's hilarious. Also BS. I know better than to ask Mr. T a question like that!

Howdy y'all. Mudge, I'd say spider bite. I'd be careful if I were you - if it is a fiddleback you'll need prompt medical attention. Icky things could happen.

Friday night I took the Boy to a birthday party and spent the evening at a bookstore waiting for him (vastly preferable to the unbelievable loudness of Laser Tag). Yesterday I did the week's shopping, took the Boy and a school friend back to the State Fair, then went to my thirtieth high school reunion. Today I've sung two services and will be going back in a couple of hours for a third. I want to go to work to rest.

Mudge, Ivansmom's post is the follow-up to mine. If you were in deep, dark crevices, you may need to thinking about the brown recluse spider. If the bite gets bad, especially if it pit-ulcers....get thee to the doc-in-a-box or ER. Two people on my street lot chucks-of-flesh to this spider that some do not think lives in MD.

Could also be lime disease.

DNAgirl, wow. What Miranda in The Tempest says is just about right:

"Brave new world that hath such people in it!"

I mean lyme disease. Lime disease might be another name for scurvy.

D@mn. Wish Gates had been SecDef in 2001 and 2002. Maybe we wouldn't be in such a mell of a hess.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/19/AR2008091903186.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Amy Tan, who is not without resources, went almost 10 years, I think, going from specialist to specialist, thinking she was going insane (delusional, weak, hallucinations), only to be finally told she had Lyme disease.

http://www.amytan.net/LymeDisease.aspx

Thank you all. Turns out to be a black-and-blue bruise. (Not on me, either; on my wife.)

Yes, I know all about lyme disease; a friend has/had it.

I see Slyness already linked to the Ignatius piece on Gates, and Ivansmom and CP see spider bite symptoms for Mudge (agree!), so now I got nothing-except a nose full of coffee from DNA Girl's link. Wish I'd seen that before Mr. F took off for St. Paul.

My daughter and I just got back from canvassing. We were assigned two apartment complexes. My legs are terribly shaky from climbing up and down and up and down all those steps. But, it was worth it. Handed out several voter registration forms and met Tim Kaine. My daughter should be on 6News at 11. She is thrilled!

DNA girl, that was VERY funny.

I did put a snort warning on my post :-)

Anyway, I moved on to more serious articles and this one almost made me cry...with hope. I have so much hope resting on this election, every peak and trough feels extra sharp.

On Obama's professorial days at UChicago:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/magazine/21obama-t.html?hp

Oh and here's a big imaginary hug for a bea c dot.

Plus today's sinfest:
http://www.sinfest.net/

And now to work!

So, this man who is "not ready to lead" has led all those lawyers, who may just one day be very influential people, to self-examine and be objective. Hmmm... Imagine that!

'McCain and the POW Cover-up
The "war hero" candidate buried information about POWs left behind in Vietnam' - By Sydney H. Schanberg

This seems very credible to me but I'd like to hear what other boodlers think about it. Length warning. The article, not pubes.

http://www.nationinstitute.org/p/schanberg09182008pt1
Sydney H. Schanberg wrote the book that inspired the movie "The Killing Fields."

It always struck me that even if only 3, 4, or 5 of our guys out of the entire group of Americans who served in Vietnam, somehow ended up as criminals who stayed ensconsed in the country as druggies, circumstantial mafiosi, i.e., creeps and traitors, etc. , the gvmt would still discourage anyone from finding out anything sordid relating to the matters. I assumed it was just a matter of finding out the number, and then adjusting my reality. No one wants to do that, and I have no compulsion to, either. I am fine with not knowing. I suppose our intelligence agencies need to know about those unrecoverable human casualties, and that their impulse to squelch such info is at least understandable. In other words, I figured sometimes poking too hard, in the face of government discouragement may be not a good idea. But you never know. Transparency turns up things unexpected. And how to run democracy otherwise than healthy levels of transparency? Trust alone? Often not advised.

Loomis asked, "Well, if people aren't buying Toyota Tundra trucks because of high fuel prices, what to do with the workers?"

I've heard that they're good with seal pup, on toast, with a Bearnaise sauce.

Speaking of recipes, if any of you are putting together a cookbook (and I know for a fact that some of you do so from time to time), I'd urge, nay, beg you to avoid (or at least further elucidate) instructions like the following, which I ran across in a recipe for Russian Dressing: "In a saucepan, cook sugar and water until it spins a thread..."

I know what this means, but I've been cooking & reading cookbooks for thirty+ years. Many beginning cooks might find that instruction a bit opaque and/or intimidating, I think.

Yeah, I'd assume you'd have to stir it while it cooks to see the thread form as well to avoid carmelizing or burning the sugar...

Such a minor detail to leave out...

Thanks for the links, DNA Girl and Boko. Each tells quite a bit about the character of the candidate it covers.

I guess I'm totally biased, but I'm sure not seeing a lot of positive stuff on McCain. I've even read that he can't fill all the seats at a rally without Palin.

Obama drew 18,000-20,000 to a rally this afternoon in Charlotte. I had a meeting, or I would have been there myself.

Jumper, think of the families-- it's 35 years and more, and those families still don't know exactly what happened to those POWs.

It's not about transparency. It's about a bunch of weasels putting their pride and political face above human decency.

"We chose not to negotiate with Vietnam for those prisoners."

They did choose to. If they had gone public THEN with the prisoners still in the hands of the Vietnamese before Congress had a chance to refuse to vote on the bill to Vietnam, maybe the war wouldn't have ended the way it did.

When I think how we launched two wars based on 3,000 civilians dead on US soil, I can see how this would have been political dynamite back then. We also abandoned a lot of war dogs in Vietnam.

(BTW, "Cracker, the best dog in Vietnam"-- is good reading, but I have a feeling the happy ending is entirely fictional.
http://www.amazon.com/Cracker-Best-Vietnam-Cynthia-Kadohata/dp/1416906371
).

Sadly, those who DID come back from Vietnam were also similarly abandoned by the government to their PTSD.

Even if they were bound not to say anything anyway, treating people like human beings that deserve to know about their loved ones does matter.

is anyone watching McCain on 60 Minutes???

Does excessive blinking mean you are telling lies? My eyes hurt from watching him blink.

a bea c, so nice to hear from you again, and I'm glad you and your daughter had a good time canvassing.

I won't be able to watch McCain - seems like every time I turn on the TV, there he is. Wish I could blink my eyes and have it be Nov 5...

a bea c.. how did folks take to your canvassing? Do you feel like it made a difference for anyone?

a bea c, it generally means the person is being questioned on a subject he's extremely uncomfortable with-- it's hitting too close to home, he's off guard.

The usual response in that situation is generally lying or manipulating the truth, yes. However, people can lie calmly if they have prepared it beforehand.

Generally, the republican presidental and vice-presidental candidates ALWAYS blink far more in debates than the Dems on average.

I'm watching 60 Minutes, too.

I don't know about blinking and lying, but McCain does blink a lot.

Consistently.

Oh, wait, he stopped when he made jokes about Hanoi being the place he'd lived longest.

On another note, a good day for both Washington and Baltimore NFL teams, both with solid home wins against decent teams.

And I was very glad to hear that the injured Baltimore player - Landry, I believe - has movement in his extremities and never lost consciousness. I still think about Kevin Everett, and grateful that he's recovering, even though he has a difficult road to travel for the rest of his life.

bc

God loves us so much more than we can imagine through Him that died for all,Jesus Christ.

Hello, friends. It is cloudy and so dreary here. It looks like rain, but no rain. It is slightly cool too, so much of a fall day without the sunshine. Alas, it is night. I'm still in the day zone.

Mudge, your dinner sounds, oh, so, delicious. I hope you and family enjoy the food, and the company. Sounds like a spider bite.

Slyness, I saw part of the speech on television. I tried to follow with the captioning, but that is difficult at times. I have to go with body language,but the crowd seemed to like what they were hearing.

My daughter's car put her down, now she's on mine. I hope it holds up. I don't mind her using mine, it's just got a lot of miles on it. I saw the g-girl today, and she spent Friday with me after school. I haven't heard from my grandsons, will call and see what happened to their plans.

My dad says McCain is desperate because he knows if he misses this chance to be President, he will not have another. I hope his desperation doesn't prompt him to do something really foolish and over the top. That is kind of scary to me. Of course, I startle easily, so I'll blame it on that.

Have a good evening, folks. I have a busy week coming up so might not be able to post at times, but will check in when I can. Keep me in your prayers, and I will do the same for you.

Almost forgot, JA, your statement on compassion was so on time, and so on the money. That is the way it should be, but so much of the time, compassion is rendered to those considered "worthy". Oh, if the world and its people were compassionate, would it not be a different place altogether? And yes, there will always be people that need our compassion and our care, and yes, that too is Scripture. Good heart, JA, good people.

Night, boodle. Sweet dreams.

TBG, I'm not sure.

We were told we need to identify the "strong McCain supporters" so the campaign will stop wasting money on them. I didn't find as many of those today as I did last time. The neighborhood was very friendly, and I even had people drive past us and ask if they could help. It felt wonderful, really.

But, making a difference? I'm not sure. I found only one undecided, and I think he claimed to be undecided because his small daughter was standing there watching us. I suspect he would have used some strong terms to drive me away from his doorstep. He refused to even touch the literature I was carrying.

It made a difference to my daughter. We canvassed a place very different from where we live. And we met people she would not see in her day-to-day surroundings. She wants to go back next week and knock on the doors we had to mark as "not at home."

It made a difference to a young woman unpacking boxes. She had just moved in and knew nothing about the area. We talked about grocery stores, pharmacies, and the quicker ways to downtown during the morning commute. But, she was a strong Obama supporter even before I knocked on her door.

Oy. Vay.

2 lawns mowed, 10 little doors made, 6 beers downed and 1 rambunctious Little Bean made sure any "rests" I took were "productive".

I'm pooped.

But it's a good pooped.

Time for couch potato mode -- and a much deserved beer #7.

Peace out...

One number I don't know is how many MIAs are still unaccounted for. That would be the upper limit of possible POWs. If you describe the current official position as there are no living US servicemen being held against their will, that leaves a lot of latitude for cover-ups and conspiracies. And you can't prove a negative.

And McCain's taped "confession" could be political dynamite.

yello, there's about 1,500 still unaccounted for.

Steve Martin just gave Tommy Smothers a special commemorative Emmy for writing for the Smothers Brothers Show.

I learned today that the little coffee shop that bravely (foolishly) set up business between two large coffee retailers gave up the ghost. I found no trace of them today, just completely vanilla empty space and a For Lease sign. Sadness.

Given the high retail rents in my town and the odd business ideas people try, most new ventures fail here. A friend favors the phrase "Inevitability Happens" over the cruder version.

Still, I need coffee (although I can quit drinking it anytime), so I went back to the retailer that less resembles McDonald's. Fortunately the clerk who knows me was not there today to say "So, you've come crawling back."

is insensate a word

my crackers are stale

Karma story coming at you tomorrow.

This is so much more cute to watch than mcCain. It gets more difficult about midway through, watch for some new special effects.

http://video.yahoo.com/network/100284668?v=3119151&l=3774747

Seems there's no feline love for Gov. Palin
http://www.nationalwatercooler.com/nationalwatercooler/NationalWaterCooler/Entries/2008/9/9_SARAH_PALIN_HATES_CATS!.html

I was happy to listen to my team win,DC covered eagles/steelers which was a good game.But I listened to the game on the radio on 2 stations,as crazy as that sounds.The game turned on 1 play,a big hit by Ray lewis caused an interception and shifted momentum.Then we just ran the ball and controlled the clock.

http://www.nfl.com/videos?videoId=09000d5d80afd6f8

Listening to The house of Blues radio hour with Ellwood as the host.Good stuff.....

SCC- scroll down on that 10:04 link, they get much better

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2008/09/22/080922sh_shouts_saunders?yrail

Good counterpoint, particularly the penultimate sentence in this article?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-ridley/rush-limbaugh-hates-mexic_b_127902.html

Discuss.

Anonymous, that's a keeper. Thanks for sharing.

Wilbrod-your link led me to Palinguage Volumes 1,2&3. All are keepers but I particularly liked this one:
SeanOcali says: If you’re 18, white, and get a 16 year old girl pregnant “life happens.”

If you’re 18, black, and impregnate a 16 year old girl, you’re a “registered sex offender.”

Here's the link to Volume 3, from there you can find 1 and 2:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-ridley/the-peoples-guide-to-the_b_126807.html

Florida Statutes on POW-MIA flags:

256.12 Display of POW-MIA flags.--On and after September 19, 1990, each state-owned building at which the flag of the United States is displayed must also display a POW-MIA flag, if such flag is available free of charge to the agency that occupies the building and if such display is in accordance with federal laws and regulations.

256.13 POW-MIA flag; display at rest areas.--The Florida Department of Transportation shall fly the POW-MIA flag year round at each of the rest areas along interstate highways in this state.

256.14 POW-MIA flag; display at state parks.--The Department of Environmental Protection shall purchase and display the POW-MIA flag year-round at each of the state parks where the flag of the United States is displayed.
________________
It's also illegal to mutilate Confederate flags. And illegal to use fireworks except to scare birds away from your crops. Lots of people have crops on July 4.

Joel keeps reportin' and writin':
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/21/AR2008092102534.html?hpid=topnews

Paul Krugman speaks infinite sense on the Paulson bailout:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/opinion/22krugman.html

In a nutshell? His advice to Congress: take a breath and take a little time to think. There's a better solution.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at the Telegraph, seemingly a fine journalist, is more optimistic than Krugman, but he seems to fail to understand that McCain can resort to populist nonsense (and maybe some attacks on the excessive power of the Ivies and their alumni) to win the election.

Krugman's good sense, and his ability to express it almost instantly, continues to astound me.

mostlylurking,
I suspect Joel's report from mortgageland will be widely discussed among those in politics. And acted on.

Goodmorning! This weekend was really nice. Perfect weather, Virginia's best.

Ms Lion and I decided on feeding the kids bacon-tomato sandwiches yesterday. We were out of bread so, as usual, Ms Lion took the older kids to the grocery store to get bread and whatever the kids could slip in the cart. I got the littlest one and we were tasked with picking out the finest tomatoes in the garden. This of course means that I kick back on the deck and sip tea while he goes and picks out the ripe tomatoes.

It only took him a few minutes before he came back with a whole shirtfull. He leaned across the table and carefully emptied his makeshift pouch of tomatoes on the table. "Wow dad!. There are too many to count!"

"Then can I have one right now?"

He answered "Sure dad, but they are gifts for mom. The tomatoes are nice because we can eat them, but you know the real gift is the memory of us working together in the garden."

It took a minute for that one to sink in. Yeah, the tomatoes are almost as good as the memories all right. It was a good harvest this year.

Mornin' everybody...

DandyLion... that story reminded me of a blackberry-stained t-shirt I had when I was about six years old. Who needs a bucket when you got a perfectly good basket covering your belly? The deal back then was us kids picked'em and Grandma turned'em into pie. A very good deal, btw. Grandma-made pies are the bestest.

Off to sawdust land for an early start... the Christmas Crunch is on and I'm as happy about it as a gnome is legally allowed to be.

Peace out...

Happy Monday, everybody.

I hope this is a better week than last, especially for the financial markets. Joel's story is on the mark, I'd say. It comes home to me: my sister-in-law grew up in Woodbridge, and her parents recently moved from there to the Manassas area.

We've had more than a couple of foreclosures in this neighborhood. I wonder what people were thinking. It just doesn't work to buy a house, spend loads to remodel/update it, and then try to sell it for a grossly inflated price.

Thanks for the MIA estimate, mudge. when I was there, the Vietnamese English language paper ran a lot of stories about negotiations to open up remote parts of the countryside for crews to search for remains. I have no idea how much of that was lip service. If I were the relative of one of those 1500 I would want to know what happened.

At a happy hour party down the street from my boss, the host was complaining that his neighbor has had his $700,000 house for sale all summer but made no arrangements for yardwork. By agreement, he started mowing the yard for the guy and is being stiffed for about $300 so far. At $40 bucks a mow, that is some petty cash management.

Morning all...

Printer ran out of toner, so we're off to a flying start. Off to the sink to return my hands to their normal appearance.

*slightly-delayed-so-as-to-avoid-casting-toner-far-and-wide Grover waves*

:-)

New link!
Very teeny tiny kit!

Mornin' all.

A busy day but important day today, I'll talk about it later.

bc

Here's a suggestion- scrap the friggin thing.