Month: January 2010

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New to twc central

Well, the old hand mill burr grinder we’ve been using for coffee has pretty much bit the dust. Oh, it still works, after a fashion, but I’ve been unable to fix the “loosy-goosy” action as metal parts begin to fatigue and wear out, because I cannot find proper replacements. So, it’s now relegated to decorative status and been replaced by:

Nice coffee mill, and the grind is easily modified, unlike our old handmill. I like the auto-shutoff, though I rarely need the feature since I make most of my coffee by the mugfull with the neat lil Bodum French press s-i-l-to-be gifted me with at Christmas.

12-oz is just about right for one of my fav mugs, but 2Tbs of beans–about what it takes to brew a robust cuppa joe in the lil Bodum after being nicely ground by the B&D mill–isn’t enough for the auto-shutoff to kick in on the coffee mill. Big deal. So I press a button twice.

O Blessed Holy Caffeine Tree!

Addendum:

Gourmet/Gourmand: is coffee “good drinks” or “good eats”? Doesn’t matter to me, cos I’m about to offend both.

In a tightwad’s never-ending search for the most value possible from EVERYTHING, I have settled on a compromise of good taste/value (of which, frankly, “good taste” is a value consideration) in my Fp coffee brewing. I’ve settled on two brewings (like two pressings of olive oil, I suppose) from the same grounds in my lil French press. The first is pretty much as instructed in the Bodum lit, except that I do no pour hot water over grounds in the Fp; I pour cold water over ’em, stir and then microwave the mixture. Then I do let it sit and brew up for another couple of minutes before pouring the first cup.

Then I commit my crime: I pour another load of cold water over the grounds and let that simply steep until I’ve finished my first cup and am ready to brew another. Then, microwave and steep.

The first cup: robust but certainly not “too strong” (whatever that means; how can coffee–great as simply beans chewed plain–be “too strong”? :-)). Second cup: more flowery and certainly a tad lighter, but still really coffee. Yes, I did try a third cup. *blech* Please trust me. It’s not an experience I’d wish on you. My worst enemy, sure, but not you. Of course, folks that think stuff brewed from a Folger’s can is coffee would probably like it well enough.

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Troubling Information About “Higher Education” in England

Note: The Underpants Bomber’s technical incompetence reflects badly on his alma mater, University College London. After all, The Underpants Bomber “Complete[d] a three-year engineering and business finance degree at University College London”1

If his former professors aren’t hanging their heads in shame and the dean of his college hasn’t hung himself (no comment on whether or not the dean would have the engineering competence to do the job right), then they ought to.

Shame on the University College London! Dreadful incompetence run amok…

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The 0! Establishes The Newspeak Method of Dealing With Terrorisim

“How to Handle the Terrorists” (someone needs to write new lyrics to “How to Handle a Woman”… or maybe not. Perhaps under The 0!’s White Cafe-au-lait House rules a simple word change from “woman” to “terrorist” will do.)

  1. Buy more “stuff”
  2. CYA for so-called “counter-terrorism community”
  3. Free porn for TSA employees!!!
  4. Rearrange the deck chairs.

Go ahead. Watch the speech by TOTUS linked above (as “glibly” er “ummed” through by The 0!). Read between the lines and translate from Dhimmicrappic Newspeak. I submit that my analysis is an accurate summation of the “steps” The 0! announces to “deal with” the problem of “man-caused disaster” (to use HIS DHS appointee’s terminology)–all on the heads of a “small band of violent extremists” not, of course having anything to do with a broadly-based worldwide jihad. Of course, TOTUS’s speech would have been much more convincing (though still as stupid) had TOTUS gotten someone who’s a competent public reader to deliver it.

Or, as Small Dead Animals put it:

The War On Man-Caused Disaster

Bringing a monthly status report to a Semtex fight.

Continue reading “The 0! Establishes The Newspeak Method of Dealing With Terrorisim”

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A Right Attitude When Dealing With Willful Idiots

I imagine there might be one or two–perhaps even more, though I can scarcely imagine such a thing–among the congresscritters, Mass MEdia Podpeople, Academia Nut Fruitcakes and the whole gaggle of Loony Left Moonbats, etc., who actually intend good toward their fellow citizens.

It could happen. Well, it could. And so, I should note,

” …the right attitude to take toward well-intentioned people who didn’t have the advantages of education and intelligence, but who nonetheless insisted on opening their mouths… “

…is to smile at the idiots and simply ignore them. No, it won’t help anyone to attempt educating them, to try to lead them out of the darkness of their willful ignorance. After all, such attempts are akin to giving a pig voice lessons. The pig won’t learn to sing and you’d just be wasting your time while annoying the poor thing.

Of course, the pig does at least have the excuse of being useful. Yum! Bacon! Sadly, no such excuses can be found for congresscritters, Mass MEdia Podpeople, Academia Nut Fruitcakes and the whole gaggle of Loony Left Moonbats, etc. Even those who might–might, I say–be stupidly intending good are just useless oxygen sinks. At best.

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Been a “Fun” 24 Hours

Yesterday afternoon–about 26 hours ago, now, internet connectivity here at twc central went south again. *sigh* About 2.5 good weeks of decent service and… kablooey!

Yeh, yeh, I walked completely through the troubleshooting tree with the voice-prompt call-in (even though I had the process memorized long, long ago). No, that didn’t help. Yes, the first thing on calling in was a recorded message saying my ISP was experiencing an unusually large call volume from my area. No, according to the supposed customer service reps I eventually reached, there was no outage (then why the swamping with calls such that it took 7 hours before I could actually reach a live person?). No, going through the troubleshooting tree with a live person resulted in no different result than doing it with the automated process or on my own.

Nor did changing out the “modem” (cable “modems” are NOT modems; they are specialty routers–very, very different technology to a modem). Heck, in the process of many, many reboots of this computer as a part of the multiple efforts I made to comply with “support’s” requests, my primary hard drive scrambled Windows boot process to the point that the Win7 repair Environment wouldn’t. Repair it, that is. (S’all right, really. I had a spare hard drive I had really meant to install it on but because of a lapse of memory had failed to, so another easy-peasy quick fresh install from upgrade media onto a bare drive. *heh*)

Fresh install of Win7 (and yes, I had tried using Ubuntu and Puppy Linux to connect, as well–as well as attempting to connect directly to the cable “modem” with other computers) and still no connectivity. Went through yet another ineffective t-shooting process (which, BTW, included power cycling both the modem and the computer attached to it), called in again and got a sweet lil idjit who informed me that my modem had been “Online for the past 15 hours.” 15 hours during which I had power cycled it several times, had changed it out for another modem, etc.

Riiiight. Went through the t-shooting tree one more time and… magically, it worked this time. Not. While lying to me aboiut my modem having been active and online for the past 15 hours, the lil idjit reset on her end. At least, that’s the best I can figure from here, since I KNOW information I’ve received from my ISP over the past 24 hours (heck, the past 6 months) has been… suspect, at the very best.

It’d just be nice if–just once–instead of playing CYA even one person would say, “Oops! Our bad. We screwed you up. Sorry.”

Meanwhile, since Lovely Daughter and her fiance were going to be out “shopping for cake” (Gee, some sheet cake and a couple lil cakes, one for bride and one–if that–for groom. What’s the stinking big deal? Wedding cake all tastes like sugar-soaked cardboard, anyway… ), he let my Wonder Woman use his network/internet connection to take her mid-term for one of her grad school classes while I shoveled his drive and did some shopping of my own. 😉 (Yeh, didn’t have to shovel his drive, but since Lovely Daughter had borrowed my 35-year-old snow shovel–hey! another 65 years and it’ll be an antique!–I figured, why not?)

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Home Again, Home Again, Jiggetty-Jig

There and back again between early a.m. and now. About 100 miles round trip–not far, but… COLD. Was 0 deg F when I left; 6 when I returned. Car never warmed above “You HAVE to be kidding me!” Lil car did NOT like. Heater? Notsomuch. Next thing to “Notatall.” Beat the outside temps by juuuust about nuthin’. Patchy ice on 2-lane roads (still!); snowing and blowing–though not snowing hard. Crisp–brittle!–light stabbing deep into brain past sunglasses when snow let up. Gloves worked for hands, but feet were blocks of ice when I got “there” and again when I returned. Just now getting feeling back in toes. Seriously.

Not bad. Pretty typical January around the Ozarks, though maybe about 10 deg F cooler than usual for this time of year.

Algore musta been giving a speech on “Anthropogenic Global Warming” somewhere near here.

Sidebar: what in the heck is that lil town in a county as sparsely populated as America’s Third world County (well, except for the “Vegas of the Ozarks” about 30 more miles down the road) doing with a McDonalds, a Taco Bell and a KFC?!? Who’dathunkit? Cheap (and very nearly drinkable) cuppa joe at the Mickey D’s, though. (What can I say? It was hot.)

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A Key Difference?

Aside from the uncharacteristic botched attribution (the line quoted is from “The Young British Soldier” not “Chant Pagan”–though both are Kipling) this comment by John Ringo, inserted into his translation of a (generally favorable!) French article on close association with American forces in Afghanistan, is telling:

Anyone with a passing knowledge of Kipling knows the lines from Chant Pagan: ‘If your officer’s dead and the sergeants look white/remember it’s ruin to run from a fight./So take open order, lie down, sit tight/And wait for supports like a soldier./ This, in fact, is the basic philosophy of both British and Continental soldiers. ‘In the absence of orders, take a defensive position.’ Indeed, virtually every army in the world. The American soldier and Marine, however, are imbued from early in their training with the ethos: In the Absence of Orders: Attack! Where other forces, for good or ill, will wait for precise orders and plans to respond to an attack or any other ‘incident’, the American force will simply go, counting on firepower and SOP to carry the day.

This is one of the great strengths of the American force in combat and it is something that even our closest allies, such as the Brits and Aussies (that latter being closer by the way) find repeatedly surprising. No wonder is surprises the hell out of our enemies.

And in an afterward to his translation of the original article, Ringo goes on to say,

What is hard for most people to comprehend is that that attitude represented only the most elite units of the past. Current everyday conventional boring ‘leg infantry’ units exceed the PT levels and training levels of most Special Forces during the Vietnam War. They exceed both of those as well as IQ and educational levels of: Waffen SS, WWII Rangers, WWII Airborne and British ‘Commando’ units during WWII. Their per-unit combat-functionality is essentially unmeasurable because it has to be compared to something and there’s nothing comparable in industrial period combat history.

This group is so much better than ‘The Greatest Generation’ at war that WWII vets who really get a close look at how good these kids are stand in absolute awe.

My association with the current crop of American armed forces is second and third hand, but the boys (and they are largely still boys in many ways) I know from America’s Third World County who’ve “seen the bear” in Afghanistan and Iraq certainly fit the mold in upholding this standard. (Man, I’m getting old. I had some of these kids in children’s choirs… *heh*)

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Typical January: Cold

15 years ago when we moved to America’s Third World County, we experienced a very, very cold January. Things warmed up a tad after that for several years, but three years ago, while Albore was loudly trumpeting his Anthropogenic Global Warming Con, we began once again experiencing genuinely cold Januaries (for those Anthropogenic Global Warming Cons, weather does that–change, you know).

This week, beginning the first full week of January 2010, temps have been consistently in the single digits at night, here in America’s Third World County, and the snow and ice on the country roads (and, heck, here in town) have made driving anywhere off the main highways treacherous–driving conditions have, in fact, been bad enough to delay restarting school here after Christmas break.

And so, although I’ve had some gigs and have a 50 mile (one way) on some not-the-best 2-lane highways on Friday for some more business, I’ve been able to–mainly–enjoy my Wonder Woman’s presence here at home this week, and she’s been able to rack up both some extra study time on her classwork and some extra sleep (it’s what winter’s for, you know :-)). It’s not the all-the-time togetherness that the ice storm of January 2007 was (when NO ONE was doing anything except simply surviving a 3-county-wide power outage in one-digit and sub-zero weather), but it’s nice.

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Are You In?

I found this in my email inbox. It has some holes and gaps and faces an even steeper uphill battle than The FairTax bill, but it has a certain rough appeal, doesn’t it?

We need THIS Change

*It will never be accomplished unless we do something about it now, not later! The only way that congress would ever vote for such a bill is for Americans to demand it to the point that our elected officials feel they have no choice. That means many Americans, which includes you, must push to get a bill written and persuade a majority to vote for it. Therefore, this must be distributed to every American who has a PC, every American! Will you help or are you just blowing smoke when you get upset with congress when they play partisan politics? Lets help bring about a Change in Washington that is more than just spoken words, a Change that Americans will be proud of, a Change that will benefit future generations. If something is not done our Children and grandchildren may not have a country like we had to grow up in. Can Americans depend on you to to distribute this and support it or will you make excuses as to why it will not work? I’m in; what about you?

*This is the best thing I have ever read pertaining to Government. It doesn’t matter what political party you like.. This is what’s best for EVERY AMERICAN!*

*Congressional Reform Act of 2010**

*1. Term Limits: 12 years only, one of the possible options below.*

*A. Two Six year Senate terms*
*B. Six Two year House terms*
*C. One Six year Senate term and three Two Year
House terms**

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators; serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.

*2. No Tenure / No Pension: **

* A congressman collects a salary while in office
and receives no pay when they are out of office.**

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators; serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.

*3. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security:**

* All funds in the Congressional retirement fund
moves to the Social Security system immediately.
All future funds flow into the Social Security
system, Congress participates with the American
people.**

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators; serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.

*4. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan just as all Americans*.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators; serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.

*5. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.*

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators; serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.

*6. Congress looses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.**

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators; serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.

*7. Congress must equally abide in all laws they impose on the American people.*

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators; serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.

*8. All contracts with past and present congressmen are void effective 1/1/11. *

* The American people did not make this contract
with congressmen, congressmen made all these
contracts for themselves.**

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators; serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.

If you agree with the above, pass it on. If not, just delete.

N.B. While I deleted some multiple “???” and “!!!” and redacted a few comma splices, the above is essentially as I received it in my email inbox.