A Sorghum Renaissance?

All Things Considered:

Much of the world is turning hotter and dryer these days, and it's opening new doors for a water-saving cereal that's been called "the camel of crops": sorghum. In an odd twist, this old-fashioned crop even seems to be catching on among consumers who are looking for "ancient grains" that have been relatively untouched by modern agriculture.
Sorghum isn't nearly as famous as the big three of global agriculture: corn, rice and wheat. But maybe it should be. It's a plant for tough times, and tough places....
Today, American farmers grow two kinds of sorghum. Sweet sorghum is tall; you can use it to make a sweet syrup or just feed the whole plant to animals.
But most sorghum in the U.S. is grown for feed grain. That version of the plant is short, with seeds that come in several different colors.
Steve Henry showed me some near Abilene, Kan., on our way to the farm where he grew up. Kansas is the biggest sorghum-growing state. Out here, they call milo.
"You've got white milo, red milo, yellow milo," says Henry, scanning the field. "Basically, you have the little berries, and they're filled with starch, like like corn is filled with starch, and the starch is what we're after."
Sorghum is used for the same things as corn: high-energy feed for pigs and chickens. It also gets turned into ethanol...In the U.S., the amount of land in sorghum has been steadily shrinking.
There are signs, though, of a sorghum revival on the high plains. The reason is water, or the lack of it. From Nebraska to western Texas, cornfields have been fed with rivers of water pumped from underground aquifers, and that water is starting to run low.

When I was a kid and I saw lists of crops, I always wondered what milo was.  Well, now I know.  I remember going to visit my roommate from college in southern Illinois, and I was amazed how much sorghum was grown down there.  Here's a map from USDA showing the growing region of sorghum, and southern Illinois doesn't even show up:

I would anticipate much more sorghum will be grown in the High Plains in the future.

Bill Gross Not Talking His Book

At least for once:

Bill Gross is feeling guilty about being among the wealthiest people in America. That's why he thinks that he and other filthy rich members of the 1% should pay more in taxes.
"Having gotten rich at the expense of labor, the guilt sets in and I begin to feel sorry for the less well-off," writes Gross, co-founder of investment firm Pimco and manager of the biggest bond fund in the world, in the opening of his latest monthly investment letter.
Gross usually devotes his outlook pieces to discussions of the bond market. And they are often littered with pop culture references. He didn't disappoint this month.
He compared those who complain about paying a greater percentage of their wealth in taxes to the Disney (DIS, Fortune 500) character Scrooge McDuck.
"It's time to kick out and share some of your good fortune by paying higher taxes and reforming them to favor economic growth and labor, as opposed to corporate profits and individual gazillions," Gross wrote.
Gross is at the very top of the ultra-rich group he is talking about. Forbes estimates his net worth at $2.2 billion, which would put him in the top 0.01%.
Gross said he and other top 1% earners need to recognize that they have had the "privilege of riding the credit wave and a credit boom for the past three decades. Paraphrasing President Obama's "you didn't build that" comment from the 2012 campaign, Gross reminds the rich "you did not create that wave. You rode it."

I've been critical of Gross at times, but in this case, he gets it.  Today's inequality is staggering, and it can't last.  There are two options, raise wages or raise taxes.  I'd be happier than hell to see this be handled by the private sector, but I won't hold my breath.

Killing Bugs with Fire, and Flame Cultivation

Wired:

Whenever I post something with a photo of a spider, I can reliably predict that the first or second comment will be “OMG Kill it with Fire!!11!!”
It’s happening more and more often, and it’s not my imagination. When you look at trends in use of the phrase, it seemed to become common in 2007, and has been slowly creeping up since then. About the only event in 2007 that I can plausibly relate to “Kill it with Fire!” is the release of Microsoft Windows Vista.  In general, attempts by members of the general public to kill things with fire (spiders or insects) end in disaster. (examples given)......The only legitimate use of fire for control that I know of is using fire for weed control in agriculture.  It’s usually given the quite awesome name of “Flaming for Pest Control.”  Here is an example:

This is why agriculture is so awesome, BTW. There just aren’t that many professions where you get to drive a giant flamethrower. Flaming is generally used in organic systems, which is a bit puzzling, since it uses propane, diesel, and produces lots of greenhouse gases.

While that is badass, it just doesn't seem like a very good idea to me.  

How Do People Survive on the Minimum Wage?

With government assistance:

So how do millions of Americans do it? This statistic helps explain it:

More than half of fast food workers have to rely on public assistance programs since their wages aren't enough to support them, a new report found.
According to a University of California Berkeley Labor Center and University of Illinois study out Tuesday, 52% of families of fast food workers receive assistance from a public program like Medicaid, food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. That's compared to 25% of families in the workforce as a whole.
The report estimated that this public aid carries a $7 billion price tag for taxpayers each year

Assuming fast-food workers are good proxy for minimum-wage workers, this actually explains a lot. If it sounds impossible to get by on less than $1,000 a month, that's because it probably is, and most minimum-wage workers don't. They earn a wage that isn't sufficient to support them, and various government assistance programs make up the difference.
Public assistance isn't just for those out of work, down on their luck, or in a short-term bind. It's for those who are gainfully employed but earning such a low wage they can't sustain themselves. Which is to say: The reason fast-food and other low-wage employers can get away with paying so little is because taxpayers subsidize the slack. The report estimates McDonald's (NYSE: MCD  ) subsidy alone is worth $1.2 billion a year, which equates to more than a fifth of its 2012 profits.

I still remember thinking how stupid it sounded when "Papa John" said it would cost an extra 14 cents a pizza to provide health insurance, that sounded like a pretty good deal.  Would better pay for workers be a pretty good trade off for getting a little less change back on fast food and Walmart purchases?  I'd say so.

A Pleasant Surprise

We got into one of our historically tougher fields today.  It has a lot of clay knolls, and always has some ugly looking areas at planting time.  I was expecting to have some of the best yields we've gotten out of that field this year, but was keeping my hopes realistic, like around 175 bushels per acre.  To my great surprise, it is rivaling some of our very best dirt.  So far, the monitor shows 206 bushel average, and the last three or four semi loads have averaged 215 to 220 bushels.  Based on that small anecdote, I would short corn futures if I were you. 

Will Peak Oil Help Out With Climate Change?

Some scientists think we won't be able to pollute as much as many feared:

Conventional production of oil has been on a plateau since 2005, said James Murray, a professor of oceanography at the University of Washington, who chaired the panel.
As production of conventional oil, which is far easier to get out of the ground, decreases, companies have turned to unconventional sources, such as those in deep water, tar sands or tight oil reserves, which have to be released by hydraulic fracturing.
But those techniques tend to lead to production peaks that tail off quickly, Murray said.
The panelists said these trends belie the high-end emission scenario from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That scenario, known as RCP 8.5, and often referred to as the "business as usual" scenario, has carbon dioxide emissions increasing through 2100.
"I just think it's going to be really hard to achieve some of these really high CO2 scenarios," Murray said.
David Rutledge, an engineering professor at the California Institute of Technology who studies world coal production, said the IPCC's "business as usual" scenario is unrealistic because it essentially assumes that growth of fossil fuels like coal will continue apace, which is unlikely.

Well, while it is good that climate change might not be as bad as scientists fear, we'll still have to adapt to a resource-limited world that most non-Amish can't really appreciate.  

Robot Takeover Watch

From Bloomberg:

Prosperity in Thailand is spreading from glitzy Bangkok to less-developed regions, thanks in part to a boom in auto-manufacturing in places such as Rayong province, where this state-of-the-art Ford plant is located. 

Wow, that is a lot of robots.  That doesn't bode well for a healthy middle class.

Harvest Continues

We're getting on the downhill side of harvest, but as the lines get longer at the elevator, less and less gets done.  Between the shit show that is my town job and the hours of operation while the elevator is open, I haven't had much time to sample the wonders of the World Wide Web.  I'll peek around and see if I see anything notable.

All I can say right now is, yes, the start of Obamacare has been a mess, but let's not spend the next five months wondering day after day if the subsidized insurance will go into a death spiral or not.  Assuming they work out enough bugs to get people enrolled, let's give this thing a few years to see how it turns out.  I remember people talking about how big of a disaster the Romney/Massachusetts program was turning out to be, but everybody seems able to live with it now.

The Greatest Scientist You've Never Heard of

Stanford Ovshinski:

Ovshinsky created a hatful of world-changing innovations. In 1968, the New York Times declared that his new electronic switch would lead to a future in which we would all have “small, general-purpose desktop computers for use in homes, schools and offices” and “a flat, tubeless television set that can be hung on the wall like a picture”.
It seemed so unlikely that no one in the US wanted to invest. What’s more, Ovshinsky’s discoveries threatened the dominance of America’s great new invention: the transistor. US corporate interests rubbished his work and he ended up licensing his technologies to a few small Japanese companies. You might know their names: Sharp, Canon, Sony, Matsushita . . .
No wonder Ovshinsky was later hailed as “Japan’s American genius”. That US overdraft might not have become quite so bad if the country’s business leaders had operated with more foresight and less fear.
By the end of his life, Ovshinsky had established a new field of science: the study of “amorphous” materials, messy solids that have no regular atomic structure. He published around 300 academic papers on the subject. His inventions gained more than 400 patents. All this from a man who taught himself physics using books borrowed from the public library in his home town of Akron, Ohio.
The technology behind rewritable CDs and DVDs was Ovshinsky’s brainchild, as was the material for “phase-change memory”, now standard in data storage technologies today.He designed the solar panels used in the Japanese calculators that flooded the world market in the 1980s. Similarly ubiquitous is his rechargeable nickel-metal hydride battery.

Wow.  That is pretty amazing.

Amazonia Manauara

Amazônia Manauara from MOOV on Vimeo.

The Cheater's Pastime

As part of Pacific Standard's cheaters' week, Tomas Rios looks at some of the strange tales of cheating in baseball:

Circa 1880s: Future Hall of Fame pitcher James Francis “Pud” Galvin becomes baseball’s first confirmed user of performance-enhancing drugs. His cocktail of choice was the Brown-Séquard elixir, a concoction of testicles harvested from dogs, guinea pigs, and, maybe, monkeys. The harvester was Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, an elderly physiologist and neurologist who claimed hypodermic injections of his elixir-prolonged human life. Galvin was praised for his forward-thinking ways in an 1889 edition of the Washington Post and died at the age of 45.

another favorite:

1936-Present: Three consecutive generations of the Bossard family have presided over Comiskey Park, home stadium of the Chicago White Sox. Emil Bossard came first in 1935 and used his encyclopaedic knowledge of the stadium to begin what would become the family business. His greatest hits include using scoreboard signals to tip off the visiting team’s pitches and moving the stadium’s portable outfield fences back to stifle opposing home run hitters.
Next up was Gene, who supposedly invented the frozen baseball trick and routinely water-logged the infield to aid the team’s groundball pitchers: a tactic that earned Comiskey Park the nickname “Bossard’s Swamp.” Stories of tilted foul lines and grass cut to manipulate the speed of ground balls also abound. Current White Sox groundskeeper Roger Bossard says there are 17 tricks of the trade, but won’t reveal all of them. Many of those dirty tricks were invented by the Bossard family: the greatest cheaters in sports history.

There are some other good ones, including Albert Bell getting caught corking his bats, and the strange break-in to try to steal back the evidence.  Good times.

The Fifty Greatest Discoveries Since the Wheel

The Atlantic put together a panel of thinkers to pick them out.  Number 1? The printing press, followed by electricity.  Number 11 was nitrogen fixation for synthetic fertilizer.  I recommend checking the list out.  As they were telling how they came up with it and what to look for in the future, there was this:

Elon Musk, not officially one of our panelists, is perhaps this era’s most ambitious innovator. He simultaneously heads a company building rocket ships, SpaceX; another making a popular electric car, Tesla; and another that is a leading provider of solar power, SolarCity. When I asked him what innovation he hoped to live long enough to see but feared he might not, he said, “Sustainable human settlements on Mars.”

Maybe he meant that if we could create sustainable human settlements on Mars then we'd already have every problem on Earth solved.  Because to solve all the problems we'd have to solve to have sustainable human settlements on Mars,developing renewable energy and stopping global warning would be easy as shit.  We've evolved to live on this planet, and nowhere else.  Mars' atmosphere would be toxic to us, the temperature range would be uninhabitable.  There would be zero building supplies. Liquid water cannot exist in the Martian atmosphere except at the lowest elevations for short periods of time.  Nothing we could take there would grow.  There are no energy sources except solar and wind power.  We couldn't even start a fire if there was even something there to burn.  And there are a lot of other challenges I'm not thinking of.  Considering those issues, I would suggest we try to stick around here and solve some of the problems we've got.  That really sounds like a breeze compared to hauling ourselves and everything we would need to live to a place where we die if exposed to the atmosphere, and we'd still have to rely on supplies hauled from Earth in a trip that would take a year and a half one way.  Not that it's impossible, but, c'mon.

NYC^2

NYC ² from Alix A.K.A L'intrépide on Vimeo.

A Real Train Wreck

Wreck in Snow Bank, Boiler Explosion, Engine No. 70

Courtesy of De Forest Douglas Diver Railroad Photographs, ca. 1870-1948/Cornell University Library

Slate:

These photos, all of which depict train wrecks on the New York Ontario & Western Railway in New York State in the 1870s, are part of a larger group of images of railroad life assembled by De Forest Douglas Diver, a railroad engineer and photographer. This collection is currently held at Cornell University, and many of the photographs are available for view on Flickr.

Some of these images are quite aesthetically pleasing, despite their subject matter. The wreck of N.Y.O. & W. Engine 140, in particular, is framed as a near-perfect pyramid, with six onlookers (including one babe in arms) decorating the pile of broken steel. Other images show the crews of laborers it took to get the rubble off the track after the violence of a crash.

Little information is available about these wrecks beyond their dates. Historian Richard Selcer writes that although 19^th-century railroad accidents were distressingly common, it’s hard to arrive at an official tally, because record-keeping was informal: “Companies were not even required to report all collisions and derailments until 1901, when the Interstate Commerce Commission assumed control over railroad safety standards.”

There are some fascinating photos included in there. One good one shows a snow plow mounted on the front of a train.

Why We Need Higher Marginal Rates

The Guardian:

In the United States, the share of total pre-tax income accruing to the top 1% has more than doubled, from less than 10% in the 1970s to over 20% today (pdf). A similar pattern is true of other English-speaking countries. Contrary to the widely-held view, however, globalisation and new technologies are not to blame. Other OECD countries, such as those in continental Europe, or Japan have seen far less concentration of income among the mega rich.
At the same time, top income tax rates on upper income earners have declined significantly since the 1970s in many OECD countries – again, particularly in English-speaking ones. For example, top marginal income tax rates in the United States or the United Kingdom were above 70% in the 1970s, before the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions drastically cut them by 40 percentage points within a decade.
At a time when most OECD countries face large deficits and debt burdens, a crucial public policy question is whether governments should tax high earners more. The potential tax revenue at stake is now very large.
For example, doubling the average US individual income tax rate on the top 1% income earners from the current 22.5% level to 45% would increase tax revenue by 2.7% of GDP per year – as much as letting all of the Bush tax cuts expire (only a small fraction of them lapsed in January 2013). But of course, this simple calculation is static: such a large increase in taxes may well affect the economic behaviour of the rich and the income they report pre-tax, the broader economy and, ultimately, the tax revenue generated. In recent research, we analyse this issue both conceptually and empirically using international evidence on top incomes and top tax rates since the 1970s.
There is a strong correlation between the reductions in top tax rates and the increases in top 1% pre-tax income shares, for the period from 1975-79 to 2004-08, across 18 OECD countries for which top income share information is available. For example, the United States experienced a 35 percentage-point reduction in its top income tax rate and a very large ten percentage-point increase in its top 1% pre-tax income share. By contrast, France or Germany saw very little change in their top tax rates and their top 1% income shares during the same period.

I was just trying to make this point on Tuesday night to a couple of Tea Party Libertarian types I went to high school with.  They looked at me like I had 3 heads.  To me, it makes pretty damn good sense, but it seems most folks around here just think it is the worst idea in the world.  My point is that if something doesn't change, the so-called defenders of Capitalism will end up being its destroyers.  With widening inequality, somethings gotta give.  I'd much rather it be low tax rates on top incomes that go away than society as we know it.

All About the Barrels

 

Photo:The Hip Flask

Wayne Curtis lays out everything you'd ever like to know about whiskey barrels, and how they add to the character of the drink.  While the whole thing was interesting, I really liked this:

Liquor barrels are essentially Dickensian nano-factories—dark, sooty, mysterious places from which marvelous things emerge. But they came to that role only after long service as simple containers for shipping and storage.
“The barrel, like the wheel, is one of the outstanding basic inventions of mankind,” wrote the historian William B. Sprague in a 1938 essay. Wooden-stave barrels first appeared millennia ago. In the first century A.D., Pliny the Elder noted their widespread use in the foothills of the Alps.
Used for centuries to transport everything from whale oil to pickles to nails, the barrel is far more ingenious than it appears at first glance. It bows out slightly in the middle (called the bilge), so each individual stave forms a longitudinal arch linking a barrel’s top and bottom. Each stave also abuts two adjoining staves, so they form, collectively, another arch, this one latitudinal around the circumference of the barrel. Barrels are thus remarkably stout and durable: if one tumbled off a ship’s gangway onto a wharf during loading, the impact of the fall was shared by all the staves, reducing the risk of breakage.
Barrel design also evolved such that a single stevedore could move one weighing hundreds of pounds. When standing upright, a barrel can be tilted and rolled on its edge; on its side, it’s even more maneuverable—only a tiny portion of the barrel touches the ground, so it can be spun in any direction, and a light push will start it moving. A skilled worker can bring it upright by rocking it a few times and popping it into position.

The emerging microdistillery movement is doing a lot of experimenting on the barrel aging side to see what they can do to quicken the aging, since it is hard for a business to wait four or more years until they can sell product.  If you are interested in spirits, this is the article for you.

Flour Mill To Be Built In SE Indiana

Cincinnati Enquirer:

A new wheat processing plant is expected to open in West Harrison and the plant’s operator expects to employ 35 people at the site by 2016.
Teutopolis, Ill.-based Siemer Milling Co. and Cincinnati-based H. Nagel & Son plan to launch Whitewater Mill LLC as joint venture, the companies said Thursday.
The companies plan to invest $37.4 million to build and equip a five-floor wheat flour mill on Old U.S. 52. The facility is expected to be operational by spring 2015 and allow the company to produce 700 tons of wheat-based products daily.
Whitewater Mill will produce flours, flour co-products, wheat germ and bran for snack and dessert foods, baking mixes, biscuits, batters and breading. About 7 million bushels of wheat are expected to be processed annually, much of which will be supplied by local farmers, the companies said.
Early next year, Whitewater Mill will begin hiring millers, loaders, maintenance and packaging associates, laboratory technicians and managers.
“Nagel and Siemer see a great opportunity for flour milling in southeast Indiana,” said Rick Siemer, president of Siemer Milling, in a statement. “Existing and potential wheat supply and flour demand factors point to long-term success for this venture.”

I would not have picked that area as a good location to build a new flour mill.  I would think that we'd be seeing fewer acres of wheat in the area, not more.  

Chinese Smog Shuts City

 Heavy smog has shrouded much of eastern China, and air quality levels have been dropped to extremely dangerous levels. The heavy smog is caused by industrial pollution, coal and agricultural burning, and has been trapped by the mountains to the west and wind patterns. The thick haze of smog is clearly visible as the murky gray color in this true color satellite image.

Air pollution in Harbin hits a record:

Extreme levels of air pollution forced schools, roads and the airport to close in a large city in northeastern China on Monday.
In Harbin, the capital of the Heilongjiang province, fine particulate matter (PM2.5) reached levels of 1,000 micrograms per cubic meter in some parts of the city, readings 40 times the level of 25 or less micrograms per cubic meter that the World Health Organization considers ideal for human health and more than three times the level of 300 that’s considered hazardous — for comparison, as the New York Times notes, the air quality index in New York was 41 on Monday morning. It was the first time PM2.5 readings have hit 1,000 since China began releasing data on PM2.5 in January 2012.
Reducing visibility to less than 50 yards in some areas, the smog forced elementary and middle schools to cancel classes, closed some highways and led to cancellations of at least 40 flights. It was the first time this winter, a period known as the “heating season” that smog caused major problems for Chinese residents. In China, the heating season begins when city managers switch on the heating systems in homes and city buildings, which in Harbin happened on Sunday. The extra coal it takes to heat China’s cities in the winter, coupled with winter weather patterns makes the season especially prone to high levels of smog in the country.

Some of the reports said burning corn fodder after harvest also contributed to the problem.

Primordial ---- Yellowstone/Grand Tetons

Primordial ---- Yellowstone / Grand Tetons from Voortex Productions on Vimeo.

The Reddest of the Red States

Utah's citizens think Senator Lee shouldn't be so crazy:

This battle has taken a toll on his popularity, however. A Brigham Young University survey conducted during the shutdown found that 57 percent of Utahans wanted Lee to be more willing to compromise. The senator’s approval rating dropped to 40 percent — down from 50 percent in June — with 51 percent disapproving.
At the same time, the online poll found, the vast majority of Utah residents identifying with the tea party still backed Lee.
Lee waved off the findings. “The only number I worry about is how many people are being hurt by Obamacare,” he said.
But Lee acknowledged that voters disapproved of the shutdown — especially in Utah, where the federal government is the largest employer. Shuttered national parks hurt the tourism industry and thousands of workers at military installations were furloughed.

Is that why folks are so adamantly opposed to the federal government out west, because it is so much of a part of their lives?  It kind of calls into question that rugged individualism meme when the largest employer in the state is the evil folks in Washington.

The False Hype of Shale Oil

Kurt Cobb lays out the skeptical case against any chance of America reaching a point of energy independence:

Recent overblown statements about U.S. energy independence from the oil industry, its paid consultants and the fake think-tank academics it funds simply aren't supported by the numbers. I have discussed this issue in two previous pieces, "The Oil Industry's Deceitful Promise of American Energy Independence" and "Oil and gas industry uses deceptive energy independence message to push U.S. exports".
Recently, friend and colleague Jeffrey Brown--who is best known for his Export Land Model which foretold of shrinking global oil exports--did some fairly simple math to show how difficult it will be for the United States just to maintain its current production, let alone produce all the oil and natural gas it consumes.
In a recent email Brown, who is a Dallas-based independent petroleum geologist managing a joint-venture exploration program, wrote the following:
The EIA's [U.S. Energy Information Administration's] estimate for the most recent four week average crude oil production rate (Crude + Condensate)[which is the definition of oil] was 7.6 mbpd (million barrels per day). Refinery runs were 15.8 mbpd, and net crude oil imports averaged 8.0 mbpd. The numbers for total liquids are, of course, different.
As several people have noted for some time, the primary problem with the tight[oil]/[natural gas] shale plays is the high decline rate.
At a (probably conservative) 10%/year decline rate for existing U.S. crude oil production, in order to simply maintain current U.S. crude oil production, the industry would have to put on line the productive equivalent of every current oil field in the U.S. over the next 10 years, or in round numbers we would need the productive equivalent of 10 new Bakken plays over 10 years, in order to maintain current crude oil production.
Citi Research [an arm of Citigroup] puts the decline rate for existing U.S. natural gas production at about 24%/year, which would require the industry to replace about 100% of current U.S. natural gas production in four years, just to maintain current production, or we would need the productive equivalent of 30 new Barnett Shale plays over 10 years, in order to maintain current natural gas production.
Companies are not finding one new Bakken play each year; nor are they finding three new Barnett Shale-sized plays each year. In fact, production of U.S. natural gas has been just about flat since the beginning of 2012. U.S. crude oil production continues to grow, outpacing most projections. But, the United States would have to more than double its output from here to supply all of the country's needs.

As he mentions, Bakken production is still increasing, but I don't expect it to for very long.  Many of the wells that have come on line will soon start declining, and they will be playing catch up from then on.  The only way we'll hit energy independence is with massive efficiency improvements or massive increase in renewable energy infrastructure.

The Cup Makes a Visit

Legendary goalie and four-time Stanley Cup winner Ken Dryden asked to have a day with the Stanley Cup, and got his wish a couple years back.  In an excerpt from a new chapter in his re-released classic book The Game, he tells what he did with it.  One stop, the tiny town where his father was born and his cousins still farm the home place, Domain, Manitoba:

Hockey had been almost entirely an outdoor game until after the Second World War. Then, with money from the postwar boom, communities to be built and sacrifice to be commemorated, many hundreds of indoor "memorial" arenas were constructed across the country to honor those who had fought and died in the conflict. In 1967, many hundreds more "centennial" arenas went up to celebrate Canada's 100th birthday. It was these indoor arenas that turned hockey from a sport played as much on boots as on skates into a truly national game.
In rural areas, the construction of a rink also symbolized something more. In the postwar decades, new farm technology had allowed far fewer people to cultivate many more acres. Fewer towns were needed. Many wouldn't survive. Those that did got the jump on neighboring towns by making themselves less dispensable. They won the right to establish a school or a clinic; they put up a grain elevator, or built a rink. In 1976, the people of Domain decided they needed an arena of their own. The money would come from a municipal debenture. The arena cost $60,000 and took the community sixteen years to pay off. Shaped like a Quonset hut, the Domain Arena is made of galvanized tin and has a sand floor. With no brine pipes beneath it to create the ice, its hockey season depends on the weather, usually beginning by mid-December and lasting until late March.
Domain's population is less than seventy; 650 were in the rink. It could fit no more. Many kids, and adults, wore jerseys of their favorite NHL teams. Dave wore his Sabres jersey; I wore my Canadiens; Judy, Team Canada. Many others wore the jerseys of their local teams — Domain Kernels, Domain Pitura Seed, Domain Generals, Macdonald Lightning, Oak Bluff Bulls, Sanford Sabres. They came from nearby villages and hamlets — LaSalle, Sanford, Brunkild, Oak Bluff, Starbuck, Osborne, Ste. Agathe, and Rosenort. Others came back home to be with their families, from Winnipeg and from places more distant. Three generations, even four, were there.....
At one point in the evening, Monty Magarrell, the master of ceremonies, Jen's father-in-law, asked those who had helped out at the rink at any time during its history to stand. Astonishing those who had come back home to see the Cup, and astonishing each other as they looked around, most of the rink stood. A small town runs on volunteers. There's not enough money to hire others to do what needs to be done. There's too much to do. And now there are lots of nice new arenas. Even Winnipeg doesn't seem so far away. At times, the most fervent volunteers wonder why they do what they do. But if they stop, things break down, the challenge to live where they do grows, and their reason to stay diminishes. The Cup gave the people of Domain and area a need to get together to do what didn't seem possible. And in doing it, to remind themselves why they volunteer, why they live in Domain, why their rink matters; to feel proud and, as Jen Magarrell put it, for "bragging rights to boot!" Two years later, people still talk about "the night the Stanley Cup was in Domain."
When people not from Domain describe the village as being "in the middle of nowhere," Domainers seem a little offended, and more surprised, as if that never occurred to them. As if they are somewhere. The night was about the Cup, but, as it turned out, more than that it was about the spirit that wins the Cup. It was about Domain.

That is a really good description of many small towns and rural communities, even if it is in the land up north.  The Canadian hockey history is pretty interesting too.  There's also a bit about the rink's hand pushed "Manboni."

Three Types of People in U.S.?

Marina Koren reports on a recent study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:

Thanks to demography researchers and their love for maps, Americans can visualize where their home states fit in on a national scale of a variety of political, economic, social, and health characteristics. One of the latest maps forgoes these traditional methods of measuring the country and investigates something a little less observable: the personality traits of its citizens.
The map, published in a recent study in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, chops the country into three distinct psychological regions based on a range of empirical data. The researchers didn't predict what these clusters might look like (or how many of them there would be), but they expected neighboring states to be, on average, psychologically similar. Geographic proximity is often correlated with human behavior, such as personality traits and lifestyles.
The researchers used self-reported information from nearly 1.6 million people collected over 12 years for 48 states (excluding Alaska and Hawaii) and the District of Columbia. They employed a commonly used personality scale to measure participants on their levels of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience, as well as separate measures to gauge opinion on politics, social issues, leisure interests and music preferences. When a given state is said to be high in neuroticism, for example, that is to say that the mean level of that trait derived from a sample of that state's residents is high compared with the mean levels of the trait from samples of residents from other states. State-level factors like economic, social, health, and religious trends, along with census data, were also included in the analysis.

What's personality type of people in the Midwest?:

The "Friendly and Conventional" region. The first region features the states of Middle America, including South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa, known as the "red" states. People here ranked highly in levels of extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, moderately low in neuroticism, and very low in openness. Residents of the region tend to be "sociable, considerate, dutiful, and traditional," the researchers write. They are predominantly white with low levels of education, wealth, and social tolerance, and tend to be more religious and politically conservative than people outside of the region. They are also less healthy compared with other Americans.

Yes.

A Couple Depressing Maps

This:

and:

A little explanation:

A majority of public school children in 17 states, one-third of the 50 states across the nation, were low income students – eligible for free or reduced lunches – in the school year that ended in 2011. Thirteen of the 17 states were in the South, and the remaining four were in the West. Since 2005, half or more of the South’s children in public schools have been from low income households.
Low income is defined as below 130% of the poverty line and these kids qualify for a free lunch.  Poverty also significantly impacts reading test scores, school opportunities and the ability to go to college.  When one just looks at cities, the situation is much worse.  Kids in public schools who are low income account for 59.8% on average of all students in K-12 public schools.  Any urban area with a population greater than 100,000 is teeming with America's poor.  Mississippi had the highest rate of low income students, 83%, In New Jersey cities 78% of the students are poor and Louisiana, Illinois and Oklahoma all low income rates of greater than 70% for their K-12 students.

There is a little nuance to this information, as whites fled to private schools throughout the south after integration took place.  But still, the numbers are very depressing.  These ans more maps of economic  hardship are here.

Hedge Fund Tries To Screw County on Property Taxes

Bloomberg:

Thousands of brick houses line the streets of Huber Heights, a leafy suburb of Dayton, Ohio, named for the builder who developed it in the 1950s and nurtured its growth. Until this year, his family was the town’s biggest landlord, with a third of all rental housing. Now the tenants’ payments are being routed to a $9 billion hedge fund. Magnetar Capital LLC, investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for its housing bets leading up to the property crash, acquired a rental business in January with about 1,900 properties from Charles H. Huber’s widow. In April, its management company applied for the largest cut to property tax assessments in the county’s history. The move could curb funding for public schools, the police and fire departments and services to the disabled, said Montgomery County Auditor Karl Keith....
On April 1, the new property managers asked to have the assessed value on 1,218 residences in Montgomery County cut by 49 percent, to $50 million from $98.6 million, according to Keith, the county auditor.
Vinebrook co-founder Daniel Bathon, a former Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc. investment banker, said the tax cut will help them invest more in the properties, which will increase their attractiveness and value over time.
“We’re going to improve the resident base for the town, which I think is a big asset to the community,” he said in a telephone interview from Huber Heights.
The assessments, based on a combination of comparable sales and estimates of cash flow from income properties, are considered fair market values, so resale amounts are lower if they go down, Keith said. The reassessments could influence surrounding property values, if local homeowners follow suit.
“Other property owners might look at those and see those as evidence their properties are worth less,” Keith said.
Granting the appeal would reduce property tax collections by $1.39 million, including as much as about $800,000 to Huber Heights City Schools, equivalent to about 16 teaching positions, and curb financing for community colleges, police, fire, libraries and services to the disabled, according to Keith.

Leeches on society. Sort of like great vampire squids. I'm really sick of corporations avoiding taxation and passing the tax burden onto their workers and the rest of society.  It's absolute bullshit.  These fuckers could use a conscience.

Fighting the Tragedy of the Commons

Some northwest Kansas farmers agree to limit irrigation water:

A few years ago, officials from the state of Kansas who monitor the groundwater situation came to the farmers of Hoxie and told them that the water table here was falling fast. They drew a line around an area covering 99 square miles, west of the town, and called together the farmers in that area for a series of meetings.
They told the farmers that the water was like gasoline in the tank. If every one agreed to use it more sparingly, it would last longer.
Proposals to cut back water for irrigation have not been popular in parts like these, to say the least. In the past, farmers across the American West have treated them like declarations of war. Raymond Luhman, who works for the that includes Hoxie, says that's understandable: "Many of them feel like the right to use that water is ..." he says, pausing, "it's their lifeblood!"
It's also their property. Under the law, it's not clear that any government can take it away from them, or order them to use less of it.
But in Hoxie, the conversation took a different turn.
Some influential farmers, including Baalman, pushed for everybody to pump less water. Baalman talked about his four children, how he wanted to preserve water for them.

He also talked about the town, and how it depended on irrigated agriculture. He argued that it would be better for the town to manage that water, to keep it flowing in the future.

What will determine whether the experiment continues?  Probably whether other farmers in the High Plains limit their own water usage:

Another farmer, Gary Moss, says he supports the agreement, but he's really waiting to see if farmers in other parts of western Kansas will do anything similar. The farmers of Hoxie don't want to stand alone in this, he says. It wouldn't be fair.
"If nobody else is jumping onboard, I think there's a lot of people who will say, 'We're not doing any good. We're just hurting ourselves,' " he says.
It's a paradox. This agreement to pump less water only happened because it was small: a deal among neighbors who cared about their town. But it may not survive unless it gets much bigger, including farmers all across the High Plains Aquifer.

I don't have much faith that other groups of farmers will join in until it is obvious they are screwed.  The mining will continue until it no longer can.  I'm glad to see that somebody is trying to be wise, but money talks and everything else walks.

The Golden Shower Rule

Scientists have found a law of urination:

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have discovered a new golden rule: every mammal takes about 21 seconds to urinate. Patricia Yang and her co-authors dubbed it the "Law of Orientation" in a paper published this week, and they say it applies across a wide range of animal sizes.

Yang and her team discovered this commonality after observing male and female cows, dogs, elephants, goats, and rats at the Atlanta Zoo. They filmed these animals urinating, taking note of their size, bladder pressure, and urethra length, and then searched for videos of other peeing animals on YouTube. Based on mathematical models derived from these data, the scientists found that every animal took an average of 21 seconds to relieve itself, despite bladders that varied in volume from 100 milliliters to 100 liters.

That's not to say that animal size doesn't matter. According to Yang, it just doesn't have a significant impact. Prior to this study, most urination models focused on bladder pressure and relatively small mammals. As a result, they didn't take gravity into account.

As New Scientist explains, an elephant's long urethra —  one meter, with a diameter of ten centimeters — gives its urine more time to pick up speed. Because of this, the animal can empty its enormous bladder in about the same time as goats, dogs, and other medium-sized mammals. For small mammals like rats and bats, gravity doesn't exert much influence on flow rates, which are instead determined by viscosity and surface tension. That's why they urinate in small drops, Yang says, finishing the job in less than a second.

The researchers will present their findings next month at the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting.

Does this figure in any way into stadium bathroom design?

The Biggest Fall

The Armstrong Lie:




I always thought he was dirty. That is one bar argument I eventually came out the winner on.

NASA Photo of the Day

October 5 (yes, they put up pictures for the days of the shutdown):

October Aurora in Prairie Skies
Image Credit & Copyright: Randy Halverson Explanation: Wind and spaceweatherare transformed in this haunting night skyscape. The prairie windmill and colorful auroral display were captured on October 1, from central South Dakota, USA, as a good season for aurora hunters came with longer autumn nights. From green to rarer reddish hues, the northern lights are sparked by the geomagnetic storms caused by solar activity. These extend far above the cloud bank to altitudes well over 100 kilometers, against the backdrop of distant stars in the northern night. Visual double star Mizar, marking the middle of the Big Dipper'shandle, is easy to spot at the left edge of the frame. The dipper's North Celestial Pole pointers Merak and Dubheline up vertically near picture center.

Not a Good Day

This:

I was getting over a little bit for a car when the combine started sliding down the ditch and into the worst wet hole you could imagine.  It was tipped far enough over that the front wheel was spinning and throwing some smoke about time I got the hydrostatic turned off.  We tried pulling on it with two tractors, but it was getting buried deeper.  Eventually, we got a wrecker out there, and working with a tractor and the wrecker, we got it out.  I tell you what, climbing up that ladder and then walking down a really steep slope into the cab felt really weird.

Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day than today.  I'd say the odds are in my favor that it will be.

Way To Go, House Republicans

The Des Moines Register points out ways Iowans were hurt by the House Republicans government shutdown:

One of the important take­aways from the government’s limited shutdown was this: While lots of people like to complain about the federal government, there is little agreement on what less government should look like.
Folks around Moville who suffered tornado damage recently were frustrated that the government representatives whose reports were needed for federal disaster assistance weren’t there when they were needed.
Some of the businesses in West Branch, home to the Herbert Hoover birthplace and presidential library, were frustrated that tourists stopped coming to the government attraction and their sales declined precipitously.
Scientists at the National Animal Disease Center in Ames, the U.S. government’s largest facility to track and deal with livestock diseases, were concerned that their long-term experiments were jeopardized because no one was tending their laboratories.
Officials at the University of Iowa began formulating contingency plans in case the shutdown continued and they had to end tens of millions of dollars in medical and scientific studies conducted there for the federal government.
In Des Moines, Gov. Terry Branstad’s staff was well aware that a prolonged shutdown had far-reaching implications for the state. Nearly every state agency relies to some extent on money from Washington. In fiscal year 2012, the cost of operating state government and programs that 3 million Iowans depend on was about $14.6 billion, with $6.5 billion of that coming from the federal government.
Without the federal government, Iowa would lose almost all its money for nursing home inspectors and services to foster care families. The state would have to find other ways to get food to seniors and low-income people. Needy college students would have to find other ways to pay for their schooling — or do without.
But that’s not all. There were delays in processing disability benefits, performing food safety inspections and investigating transportation accidents. Some businesses were unable to import and export goods. The nation’s king crab fishing fleet remained in port because there were no federal workers to set quotas for their catches.

There was some talk by Republicans that they might raise the debt ceiling for six weeks but leave the government shut down.  They are lucky that the Democrats didn't let them do that, because they would have looked pretty damn stupid as more and more people realized how they were negatively impacted by the shutdown.  Yes, a functioning society needs government, and Republicans would do well to remember that.

23 Years

October 20, 1990:

Damn, I'm old.  Damn, I hope the Reds win another one during my lifetime.

Olmstead Locks and Dam Project Causes Controversy

A closer look at the Olmsted dam project

All Things Considered:

This week's congressional compromise to end the government shutdown and raise the debt ceiling had a few other provisions as well.
One of them allows additional spending on a lock and dam project on the Ohio River between Kentucky and Illinois.
The amount is $2.1 billion — a rounding error compared with the $16.7 trillion debt ceiling. But it's still enough to rile budget watchdogs, as well as hard-line conservatives who call it pork-barrel spending by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican.
The Army Corps of Engineers has been working on the new lock and dam on the Ohio River since 1988. It's located between the towns of Olmsted and , a few miles up from where the Ohio meets the Mississippi.
It's just downstream from the old set of locks and dams, which date to the 1920s. Some of the machinery operating the locks still needs to be raised and lowered by hand — "by these crews of men and women that are out on an old steamboat," says James Bruggers, energy and the environment for the Louisville Courier-Journal.
"These two old locks and dams that are just upriver from the Olmsted project are a really great example of our nation's crumbling infrastructure," Bruggers says. "They're already sort of a choke point for this commercial barge traffic."
The barges carry coal, grain and other cargo — about 90 million tons per year.
This is one of the biggest construction jobs going right now in the United States, with massive blocks of concrete being lowered into the river.

While this project has been massively over budget, it is a much needed navigational improvement on the Ohio River.  Much of the blame for the overruns come from consultants being dramatically optimistic about the cost of using a complex construction method.  Funding from Congress has been difficult to garner, so this is a big deal.  Check out how the two locks upstream work.  They will be replaced by this project:

Business Interests Consider Targeting Tea Party

Wonkblog:

Now that the shutdown and debt-ceiling fight have exposed a rift in the Republican Party, lines are being drawn in the battle for control: On one side, there is Boehner and his circle of powerful business allies. On the other, tea party lawmakers and activist groups such as Heritage Action and the Club for Growth.
“I don’t know of anybody in the business community who takes the side of the Taliban minority,” said Dirk Van Dongen, longtime chief lobbyist for the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, who has known Boehner since the lawmaker’s first election.
In the hallways of the country’s leading trade associations, there is talk about taking on tea party Republicans in at least three states. (Michigan, Alabama and Idaho)

Please God, could the business lobby find somebody with half a brain to take on Jim Jordan (Dumbfuck-OH).  Preferably somebody who, unlike Jordan, hasn't spent his whole career pulling a government salary to attack people who depend on the government to get by as ne'er-do-wells.  Pot-Kettle.

Quote of the Day

“The president gets up every day and reads the newspaper and thanks God that Ted Cruz is in the United States Senate,” a Republican senator pointedly told Cruz at a closed-door meeting.

The President and Jon Stewart.  The rest of the country, not so much.

Classic Jack Handey

As an antidote to the Congressional idiocy the last couple weeks, The New Yorker links to some of Jack Handey's stories they've published over the years.  Dude, that guy is hilarious, and very, very weird.  Here's a sample from one of his stories:

You will never know what it’s like to work on a farm until your hands are raw, just so people can have fresh marijuana. Or what it’s like to go to a factory and put in eight long hours and then go home and realize that you went to the wrong factory.
I don’t hate you; I pity you. You will never appreciate the magnificent beauty of a double rainbow, or the plainness of a regular rainbow.
You will never grasp the quiet joy of holding your own baby, or the quiet comedy of handing him back to his “father.”

The man is a comedy genius.

Haulin' That Gargantuan Cranium About

This has been on my mind all night:

Oil Man

Oil Man from Lucid Inc. on Vimeo.

A Fire Gone Wrong

The Washington Post reports on a 2012 fire in Prince George's County, Maryland, that nearly killed two volunteer firemen.  It is a very powerful and touching story, but this little fact surprised me:

The Prince George’s County Fire/EMS Department is a massive apparatus, with 45 stations covering about 500 square miles populated by nearly 900,000 people. All but two of the 45 stations are owned by individual volunteer fire companies, which operate independently, purchase their own equipment and make their own personnel decisions but work in concert with the county department. When a 911 call comes in, Prince George’s County Fire/EMS takes command of the dispatched stations.
Countywide, there are 814 salaried fire and EMS personnel and 1,095 volunteers who are certified to ride firetrucks and ambulances.
Some of the volunteer departments are partially staffed by career (meaning, paid) firefighters and paramedics, though not Bladensburg, which has been an all-volunteer station since 2004. Nearly half of its 68 fire- and EMS-certified volunteers are from out of state, Kuenzli said.
“We are the largest, busiest combination volunteer and career department in the United States – and also the most complex,” said Prince George’s County Fire Chief Marc S. Bashoor, whose annual budget exceeds $125 million.
Averaging about 135,000 fire and emergency medical calls annually, the department is among the 15 busiest in the United States, according to Firehouse Magazine’s National Run Survey. In the most recent survey, Prince George’s ranked ahead of San Diego, San Francisco, Denver, Atlanta and Boston but behind the District and Baltimore.

And this is amazing:

O’Toole suffered second- and third-degree burns to both hands and wrists and first- and second-degree burns to most of his chest and back along with most of both legs and arms. There were 10 surgeries in Washington and then three more in Long Island, plus an endless series of rehabilitation appointments and occupational therapy sessions.
He has spent most of the past 19 months trying to get back to work, to return to the very thing that nearly killed him.
“I would love to be a career fireman for the rest of my life,” he said one afternoon in the Bladensburg engine bay, standing in the shadow of Truck 809. “[Stuff] happens, and it’s unfortunate. Soldiers get blown up. Cops get shot. Firefighters get burned. . . . I knew what I was doing. I knew the risks.”.....
The culture of the fire service is a potent, magnetic force. Firefighters who are burned in the line of duty typically come rushing back – or hope to, anyway.
“The majority of guys who get hurt, they’ll tell you that’s their goal from Day 1, to get back to work,” said Jason Woods, president of the DC Firefighters Burn Foundation. “It’s hard to explain. Most civilian burn survivors don’t even want to be next to a campfire. These guys will tell you they want to go back into a burning building.”
Near the end of August, O’Toole sent an e-mail to Kuenzli about his possible return. O’Toole said he wanted to get back on the truck to ride again.

Read the whole thing.  The most powerful part of it to this old man is that both of the injured firemen were in their early 20s, and they both look like little kids in the pictures.

Now That's Steep

The Atlantic features pictures of Gruyere cheese makers in Switzerland as they make cheese and their cows pasture in the mountains for the summer.  This picture blew me away:

Cows graze in a field at the Tsermon mountain pasture in Gruyeres, Switzerland, on July 30, 2013. (Reuters/Denis Balibouse) #

Holy shit is that steep. They also have pictures of the end of summer procession of the cows from the mountain pastures down to the valley.  Last year I had a picture from one of these in Bavaria.  That's beautiful country.

Accelerated Bridge Construction

Wired:

Construction began late last year, with a combination of pre-made components being shipped in while the construction of two new superstructures on temporary supports were mounted alongside the current bridge.
“We assembled these pre-cast elements into a single span,” Sivakumar explains. “With one superstructure in the median area between the two existing bridges and another north of the westbound bridge. While all this was happening, [the construction crew] built a new superstructure underneath the existing bridge.” And all this was happening without any effect on traffic.
“People see what’s going on, but there’s no impact to them,” says Sivakumar.
At 5 p.m. on Saturday, September 21, the DOT closed I-84 and the first round of demolition began, with crews working for four hours to rip apart the dilapidated structure. And then the slide began.
Four 100-ton jacks began pushing on the new roadway plates, each set atop a “slide track” with a teflon surface that slips across the underside of the polished, stainless steel plates. But each jack only has a stroke of around 30 inches, so every two and a half feet the plates slide, the crews move the jacks forward to push the new roadway further.
“It’s a slow process,” Sivakumar admits. But the bridge was in place eight hours later, and Sivakumar says it could have been done in four to six hours, “but it was pouring that night.”
The final step was to raise the approaches of the road on either side of the bridge to match the new structure’s height and length, so an army of asphalt trucks, pavers, and workers descended on the two sides to build up the additional space and make it strong enough to handle the hundreds of thousands of tractor trailers that would roll over it in the coming years.
The westbound span was opened to traffic at 12:55 p.m. the following day, widened into a single span bridge that was 80 feet long and 57 feet wide — more than twice the width of the previous bridge — with three lanes and two full-size shoulders.
This Saturday, October 19, the eastbound span will be slid into place, and if weather isn’t an issue, Sivakumar says the new span could be open even earlier.

That's pretty cool, but I can't imagine how nerve wracking it would be to do this the first time.  I know I'd be shitting my pants as they started jacking the deck over.

Wisdom from Whitey

Grantland highlights a classic 1992 profile of Whitey Herzog for the LA Times Magazine in 1992, by Pat Jordan.  There is a lot of classic shit in the article, but this brought back some memories:

 He was born in 1931 and raised in one of those small, pinched, hardscrabble Midwestern towns so well delineated in the stories of Sherwood Anderson — a town where people tend to remember a native son's failures more than his successes. When Herzog returned to his hometown as a big-league baseball player in the '50s, people would say to him, "Your brother Herman was a better player than you." Herzog would snap back, "Why don't you ask him? He's carrying mail right here in town."
New Athens (pronounced Ay-thens), Ill., population 2,100, lies 40 miles east of St. Louis. Sixty years ago, much as it is today, New Athens was a farming and coal-mining town with two lumber mills, strip mines, a foundry, a brewery and 16 bars. Its inhabitants, mostly descendants of German immigrants, were neat, clean, orderly, punctual, hard-working and hard-drinking people who, inexplicably and proudly, referred to themselves as hard-headed Dutchmen. They saw the daily sameness of their lives as comforting, not confining. A day in the mines. Shots and beers on the way home. Checkers on Saturdays at the barbershop. The big Sunday dinner. Laundry on Monday. When Herzog passed through town with a U.S. Army baseball team in 1953, he took his teammates on a tour. He told them who would be sitting where in which bar at what time, and they were. Thirty-four years later, Herzog would write in his autobiography, "White Rat": "And unless they're dead, that's where they are right now."
Herzog is reticent about his parents. He says only that his mother worked hard in a shoe factory and was so fanatically strict about cleanliness that he preferred to stay away from home as long as possible, playing sports and working at the Mound City Brewing Co., where he learned to drink beer like his father. Edgar Herzog worked at the brewery, where he had the distinction of never having missed a day of work. Herzog remembers his father telling him: "Be there early and give them a good day's work, so when it comes time to lay someone off, it'll be the other guy."

So I was in Whitey's old neighborhood visiting a friend from college right after we graduated.  It so happened that we were hanging out on Saturday evening at a campground with his friend from high school, his folks and a bunch of people he grew up around.  We had a good time drinking and shooting the shit.  Finally, at 11:00, he loaded his friend and I in his car to go to the liquor store in town and meet up with his girlfriend.  She left work and we drove for a couple of blocks, then my friend got out of his car, went up and talked to her, then came back and told me to have his friend give me directions to his grandma's house where I could crash out until he got done "visiting' with his girlfriend.

I took the wheel of his car, and followed his friend's directions to my roommate's grandma's house.  When I got there, I parked the car and started to the door, his friend asked if I wanted to head back to the campground for a while.  I figured I had nothing to lose, so I went back out there with him.  After way too many beers, I was arguing politics and sports with one of the boss men from the campground (and I was hitting on his wife).  He found out I was a Reds fan, and made some snide remark about Pete Rose.

That was game on.  I told him that Pete was the best player ever, and when the guy kept giving me shit, I looked at him, and told him that Whitey Herzog was a homosexual.    Now most likely, that wasn't the thing to say about Whitey.  But somehow, I was able to keep the guy from punching me, and then hanging out with him for a while before my roommate's friend and I had to head back to town.  Needless to say, when my roommate and I were sober again, we had a few good stories to tell.

Beautiful Seascapes

THE WORLD GEOGRAPHY features 10 beautiful pictures of unique oceanic scenes.  Here's one of the most interesting:

In the resort town of Skagen you can watch an amazing natural phenomenon. This city is the northernmost point of Denmark, where the Baltic and North Seas meet. The two opposing tides in this place can not merge because they have different densities. 

The area where the Baltic and the North Sea come into contact is quite shallow and so the contact face is relatively small. There is of course some mixing but it is quite minimal due to the difference of the density.
It is also helped by the fact that the Baltic is not tidal which keeps most of its water within the Baltic basin and this water is constantly being reduced in salinity by the rivers which drain into the Baltic. Were it not for that small opening into the North Sea the Baltic would be a giant fresh water lake. The contact area is a great sight to witness. [link, map]

There are a bunch of awesome pictures there.

Hahahahahahahahaha

So this government shutdown was for what?  Obamacare is still in place (although it is struggling mightily, and might be the biggest story on the news if Republicans weren't able to make the most incompetent Democrats look like Goddamn geniuses) and Republicans got pretty much jackshit out of their "negotiations" .  So we went through 16 days of bullshit sideshows like the World War II Memorial circus, and the evidence comes in that if my Congressman, John Boehner, had brought the original Senate bills to the floor, we never would have had a government shutdown.  But the thing is, the Republicans made themselves look so damn stupid all on their own.  This was the world's biggest unforced error. 

I have been wondering something about the WWII monument clusterfuck.  Tea Partiers claim to be big fans of history.  Yet, they didn't realize that in the last government shutdown the National Park service shut down the D.C. memorials?  And did they realize that the same big government that they hate now was much more omnipresent during World War II?  The government then had a much higher debt to GDP ratio, dictated what industry would build, built factories to manufacture more products for government purchase, rationed fuel and food, installed price and wage controls, enforced mandatory conscription, taxed incomes at rates up to 90%, enforced blackouts at night and generally made Barack Obama look like a reactionary.  How can they shut down the government, make some ridiculous scene about the government blocking veterans from their memorial because the government they shut down is shut down, and then talk about how much freedom we've lost compared to when those same veterans were young.  How is that for cognitive dissonance?  These guys claim to be patriots, but they are the Southern Democrats of 1861.

RADIANCE

After the last couple weeks of sheer idiocy, I could use me some Northern Lights:

RADIANCE from LakeSuperiorPhoto on Vimeo.

STUKENBORG

STUKENBORG from Order & Other on Vimeo.

Fallout From the South Dakota Blizzard

Scientific American:

Ranchers are both trying to bury animals and haul them to roadways where renderers will remove the bodies. But while the snow melt has allowed for roadways to be cleared, the pastures in many areas are flooded or too muddy to access, making it hard to collect carcasses and to care for surviving animals.
Silvia Christen, executive director of the South Dakota Stockgrowers Association, said most cattle ranchers do not carry private insurance policies because they are cost prohibitive and have exclusions that would have ruled out coverage in this situation anyway.
She said the ranchers' only financial assistance would be found in a disaster program that is part of a proposed U.S. farm bill. But the U.S. government shutdown and delays in passing a new farm bill have left ranchers with no assistance.
Ranchers are not able to even consult with their U.S. Farm Service Agency representatives on how to document their cattle losses, since the FSA workers are on furlough because of the shutdown, she said.
Christen said each calf lost has a market value of roughly $800-$900 and each cow is valued at about $1,800, so the total losses could easily be in the tens of millions of dollars.
"This is a major financial loss for these ranchers," she said. As well, she said, the emotional loss has been wrenching.

A Modern Farmer article has some gruesome pictures of dead cattle.  It is notable that there are things the federal government does for rural folks, even though a large percentage of Congressmen representing rural areas don't seem to realize that.  My prayers go out to all those ranchers.  I can't imagine how terrible that is.

This is What You Get When You Vote for Morons

The House Republicans can't even agree amongst themselves on a proposal to settle this fuckup they (along with that narcissistic prick Ted Cruz) brought on.  Josh Barro isn't surprised:

Roughly one-third of this caucus thinks hitting the debt ceiling and shutting down the government are great strategies to try to stop Obamacare. The other two-thirds of the party has realized all along that this strategy sucks, but they could not find any way to stop their party from implementing it — even though these "reasonable" Republicans outnumber the crazies....
Can you imagine the situation this country would be in if Republicans controlled both houses of Congress right now? Or if we had a President whose administration gets jerked around by Heritage Action in the same way that House Republicans do? It would be a trainwreck, and "reasonable" Republicans like Nunes would still be on television saying they understand it's a trainwreck, but by golly, operationally, they had no way to stop it.
There is no serious argument for Republican governance right now, even if you prefer conservative policies over liberal ones. These people are just too dangerously incompetent to be trusted with power.
A party that is this bad at tactics can't be expected to be any good at policy-making.

Voting for Republicans to run the government is like putting arsonists in charge of the fire department.  These idiotic, mouth breathing, Dominionist, dumbfuck assholes have no business being in charge of a Neighborhood Watch or a church council, let alone being the deciding votes on whether to allow a completely unnecessary default on our national debt. If you look at the Tea Party caucus very closely, you'll see some of the dumbest people to ever serve in Washington.  Unfortunately, we may just find out how dangerous that many incompetent morons in power can be.

Hopefully, the Senate, along with Democrats and what few sane Republicans are in the House, will be able to get something done to prevent a financial meltdown for no reason other than letting bed wetters play with matches.

Lac-Megantic After the Blast

All Things Considered follows up on the Quebec town blown up by the runaway shale oil train that derailed in the middle of town in July:

Parts of the city were flattened by the blast. Underneath the remaining buildings, cleanup crews have discovered that much of Lac-Mégantic's downtown is saturated with heavy metals — lead, arsenic, copper — and that thick crude oil. Three months after the explosion, they are still pumping spilled crude oil and chemicals from underneath what used to be a gorgeous lakefront street.
In his office, Mercier spreads out a map on his desk, showing the vast scope of the cleanup.
"So, the petroleum mostly flew on the ground, on this side to the lake. So, the lake was burning for a big part," he says. "That was something to see, yeah? You can see here, all the landscape in this area is destroyed ... all these houses are gone now. Nothing there, nothing there."
A fleet of huge trucks and backhoes is laying the foundation for an entirely new downtown. Officials have decided that a new business district is needed to replace what's been destroyed or contaminated.
About $116 million has been pledged for that effort, but no one's sure what the final price tag will be. The province of Quebec and Canada's national government are feuding over how much to spend and who should pay.

They also go into some detail about the tanker cars, and their shortcomings:

But much of the scrutiny has fallen on the type of freight car that erupted that day — the big, sausage-shaped tank car known in the industry as a DOT-111A.
"It's rigid, it's prone to derailment, and when it derails because of the coupling design, they're prone to puncture," says Lloyd Burton, a professor at the University of Colorado who studies rail transport of hazardous materials.
It turns out DOT-111A's make up two-thirds of the tank cars used in the U.S. and Canada — they're like the workhorse of the rail industry.
Thousands of them roll through towns and cities across America every day. And Burton says they're carrying increasing amounts of increasingly volatile crude oil and chemicals produced by North America's booming energy industry.
"The most dangerous crude, the highest sulfur crude, the most explosive and most flammable materials are being carried in tank cars," he says, "And they're being carried in tank cars that are simply not equal to the task."
For decades, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board has been issuing strongly worded reports about the safety of these very same DOT-111A's, calling them "inadequate" for carrying "dangerous products."
Despite those warnings, the rail industry has resisted replacing its tank car fleet.

However, that seems to be changing a little bit.  Pipelines have fewer accidents than trains, when transporting oil and petroleum products.  However, when they do have problems, they are usually pretty big:

Initial investigations following a 20,600-barrel leak on a Tesoro Logistics pipeline in North Dakota point to corrosion on the 20-year-old pipeline, state regulators said Friday.
The 6-inch pipeline was carrying crude oil from the Bakken shale play to the Stampede rail facility outside Columbus, N.D., when a farmer discovered oil spouting from it Sept. 29.
It is the state's largest oil spill since it became a major U.S. producer. It is also the biggest oil leak on U.S. land since March, when an Exxon Mobil pipeline spilled 5,000 to 7,000 barrels of heavy Canadian crude in Mayflower, Ark...
The pipeline, which runs 35 miles from Tioga to Black Slough in North Dakota, was built by BP in 1993.
It is a part of Tesoro's "High Plains" pipeline system in North Dakota and Montana, which gathers oil from the Bakken shale and delivers it to another Enbridge pipeline and Tesoro's 68,000 barrels-per-day Mandan refinery.
Tesoro bought the pipeline and the refinery from BP in 2001.
Farmer Steven Jensen said Thursday the smell of sweet light crude oil wafted on his farm for four days before he discovered the leak, leading to questions about why the spill wasn't detected sooner.
"These companies, they've got to step up to the plate and use better technology. There is no reason this shouldn't have come up somewhere," Jensen said.

Anyway, the Lac-Megantic disaster was a combination of numerous issues.  Hopefully, lessons were learned, but I have a feeling that not enough were.