Travels with Gunther and Kara

We’ve been getting increasingly antsy the past couple of weeks…and I can now tell ya that me and Kara…not to mention Neil and Connie…are ready to be back on the road. That means we’ve got our split between traveling and sitting here in our Winter HQ just about right I think.

You probably saw on the news yesterday about the fire in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris…looking at the footage on CNN yesterday we didn’t think there would be anything left of the inside and we were figuring better than even odds that the stone would be weakened enough by the heat that the whole structure would collapse. The bad news…is that most of the inside was destroyed…the good news is that the irreplaceable relics that were stored there, the Rose Window on the East transept, the organ, and much of both the artwork and statuary was saved as well as the two iconic square towers on the front of the church. It will still take years…probably 5 minimum…to rebuild it, especially as I’m sure that it will be built to be identical…or as identical as possible but using modern construction techniques…to the original. It will still probably cost north of $500 million to restore it though…and with the financial problems in France; and considering that under their system it’s the government responsible for the reconstruction rather than the Church…who knows how long it will take to carve out the funding.

In other news…the redacted Mueller report will be released by the AG/DoJ probably this Thursday…and I’m amazed at how the Democrats are ignoring the law and trying to make it the Republican’s fault instead of theirs.

I have no idea what the report says…and as said here before the president isn’t our favorite person…but all you see in the media is the Democrats; from Ms. Pelosi to Mr. Schumer to various representatives…are demanding the “complete and un-redacted report including all supporting evidence” be released to the Congress…because “we the people paid for the investigation and we the people deserve to see the results”.

Unfortunately…and this is what really pisses me off as it’s just a political BS move and serves the interests of justice not in the slightest…is that there are rules about what the AG can and cannot release. Way back in the olden days when President Clinton was impeached…he was investigated by what was knows as a Special Prosecutor. Under the law which specified how and when a Special Prosecutor was to be appointed…the report went to the Congress and was specifically allowed to be released in full to the public…which is what happened. The Democrats in Congress were furious about this because all of President Clinton’s dirty laundry was published by the NY Times and Washington Post. In order to prevent this from happening again…the Special Prosecutor law was allowed to expire and then a Democratically controlled House of Representatives and Senate passed…and a Democratic President signed into law…the current Special Counsel Act (not it’s actual name but I was too lazy to look up the right one).

Under the Special Counsel Act…a counsel could be appointed to investigate potential wrongdoing that a standard Department of Justice investigation may not have been able to be impartial in. However…there are significant differences between the Special Prosecutor Act and the Special Counsel Act. First off…a Special Counsel investigatory powers are significantly reduced from what a Special Prosecutor enjoyed. Second…by law…a Special Counsel does not report to Congress but instead reports to the Attorney General. The AG is required to report…at a minimum…any circumstances in which he overruled the Special Counsel’s decision to seek prosecution…but he is not required to report anything else. This is what AG Barr did a few days after the report was received…he reported that the Special Counsel did not find collusion or conspiracy between anyone in the President’s campaign and the Russian government…and that the Special Counsel did not determine one way or the other whether obstruction of justice had occurred. Thus…by law…the AG is allowed and required to determine whether obstruction of justice charges are warranted.

Further…by both the Special Counsel Act and longstanding Department of Justice policy…the AG may…at his sole discretion…release to either the Congress or the public the report of the Special Counsel…but only after he has redacted from the report anything that is classified, anything that reveals intelligence sources and methods, anything related to grand jury testimony, and any information derogatory to any person who was not charged. These redactions are required by law…which is exactly what the AG is doing. Supporting evidence to the report is not to be released.

Democrat mount pieces however…are continuing to demand the “full release of the un-redacted report and all supporting evidence”…in other words they are demanding that the Attorney General violate US statutes. Do they know that this is illegal…of course they do…but by demanding something that is specifically prohibited by law…they can appear to be looking for transparency and no matter how many times the AG or Republican side points out the illegality of their demands the media will continue to report that the AG is “stonewalling” and “white washing” the report.

All I’ve read in the mainstream media for the past two years…is how Bob Mueller was the man who would single handedly save the US from the President…now that he’s released a report that says there was no collusion or conspiracy…I’m seeing lots of attacks on him by the same media that praised him the past two years.

Maybe it’s just me…but according to the AG…Mr. Mueller is helping to redact the report for release to Congress…BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT THE LAW REQUIRES…and I’m sure that if he thought that AG Barr was misrepresenting his report he would have said something. At this point…Democrats are demanding that he come and testify to Congress…it’s not going to surprise me at all when he basically doesn’t tell them anything more. While I don’t know him…I’m a bear after all…he appears to be a principled law enforcement officer…and it won’t surprise me a bit if he basically testifies to Congress that he followed the law and submitted his report as required by law to the AG and declines to go much beyond that.

Then there’s Representative Omar…she’s currently having a twitter spat with the President. She said…on video…in a speech to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) that on 9/11 “some people did some things”…specifically blowing up the towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Now I’ll grant you that conservative media selectively edited her remarks and she was really talking about the fact that after 9/11 some of the rights of Muslim citizens were potentially violated and how CAIR…according to her speech…was invented after 9/11 to fight for the constitutional rights of Muslim citizens. CAIR was actually founded back in 1994, well before 9/11…and there is at least some circumstantial evidence that CAIR has supported Hamas and other terrorist organizations. Anyway…while her point was valid…she deliberately used language…”some people did some things”…that was intended to enrage conservatives and provoke a reaction from them…so that she could claim the high ground and say she was being attacked. There is language she could have used to make her point that would have been much less inflammatory…but she chose not to use it. Naturally…the President responded via twitter by tweeting out a video that a NY daily published of her actual speech on video with 9/11 imagery along with it. Now she’s all offended…as is Ms. Pelosi…because she’s “received death threats”…and it’s solely the President’s fault and he should retract his tweet. Seems that Progressives are only interested in free speech that they like. Me…I’m in favor of free speech…as a famous patriot back during the Revolutionary War said…”I may not like what you say but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it”.I think her comments were reprehensible…but as a US citizen and member of Congress she has freedom of speech. Unfortunately for her and the Democrats…the President has freedom of speech too…and all he did was advertise words she’s already said on video.

Apparently there was some discussion at the White House a month or two ago about taking the illegal aliens currently in custody…and since various courts have ordered them released…taking the illegals to so called “sanctuary cities” and then releasing them there. Me…this sounds like a good idea, since sanctuary cities refuse to enforce existing US immigration law…then releasing the illegals there for the sanctuary cities to support. Naturally…conservatives think this is a brilliant idea…and just as naturally progressive think it’s a terrible idea…but they’re also claiming that this would be illegal and is a callous politically motivated stunt.

Ok…what else is going on?

Pi…we all know what it is right…it’s a number that you get by dividing the circumference of a circle by it’s diameter…and it’s a number that has an infinite number of decimal places…it’s an irrational number which means it can’t be represented by a fraction…sort of like 6/4 can be described as being exactly equal to 1.5. Pi however…goes on forever…it starts 2.th 3.141592654 and goes on from there.

However…and this might only be interesting to me…but hey, it’s my blog so you get to read about it…there was this Indian mathematician named Srinivasa Ramanujan who came up with an idea that any decimal number can be accurately represented by the addition of a series of sub parts…and he came up with the following equation for calculating the value of Pi.

What you do is start with a value of k=0, then k=1, 2, and so on up to k=infinity…and then you figure out the value of the expression above for each value of k, add them all up, take the reciprocal of what you get and you get the value of Pi. This is how long versions of the value of Pi are actually calculated…if you go here you can see the first 100,000 digits of Pi written out. In practical terms…doing this many digits is useless. NASA uses only 15 decimal places when they do orbital calculations for interplanetary spacecraft launches…why stop at 15. Turns out that they only use 15 digits for Pi…at least according to a web site I ran across…and you determine the circumference of a circle at the limit of the observable universe then you’re not quite precise…but the imprecision is about as large as a hydrogen atom if you use 39 digits. Since NASA’s calculations are in a much, much smaller scale than the observable universe…15 is enough…although it’s actually been calculated out to about 13 trillion decimal places. For NASA’s purposes…the farthest thing they have done calculations for is the Voyager I spacecraft which is about 12.5 billion mils away. Using their standard 15 digits of pi and doing the calculation…they’re off by about 1.5 inches.

And that’s way more than you wanted to know about Pi. There’s probably a similar argument to made about the constant e which is about 2.718281828459045…e is the basis for the natural logarithm but I’m not going to try to ‘splain logarithms to ya…if you’re not a scientist or engineer you just don’t have any practical use for them.

Have you seen the pictures of Julian Assange after he was expelled from the Embassy of Ecuador in London and arrested by British police? Looks like some crazy bearded freak to me. He’s under indictment by the US for computer hacking…I’ve not researched the law in detail but at least by some definitions he qualifies as a “journalist” and hence might have some protection against being prosecuted for publishing classified material he was provided. Just like the NY Times and WAPost weren’t prosecuted for the Pentagon Papers back during the Vietnam War and the materials that Mr. Snowden leaked…he might have a case against prosecution. That’s not to say what he did was right…I haven’t come to any full conclusion on that question yet…it’s not a black and white issue and there are a lot of nuances to be considered. Fortunately…I’m not likely to be on the jury for any trial he’s subjected to…so I’m not wasting any brain power on it. From a strict “defense of the US” standpoint then publishing classified stuff should be illegal…but when you get right down to it is Wikileaks any different from NYT or WAPost…dunno as that’s a way too hard question for me to answer.

Saw an article today about the priciest toll roads in the US…the winner is the Pennsylvania Turnpike which costs $45.75 for transiting its entire 193.76 mile length. Second is the toll road up to Pikes Peak in CO…$40 per car for its 19 mile length. We’ve been up it…in fact there’s a race up it every year called the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb…the course has 156 turns over 12.42 miles climbing 4,720 feet…the current Unlimited Record which was set by an electrically powered Volkswagen I.D.R…which looks eerily similar to the VW Van that hippies drove back in the 60s…in 2018 is 7 minutes and 57 seconds…for an average of 93.73 miles an hour. Having driven up that road…with it’s 170 degree switchbacks and if you went off the corner it’s a long, long way down…that’s pretty darned quick.

Again…something that might only interest me.

All of the Democratic candidates…well at least a majority of them…have released their tax returns this week…seems that Ms. Harris, Mr. Sanders, Mr. O’Rourke, and Ms. Warren…well they’re all part of the 1% that they decry so much. However…all of the “tax the rich” schemes they’ve endorsed only tax people that make more than they do…funny how that worked out.

Interesting things found on the net.

Andre the Giant was a mainstay of professional wrestling (or wrasslin’ as we would say in the south) back in the 60s to early 80s. Andre was a Frenchman who stood at 7’4” tall and w weighed 520 pounds. Neil remembers seeing him on Saturday Night Wrasslin’ back in the day…and the guy was huge. Essentially he would pick up his opponent and just bear hug him until he passed out and then toss him onto the mat and pin him. To show you just how big he was…here’s a photo of him holding a standard 12 ounce beer can.

This is a Golden Pheasant or Chinese Pheasant…it’s one of the few remaining members of the genus Phasianidae…this is a male and they average 35-41 inches in length. Quite striking…ain’t it.

This how skinny girls fake up their online dating site profile.

People often confuse the position of the knee and ankle in most animals. Conscious of this…here’s an illustration by the Japanese illustrator Satoshi Kawasaki showing what a human would look like if their knee and ankle were in the same relative position as a human, then dog, then horse, then flamingo. Really gives you a different perspective on the anatomy of animals, doesn’t it.

Ever wondered how the population of the world is distributed…amazing enough it’s really concentrated in SE Asia as shown in the following graphic. Of the current 7.7 billion world population…over half live inside the circle.

An interesting item I ran across…one of the earliest slave owners in America was a fella named Andrew Johnson who lived in the colony of Virginia from 1600 until 1670. He was a successful…and very rich for the time…tobacco farmer. You’ve probably never heard of him…I certainly had not. The really interesting thing about Mr. Johnson is not that he was successful, not that he was rich, not that he was a tobacco farmer, and not that he was a slave owner. The most interesting thing about him is that…believe it or not…he was black. I only offer this as an example of how we in 2019 look at the past with our 2019 societal norms and customs. While we in 2019 find slavery abhorrent…back in the 1600’s it was a perfectly acceptable thing…and even black men owned slaves. Think about that the next time you’re tempted to judge past centuries by today’s standards of what is acceptable.

And finally…we’ve all seen and heard the Beef Council commercial…naturally it’s a suggestion that “beef…it’s what’s for dinner”…and it uses the famous Hoe-Down tune from Aaron Copland’s Rodeo Suite (pronounced Ro-day-oh). You may not really know that it’s Rodeo or that Mr. Copeland…arguably the most capable of America’s classical composers…wrote it…but if you click here or here I can almost guarantee that you’ll recognize the music. Anyway…what’s for dinner. Why it’s ET…easily recognizable by anybody who’s seen the 1982 film ET the extra terrestrial.

Cyas.

Yeah…let me go down the cooking rathole a little…because I need to brag on this some.

Neil’s been making curry for many, many years…but he’s always added plain old grated cocoanut to the mixture. So’s Connie keeps track of her email and periodically we find recipes…we always forward an email to Neil with [RF] as the beginning of the subject line and that prefix results in the email being automatically sorted via an email filter to Neil’s Recipe file.

Connie found this one named Chinese Chicken Curry the other day…and we all thought it sounded good so it went into the recipe file. Today we decided to try it. Neil thawed out a single chicken breast and in accordance with the recipe he made the following.

Cube the chicken and toss with some soy sauce and corn starch (that will thicken it later) and set aside. Then chop up some scallions…also known as green onions…in this case we used 6 of ‘em. Meanwhile Neil cooked some rice outside…it’s 90 here and we’ve got the A/C on so we made all that steam outside…and then Connie grated some fresh garlic and some ginger…we always keep fresh ginger frozen in our freezer for various oriental dishes…and he also finely chopped a Seranno  pepper…he took out the seeds so it was not that hot.

Once the rice was almost done…he sorta stir fried the chicken until it was browned but not done and set it aside. Then he sautéed the scallions, garlic, ginger, and pepper for a couple minutes…then added cumin, some crushed red pepper to give it a little more heat, garam masala (Indian spice), cumin, and curry powder. Then added a can of cocoanut milk…this is distinctly different from the sweetened cocoanut milk like Coca Lopez brand that ya make Pina Coladas out of in that it has only a little added sugar. Bring all that to a boil and then add the browned chicken cubes and cook for 5 minutes or so. The corn starch on the chicken helps thicken the sauce so it’s pretty thick and then add some cilantro…in our case we always have fresh cilantro pesto in the fridge…along with a little salt to taste. Serve over rice.

Neil’s done all of this before for curry dishes…but I gotta tell ya the addition of the cocoanut milk instead of chicken stock makes a world of difference. We all agreed that it was about the best curry he had ever made…and cocoanut milk is not on our “always keep in the pantry” list.

We have some leftovers for lunch tomorrow…but if you like curry then I highly recommend you try this instead of chicken stock or water in it…amazingly enough it doesn’t really make the final dish very cocoanut tasting…our opinion was that we would still add some grated cocoanut at the end as we like our curry to have some cocoanut flavor. We all knew it would be good…but had no idea it would be that good.

We dropped of Li’l Red at Service King today for repairs…so…knock on wood…it should be done before our scheduled leave date and won’t cause any issues for us. 

I see that the Democrat head of the House Judiciary Committee had a vote earlier this week to authorize him to subpoena the entire, un-redacted Mueller report. Apparently…he hasn’t read the law…or maybe he has and is just pandering to the media the liberal base, which is more likely the case…that was enacted under a Democratic administration and Attorney General…this law and policies make it illegal to release Grand Jury testimony to the public…and also make it mandatory that a Special Prosecutor submit his report to…and only to…the Attorney General…who then releases a summary report to Congress. My guess is that the Dems know exactly what they are doing…and that what they are demanding is illegal…but they’re playing to their base and the press so that they can seem to be “the only ones interested in transparency”…in other words they’re playing for political points.

I’ve also seen in the past week or so from numerous Democrats how…Mueller is covering for the President…never mind that for the past two years they’ve been touting him as a paragon of virtue who would “bring down Trump”. Unfortunately…now that the report says there was no collusion…which isn’t actually illegal anyway…they’re turning on Mueller as a bad guy.

I realize not everybody likes the President…but as President Obama once said…elections have consequences…and the Democrats lost. It’s way, way past time for them to accept that…and to actually try to govern the country instead of demanding more investigations…at this point it’s all political and doesn’t have a darned thing to do with justice,  what’s right, or whether the President committed an impeachable offense. I’m sick of all of them.

I’m so pissed off at the Democrats…and their friends on various liberal dominated courts…who seem to think that we should be offering an open pass to every illegal immigrant who wants to come here and get benefits. Instead…how about enforcing the existing immigration laws and…more importantly…prosecuting the US based businesses who hire illegal labor. Put the business owners in jail…and enforce the law that says if you aren’t a legal us immigrant you can’t have a job in the US…if the employment opportunities for illegal immigrants dry up…then maybe they won’t come here. Sure…it might cost a little more for an avocado or to get your office building cleaned…but the first and most important reason to have a national government is to provide for national defense…and that starts at the border. Why in the hell are the Democrats interested in allowing essentially an open border and ignoring the requirement that if you want to immigrate to the USA you need to do it legally and not just swim across the Rio Grande. I’m also pissed at the Democrats who are 100% adamantly opposed to any sort of border barrier…as recently as 2000 or so both Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer went public with speeches on the floor of Congress that demanded…yes, demanded…a physical barrier at the US/Mexico border. However…in today’s political environment…doing the right thing is by the wayside…it’s much important to resist whatever Trump wants regardless of whether it’s a good idea or not…the Democrats are still pissed that they lost the 2016 election…and overturning the results of that election is their primary goad.

Our friends Bill and Linda won’t be at the NHOG rally in a couple of weeks…they have had some scheduling issues and wont make it. Too bad…Bill and Neil…along with our friend Ray…usually spend at least 2 days during the rally wandering around fixing various rigs. We’ll miss seeing them…a lot…but at least they went ahead and shipped us the 2 bottles of Hell’s Kitchen Habareno Hot Sauce from Cannon’s Country Gourmet they bought us earlier in the spring…Cannon’s factory is up in Plant City FL and after they visited us in January they stopped there on the way north and bought more for both themselves and us. It’s…hands down…the best hot sauce we’ve ever tasted. We’re not interested in hot just for the sake of being hot…we like flavor to go along with our hot and this Habanero Hot Sauce is far and away in first place for the best stuff we’ve ever had. We were down to our last bottle…and now we have 2 more in reserve. Thanks a lot Bill and Linda…we really appreciate it.

We’ve got all the materials for replacing the carpet in our LR slide with hardwood flooring when we arrive in Kerrville TX for the NHOG Rally…I’ll make sure Neil…or Connie…takes some photos for posting about it later.

Connie and Neil…on the way home from dropping Li’l Red off for body work…both agreed that they were ready for winter stop to be over and to get onto travel season and some Fun Stuff…that’s called “Hitch Itch” in the RV badness…but in any event they’re both looking forward to being on the road again for 6 months of travels.

Interesting stuff found on the net.

I think I already posted these…but Ima not sure so here they are again.

A real Cliff hanger.

Disney logic.

Karma.

First world problem.

I think this might be a problem…this is a single photograph.

It’s true.

And finally…

Cyas.

Well…then it does. 

Today’s lunacy example for instance. There’s this black law professor at Harvard…Ronald Sullivan, Jr…who also happens to be the faculty dean of Winthrop House…which is one of Harvard’s 12 undergraduate housing complexes.

Earlier this year…Mr. Sullivan joined Harvey Weinstein’s legal team…ya know that whole due process, everyone gets their day in court, must be proven guilt beyond a reasonable doubt thing…anyway he’s now part of the legal team handling Mr. Weinstein’s case.

So along comes a “visual and environmental studies” major…whatever that means, I have no idea…who first initiated an online petition that has since turned into an in-depth review by Harvard administrators…anyway the student claims that Mr. Sullivan’s choice of legal client was…”deeply trauma inducing” and shows that Mr. Sullivan doesn’t “value the safety of students”.

Instead of calmly explaining to the poor millennial that even the most despicable defendants are entitled under the constitution to a fair trial by a jury of their peers in an adversarial proceeding where guilt has to be proven “beyond reasonable doubt”…Harvard has launched a review of “concerns about the community’s overall climate”…where they’re individually interviewing students residing at Winthrop House. The dean of Harvard’s faculty of Arts and Sciences…well, he’s not sure about Mr. Sullivan’s ability to rehabilitate himself because his statements to date to reassure the community have been “insufficient”. 

Now I have no other information about Mr. Sullivan than what was published in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece today…and while Mr. Weinstein’s actions if true are probably reprehensible…like many instances in today’s me-too climate it’s pretty clear that actual evidence may be limited and whatever happened might come down to he said/she said…and since I’m not on the jury and haven’t heard the evidence I have no idea whether I would vote for conviction or acquittal…but the idea of a fair trial with competent legal representation is one of the founding blocks of American jurisprudence.

So instead of using this as a learning opportunity to explain to the poor snowflake undergrads that they don’t always get what they want and that the college administration is in charge…Harvard is essentially saying that because Mr. Weinstein is unpopular he doesn’t deserve his constitutionally guaranteed protections.

Nuts I tellya.

Ya remember hearing how the progressives were howling about how the President’s Supreme Court choices would undermine the rule of law and overturn all the rights that progressive judges had enshrined in the constitution even though they’re not really there Yeah, me too. So in two of the three decisions issued by the court yesterday…those two justices were on opposite sides. Granted…these two cases involved Indian treaties and maritime law…but rather than the lockstep voting control of the court that was decried during their confirmation hearings…apparently each voted based on his understanding of the constitution. Imagine that…judges that actually read and interpret what it says…shocking I tellya.

Regarding the shooting at the pair of mosques in Christchurch New Zealand last week…first up it took all of 3 days for the media to Invoke TDS and say it was Mr. Trump’s fault. Second…and more importantly…the hero in the story who probably saved a lot of lives was this fella named Abdul Aziz. He’s an Afghan native who lived in Australia for 25 years before moving to New Zealand. When the shooting started…he got his family and other worshipers down on the floor then ran out to attract the gunman’s attention…first throwing a credit card machine at him and then picking up a discarded shotgun and breaking the window in the getaway vehicle causing the gunman to leave the scene. With all the bad press that an extreme minority of Muslim folks get…it’s nice to see an example that illustrates…as we’ve said around these parts for a long time…that the vast majority of them are good people…and law abiding citizens who do the right thing.

Ran across another presidential candidate yesterday…some guy named Andrew Yang…never heard of him but apparently he’s running too…on a platform to guarantee a universal basic income of $1,000 per month to every adult in America…and he’s going to cancel completely Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and welfare to pay for it. The only trouble with his plan…which he conveniently ignores…is that cancelling all of that gives him about $2 trillion a year to spend on his universal basic income…which will cost somewhere north of $3.5 trillion a year. Guess he needs to go back and take first grade arithmetic again.

Neil went over yesterday and picked up our new flooring…when we get to the NHOG rally in Kerrville he and a buddy are going to install it in our living room slide. The carpet is pretty worn out and we’ve always wanted the hardwood flooring in the slide as well as the rest of the rig…so we’ll solve both problems.

Grand baby Alex isn’t doing too well…he got nipped by Betty yesterday. Apparently he crawled up on the couch and she snapped at him. We didn’t get any real details…but my guess is that since Betty is basically blind at this point she was probably asleep on the couch and Alex either startled or landed on her and hurt her and she instinctively reacted. Alex isn’t too badly damaged…got a bandage on his nose. Connie’s worried he will have a scar…Neil told her that guys didn’t care about scars…but she’s not quite convinced.

Over in CA…the governor has apparently decided the wishes of his voters don’t matter. On the ballot in 2016 there was a referendum to abolish the death penalty in the state…and the referendum lost 53%-47%. So by a popular vote totaling 13.5 million valid ballots…over 1.0 million were rejected as invalid, that’s 7% of the ballots cast which says something about the ability of CA voters to read and understand a simple question and then choose Yes or No…anyway the population voted in favor of capital punishment. Newly inaugurated Governor Newsome has chosen to ignore the states voters and (a) initiated a moratorium on capital punishment in the state and (b) commuted the sentence of all death row inmates…that latter decision can never be overturned by a governor who might follow him. Unsurprisingly enough…he trotted out a widow (or maybe mother, can’t find the particular url again) of a murder victim who agreed with his decision. Also unsurprisingly…he didn’t specify how many victim relative he had to ask before he found one who agreed. While I haven’t seen any polls on his decision…from the articles I’ve seen most victim families seem to be pretty darned upset about it. His justification is that capital punishment is applied disproportionately to people of color…seems to me a better idea is to apply it to all murders  and once guilt has been established limit the time for appeals…and we all know there are countless appeals that have nothing to do with guilt but everything to do with delay of sentence imposition…ya know, things like “he was abused as a child” and “she was a victim of Stockholm syndrome who was abused by her husband/father/whatever. In most of these cases…guilt is pretty well established. It’s true that there are a lot of people of color on death row…but how much of this is because they commit the crimes and how much is because they’re people of color has never been shown by the other side. Me…I think if you can’t do the time then you shouldn’t do the crime and that the chief problem with capital punishment is that it takes too long. The other side claims it’s not a deterrent…but I can tell ya for sure that it deters at least one murderer…and if it was carried out more expeditiously it just might deter some others as well…I wouldn’t be opposed to bringing back public hanging or beheading like they used to do.

Apparently there are some issues with the Boeing 737 Max aircraft…two basically new planes have crashed in the past year with pretty similar flight paths after takeoff. I’m not an aerospace expert…after all I’m just a bear…but I did a little googling yesterday after seeing numerous articles blaming the problem entirely on Boeing. My 15 minutes of research indicates that there’s probably a lot of blame to go around…from the FAA who certified the aircraft and who are probably too in bed with the aircraft industry to be a proper regulatory agency to the airlines who wanted an aircraft that didn’t need a new type rating for the pilots, a different type rating requirement would mean more pilot training/cost and make scheduling of aircraft and aircrew harder/more expensive to Boeing who wanted a more efficient plane and made some design changes that may or may not have had an impact to the software engineers who…because of the mechanical changes to the airframe instituted a new system that issues flight control instructions without the pilots knowing anything about them at intervals specified by the software.

Naturally though…the commenters on internet articles have deduced both the cause and required corrective actions necessary…the black (well, actually they’re orange and not really boxes either these days) boxes haven’t been analyzed yet but since the interwebs weenies have already figured it out maybe we ought to just skip the NTSB investigation and force Boeing out of business.

There’s this Fox personality named Jeanine Pirro who asked the other day on her interview show whether the fact that Representative Omar wears the hijab in public means that she supports Sharia law which is in some respects antithetical to what the Constitution says…her intention was to initiate a debate on her show about the question. I don’t see anything Islamaphobic in that question…but the left is outraged by it and she’s been apparently suspended (or at least her show was preempted last Saturday). At the same time…Representative Omar’s “anti-Semitic” remarks…which again I don’t find all that anti-Semitic but then I’m not Jewish…are left to pass and she’s being lauded by many on the left. In both cases…having read the exact wording of each woman’s remarks…I can say that each has a valid point but because they were on opposite political sides they phrased their statements poorly…and then the other side jumped all over their poor wording rather than the substance of what they were trying to say. What ever happened to political discourse…we used to be able to at least talk reasonably with the other side and while we might not convince them of the rightness of our position…at least it wasn’t just name calling. And it’s not just us…down in Australia a right wing Senator had some comments about the New Zealand shooting…and again he (in my opinion) chose poor wording to make his point. So this millennial…he sneaks up behind the elderly Senator who was talking to some reporters and after carefully positioning his phone to record video…so he could go viral I guess…anyway he smashes an egg into the back of the Senator’s head. The Senator reacted and popped the snot nosed little so and so one. Now the kid is being lauded in the media as a hero and several senior legal folks in Australia are trying to being the Senator up on charges. From looking at the  video…the Senator…even though he worded it poorly…had a valid point of view, he was attacked by the kid, and he responded. Nobody went to the hospital, no blood was shed…and the kid got his 15 minutes of fame out of the it…so why make a big deal out of it.

We rarely vote Democrat ‘round these parts…but I did see a couple of interesting election related articles in the past day or so. First…from all the media exposure that Ms. Omar, AOC, and other socialist/far left folks are getting these days…it turns out that the more mainstream Democrat PACs were far more effective at getting their candidates elected than the far left was. In the primaries…something like 80% of the candidates endorsed by the mainstream PAC won their primaries and only about 25% of those endorsed by the far left won their primaries…and precisely 0 of the seats flipped by the Democrats from Republican control were won by the far left endorsed candidates. Second…mostly what we’ve heard about the election in 2016 was that Ms. Clinton “won the popular vote”. Now notwithstanding the fact that Mr. Clinton won twice while losing the popular vote and nobody was talking about popular vote back then…there are about 3,200 counties in the US…the number is inexact because some states have districts instead of counties so let’s call it 3,200 country like political boundaries. Turns out that Mr. Trump won the county tally by about 2,500 to 500…again it depends on exactly how you define “county”. Even in supposedly blue NY state…he won over half of the counties in the state but Ms. Clinton’s 2 million vote majority in 4 of the 5 counties that make up NYC (he actually one one of them) tipped the state to her. What this means is that the founding fathers got it exactly right when they instituted the Electoral College…which was originally setup to prevent the populous southern states from outvoting the relatively low population northeast states…in order to ensure that all states…from smallest to largest…had a say in the election. If we shifted instead to a national popular vote standard instead of the Electoral College…an idea Ms. Warren has said should be completed before the 2020 election…then the only states that would matter are CA, NY, FL, and TX with perhaps PA and OH added to the mix. Looking beyond states…it would mostly be NYC instead of NY, LA instead of CA, southern FL instead of FL and Dallas/Fort Worth  instead of TX that would elect the President…those areas have enough population to override anything the rest of the country could do. I don’t think the Electoral College overturning constitutional amendment will happen though…you need 2/3 majority in both houses of congress to get it started and you need 38 states to ratify it and I can guarantee that the small states…the ones Ms. Clinton and her ilk refer to as fly-over states…aren’t going to ratify it.

Ok…on to interesting things found on the net.

I know I missed the date and that St. Paddy’s Day was last Sunday…but here’s a belated Happy St. Paddy’s Day to ya’. You can always find a pot o’gold at the end of the rainbow ya know.

This is a guy from the UK responding to the NZ mosque shootings…another hero.

Ya know that guy at Alabama who’s the quarterback…his name is Tua Tagoviola…I wondered why his first name was Tua and why his parents gave him that name. Turns out…it’s just short for his real name kinda like Bob and Robert. 

In the long name category…I think we have a winner. This is a sign at a train station in Wales.

Everybody knows that a hydro electric dam is big…but sometimes you need to see a photo like this to realize just how big they are. This is a picture of the penstock…that’s the name for the pipe that leads down to the generator room…being installed at the Hoover Dam back in 1935.

This gang violence has to stop…now.

This is a diamond squid…it’s about 2 feet long. Pretty neat.

Who says birds aren’t smart?

And finally…

Cyas.

Yup…we actually did something these past two weeks. 

After my last post…Connie and Neil completed their transition to the Fort Myers Elks Lodge. They attended the lodge meeting where their transfer was approved and their new membership cards should be available tonight when we head over there for music and Happy Hour.

After that…we left last Friday morning for a quick trip up to Midlothian VA outside of Richmond to see Alex and his parents Bryan and Jen…and to drop off some stuff at our storage unit like we usually do. We generally leave our Christmas stuff in our storage unit over the summer travel season and since we’re going directly from Fort Myers to Texas for the NHOG rally Virginia just isn’t on the way so we took it up with us.

It’s about 900 miles up there from here so we blasted out of the campground shortly after 0600, stopped at Loves for breakfast and coffee and hit the road. Up I-75 to Ocala FL, then US301 to pass west of the Jacksonville beltway and onto I-95 just north of Jacksonville…and 600something miles later we pulled over for the night in Fayetteville NC. We had a pretty good meal at the local Holiday Inn bar…our original  plan to go to a local seafood place was dashed by the large crowds waiting for a seat…too bad as it really smelled good. Up pretty early…although not quite as early as Friday…we pressed on the last almost 300 miles and arrived there in late morning. We stayed at the kids house sleeping on the pull out…it’s not all that comfortable but it does have the advantage of being free instead of $160 a night. 

We spent the rest of Saturday and through Tuesday there doing Alex things mostly…our original idea was to take them out for Bryan’s birthday on Monday but he preferred to eat in so we just did that instead. We did take Jen and Alex out to a Mexican place named Chuy’s…it’s a chain but it turned out to be pretty good so we would definitely go there again.

Connie and Alex playing cards.

Alex ‘splaining something to Neil.

Alex and his shield.

Connie had to be back for a Ladies of Elks meeting Thursday afternoon…so we pretty much got packed up Tuesday afternoon and the car loaded before the aforementioned dinner out. Then Jen’s dad called and wanted to bring us over some ground venison to take back…he did and we had a nice visit with him as well, haven’t seen him in about 18 months so it was great to catch up with him and hear the news about a situation he’s involved in with a society up there…it has a rental property with occupancy issues and he finally convinced them to kick the tenants out as it’s just not safe  as well as being a lawsuit risk.

With the venison in hand…it was already frozen…we modified our plans slightly and after getting up at 0500 Wednesday morning we quickly packed the car…kissed Jen ‘bye…and made 3 quick stops on the way to the freeway. Dunkin Donuts for coffee and breakfast, the Shell station for gas, and the Kroger grocery store for dry ice to keep the venison frozen until we arrived. Then it was onto VA-288 and then I-95 south…and again 600something miles later we stopped in Macclenny FL at the Travelodge there…Macclenny is right near the intersection of I-10 and US-301 where we needed to head south to Ocala to get on I-75 home. She passed on a hotel east of US-301 because it was $160 and went for the $63 Travelodge instead…then all she did was gripe about the hotel. First up for her was to wash her hair and…according to her…the hotel ran out of hot water halfway through. Gripe, gripe, gripe. Turns out that it wasn’t actually a lack of hot water…somebody in a room further up the line turned on the shower and sucked it all up so none made it to our room…as when Neil went in after her there was hot water available but just not a strong stream.

Luckily…although she was unhappy with the hotel…dinner turned out to be really good. We walked across the street to Bootsie’s Bar and Grill…hey, it was close…with the intent of having Happy Hour then either eating there or heading a mile or so in the car to a local seafood place. We quickly met Tabitha the PM bartender and the single other customer that was there early on a Wednesday evening…Tabitha turned out to be a hoot and a delight so we had a second cocktail/beer and then ordered a couple of cheeseburgers. We weren’t expecting much…but they actually turned out to be really, really good burgers and we enjoyed them with another cocktail/beer before wandering back across the street with happy smiles on our faces from the good food and conversation. Again we were up early the next morning…and after taking a look at the free continental breakfast…it didn’t look very appetizing…we hit up the Golden Arches for breakfast and hit the road. We got home in time to have lunch and unpack the car before Connie headed off to her LoE meeting in the afternoon. After dinner we watched the tube for awhile and then went to bed…happy to be again in our bed at home with our stuff. Visiting the kids and Alex is nice…but it’s just not home and we were ready to be back.

Friday Gordon the mobile RV tech came by and he and Neil replaced our awning canopy fabric…after 7+ years on the road it was worn out, dry rotted, and the seams all coming apart so it needed a new one. They got the old one off and new one on a lot easier than they expected it would be and were don’t before noon when Connie arrived home from the grocery store.

Let’s see…what else went on.

Politics…there continues to be ongoing idiocy from both the almost countless at this point number of contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, from the President himself, and from the right wing as well. I can’t understand how any of them think…anybody with 3 working brain cells easily recognizes the lunacy from all sides.

At least we’re not alone in having stupid politicians…the UK’s aren’t doing much better this week. As you probably know…there’s the ongoing brouhaha over the UK leaving the EU known as Brexit. Back in 2016 there was a popular referendum on whether to leave or not and leave won…so the government has been negotiating for the past 2-1/2 years with the EU on a divorce settlement. Turns out that each side has their own non-negotiable demand…and those two demands are fundamentally opposed to each other.

As of today…the UK will be leaving the EU on March 29 regardless of whether a deal is reached or not. The fundamental difference seems to be whether there will be a hard border between the UK Northern Ireland and the independent Republic of Ireland who share the island of Ireland. A hard border means that customs and immigration will be there, a soft border means that the UK will remain trapped in a customs union with the EU indefinitely. There’s also the issue of what is known as the Good Friday Agreement…that’s what ended the sectarian violence years ago…which says there can’t be a hard border between the two. 

So this week…the UK Parliament voted down…again…the deal that was negotiated which says no hard border and a customs union…primarily because there’s not an ending date for the customs union and it essentially ties the UK to the EU rules even though they’re no longer members. Then they voted against a no deal exit on March 29…even though that vote has no legal validity since the departure is a done deal at this point unless it’s extended or cancelled…t this point the UK will exit on the 29th unless a delay or cancellation of the departure is approved. Parliament then voted to extend the date past the 29th…even though again this has no legal validity as the existing treaty says that’s the date for departure. The UK can request an extension but it needs a unanimous vote from the other 26 member countries of the EU…and at least two of them have said publicly that they won’t approve an extension unless there’s some prospect for an agreement that Parliament will accept…and that gets back to the fundamentally incompatible demands. The EU’s chief negotiator says “we have a deal…and we’re not reopening negotiations”…so basically nobody knows what will happen. The side that lost the referendum back in 2016 is demanding that there be another referendum…basically they want to re-do the election that they lost, much like the Democrats here want to re-do the 2016 Presidential election that they lost. Most of the “remainer” crowd is in favor of another referendum but that was defeated soundly in Parliament. Most amazing is that the reason for the demand for another resolutions is that…according to the remain proponents…only old people voted to leave, and they’ve all died off now and been replaced by younger, more liberal, more forward thinking millennials who clearly see that socialism and the EU is the superior choice and we should just step aside and let them run the country…very similar to the attitudes of liberal millennial in the US.

AOC has now kinda sorta recanted her “say no to Amazon” blather of some weeks back…now she says they’re welcome to return if they “get community involvement” in the process and “meet the community’s demands”. Strange…I thought that Amazon negotiation with the city and state was community involvement…apparently she thinks that Amazon should give up the tax credits they were going to get, fully support unionization of the jobs in the campus, and invest in local schools as well. Somehow…she thinks that Amazon getting $3 billion in tax credits while paying another $20something billion of actual taxes was a bad deal for the city and state…and that the $3 billion could be spent on other things…apparently she doesn’t realize…or care to admit…that there’s no actual $3 billion available, it’s just a break on the taxes that Amazon would have paid later on…not to mention the number of jobs both at the campus and in ancillary businesses to support the workers at the campus.

Jussie Smollet has been indicted for 16 felony counts over his fake “hate crime” in February…he’s still claiming he’s innocent of course and his lawyer is decrying the “over reach” of prosecutors to actually have the gall to charge him for his criminal acts.

The liberal media is all up in arms over the “limited sentence” that Mr. Manafort received the past week or 10 days…it seems they don’t understand that despite all their claims of how he should have gotten 20+ years the actual crimes he pled guilty to have much lower sentencing guidelines…even though his plea agreement with Mr. Mueller was tossed out and Mr. Mueller recommended the longer sentence demanded…the actual crimes he’s guilty of have lower sentences…maybe the armchair lawyers need to go and read what the laws actually say. Probably not though…they don’t bother reading the Constitution so it’s unlikely they’ll do anything to educate themselves  at all…mostly they want to just scream “collusion”…even though there’s no such crime as collusion. Mr. Manafort’s crimes…well, they all took place long before he joined the President’s campaign staff.

Neil’s guess about the whole long standing Mueller investigation will be that…yes, the Russians had an interest in who won our election. That’s like saying water is wet…just like w have an interest in who wins the Russian’s election…and we have an interest in ignoring the actual results of the recent one in Venezuela and want to overturn it for an opposition candidate that we like. While I agree with most that the duly “elected” President of Venezuela is a crook who rigged the election…it’s been ratified by their judicial system (which is likely biased I also agree)…and hence should we accept it or try to get rid of him. I’m not in charge of the US foreign policy…and we should do what’s in the best interests of the United States first…it does seem kind of weaselly to me that we decry the Russian’s “interference” in our election while thinking it’s OK for us to have an interest in and support anti-Putin politicians and the opposition in Venezuela.

It’s not like the Russians actually did anything to the voting process after all…they just published Facebook and other social media posts that supported who they preferred to deal with after the election.

I’m sure that the President…like both others before him and his opponent in 2016…did some slime-worthy things to get elected. I’m not so sure that (a) any of them were actually illegal, (b) that a prosecutor can prove any of them beyond reasonable doubt, or (c) that any of them rise to the impeachable definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors” as specified in the Constitution. Just like President Clinton before…every body pretty much knew that he was a hound dog who had many women through his political career besides his wife. Just like his wife…who arguably violated both classified material and record retention laws with her private mail server. Most politicians who are successful have skeletons in their campaign closets…but proving they did it and even proving it was illegal is problematic.

However…the likelihood of common sense breaking out and Congress…or any of the other politicians involved…actually running the country and doing their jobs is pretty remote I guess…it’s much better to try and trash the other side than to try and reach some compromises with them that will actually make things better.

In one last note from the news this week…the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals has determined that flipping the bird at a cop is constitutionally protected free speech. Turns out this…amazingly enough not a millennial but a 61 year old…woman was pulled over by a cop for speeding. He decided to show leniency and gave her a ticket for a lesser offense that was cheaper to pay and involved fewer points. As she drove away…in response to his kindness she flipped him the bird out the window. In response, he pulled her over again 100 yards down the road and then gave her the speeding ticket…she then sued him. The court held that any reasonable offer would know that a citizen who raises her middle finger was engaging in 1st amendment protected free speech. They stated that it violated no law and that it was “an ancient insult that did not give police a reasonable suspicion of a traffic violation”. The cop’s claim that he was protected from liability through qualified immunity was also denied. Seems to me that while she was technically right and legal in her action…rewarding a cop who gives you a break is just the wrong thing to do…me…I would thank him for letting me off rather than piss him off. Dumb I tellya.

Interesting things found on the net.

Another couple of those ya gotta’ wonder signs.

Wine for old people.

Fun fact about Apollo 13…everybody knows this was a spectacular failure of the Apollo program and how they made it back by the skin of their teeth after the service module oxygen tank basically blew up. After their problem…they looped around the back side of the moon at an altitude of 254 miles…which made their distance from earth of 248,654 miles…which makes them the record holders of the “farthest humans have ever traveled from earth” record. Here’s a shot of the moon as they passed.

Meanwhile…in Canuckistan.

There’s this bird in New Zealand known as a Kea…it’s a large parrot found in alpine regions. This is what it looks like…pretty uninteresting, eh?

In flight however…it’s completely different and quite magnificent.

Everybody knows about the Great Red Spot on Jupiter…it’s essentially a large hurricane as seen below in a shot with the shadow of the Jovian moon Io passing over it.

The question is…just how big is the Great Red Spot. Well…here’s an image of it and the earth to scale.

Then there’s the sun…which is even larger than Jupiter…in fact one million earths would fit inside the sun. Understanding a million is one thing…but…again to scale…what would a million earths inside the sun look like.

Those really give you a better appreciation of and ability to visualize the relative sizes.

Here’s a Jim vs Joe comparison…I think it came from Mike Rowe’s web site (he of Dirty Jobs fame). Mike is a great believer in hard work and while he thinks that college is a good thing…he’s of the opinion that not everybody needs or wants a college degree, and that there are plenty of good paying jobs that don’t require a college degree.

Ran across this article on the Guardian…guess I can post the link here since the new EU copyright rules haven’t gone into effect yet…apparently there’s a woman in the UK named Amber Butchart…she’s a fashion historian and works as a buyer for a vintage clothing shop…normally spending her days evaluating antique dresses, corsets and the like for sale and putting appropriate values on them. Anyways…in her guise as a fashion historian she has great knowledge about fashion of old of course…and this includes underwear. She’s able to identify the time period that underwear came from…all the way from the corsets of Victorian days through the cone bras that were popular in the 60s along with the various flavors of panties, thongs, boy-shorts, hi-briefs and the various other kinds of underwear that women wear. She can use materials, design, and construction details to date underwear to the time it was produced…and hence if the underwear happened to be found on a dead body she can assist in determining when the person died or was murdered or whatever. She’s frequently engaged by the police departments in both her local area of Surrey as well as throughout the UK to help date bodies that are found. This is apparently particular valuable if there are only skeletal remains in figuring out when the person died in hopes of figuring out who they  were.

Her official title is Consultant Forensic Garment Analyst…but she’s better known about the various law enforcement agencies she supports as…you guessed it…the Fashion Police.

Finally…a couple of quick funny ones.

What’s this…a face plant of course.

Cyas.

Yup…just like there are these drugs that are effective against a broad spectrum of bacteria…stupidity knows bounds as to political persuasion, age, race, gender, or pretty much anything else. Today’s examples all came from the various news media sites today. It’s not all stupid today though…there are actually a couple of feel good stories in here.

First up…Representative Jayapal (D-WA) has a new plan for Medicare for All. She’s going to offer…copying right out of her plan here…ban employer health plans, no payments for anything but prescriptions, 2 year transition period, reverses Hyde amendment on federal ban on abortion funding, she says it’s not clear how it would be paid for but surely a wealth tax, mandatory employer contributions, and savings from reducing costs will cover it. Nothing in there about how much it would cost…no evaluation by the OMB or congressional cost estimation bodies, no evaluation of how much money the wealth tax would bring in or how much wealth would flee the country if it was enacted, no specification about the “mandatory employer contributions” which is essentially another tax that will be passed along to their customers, and no evaluation of how this plan will reduce costs. Has the government ever…I mean ever…taken over anything and made it more efficient. There’s an example of this further down the page in the SpaceX note.

Following right up on that…according to the headline…”California school called police on a 5 year old”. Then you get into reading the article and it turns out that this 5 year disadvantaged youth in Upland CA started his week off by initiating a fight with another kid in his class. Then the next day…something again sets him off and he proceeds to have a 45 minute tirade where he basically trashes the classroom including tossing chairs through windows, dumping file drawers and pretty much everything else on the floor. So the school resource officer…who granted is a policeman but is stationed in the school permanently to maintain order and protect the kids and staff therein…anyway he gets the report of a disturbance so naturally he goes to the scene…ya know it is his job after all. He watches while the teacher attempts to control the kid…can’t touch him of course in today’s litigious society and ya know how easy it is to reason with a 5 year old…anyway finally the cop escorts the kid to the office…he’s never spoken to the kid through all of this…and they sit there while the office staff calls his mother…her name is Chiquita or Chiniqua or something along that vein…to come and take him home. On the way out with his mother…the resource officer says “you be good now, ok?”. Now maybe it’s me…but that doesn’t sound like “calling the police on a 5 year old” at all…but ya know how the media will say anything to get clicks and make authorities, police, or school staff look bad.

Next up…the brawl in the legislature in West Virginia. Apparently some right wing member or staff…it wasn’t clear who posted it from the article…anyway they put up a poster that was…well, let’s call it politically incorrect. I won’t give the idiot who did it the web hits by posting the poster…but it essentially had a photo of the Twin Towers in NYC right as the second plane hit them…with wording to the effect of “you said you would never forget”. The second half of the poster had a photo of the Muslim congresswoman from Minnesota…she of the blatantly anti-Semitic remarks a couple weeks back…and wording that basically says “this is proof you’ve forgotten”. What kind of an idiot does this. Sure…there are Muslim terrorists in the world…but even if the number is 50,000 (probably a high estimate IMO) that’s a minute fraction of a percent of the 1.6 billion muslims in the world. The vast, vast, overwhelmingly vast majority of muslims…including both US citizens, immigrants, and citizens of other countries…are peaceful minded people and their religion specifically decries the violence and hate the bad ones espouse. Just like any other social, racial, religious, ethnic, or any other category you want to name…they all have good people and they all have bad people. I’ve never seen any evidence…although admittedly I haven’t really looked for it either…that any group has a significantly higher percentage of terrorists, criminals, drug dealers than any other group…the only real exception I can think of is suicide bombers. Whoever posted this in the legislature there is a complete loon…and I say this even though her politics, actions, demands, and policies are 100% opposite of what I believe.

This is Isaac (Ike) Fabella…he’s a WWII vet who lives in a nursing home in Michigan…he posted on Twitter last week that he would like to get 100 cards for his upcoming 100th birthday. So far…he’s up to 16,000. Goodonya Ike.

Next in today’s hit parade…idiot millennials. Now I’ve blocked out their faces in the two images below and won’t mention their names so they will get zero publicity for this stunt from me. Anyway…according to the article…these two 20something Portuguese “social media influencers”…I’ve got no idea how you become one of those or even what it means…but apparently posting photos of yourself doing stupid things on Instagram is all part of it in the competition to see who can get more likes or followers or whatever Instagram calls them. Anyway…they were on this moving train in Sri Lanka recently and decided it would be a good place to do some of the aforementioned stupid things…I think the images speak for themselves.

Does this look like something anyone with more than 10 working brain cells would do? She claimed it “wasn’t dangerous at all” and encourages her followers to create similar “moments” in their Instagram feed. Morons I tell ya…

Joe Biden…well he’s apparently gotten himself in trouble with some of the alleged leaders in the Democratic presidential field…there are 14 of them running so far…and each one is trying to out-socialist the rest and make demands that are farther to the left than anybody else. Apparently…Uncle Joe is thinking about running again…and despite being considered pretty liberal when he was in the Senate…he’s not being described as “mainstream” compared to the rest of the candidates. So what was his crime against socialism and progressive mores…why he said that Vice President Spence was a good guy and he could work with him. Apparently Democrats aren’t allowed to say anything nice about the other side. I wonder if the “boss” AOC gave him permission to speak…after all last week she said she was the boss.

Bernie Sanders…well he says that “no action too drastic for the government to take to address climate change.” No mentions of how to pay for it or even achieve the advances it demands…but we should do it anyway…right along with enacting Medicare for all, free college, and a partridge in a pear tree.

In the “what were they thinking category”…in Kentucky…the legislature has actually passed and sent to the governor for signature a law that authorizes concealed carry of firearms with no permit, no license, no training, and no background check. Now the 2nd amendment guarantees…and has been upheld by the Supreme Court…the right to keep and bear arms…things like permits, background checks, and training strike me as a good thing…that will help keep guns out of the hands of crazies and make sure that owners understand basic safety items like safeties and making sure the cop that pulls you over for a traffic violation is aware you’re carrying. Nuts Ima tellin’ ya.

What does all this mean? Well…as my friend Randy Cunningham of This is True fame says…there are obliviots in every population no matter how you slice it.

Johnny Manzel…ya know “Mr. Football”…he of the failed NFL career who went on to get signed by the CFL up in Canuckistan…he got canned this week from his team for violating the terms of his agreement with the CFL that allowed him to play…and told that no other team in the league could sign him. Nothing surprising in there given that he’s never grown up past the age of 11 or so…but the article went on to talk about his wife Bre Tiesi-Manziel who took part in a half marathon race for charity in Temecula CA last weekend. She posted photos of her finishing the race in 1:58:22…which is about a nine minute pace and put her in the top 30 female finishers…and is certainly achievable for a first time half marathon participant who’s properly trained. However…some folks at the finish line thought she looked entirely too good to have just finished the race…and Neil’s run enough races for me to know that you never look good at the end of a race…makeup not smeared, not out of breath, not all sweaty…so they went back and looked at her mile times through the race. Turns out she passed the halfway point (6.4 miles) in 1:31:00 or about 14:15 per mile pace This means that in order to have actually finished the race in 1:58 she ran the second half of the race in 27 minutes and change. For those of you who aren’t runners…let me tell you a bit about this. This means that she ran the last second half of the race with every mile right around the 4 minute mark…ya know the one that Roger Bannister first broke back in the 50s. The woman’s world record for a mile as of today is 4:12…and that was obviously run with having first run the first half of the half marathon and the record holder only had to run a mile…and we’re supposed to believe she…a first time half marathoner…broke the woman’s world record for a mile by 12 seconds…not once but 6 times? Turns out that there was a loop in the course you were supposed to go around twice and a race pace person…that is a guy who was deliberately running a pace so he would finish in exactly 2 hours…saw her turn back to the finish line and skip the second loop. When you account for the reduced distance…she finished the whole race in just about a 14:15 pace…exactly like she had at the halfway mark. Once exposed in the media…she posted a photo of the 11 mile marker…that she would have passed if she did the second loop…and that’s supposed to “prove” that she ran the whole race. No mention by her of how she managed to break the woman’s mile record 6 times over. More millennial stupidity I guess.

In the “how the heck does that even happen” vein…the nation’s largest Neo-Nazi group…named the National Socialist Movement…short aside here on socialist…I’m a bit confused by the name as socialists usually believe in taking from the rich, giving to the poor, and giving advantages to every last “disadvantaged” group in the population…and that’s typically not what Neo-Nazi groups want…but maybe it’s just me. Anyways…they’ve got a new director now…his name is James Hart Stern…and his policy is to dissolve the group. The corporate filings don’t say how he got the job or why the last director left the position…but that’s not the most interesting part. Despite this being a Neo-Nazi group…the new director is a black activist.

Saw an article also about Bill Gates house. Ya know…Bill Gates who founded Microsoft, became a pretty much self made $100 billionaire, largely was at the forefront of the personal computer and high tech industry…yeah, that Bill Gates…the noted liberal, philanthropist, and believer in trying to lower carbon emissions. Anyway…he tells in the article about how being a billionaire makes his life easier because he has doesn’t have to worry about money. His house…and I”m not sure why he needs all of this…has 66,000 square feet, 18 and 3/4 bathrooms, a 60 foot indoor pool, an indoor trampoline room, an in house theater and a library. It was built out of 500 year old Douglas fir trees…wait, I thought he was supposed to be an environmentalist…I’m not sure why anybody needs a house with all of that…but hey, he’s got $100 billion so he can buy whatever he wants without worrying about medical or college costs. The article then went on into some questions about the Green New Deal…and despite being a liberal who believes in getting to zero carbon emissions…well he basically said it’s nuts. He said “It’s not realistic to think the entire economy and infrastructure could be transformed in a few years.” and “For example, for many people in low- and middle-income countries, cattle are an essential source of income and nutrients,” he wrote, adding that the best approach would be to “invest in innovation” so that things could continue “without destroying the climate”. He also stated that to solve the problem would require breakthrough inventions in many fields…but I guess AOC will just order those breakthrough inventions since she’s the boss.

Victoria’s Secret announced it is closing 53 more stores in addition to the 30 they closed in 2018. I guess millennial women don’t believe in buying sexy lingerie to entice their men (or woman) partners. Call me crazy…but I would much rather see a woman in a bustier, garter belt, stockings, and heels than in combat boots and stained/torn tightey whities…but mebbe Ima old fashioned.

Last one…let’s talk about Elon Musk. I don’t understand how somebody who’s obviously a gifted entrepreneur and forward thinker can simultaneously run SpaceX…which is doing spectacularly…while also running Tesla…which is doing spectacularly bad. SpaceX has a series of NASA contracts totaling $2.4 billion to develop a rocket and capsule that can deliver both cargo and up to 7 passengers to low earth orbit…that funding covers both development and launch of 10 cargo missions and 6 manned missions. It was founded in 2002 and launched their first rocket to orbit in 2008 and launched the flight demo test vehicle today…it will dock autonomously in a day or so, spend a week there, and return to earth again autonomously. They’ve achieved more than NASA in fewer years at less cost. Their current heavy launch vehicle Falcon 9 Heavy can lift 140,000 pounds to low earth orbit or 60,000 pounds to a geosynchronous transfer orbit for a cost of $90 million ($150 million if the flight profile prevents recovery of the first stage). This compares to 61,000 and 8400 pounds respectively for a space shuttle launch…which cost $400 million just for the launch without considering the development cost of the system. So as you can see…SpaceX is doing pretty well. Tesla…on the other hand…well they have a pretty decent electrical vehicle…but it costs $60,000 and they’ve built about 500,000 of them since 2015. It’s clearly not a vehicle for the masses…and he has been fine by the SEC for stock manipulation recently. Production dates keep slipping and they announced this week that they’re closing all their stores, shifting to online only sales, and providing no test drives to anybody. Their solution if you want a test drive is to buy one…you can then drive it for a week and if you don’t like it bring it back for a full refund less $1,000. Oh yeah…they also announced a new cheaper version of the Model 3…which only costs $35,000 but to get that they stripped all the cool technology stuff out of it and reduced the range. Probably has only an AM radio too. So how can a guy who’s smart enough to hire good enough engineers to do what SpaceX has done be such a miserable failure at building cars? I dunno.

OK…last one. You probably heard about the jogger that was attacked by a mountain lion out in Colorado a couple weeks back…he ended up bashing the cat in the head with a rock and strangling it to survive. Instead of congratulating him on his ability to improvise, adapt, and overcome…and survive the encounter…the media appears to be trying to generate sympathy for the poor innocent victim (the mountain lion). To wit…the local game warden people competed a necropsy…that’s an autopsy on an animal…this week and announced that it was a male “kitten” weighing about 40 pounds and about 4-5 months old…in the first place it’s a cub and not a kitten but the report makes it sound like it’s a house cat. Mind you…it’s 3 or 4 times heavier than even a big house cat, has sharp teeth and claws, is pretty quick, and is one of the apex predators in the west. Despite it’s size…it clearly considered the jogger to be lunch…so why does the media insist on portraying it as the victim and try to drum up sympathy for it? Anybody that’s ever gotten in a disagreement with a house or feral cat knows that even a 10 pound wild feral cat can do some serious damage to your person…so we’re supposed to be sympathetic about an animal 4 times that size who decided to eat a jogger? Nuts I tellya. 

On to other interesting things found on the net.

Stealth aircraft.

This is a 21 year old Red Knot bird named B95 or Moonbird. He’ a shore bird that goes to the far north…like Baffin Bay in Canuckistan, the shores of the Northwest Passage north other, and northern Greenland and Alaska in the summer…then migrates to South America in the winter. Anyways…Moonbird has flown far enough in his lifetime during migration to have covered the distance from earth to the moon and back.

This one is certainly apropos for Florida…since we have all the old people down here. I’ve been saying for years that old is a state of mind and doesn’t have anything to do with the mileage on your body…but let’s just say that a considerable percentage of the population down here easily fits into the old category.

Lego men…ya know those little figurines that come in your Lego set…they were introduced in 1978 and as shown by the chart below…the population of Lego men will surpass the population of humans by the end of 2019.

Interesting mannequin choice for a table saw display advertisement.

And finally…here’s a really cool looking mushroom. It’s a Mycena interrupta, commonly known as the pixie’s parasol. It’s pretty small…ranging from 0.8 to 2 centimeters in size…but it’s pretty cool, eh?

We got actual news to report today…so no Reality Based Blogging (RBB)© this time.

One small note on previous stupidity though…now that Mr. Smollett has been charged with filing a false police report…it’s amazing how almost all mentions of his situation have disappeared from the news media. The only article I’ve seen in the past 3 days was one that talked about he deserved compassion for his misdeeds.  Yeah…right. That’s the only way that you can convert two positives to a negative connotation.

Anyways…Connie and Neil…well, they’re famous…or maybe infamous is a better idea…or maybe even they’re having their 15 minutes of fame.

To wit…back awhile back Connie had signed up for Money Magazine’s Consumer Panel…it’s some sort of forum where they can take the pulse of their subscribers or some such nonsense…and part of that entailed a brief description of her life so she talked about living in the RV full time.

She got this email from them back in January or late December and asked if we would be willing to give them a brief interview for an upcoming article on RV life. She said sure…and a few emails back and forth between her, the Money contact, and the freelancer author we had a phone interview for about an hour with Paul the author. Once that was done…and Neil sent Paul a few photographs of the rig and places we had been…we figured we were finished.

A couple weeks later…we got an email from the Money contact asking us if we could sit for a photo session…apparently the article had been green-lit for publication, upgraded to a “feature” (whatever that means in publishing-speak), and if we would allow them to send a professional photographer to take some photos. Again…we said “sure, why not”…and the appointment was setup.

So a couple days later Mary Beth and her assistant Ray showed up with a trunk full of lights and cameras and she spent about 3 hours taking shots of us outside the rig, inside doing action shots like cooking and such, and romantically walking through the campground…well Connie walked romantically but Neil wasn’t quite sure what that meant…but both Mary Beth and Connie assured him that holding hands and looking lovingly at her was just what the doctor ordered. We had another few emails back and forth with the Money contact telling us the photos were great and once again…we figured we were done. We did have quite a number of our neighbors wander by and stare at Mary Beth, Ray, and us…they were clearly trying to figure out what was going on but nobody asked. We were hoping to attend the campfire that evening…I’m sure we would have been the talk of the campground and it woulda been nice to see what people thought…but it rained and the campfire didn’t happen…and by the next week I guess we were old news.

Earlier this week…we got an email from Money saying the article had gone live online…and will be published in the paper magazine in the April issue. You can take a gander at the online version here…We Traded Our Home for a $50,000 RV in Retirement — and We’ve Never Been Happier. Pretty spiffy eh? We’re the second of two couples in the article and although there’s only the single photo in the online article I figure the print version might have a few more…otherwise the $$$ that the photographer and her assistant got paid in time and expenses wouldn’t be worth it.

True story following up on the other couple in the article…at the end she talks about meeting a person that worked for her dad. We were in Minnesota a couple years back and in the commissary on the military base we were shopping and this fellow about our age walked up and asked Neil if he was from Alabama (he had on one of his Crimson Tide hats). He says yeah…the guy says where from…he says Mobile…the guy says where…he says Crichton area…guy says where…he says Siena Vista…guy says “the street that always decorated at Christmas and the line of cars to come in and see the lights was blocks long”…Neil says yeah…guy says where on the street…Neil says about half way down just before the downhill on the left side…guy says “the yard that the street from the black folks neighborhood dead ends up against” (back then folks generally lived in areas that were single race rather than completely mixed race like nowadays…Neil says yeah…guy says “I grew up 2 houses from the end of that street.” They grew up within probably 150 yards of each other but never met…another one of those because back in those days things. He went to the rival public high school to McGill where Neil attended.

Our local eaglets are doing well…they’re 64 and 66 days old now and normal fledging (first flight) is typically 9-10 weeks…so that should be happening pretty soon. They’re pretty much full grown at this point and have all their flight feathers…but not the white head and tail that come with sexual maturity at about age 4…and are testing their wings on the nest.

Food deliveries to the nest today consisted of 5 fish and 2 rabbits…and it’s only about 1400 as I’m writing this…Harriet and/or M15 are out hunting almost all the time in order to deliver enough food for the both of them.

We’ve been members of the North Fort Myers Elk Lodge #2742 since we transferred our membership down to this area 4 or 5 years ago…but this week we went over to Fort Myers Lodge #1288 and filled out the transfer dimit (that’s a fancy word for form…why they can’t just use the word form is beyond me…but then they got all these rituals too and most of them seem a bit over the top to me…but thems the rules) to move our membership…we should be approved next week at the 1288 monthly meeting, Neil paid our dues to the new lodge, and we’ll get new membership cards. I don’t want to go into a whole lot of detail on the reasons…let’s just say that 2742 isn’t as friendly a place to be anymore and many of our friends have also submitted transfer paperwork. The new lodge is about 10 miles away instead of 5…but from our visits over there it’s friendly people and more comfortable than we’ve felt at the old lodge the past year or so…and we will drive 5 more miles for that.

Yesterday we finished up the last remaining item from Neil and his sister MJ serving as co-executors of his mom and dad’s wills…his dad had a $20 gold piece from the 1800s that he won in a card draw with his siblings at their dad’s passing and he wanted it passed along the same way. Due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control…he and his 3 siblings have not been in the same place at the same time since his mom’s passing…and it’s just been too long. So after some discussion with MJ…we had Father Tom (the pastor at our church here in Florida) run a little lottery to select a winner. That’s been completed and Neil will be providing the coin to the duly chosen sibling in due course…but which sibling that is will be left to the unknown unless they choose to reveal themself.

Monday is the St. Therese Parish Mardi Gras dinner…it’s one of those formal cocktail/dinner/dancing things. We’ve got tickets and will be sitting at the choir table with a bunch of Connie’s friends from there. It’s a good time…he’s trying to get her to go to the dollar store and get herself a gold mask with feathers on it…but he’s not holding out much hope.

Connie’s looking forward to some Alex time in a couple of weeks…we’re heading up to see him…and the human kids as well as it’s Bryan’s 35th birthday coming up and with our trip from FL straight to TX for the NHOG rally VA just ain’t on the way.

Interesting stuff found on the net.

Ya know how they say there’s a story behind every rule and sign? I would love to know the rest of the story that resulted in this one.

I wonder how much his hospital bill was afterwards.

RV IQ towing test…but I’m afraid most non-RVers won’t get it. He’s hooked his safety chains to a quick release clip. So if the trailer jumps off the hitch…instead of the chains ensuring it mostly stays attached to the tow vehicle…it will just proceed down the highway independently.

Aussie road sign.

They ain’t wrong.

Cyas.