Sequester-Nation

If the US were the Titanic and Congress were its crew, the situation would be like this: the ship is headed straight at an iceberg but the crew can’t agree on how to avoid the iceberg. Half the crew wants to steer to the right and half the crew wants to steer to the left. They’re arguing, “Go right … go left … no, right … no, only left avoids disaster.” Meanwhile the ship is minutes away from running into the iceberg.

Once again, the US Congress can’t get its act together to pass a budget bill. Congressional Republicans blame Obama, of course, but Obama has nothing to do with the problem. It is the responsibility of Congress, of the House and the Senate, to pass a budget bill.

Here’s what is supposed to happen. The President sends a budget request to Congress. Congress debates the budget request, makes changes to it, and finally both the House and the Senate agree to the budget and send it to the President to be signed into law.

Here’s what actually happened. The President sent a budget to Congress in February, 2012, for fiscal year 2013 (October 2012—September 2013). Congressional Republicans and Democrats have been squabbling over the budget ever since. They can’t agree on what changes should be made to the budget, and so there is no budget for the President to sign. Meanwhile, Congress is funding the government through a “continuing resolution” called the Continuing Appropriations Resolution, 2013, which was passed in the House 329–91, passed in the Senate 62–30, and signed by President Obama on September 28, 2012. The continuing appropriations resolution expires March 28, 2013. At which point it starts all over.

LP

You’ve probably heard part of this song in a television commercial. After you hear it, it’s hard to get it out of your head. The name of the song is “Into the Wild” and it’s performed by LP. LP’s website is at www.iamlp.com.

Continuing Saga of the Roof Leak

The story up to this point:

Roofer re-shingles roof.
Roof leaks around north dormer.
Roofer tries quick fix.
Roof still leaks.
Roofer does major repair involving removing and replacing siding.
Roof leak is fixed.

Roofer leaves town. Eighteen months pass.

Roof leaks around south dormer.
New roofer tries quick fix with caulk.
Roof still leaks.
New roofer adds more caulk.
Roof still leaks.

But BONUS, it not only leaks where it leaked before; now there is a new leak. The new leak doesn’t drip; water simply runs the length of the rafter and into the insulation above the first floor ceiling.

Including the original, the house has had 4 roofs. None of them leaked until this one. None of them were installed by an all-Mexican crew in less than a day until this one. Could there be a connection? Hmm, I picture a conversation taking place in a small Mexican border town.

“When you get across the border, call my cousin Jesús. He’s a roofer, he’ll have a job for you.”

“But Pablo, I know nothing about roofing.”

“Don’t worry, Juan. My cousin will explain what you need to know. It’s called on-the-job training. The important thing is to work fast. The faster you work, the more roofs you do, and the more money you make. Don’t worry about being perfect.”

Yup, I’m pretty sure there was a conversation like that at some point in history.

Snow Moon

This is the night of the full Snow Moon. The February full moon is also called the full Snow Moon because the deepest snowfalls usually occur in February. Some Native Americans called it the Hunger Moon because deep snow makes hunting difficult.

<< This is not a snow moon. Unapologetically ripping off René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (This is not a pipe). And you’re thinking, “right, right, it’s a photo of a snow moon. We get it.”

Actually, it’s not even that. It’s a photo of the moon I took in March, 2011, and retouched to look like it might belong in the image of the treeline, so it’s a faux snow moon. I dropped the faux snow moon into an image I took last night. 

Because when you take a picture of an actual full moon over neighborhood trees, the photo looks like this…

Raining Fire

I ran across this video and thought it looked and sounded almost hypnotic. A solar flare erupts on the sun and follows magnetic field lines to create loops larger than the earth. As it cools, the superheated plasma rains down on the sun’s surface in a phenomenon known as coronal rain. The music is "Thunderbolt" by Lars Leonhard.

Best viewed full screen.

Local News

Last night I was working at my computer while a nearby television was powered on. Commercials were airing. I could hear the commercials but I wasn’t watching them. Suddenly one of those 5 second local news promos came on. This is what I heard:

“Her killer finally punished. Now this Henrico woman talks exclusively with us.”

I thought, “Whoa, are the local news people going to use a ouija board to conduct an interview?” Because I’m down with that. I hope it’s a glow-in-the-dark ouija board. That would be cool. I think holding a séance on the local news would be awesome. Talking with the recently deceased would be a lot more interesting than city council meetings. “How do you feel about being dead?” and “What do you think of your killer’s sentence?” would make great interview topics.

But then it occurred to me that the news promo may have been referring to two different women. Well heck, there’s nothing awesome about that. Still, I think I’m onto something.

Reverberations

One afternoon I was watching a TV show and a guest on the show described how he enjoyed scaring his little boy with practical jokes. He insisted it was just harmless fun. The show’s host, a doctor, told the man that what he was doing could be harmful, but the man didn’t believe him. I sadly shook my head. I wondered why a grown man would enjoy frightening children. I would have liked to have told that man a story. My story was about a little boy not too different from his little boy. I would have told my story something like this:

There was a boy. One day when he was 3 or 4 years old, his father told him to stand in front of the family’s radio. The old radio was as big as a jukebox. It had a powerful tube amplifier and a 15 inch speaker. The boy stood in front of the radio as he was told, and his father placed a record on a phonograph that sat atop the radio. A song began to play. The name of the song was The Wreck of the Old 97. The boy’s small size meant that he was standing directly in front of the 15 inch speaker, a foot or two away. At a point in the song, a train whistle blew. When the train whistle blew, his father turned the volume control up to maximum. The scream of the train whistle was deafening. In fright, the boy looked up at his father. He saw his father laughing heartily, as though it was the funniest thing he had ever seen. Years passed and the father never tired of telling anyone who would listen the story about the record and the train whistle and how he scared the wits out of his little boy. The story never failed to make him laugh. Life went on after that, but the scream of the locomotive’s whistle and the terror the boy had felt lay deep in the boy’s mind like a dark seed buried in fertile ground.

Years later, when the boy had grown into a young man, he was sitting one evening at a table with strangers in a large dining hall filled with many tables of strangers. After dinner, a person stood at a lectern and began to give a speech. Beside the young man, just a few feet away, was a large and powerful loudspeaker. It was the only loudspeaker for the entire room, so the volume of the sound coming from loudspeaker was very high. During the speech, a strange thing happened to the young man. He was struck with fear. This was not an ordinary fear, but a runaway fear that fed on itself, becoming greater and greater until it could grow no bigger. The room faded, the people around him at the table became silhouettes, he could hear nothing but his own racing, pounding heartbeat. He could think of nothing but fleeing the room, and it took every ounce of mental control to continue sitting at the table. He was sure he was dying or going insane. It was the most awful thing he had ever experienced.

After a few minutes, his racing heart slowed, the dimness faded, he could see his dinner companions once more, and he could hear sounds again. Normalcy seemed to have returned. Alas, this was not to be a one-time event. It would soon happen again, and again, and again. The young man didn’t know it at the time, but the event would happen hundreds of times, thousands of times, for decades to come. And though the young man knew it wasn’t real, and that it was just his mind bluffing itself, the intensity of the fear remained just as high and just as disabling as that first time. The young man went to psychiatrists, but they couldn’t help. He went to hypnotherapists, but they couldn’t help. He tried other therapies: progressive relaxation, systematic desensitization, alpha-wave biofeedback, meditation, and of course, pills. He went to great lengths to avoid the things he knew would provoke that primal fear. It always happened in the presence of others, so he avoided social situations whenever he could. He became a “loner” so that he could escape panic-producing situations faster without having to invent explanations and make apologies. But still, panic attacked him when he was driving, attacked him in restaurants, attacked him in the dentist’s chair. Panic attacked him whenever panic would be the most inconvenient thing that could possibly happen. He learned to not show he was under attack. It was his secret. No one could have understood, anyway.

If a prank played on him when he was 3 or 4 years old was the seed, his home life was the fertile ground that nourished the seed. Perhaps, if his early years had not been filled with anxiety, if he had not awakened in the night to find his mother pushing his bed across the room to block the bedroom door, only to see his father’s fist smash through the solid wooden door – if he hadn’t been awakened in the middle of the night (“shhh … your father is going to kill us”) and hustled off in the darkness to a hotel – if he hadn’t been witness to drunkenness and fighting virtually every day of his childhood until he felt his brain would explode – if he had not had to be invisible so many times – if every day had not been something to survive: then his life might have been different, and an early cruelty might not have made all the difference.

I wish I could go back in time and talk to that little boy. I want to explain things to him. I want to reassure him. I want to tell him to not be too afraid because, despite the cruelties to come, he will survive. But I can’t tell him that. He’s gone. He’s only a wisp of memory now.

I can’t talk to him but I can speak to adults with children. I would remind them that adults have years of psychological armor that young children don’t have. What seems like a harmless prank to an adult can, with a young child, reverberate down the years to reach fruition decades later. That fruition can take many forms: panic attacks for one person, drug addiction for another person, run-ins with the law for still another person. Every event shapes a life for good or for ill.

Before his life was over, my father confided to a close relative – who later told me – that had he known those many years ago the effects of his behavior, he would have behaved differently. So it would seem my father had regrets, though he never expressed them to me. I suppose he didn’t know how.

That’s the story I would have told the man on the TV show – the man who considers it fun to frighten his young child with harmless pranks.

Roof Leak Redux

People won’t listen to me. I once blogged about an experience I had with an electrician. You can read it here if you feel so inclined. (I think it’s a good blog post and definitely worth reading, but I’m biased.) In the blog post I describe how I saw an electrician doing something incorrectly and tried to warn him. He brushed aside my warning. “I’ve been doing this for twenty years!” he told me. After which he blew up my fuse box and came very close to being killed or maimed. Evidently he had been doing it wrong for twenty years and getting away with it, until he made the mistake of believing that wiring a home is no different from wiring a toaster.

Eighteen months ago I hired a roofer to re-shingle my roof. The first time it rained the roof leaked around a dormer. The roofer sent someone to fix it, and that person tried a “quick and easy” fix. The next time it rained the roof leaked again. This time the roofer made a proper fix, which involved removing siding from the dormer, adding shingles, and replacing the siding. It was more work, but the leak was fixed.

Recently a leak developed at another dormer (my roof has two). It’s just like the earlier leak. The only difference is the different dormer. But at least I know how to fix it.

The original roofer has moved to another city and I can’t contact him, but I located his uncle who is also a roofer. His uncle came to my house a few days ago to assess the situation. I wanted to tell him how the leak in the other dormer had been fixed. I wanted him to have the benefit of my experience with that dormer. He didn’t want to hear anything from me. “We know what we’re doing,” he assured me. He sent his helper to the roof with a caulking gun and the man put down a heavy bead of white caulk between the shingles and the siding. Then they put their ladder back on their truck and off they went. I was hopeful but not at all confident that the leak was fixed.

Today it’s raining and guess what ... the roof is leaking just as before. The only difference is that before the caulking was applied the water leaking in was as clear as tap water, and now the water is milky white.

So to sum up: I replaced a roof that wasn’t leaking with a roof that has leaked twice and has required 3 repair attempts and is still leaking.

I have a ladder and a caulking gun, and I have no doubt I can install a roof that leaks. Does that qualify me to be a roofer? Why yes, apparently it does.

The Watch

I remember a little boy. When he was three years old his only possession, other than the clothes he wore, was a Mickey Mouse watch, and he loved that watch. One night his father admonished him about something and it ended with a threat, “… or I’ll take your watch away from you.” The man used that threat because he knew how much the little boy loved his watch. But the boy, even at the age of three, would not be intimidated, so he replied, “I don’t care.” Then the man took the watch off the little boy’s wrist and placed it on the fireplace hearth and stomped it to pieces.

It’s odd what memories wash down the stream of time. What was the man’s admonition all about? Who knows – probably something unimportant. On the other hand, the sight of a cheap but beloved possession being destroyed would turn out to be impossible to forget. It was a demonstration of rage and cruelty that, at the time, probably meant nothing to the man. It was also the beginning of a divide that would only become wider as the years passed, until eventually it would be a divide that neither father nor son could reach across.

Puzzle

I saw this puzzle on the Web:

Simple test? More like ambiguous test.

You can compute the answer in your head. But let’s enter the numbers and operations into a calculator. The result of each operation is shown in square brackets:

So “D”, 56, is the correct answer. Or is it? The fact that the number 56 is so easily obtained tells us that it can’t be the complete answer. If it were, then everyone would solve the puzzle in seconds.

Let’s treat the numbers and math operations as a line of computer code. After lines of computer code are created (coded) by a programmer, a software tool called a compiler converts the typed code into an executable program. Compilers prioritize multiplication and division over addition and subtraction. Higher priority operations are calculated first. If we enclose the higher priority (multiplication and division) operations in parentheses and perform those operations first, we are doing what the compiler does:

So “C”, 50, is a correct answer. But wait. A compiler gives priority to multiplication and division, but that doesn’t mean we have to do the same. We can choose to give priority to addition and subtraction. If we do, we will get:

So “A”, 0, is also a correct answer.

We know answers A, C, and D can be obtained from the formula. It is reasonable at this point to suspect all the answers are correct. What about answer B? Do you see any way to solve the formula for a result of 8? If you want to try, go ahead. I’ll hide the solution below the break while you think about it.

Give the Guy a Break

We need to give Oscar Pistorius a break. The South African Olympic Champion accused of shooting his model girlfriend says he thought he was shooting a burglar. Folks, that’s an easy mistake to make in South Africa. As we all know from watching the National Geographic channel, pretty much all South African burglars resemble hot, blonde models. It’s a fact. And the first thing a South African burglar will do after breaking and entering is go to the bathroom and lock the door.

That explanation does sound a little balmy – a lot balmy, even. Let me start over. Imagine you’re sleeping in a dark room. You awaken and hear noises coming from the bathroom. You realize there are two possibilities. One, your partner is using the bathroom. Two, an intruder has scaled the wall of your gated community, placed a ladder to the window of your bathroom, climbed up and entered the bathroom, then locked the door and is using the potty. You find the latter explanation so compelling that you don’t even bother sliding your arm over to see if your partner is still in bed.

At this point you have two courses of action. One, you get up, knock on the bathroom door, and ask, “Honey, are you in there? Are you okay?” Two, you get up, grab your pistol, go to the bathroom, and begin firing shots through the door, aiming to hit anyone using the potty.

When I put it that way, it doesn’t sound any better. Let me try this from a different angle.

Pistorius’ defense team says he is innocent of intentionally murdering his girlfriend. They say what he meant to do was intentionally murder an intruder using the john.

I’m explaining this all wrong. Let’s skip that part.

Police say they found .38 caliber ammunition in Pistorius’ home. That would be illegal as Pistorius isn’t licensed to own a .38 caliber firearm. Pistorius says the ammo isn’t his. So there. (I wonder if that excuse would work if police detectives found weed in my kitchen cabinet. Me: “Hey, it’s not mine.” Detective: “Oh. Well then, never mind.”)

Police say they found hypodermic needles and two boxes of testosterone in Pistorius’ home. Pistorius’ lawyer says, “Oh that! That’s not testosterone. That’s, uh, a healthy herbal remedy.” Or words to that effect. I don’t know about you, but I find it completely reasonable that after eating a hearty breakfast – perhaps Wheaties, the Breakfast of Champions – Pistorius would take his morning health supplement by sticking a syringe in his ass.

Oy. I’m still explaining this wrong.

All we know for sure is that a beautiful, young woman is dead and apparently it’s no one’s fault.

Well, maybe it’s her fault. After all, she is the one who got up to use the lavatory without telling her boyfriend, “Honey, I’m going to the bathroom; please don’t shoot me while I’m gone.”

By the River

Yesterday was nice: sunny and warm. The afternoon temperature was about 44° F when I drove to a small spot on the river where the waterfowl congregate. I know 44° may not sound warm to some, but compared to the early morning temperature of 14° it was almost balmy.

I used my $99 point-and-shoot camera in video mode. Hence, the quality isn’t great. The day was breezy, as you can hear on the audio track. If you listen carefully you can, at times, hear sounds of the city. This spot is a restful, hidden place inside the city. I encountered three other people there: an older couple visiting for the first time, and a young man and his dog. Like me, he had come there for the quiet, and I left him to his solitude as I walked down to the river bank.

If this were summer, there would have been a few fishermen beside the river. On this day there were none. Soon the others left and I was alone. The little spot on the river was now accompanied only by ducks, geese, seagulls, sunshine and wind, and me.

Caveat Lector

There’s a Republican state senator in Idaho named John Goedde who wants Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged to be required reading in Idaho high schools. In fact, he has introduced legislation to require it. He said reading the book made his son a Republican.

I read Atlas Shrugged many years ago. It was a good book and I enjoyed reading it. But it was a novel, not a true story. It was made-up out of Ayn Rand’s brain. Every character, every event, every detail was fictional. Nothing in the book was real. There is nothing wrong with being a Republican, but the decision to be a Republican, or a Democrat, or a conservative, or a liberal, should rest upon something more solid than a novelist’s imagination.

I cannot imagine myself reading a novel and then putting down the book and deciding that, because of the imaginary story I just read, I’m going to be a Republican, or a Democrat, or a Christian, or a Muslim, or a Nazi, or a jihadist. I try to base my decisions on reality and facts, not on another person’s imagined version of reality.

The fact that Senator Goedde thinks reading this novel will sway young minds a certain way tells you that he thinks the book is effective propaganda. And in fact, Ayn Rand had an agenda when she wrote Atlas Shrugged and her prior novel, The Fountainhead. Her agenda was to promote her philosophy of Objectivism and her own ideas of laissez-faire capitalism and small government. There’s nothing wrong with promoting one’s ideas in a book, but let the reader beware: enjoy the book; don’t adopt its ideas, whatever they may be, uncritically.

I’ve read many books that might influence young minds. One is Paul de Kruif’s book Microbe Hunters, published in 1926. The book chronicles how early scientists tracked down the causes of major infectious diseases and discovered how to prevent and cure them. The book is inspirational and I am sure it has influenced many young people to enter careers in science and medicine. But Microbe Hunters espoused no philosophy. It was about real people and real events and how they made the world a better place.

If a work of fiction changes a person’s identity, or influences someone to a particular course of action, then I would say that person’s education system has failed him. We must operate with eyes wide open, using critical thinking and real-world logic, or we run the danger of operating in a fictional world with rules that apply only to the fiction in our heads. And we won’t even know it. Caveat lector.

The Acceleration Factor

There is another of those “my car accelerated out of control” stories that seem to become fashionable from time to time. On the Guardian website is a story about about a Frenchman named Frank Lecerf who could not slow his car, a Renault Laguna. The gas pedal seemed to become jammed at about 60 mph. According to the Guardian story, every time Frank applied the brake the car went faster. Eventually he was going 125 mph. Police drove interference for him, clearing other cars out of the way and calling ahead to have toll stations raise their barriers for him. He drove at high speed for over 125 miles into Belgium before running out of gas, at which point he “crashed into a ditch.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve read about automobiles accelerating out of control while their helpless drivers call 911. When I read about a runaway automobile, what I wonder is this: do none of these cars have ignition switches? Do none of these cars have clutches? Do none of these cars have automatic transmissions with a Neutral position on the shift lever? Do none of these cars have power brakes?

One of my college-days cars was a 1960 Plymouth. One day I decided to overhaul the carburetor. I bought a carb rebuild kit and carb cleaner. I took the carburetor apart, cleaned it, and replaced some of its parts with parts from the rebuild kit. When I was installing the newly cleaned carburetor onto the intake manifold, I had to choose whether to use the old carb-to-manifold gasket which was quite thick, or the much thinner gasket that came with the kit. I decided to use the new gasket. As things turned out, that was a bad choice, as the reason for the extra-thick gasket was to prevent the accelerator linkage at the carburetor from getting jammed against the intake manifold.

I took the Plymouth to a lightly-traveled industrial road to test the engine performance. I put the gas pedal to the floorboard, the Plymouth’s engine roared, and the car flew down the road ... fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty miles per hour. I removed my foot from the gas pedal and the pedal remained glued to the floor. The accelerator linkage was jammed. I reached for the ignition key and turned the key to OFF. Immediately there was a loud “BANG!” It was like a backfire but louder. I braked and steered the Plymouth to the shoulder. I got out and walked around the Plymouth, inspecting it. I knelt down and looked under the car. The muffler had exploded, and the inside parts of the muffler, looking like tin cans with dozens of small holes drilled through, were hanging out of the split-open muffler. I had to buy a muffler, but stopping the car was easy enough.

Later, I had an experience with a 1974 Chevy van. While driving at about 60 mph, I took my foot off the gas and the Chevy didn’t decelerate. The linkage to the gas pedal had become entangled in vacuum lines around the carburetor. I easily slowed the Chevy using its power brakes, pulled onto the road’s shoulder, and stopped. I switched off the racing engine and put the vehicle into Park. I got out and raised the hood and found the problem right away. Although I routed the vacuum lines away from the accelerator linkage as best as I could, I experienced the problem again. And as before, stopping the van by using its brakes was easy enough to do.

I have a friend whose car accelerated out of control. She braked but the car went faster. She drove through front yards and hedges, over patio tables and lawn chairs, until finally she looked down and saw that her foot was on the gas pedal. Anytime someone says, “Every time I applied the brake, the car went faster,” you know they had their foot on the gas.

At the end of Frank Lecerf’s story he says when the car finally ran out of gas in Belgium, he crashed into a ditch. What? He drives 125 miles at speeds up to 125 mph without hitting anything and when his car runs out of gas and is coasting to a stop, he “crashes into a ditch.” Really? Something is very fishy here.

Horses, on the other hand, are a different matter. I can tell you from personal experience, they really can, and do, suddenly and unexpectedly accelerate out of control. Or stop when you want them to go. They have no seatbelts, they have no airbags, they have hard seats, no emergency brake, and people ride those dangerous things and call it fun! Give me internal combustion any day.

Tugboats

I am watching cable news as it shows the disabled Carnival Triumph cruise liner being towed to port in Mobile, Alabama. Four tugs work to tow the liner to port as ocean currents and wind combine to push the liner off course. One large tugboat tows the liner with a hawser attached to the liner’s bow while other tugboats push against the side of the liner to offset current and wind. The force vectors produced by the forward tugboat, the side tugboats, the current, and the wind blowing against the 893 feet long, 14 story tall liner must combine to produce a composite force that points in the direction of port.

Tugboats are cool. They’re the 4-wheel drive vehicles of the ocean. They’re small but have powerful engines. Tugboat engines are often the same as those used in railroad locomotives. The propeller is driven mechanically rather than by converting the engine output to power electric motors as is done with diesel-electric locomotives. The pulling power of a boat is called it’s “bollard pull” and for tugboats it is measured in tons.

The coolest tugboats are seagoing tugs such as those used by maritime salvage companies. Deep sea salvage tugs must be able traverse thousands of miles of open sea, locate a ship in distress in the midst of a hurricane, hook up to it, and tow it to safety through mountainous waves and treacherous gales. As I watch the Carnival Triumph being towed toward land, I am reminded of a book I read long ago.

One of the most interesting and compelling books I’ve read is the non-fiction book titled The Grey Seas Under by famed Canadian writer Farley Mowat. The book follows the legendary Atlantic salvage tug Foundation Franklin through many daring rescues in the North Atlantic during the Great Depression and World War II. The book concludes with Franklin’s final voyage, during which the tug was battered and severely damaged while attempting to tow the Motor Ship Arosa through a North Atlantic hurricane. The book, first published in 1958 and still in print, is a gripping saga of the sea.

Farley Mowat is a master storyteller, and for those who read The Grey Seas Under and want more deep-sea drama, more is available. Foundation Franklin had a sister tug named Foundation Josephine. In 1961, Farley Mowat released a book about Foundation Josephine called The Serpent’s Coil. Reading either book will drop you into an entirely different world.

The Roof, Again

When I moved into my house, the roof was leaking in several places. I called a roofer and he fixed the leaks in the roof. Time passed and every time the wind blew hard the roof lost one or two shingles. Replacement shingles didn’t match the color of the old shingles, which was unsightly, and the roof grew more unsightly as a black fungus grew on the shingles. I had the fungus removed with chlorine bleach but it grew back quickly. In the spring of 2011, I decided to re-shingle the roof rather than wait for it to leak and damage a ceiling inside.

My house has two dormers on the front. A few days after the roof was re-shingled, rainwater got through the roof where a wall of a dormer intersects the roof. I found the leak before it damaged the ceiling below and called the roofer. He sent an employee to work on the roof. The next time it rained, the roof leaked again. I called the roofer again. The roofer came to the house and examined the situation, and sent an employee to work on the roof again. This time the leak was fixed. That was 18 months ago.

Yesterday morning, I walked into my living room and saw water stains on the ceiling. The problem was the same as before: rainwater got through the roof where a wall of a dormer intersects the roof, only this time it is the other dormer that is leaking. The irony is that the roof wasn’t leaking prior to being re-shingled.

As before, I called the roofing company. This time I got that “doo-dah-dee” tone from the phone company and a recorded message, “This number is no longer in service.” I still had the roofer’s cell number and I called it. It was no longer the roofer’s number.

Doo-dah-dee, “You’ve been screwed.” 

If I find that roofer, I intend to tell him to stick to some manner of work he’s good at, because he sucks at roofing.

It Works Like This

One day my mom died in the hospital. She had Medicare and the hospital billed Medicare. Medicare paid their share of the bill. I knew that mom’s Medi-gap policy, which I had found in her house, would take care of the rest.

A few weeks went by and a woman from the hospital’s billing office called me and asked if mom had a Medi-gap policy. I told her, “Yes.”

I got the policy out and gave her the name of the insurance company, the policy number, and the name and phone number of the contact person at the insurance company’s office. She thanked me and hung up.

A few weeks went by and a woman from the hospital’s billing office called me and asked if mom had a Medi-gap policy. I told her “Yes.” I got the policy out, again, and I gave her the name of the insurance company, the policy number, and the name and phone number of the contact person at the insurance company’s office, again. She thanked me and hung up.

A few weeks went by and a woman from the hospital’s billing office called me and asked if mom had a Medi-gap policy. I told her, “No.”

They didn’t call again.

What’s Real?

Everything in this video is CGI. Not just the ships but the sky, clouds, sun, scenery, car – everything is computer generated imagery. The video was created by professional animator Aristomenis “Meni” Tsirbas, who worked on Hellboy, Titanic, and Star Trek. He worked with students from the Gnomon School of Visual Effects to create the video.

There’s an old adage: Don’t believe anything you read and only half of what you see. That adage has never been more relevant than in today’s world.

Mobile Device? Watch here.

Beatles

One day in the 1950s, my dad bought a reel-to-reel tape recorder. It was as big and heavy as a suitcase full of bricks, but it was a marvel of its time. One afternoon in January, 1964, I was using it to record music off the radio. I would record a song and at the end, if I didn’t like the song, I would rewind the tape and record the next song over it.

A song came on the radio, recorded by a group called the Beatles. I had never heard of the band; their music had been released in the US only a month earlier. I hadn’t heard this song, a tune called “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” When it ended, I wasn’t sure I liked it. I rewound the tape to record over it. But there was something different about that song. I decided to listen to it again. I pushed the Play button, and as it played I thought, “That’s not bad.”  When the song ended for the second time I thought, “This song is a keeper.”

Soon, the Beatles were all over AM radio. I could tune from radio station to radio station and hear a different Beatles song playing on every station. I was amazed at how many hits they were cranking out. But more than that, the Beatles evolved and their music evolved.

If you listen to pop music before the Beatles and then listen to pop music after the Beatles, there is no comparison. Before the Beatles, much of pop was just bubble gum. There were exceptions: black rockers who couldn’t get mainstream airtime, blues, folk, and jazz musicians. Singers like Elvis, bands like The Beach Boys and folk-rockers like Peter Paul and Mary were recording good music, but R’N’R was still saddled with past hits such as “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose It’s Flavor On the Bedpost Overnight?”, and “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini”, and “The Purple People Eater.”  The Beatles blasted that bubble gum music off the landscape for good. They initiated an era of R’N’R that was more innovative, complex, creative, and distinctive.

Words alone can’t convey the impact the Beatles had on music and our culture. It’s an overused phrase, but true: you had to be there.

Automobiles

What can I write about automobiles?

I could write about my first car – a 1958 Fiat Sedan that got me to a local college and back home every day during my freshman year. Except – I’ve already blogged about that car, and IMHO it was a pretty good post. It was called The Fiat. Find it here.

So I will write about my second car, a 1955 Chevrolet. It got me to a college in Richmond every week during my sophomore year and back home every weekend. The body had black paint, and it taught me never to buy a car with black paint again. Nothing shows dirt like black auto paint.

One cold, winter day Richmond got 13 inches of snow. The plow came by and buried my car. It took me a long time to dig the Chevy out of the snow. Two days later, the city got 12 inches of snow and the plow buried my car again.

The Chevy had an inline six cylinder engine. An internal oil passage was stopped up, and someone had added a length of copper tubing to bypass it. The copper tubing ran over the top of the engine, a few inches above the valve cover, connecting an oil port on one side of the engine to one on the other side. Driving home from work one day, the copper tubing broke – metal fatigue, I suppose. Oil pressure dropped to zero and the oil warning light came on. I stopped, got out of the car, and raised the hood. Oil spurted from the broken tubing, spraying oil over the windshield and across the roof of the car which, of course, was painted white.

The engine ran well but it was worn out. It burned a quart of motor oil every 20 miles. Cylinder compression was so low the Chevy could roll down a hill while parked in first gear with the engine off. The problem was not worn piston rings. The problem was a “soft block” with worn cylinders. During one summer I drove from my home in Virginia to my job in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and sometimes back home for the weekend. I always carried a few gallons of motor oil in the trunk. Not a few quarts; a few gallons. After I drove about a hundred miles or so, the oil light would come on and I would immediately stop the car on the shoulder of the road and raise the hood. I would get a large container of motor oil from the trunk and fill the engine crankcase.  At first I was careful to fill the crankcase to the FULL mark on the dipstick. After a while, I no longer cared about accuracy. I just poured in what seemed like a gallon of motor oil and put the filler cap back on. Then I had to wait a little while because the engine was so hot the starter couldn’t crank it. After that, the car was good for another hundred or so miles.

That same summer I worked in Maryland for a while. I drove to work every Monday morning and drove to my parents’ home every Friday afternoon. I was earning tuition money so, to save every dollar I could, I lived in a room with no electricity, no lights, and no hot water. (I wrote about it here.) I had to stay there during the week, but I was not about to stay there on a weekend when a house with electricity and hot water was a mere 140 miles away. So every Friday afternoon I left work and headed for the D.C. Beltway.

There was a very long on-ramp to the Beltway and on Friday afternoons the Beltway was crowded with traffic – even in 1966 – making it difficult for cars to enter. I always spent 20 to 30 minutes creeping along the on-ramp. When cars ahead of me stopped, I stopped. Every few minutes, cars ahead of me would move forward by one car length and I would move the Chevy ahead by the same amount. But a few minutes of idling had caused a buildup of oil somewhere in the engine. When I gave the engine gas, thick blue smoke poured from the tailpipe for a few seconds. Looking In the rearview mirror, I was unable to see through the dense cloud of smoke. It slowly drifted away and the cars behind me reappeared. They were far behind me. No one dared get close to my car. It was embarrassing to drive a car that produced its own smokescreen, but overhauling the engine was an expensive job and I needed every dollar.

Eventually, I reached the Beltway and headed to I-95 South, where I got in the left lane and stayed. I wasn’t afraid to give the engine gas. For the next ninety miles I passed every vehicle on the road: cars, trucks, buses. Yes, I was driving too fast – to be honest, everyone was driving too fast. The Chevy was worn out and burned oil like crazy but, when I asked, the old car could still fly like the wind.

Planes

My first job out of college required me to travel by plane. Most of the time I flew on Douglas DC-9s (later called McDonnell-Douglas) and Boeing 727s. In 1970, the Boeing 747 was introduced. I remember the first time I walked on board a 747. It was huge!

Over time, airliners evolve and different series and sub-variants of the plane are produced. If what I describe is different from your experience, it may be that we flew on different variants.

The jets I usually flew on had a single aisle down the center of the plane. A DC-9 had two seats on one side of the aisle and three seats on the other side. Some DC-9s had a first class section with two seats on each side of the aisle.

A 727 had a first class section with two seats on each side of the aisle and a coach section with 3 seats on each side of the aisle.

The 747s had 3 classes of seating: first, business, and economy. Two seating aisles ran the length of the plane. In economy class where I usually sat, each row of seats had four seats in the center, an aisle on each side, and three more seats between each aisle and window, for a total of 10 seats per row. If economy class was sold out, my employer allowed me to bump my seat up to business class. The seats in business class were wider, farther apart, and more comfortable. The center row held 3 seats, and there were only two seats between each aisle and window, for a total of 7 seats per row. This was before Congress deregulated the airlines, and I never flew on a 747 that was crowded. In fact, I flew on 747s that were almost empty. It boggles my mind that I could fly three thousand miles across the country on an airplane that held between 400 and 500 seats but carried only two or three dozen passengers.

I once flew to Los Angeles to spend three weeks at the McDonnell-Douglas facility in Huntington Beach (they were in the process of moving to Long Beach – now both plants are closed). I was a design engineer for the Sprint missile guidance system. M-D had a problem with the missile’s wiring. When squibs were fired, the detonator current created transient voltage spikes on adjacent wiring. A bunch of engineers were working on the problem and I was one of them. I was just thinking about that trip and I wondered if I had flown to M-D on one of their jets. Aside from that small irony, I got my first close-up look at a Sprint missile on that trip.

Sometimes I had to get off a jet and finish the trip on a commuter plane like the de Havilland Twin Otter (18 seats in 9 rows) or the Beechcraft 99 (12 seats in 6 rows). The commuter planes (I have a friend who calls them “buzz bombers”) flew low and slow so passengers had a good view of the terrain below them. Video: Watch a Twin Otter land. Set the video to HD and Full Screen and you’re almost on the plane.

When I was a kid, my father and my brother and I would go to a local airport and pay a pilot to take us on a 10 minute joyride over the city. I enjoyed flying and wanted to be a pilot. I subscribed to Flying magazine. My favorite column was called “I Learned About Flying From That.” Every month a pilot wrote about a flying mistake that almost killed him and what he had learned from it. At one point in time I took flying lessons, but other issues cropped up and I never completed the lessons. (I did learn a few things, like taking off is easier than landing, and never run the flaps up until after the engine has been started.)

But if ever there was a time to enjoy flying, it was that era. No airport screening. Comfortable seats. Amenities like meals, snacks, soft drinks, and mini-bottles of liquor to enhance your soft drink, if you wanted your drink to be a real drink. Want to take a nap? The flight attendant would bring you a pillow and blanket. Now, flying is much cheaper but passengers are packed like sardines and every convenience costs extra.

Have luggage? Extra.
Need water? Extra.
Seat to sit on, air to breathe? Extra and extra.

Soon passengers will be standing and hanging onto straps like subway riders.

Trains

The year is 1955. I’m a youngster. I’m about to travel from Virginia to Florida by train. I stand on the station platform awaiting the arrival of Seaboard Air Line’s Silver Meteor. It roars into the station with such speed that I don’t see how it can stop in time, but it does. The sound of the engine, the smell of the diesel exhaust, the anticipation I feel as I step onto the train, the little button I press to get ice water, the design of the metal plates that cover the couplers between passenger cars: everything is new and different and is impressed upon my memory. The passenger cars are fairly quiet on the inside when the train is underway. But sometimes I open the door at the end of the car and step through to the next car. Momentarily I am outside of the passenger car and in the open space between cars. Steel wheels roar against steel tracks. Warm air gusts past my face carrying diesel fumes from the engine ahead.

When I was a kid, travel by train was almost a treat. Sometimes interesting things happened. Interesting to me, that is, but annoying to adults who only wanted to get to their destination. For example, once the train broke into two parts when one of the couplers somehow uncoupled. I was in the half of the train that had the engine. We backed up a long way to hook up with the missing half of the train.

Flash forward and the year is 1975. I’m riding Amtrak’s Mountaineer to Christiansburg, Virginia. It follows the route of Norfolk and Western’s Pocahontas up a long, gentle grade from the coastal city of Norfolk into the mountains of southwestern Virginia on its way to Cincinnati and Chicago. There is a dome car and I settle into one of its seats. The dome car is so called because it has a glass dome in the roof from which passengers can see in all directions around the train. I relax in my seat and watch the countryside pass by. The hours pass quickly. Soon the Mountaineer is at the small Christiansburg station and I detrain.

There was a time when trains were the civilized way to travel. A dining car (or diner) is like a full-service restaurant. You can order meals and drinks. Some trains have a lounge car (or club car) with large windows and comfortable seats. Lounge cars often have a small kitchen where a meal can be prepared to order. Some lounge cars only have a grill (grill car or café car) where you can order items like club sandwiches, burgers, and pizza.

Now everyone wants to fly and “get there” fast. If train travel were a novel, air travel is the Cliffs Notes version of that novel. I ask, “Where’s the fun?”

Odds and Ends

Today I’m posting random things, odds and ends, flotsam and jetsam, that have been collecting in my drafts folder and in the back of my mind.

Riddle

There’s a thing in a box. Sometimes it spins fast, sometimes it spins slowly, and sometimes it doesn’t spin at all. It spins while the organ music plays. When the music stops, the thing in a box doesn’t need to spin. What is this thing in a box called?

Beliefs

In America, marijuana is illegal because it is believed to be addictive.

In China, videogame consoles are illegal because they are believed to be addictive.

In Korea, it is believed that running a fan in a room will use up all the oxygen. No Korean will run a fan in a room without opening a window.

Treats

In Cambodia, a favorite delicacy is deep fried tarantula.

In China, a favorite delicacy is pickled jellyfish. I’ve eaten pickled jellyfish.

In parts of the southern US, a favorite delicacy is pickled pigs feet. I’ve eaten pickled pigs feet. It tastes much better than pickled jellyfish.

Earth

Some people believe the Earth is hollow with openings at the poles. We live on the outside, while UFOs originate from a civilization living on the inside.

Some people believe the Earth is hollow and we’re living on the inside.

Some people believe the Earth is flat. They say if it was round, we would slide off.

I Would Ride With You …

“Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the disheveled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.”

– William Butler Yeats, "The Land of Heart's Desire"

Quotations

“We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.” – François de La Rochefoucauld

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” – Mahatma Gandhi

“Children and animals have a hard time in this world.” – my mother

One Is The Loneliest Number …

So says the song written by Harry Nilsson and made famous by Three Dog Night. Nilsson wrote the song after calling someone and getting a busy signal. He stayed on the line listening to the “beep … beep … beep” tone as he wrote the song. Suppose instead of a busy signal, he had gotten voicemail.

Political Definitions

Politicize: the art of blaming everything on the other party, especially the problems created by your party.

ObamaCare: a derisive term for a health care law written by Congress, passed by both houses of Congress, and signed by President Obama.

Medicaid: a government program that provides a way for unethical doctors to become millionaires.

Real Americans: a political code-phrase for the population that remains after removing racial minorities, immigrants, Muslims, gays, and intellectuals.

Timing

On October 19, 2012, Lebanese Tourism Minister Fadi Abboud announced that he wanted to sue the producers of the US drama “Homeland” because, he claimed, it wrongly depicted Beirut as a dangerous city that harbored terrorists. He also demanded an apology from the show’s producers.

On October 20, 2012 (the next day), a car-bomb explosion in Beirut killed at least eight people and injured an estimated 80 people.

Answer To The Riddle

What is the thing in a box that spins when the organ music plays?

The first time I watched Grace Potter play the Hammond B3 organ, I wondered “what the heck is that weird looking thing spinning in that box behind her?” It was a Leslie Speaker. Also known as the Leslie Rotary Speaker System, it is used to render a vibrato effect to the organ’s sound.

Listen (looking down on the treble speaker):

A 4 minute history of the Leslie speaker:

That’s all the odds and ends I have for today.

Super Bowl XLVII

It’s Super Bowl Sunday again. Yes, I’ll be watching. No, I don’t have a favorite team in this game (“my” team didn’t make it), but I will choose to root for the Baltimore Ravens. San Francisco has already won 5 Super Bowls to Baltimore’s one win. Baltimore is the underdog. And, Baltimore is an east coast team and I live on the east coast. It seems to add up to as good a reason to root for the Ravens as any.

Reading and Writing

I’ve already blogged about how much I loved to read when I was a schoolboy. I read a lot of classics:  Homer’s Odyssey, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Little Men, Jack London’s White Fang and Call of the Wild, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamozov to name a few. I read “modern classics” like Nevil Shute’s On the Beach and Trustee from the Toolroom, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I suspect most people don’t read a lot today. It’s too easy to sit in front of the TV and have what passes for entertainment shoveled into your brain. Like fast food, it may be schlock but it’s convenient. And that’s too bad. People who don’t read are no better off than people who can’t read.

Anniversary

It has been 10 years to the day that the space shuttle Columbia was destroyed over Texas while returning to Earth. During the flight into orbit, a piece of foam insulation broke from the main fuel tank and put a hole in the heat shield on the leading edge of the shuttle’s left wing. From that point on, Columbia’s astronauts were doomed but didn’t know it. On the descent from orbit, the hole in the wing allowed atmosphere heated to plasma temperatures to enter the wing and cause further damage. The hot plasma heated the inside surfaces of the wing causing heat shield tiles on the wing to de-bond. Eventually the left wing failed. During this process the damaged wing produced drag which forced the shuttle’s nose to the left. Thrusters fired to compensate for the drag and force the nose back in line with the shuttle’s flight path. When the drag from the damaged left wing became too great, the thrusters could no longer compensate and the shuttle began to spin. At Mach 18, aerodynamic forces then broke it up. Until this point in time, the crew were alive and trying to save Columbia. According to the accident report:

“We have evidence from some of the switch positions that the crew was trying very hard to regain control. We're talking about a very brief time in a crisis situation.

"This report confirms that although the valiant Columbia crew tried every possible way to maintain control of their vehicle, the accident was not ultimately survivable."

Depressurization rendered the crew unconscious within seconds. The breakup of the crew module was so violent that the upper seatbelts were broken.

"As a result, the unconscious or deceased crew was exposed to cyclical rotational motion while restrained only at the lower body. Crew helmets do not conform to the head. Consequently, lethal trauma occurred to the unconscious or deceased crew due to the lack of upper body support and restraint."

Ultimately, approximately 84,000 pieces of of debris weighing roughly 85,000 pounds (38% of the orbiter’s dry weight) were recovered.  Included in the debris was a can of round worms from a science experiment on board Columbia. The worms survived their fall to Earth.