Category: the value of X

Profiles in courage:
Baseball Season has begun, with teams reporting in the little leagues around here. My own future all-star has a team assignment and one practice under his belt. I decided to take him out this afternoon and get some throwing, catching and hitting in (the hitting was his idea).

Picture yourself pitching (if you can call the wild, untameable slop I throw pitching) to a hitter who only likes to hit balls inside. For him to get a hit, I have to throw over the inner part of the plate. Yuck. Luckily for both of us, I was able to get a few across without a hit batsman, ie, having to explain to his mom that almost 9 years of hard work was all for naught, as I had removed our son’s head with an errant pitch.

Then it was his turn to hurl a few, but he wanted a catcher. So I ended up on the receiving end of his stuff. It went pretty well, when he took his time (meaning I was only in danger if I failed to pay attention, not from any intentional shots to my unhelmeted head). When he was distracted, he was wild and I was only in danger of being hit by ricochets off the backstop (two or three of those).

Adventures in photography:
The baseball practice was at the old Sand Point naval station, so while they got started on all that, I took the old pinhole camera down around the hangars to see what I could find. I really began to think things weren’t right when I kept winding on film without getting a sense I was going to run out. So when we got home, I tossed the camera, the tank, and the 120 reel in the changing bag and used some refreshingly adult language as I worked to get the film on the reel. I have never handled 120 film before and in hindsight, it might have made sense to get hold of an old past-the-sell-by date roll and practice this in daylight. Take that as a suggestion if you ever get the urge to work with 100+ year old film technology.

So I got on the reel, with some certainty that the film is not wound on correctly and probably touching. I tore the paper backing off and was struck by the disturbing realization that it might have been in there backwards the whole time, meaning that non-photosensitive paper backing was facing the light/image source, and the other side facing the back of the camera, slowly absorbing the light through the counter hole (through which I never saw a number, merely blackness).

Chemistry is mixed and cooling (D-76 get mixed at temperatures hotter than my water heater produces, so I had to microwave some of the water to get the desired temperature of 131℉). I will try and process the film tomorrow. If this turns out to have been a wasted effort, I will have my practice film in hand, at any rate.

Adult Entertainment:
The young’uns were attendees at an evening ‘do at their school Friday night, which freed up their parents to go out for a meal at a place that didn’t supply crayons, didn’t have cups with lids, or cater to anyone special at all. Café Lago was our destination, and I can concur with a friend who said their lasagna was the best in the world: I’ve had plenty, and made more than a few, but this was on another plane entirely. I had gnocchi, a dish I try when I can find it.

It justified my beliefs about Italian creativity: you give a potato to the English, they boil it; the Swiss, they fry it; the French, they sauce it. But the Italians give us Potato Gatto and Gnocchi, two things it would never occur to anyone else to come up with.

Now playing: Slave Driver by Bob Marley & The Wailers from the album “Rebel Music” | Get it

A friend, a crafter of diverse skills — sewing, knitting, quilting, leatherwork, &c. — pointed out to me that the local economy must be healthy, since some of her crafty haunts were closing up. Being nigh on 80 years old, she has some perspective on this, and says its a tried and true pattern that when the local economy skids, craft outlets do well, and when business in general is good, crafting falls out of favor.

My take on it was purely utilitarian, that people did more mending and stretching of their dollars, but her take was that people spend money on entertainment outside the house — movies, concerts, and such — when they have it and sit home by the fireside making stuff when they don’t.

What do you think?

That’s Another § Unqualified Offerings:

[A]t that meeting [on the afternoon of 9/11/2001 -ed], Rumsfeld was already thinking of using the atrocities as an excuse to go to war with Iraq. It’s important to stress: Rumsfeld is not wondering if Iraq did it; he’s wondering if it can look enough like Iraq did it to pin the blame there.
It can’t be stressed enough: the Pentagon was aflame; there was smoke pouring from a hole in the Pennsylvania fields and the World Trade Center complex was belching its ghastly cloud, and already our rulers were thinking not, who is to blame? but what can we get away with? What will the still-bubbling fat of the murdered serve to cook?

These people are just gangsters and criminals. Here are the handwritten notes:

Best info fast
judge whether good enough
Hit S.H@ same time –
Not just UBL
[ . . . ]
Near term target needs –
– go massive – sweep it all up
– Things related & not

Doesn’t sound much like a well-reasoned, deliberative approach . . .

Now playing: Rude Mood by Stevie Ray Vaughan from the album “Texas Flood” | Get it

Time to stock on provisions.

Current Watches, Warnings and Advisories for Washington Issued by the National Weather Service:

THE COLDEST TEMPERATURES IN AT LEAST A DECADE EXPECTED THURSDAY THROUGH THE WEEKEND… A VERY COLD AIR MASS IS CURRENTLY FORMING OVER THE YUKON OF NORTHERN CANADA. THE LATEST NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE COMPUTER MODELS DRIVE THIS COLD AIR MASS SOUTHWARD TO THE WASHINGTON AND BRITISH COLUMBIA BORDER BY THURSDAY MORNING. A COLD FRONT WILL THEN SWEEP FROM NORTH TO SOUTH THROUGH WASHINGTON DURING THE DAY ON THURSDAY BRINGING A DRAMATIC DROP IN TEMPERATURES. HIGH PRESSURE WILL PERSIST OVER THE AREA FRIDAY INTO THE WEEKEND MAINTAINING THE COLD CONDITIONS. HIGH TEMPERATURES FRIDAY AND SATURDAY WILL LIKELY REMAIN IN THE UPPER 20S OVER MOST OF PUGET SOUND. NIGHTTIME LOWS ARE EXPECTED TO FALL INTO TEENS BOTH FRIDAY AND SATURDAY MORNING. A FEW WIND SHELTERED LOCATIONS SUCH AS OLYMPIA COULD POSSIBLY FALL BELOW 10 DEGREES. AT THIS TIME…MOISTURE APPEARS LIMITED WITH THIS SYSTEM. HOWEVER…FLURRIES OR LIGHT SNOW SHOWERS ARE STILL POSSIBLE WITH THE FRONT THURSDAY AND WITH A PASSING LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM THURSDAY NIGHT AND FRIDAY. ACCUMULATIONS APPEAR MINIMAL AT THIS TIME BUT ANY CHANGE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SYSTEM COULD PRODUCE MORE SNOW. IN ADDITION…A STRONG BLAST OF NORTHERLY WIND WILL FOLLOW THE FRONT ON THURSDAY. THIS WILL PRODUCE ESPECIALLY HAZARDOUS CONDITIONS FOR MARINE INTERESTS IN ALL WATERS. OVER LAND…NORTH WINDS OF 25 TO 35 MPH COMBINED WITH TEMPERATURES FALLING INTO THE 20S WILL PRODUCE WIND CHILLS IN THE SINGLE DIGITS…AND POSSIBLY COLDER THURSDAY NIGHT AND FRIDAY MORNING AS WINDY CONDITIONS PERSIST. IT IS ALSO POSSIBLE THAT WINDS COULD EXCEED HIGH WIND CRITERIA…SUSTAINED 40 MPH WITH GUSTS TO 60 MPH…BY LATE THURSDAY INTO FRIDAY OVER THE NORTHERN INTERIOR AND THE CASCADE FOOTHILLS. CONTINUE TO MONITOR WEATHER FORECASTS IN THE EVENT HIGH WIND WATCHES ARE NEEDED.

So two hailstorms, thunder and lightning, a dusting of snow, all in preparation for this? Yikes.

DNC State of the Union Attack – FactCheck.org:

The President left out a few things when surveying the State of the Nation:

• He proudly spoke of “writing a new chapter in the story of self-government” in Iraq and Afghanistan and said the number of democracies in the world is growing. He failed to mention that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan yet qualify as democracies according to the very group whose statistics he cited.
• Bush called for Congress to pass a line-item veto, failing to mention that the Supreme Court struck down a line-item veto as unconstitutional in 1998. Bills now in Congress would propose a Constitutional amendment, but none have shown signs of life.
• The President said the economy gained 4.6 million jobs in the past two-and-a-half years, failing to note that it had lost 2.6 million jobs in his first two-and-a-half years in office. The net gain since Bush took office is just a little more than 2 million.
• He talked of cutting spending, but only “non-security discretionary spending.” Actually, total federal spending has increased 42 percent since Bush took office.
• He spoke of being “on track” to cut the federal deficit in half by 2009. But the deficit is increasing this year, and according to the Congressional Budget Office it will decline by considerably less than half even if Bush’s tax cuts are allowed to lapse.
• Bush spoke of a “goal” of cutting dependence on Middle Eastern oil, failing to mention that US dependence on imported oil and petroleum products increased substantially during his first five years in office, reaching 60 per cent of consumption last year.

[. . . ]
Whether imports from the Middle East can ever be “a thing of the past” is open to question. It is true that the US currently imports nearly as much oil from nearby Canada (2.1 million barrels per day last year) as it does from all Persian Gulf countries combined (2.3 million barrels per day), but that’s still a lot of oil to do without.

So are we invading Canada next?

The whole article is reasonably interesting, though FC shies away from calling a spade a spade. A speech like this is not an extemporaneous riff, but a calculated political message. Omissions or errors are not accidents (unless one wants to accuse the administration of even more egregious incompetence).

Someone somewhere said it better than I could: any speech by this president can be safely ignored, since they are all politics and no policy. Reading through the highlights above, it’s like a poll or survey, to see which points garner the best response. With 24 hours, the pledge to cut Middle Eastern oil imports by 75% was quietly recanted as “purely an example.”

This administration, to its cynical benefit, has figured out that it’s easy to lie or spin the facts upfront and correct them later, since no one will read the corrections. The 24 hour news-cycle is now a 30 second attention span.

Now playing: Mr Kennedy by The Soft Boys from the album “Nextdoorland”

Not sure why I was drawn to this.

It’s interesting how devolution — the move toward autonomy for Scotland and Wales — has also spurred interested in the English flag, the Flag of the Cross of St George, as opposed to or as well as the Union Jack.

MaxSpeak, You Listen!: IT HAS COME TO THIS:

Forgive me for repeating myself, but for job growth, this has been one stinky recovery.

It happens that the extent of actual job growth can be accounted for by growth in public sector jobs. And there’s nothing wrong with that. However.

The upshot is that the triumph of Republican-conservatarian economic policy consists of an expansion of government jobs financed by loans from the Communist Peoples Republic of China.

And if we can’t/don’t pay off those loans, then what?

Seriously, the bottom-line difference between the left and the right is that one is tax and spend, while the other is borrow and spend. Which is more honest?

from the comments to Catch — catch.com — Life is like a box of bedwetters:

Remember how they used to have to ask people to hide under their desks? It seems like most of these people have to be asked to come out from under them.

Catch.com is just the place when you need a little extra snark . . .