Avoidance

     I'm trying to not write too much about politics in this week before election day.  Especially not in the "look what those people just said or did" vein.  You see the news.  Maybe you mostly get one-sided stuff, or not, but the most egregious examples break through.

     It's nitwit season.  The politicians will do or say whatever they think will get them the most votes; they'll hang out with people who they think will appeal to the voters they want.  It's kind of a concentrated X-ray view of who they are.  It's worth watching, and you don't need me as tour guide.  But keep your eyes open.  Read the fine print.  Read the big print, too.  There's always a core of truth in a politician's hyperbole about what they plan to do.  Even if you assume every word the candidates say about their opposition is overheated alarmism, pay attention what they have to say about themselves.

Knees And Other Things

     It's been almost four weeks since I fell, hard, on my left knee.  The scrapes have healed, the bruises have not quite faded and while the swelling persists, it's a little less every day.  (I also took damage to the heel of my right hand.  Midway through last week, that scrape had healed up enough to stop wearing a bandaid over it.)

     With that knee hurt, I was not very active.  When I did move, my already-injured right knee had to take up the slack, and that is having consequences.  With long-existing damage to the cartilage bearing surfaces and a handful of screws holding together a spiral fracture that started between the two knobs on the end of my thighbone and continues upward, it's never going to be entirely right.  All I can do is work to maintain range of motion and try to keep the network of muscles that hold the knee together in good shape.  Right now, it's pretty sore and a bit swollen.  I'm back to going up and down steps by letting my left knee do all the work, and movements that stretch the hamstring of my right leg can be painful.

     All that adds up to needing to run through simple physical therapy exercises over the coming weeks, to get that knee back into better shape.

     Yesterday was the regular online meeting of a writing-critique group that I chair, followed by a meeting of the larger writer's club.  I spent a lot of time sitting instead of exercising.  And took much of the afternoon napping because, introvert that I am, social interaction leaves me pretty drained.

     The day had one more bright spot, though: Friday, one of the smallish supermarkets I frequent had small steaks on sale!  I picked up a couple, and added vegetable kabobs from the other grocery on Saturday along with some nice little Yukon Gold potatoes.  All of it ended up over hardwood lump charcoal on the grill yesterday.  The spuds got a trip through the microwave before being wrapped in foil and stashed in the corners.  The kabobs -- mushrooms, onion, red and green bell peppers and pineapple --were drizzled with a little extra-virgin olive oil.  Steaks and kabobs were happy on little stainless-steel grill pans.  Well-perforated, they're a lot easier to clean than the grill bars themselves.  It was a meal I haven't enjoyed in quite awhile; locally, the price of steaks went stratospheric during the Covid pandemic and they've only come down a little since, much more slowly than poultry, pork and less-desirable cuts of beef.

     Today, I'm getting caught up on laundry, a good excuse to keep myself moving.

Oops, Wrong Pepper

     It's still pretty good.  It's right at the edge of "too hot" for me.  But I'd better start at the beginning--

     My corned beef hash experiments are ongoing.  The best of the modern brands (Hormel Mary Kitchen) isn't too different from the stuff I remember from childhood, but it's not quite the same.  Adding a simple cornmeal and (panko) breadcrumb crust is a big improvement, and having gotten that far, I wondered how it might work to add a small can of mild green chilis to the hash.

     Someday I'll know, but not today.  There were five cans of chilis in the cupboard: a larger can of fire-roasted ones, three 4-ounce cans from various brands, and one that wasn't: it was a small can of jalapeno peppers.

     Naturally, that was the one I laid hands on and opened without checking.  At that point, I was committed.  I don't dislike jalapenos, but their particular heat is a little too much for my palate except in very small quantities.  I added extra cornmeal to the hash and peppers mix (it's an excellent moderator of flavors), broke a couple of eggs over it, and snipped cheese on top right before serving.  I also chopped up some fresh cherry tomatoes, and put them on top of the cheese when I served it.

     It's good, but it's still hot-hot.  I'm alternating bites of toast with the hash, and that works out.  Tam wanted to try it, and she says corned beef hash with jalapenos is good.

     So if you're down with heat, that's something you might like.  I'll try mild green chilis next time.  Checking online, I've found some recipes that add a small amount of canned diced tomatoes and peppers to the hash, and that looks intereresting, too.

Carnivorous Sheets

     A load of sheets got washed this week as a "background process:" run 'em in the washer while doing other things, move them to the dryer and let it cycle, leaving the folding for later.

     This morning was later.  While the coffee water boiled, I spun up the dryer with a damp washcloth added.  By the time the coffee was ready, so were the sheets and pillowslips.

     I should have had a cup of coffee first.  Opening up the dryer was like looking into a long forgotten roach glue trap: there was just one suspiciously-fat fitted sheet, lurking in the bottom center of the dryer drum.  Two sets of sheets, a half-dozen colorful pillowcases, all eaten right up!

     One set of sheets was flannel.  The other was super-soft, high thread count cotton, with a fully-elasticized fitted lower, and over two tumble-drying runs, it had softly and gradually enveloped all of the other bedding and twined it all up.  It was a struggle to get everything out of the tangle without any of it ending up on the floor.  Folding it was another battle -- the space available is limited, just the tops of the washer and dryer side-by-side, and a space in front of them.  The soft sheets want to creep over the edge, and they want to fold in multiple places instead of just one.  The fine cotton is the worst, but flannel is equally determined to embrace gravity.

     They're all folded and stacked on top of the washer and dryer now, contemplating their crimes and preparing to be put away.

Tower Lights

     A commenter asked about this the other day: what's the deal with those red or white-strobe tower lights?  What do they have for backups?

     Obviously, the lights on tall structures are there to warn aircraft away.  Not just radio towers, but smokestacks, water towers, bridges, tall buildings, the taller power-line supports and sometimes even power lines.

     I'll stick to the ones I know.  The rules are similar for the rest, though you will find red (and occasionally yellow) spheres on power lines (and some guy wires) for daytime visibility, especially near airports and in crop-dusting regions.  But a typical red-and-white painted* radio tower over a hundred feet tall has a blinking beacon on top (a "code beacon," in that every aspect of it is determined by FAA rules), and maybe sets of steady-burning markers or "obstruction lights" down the side.  The marker lights are not always there -- research shows those are the lights that confuse migrating birds, and if the tower lighting is otherwise compliant with modern requirements, the owner can apply to turn them off.  There are rules for the arrangement of lights depending on height, rules which have changed over time.  Older towers are "grandfathered" until they replace their lighting system.  Currently, it is always beacon-obstruction-beacon-obstruction, etc, from the top down.  You'll see some older tall towers with a pair of marker levels below the top beacon.

     If the tower has white strobe lights, there will be a set on top and, depending on height, more lower down at regular intervals.  They are on all the time, at two different intensities (day/night) for "medium-power" strobe lights, and three (day/twilight/night) for the "high-intensity" strobes you're more likely to see on very tall towers.  Since they have bright lights all the time, towers with strobes don't have to have the red and white paint job.  There are also a few that split the difference, strobes by day and red lights at night, usually in areas where the bright white flash annoys the neighbors.

     Red lights or white strobes, the FAA defines what degree of "north sky illumination" calls for the lights to turn on and off.  You have to have a photocell with a clear view of the north sky (or, presumably, an operator on duty looking at a light meter who flips the switch).  You have to inspect it quarterly.  Most are sealed units these days, and they either work or they don't.  My "North Campus" site had a tube-type control until the late 1990s, with an adjustment, and yes, I would climb a ladder, holding a light meter, and sit out the sundown, seeing that the thing did its job correctly and adjusting the knob if it did not.  FAA-approved photoelectric sensors ran around $300 back then and when the tube unit finally conked out, I replaced it with a modern one and built an interface so the new unit could control the rest of the 1950s system.

     The lighting system must be monitored.  This is done either by having a person check it once a day after sunset by eyeball or remote telemetry (you monitor the current drawn, and the variation caused by flashing the code beacons) and logging the check (and if a beacon is out, calling the FAA reporting number so they can issue a NOTAM, a Notice To Air Missions, warning pilots of the failed light); or by an automatic system that calls, emails or texts a responsible party if there is a problem with the system.  Many tower owners do both.

     There is no general requirement to have backup power.  If the lights go out, you call the FAA, and they issue a NOTAM.  They always ask how long the problem will last; they won't issue "forever" NOTAMs.  They'll give you a week or two, but they're not happy about it.

     There are requirements for the lights themselves that result in redundancy.  All lights levels must be fully visible from 360 degrees around the tower.  Markers are often installed in pairs at each level in skinny, shorter towers, and tall ones usually have three or four, one per leg, mounted on the outside (where they can get whacked by falling ice, so sometimes there's a perforated "ice shield" a little way above them).  Each marker is a rugged, traffic light type 100 W+, 130V  bulb in a small red Fresnel-lens dome or a LED fixtures of the same shape and light output, including infrared.  Strobe lights are installed the same way, pairs, triplets or quads.

     The flashing code beacons are a whole other ball game.  The classic incandescent version is over a yard tall, a foot and a half wide, a metal framework supporting clear glass Fresnel lenses with red filters inside.  It hinges open in the middle, allowing access to a pair of 620 W bulbs almost as big as your head, one base down in the bottom section, one base up in the top.  They're wired in parallel, and as long as at least one is burning, it's in compliance with FAA requirements.  Old ones have asbestos-insulated wiring and asbestos in the gaskets between the sections of the Fresnel lens, so don't play with them if you find one by the side of the road.  (You probably won't.)
     The modern LED replacement code beacon -- about $5000.00, the last time I bought one -- looks nothing at all like this.  It's a short, white-and-clear cylinder loaded with super-bright, heavy-duty light-emitting diodes, and it will leave you literally dazzled if you wire it up in a workshop and turn it on with your back to it.  Ask me how I know!  They put out the same amount of light and IR as the older ones.
     Light-bulb versions are flashed from ground level, either with a motorized gadget based on a traffic-light flasher, or modern solid-state flashers, and all the lights on a tower have to flash in sync.  The old motorized flashers often used cams and sealed mercury switches.  When the flash-at-the-same-time rule was made, I synced up the set on our tower by carefully aligning the cams: you can't see the tower at all from the room where the thing was mounted on the wall.
     Code beacons have the same requirement for 360-degree visibility.  Below the top level, they are usually installed in pairs to ensure that at least one isn't blocked by the tower, no matter where you are.  And they often have ice protection, since the cost of replacement is high no matter if it is LED or incandescent.

     The big tower I am responsible for has a mixture of LED beacons and markers (the highest ones, where you have to shut important stuff off to send a tower guy) and incandescent.  We try to replace the incandescent bulbs once a year, in the fall.

     (P.S. Another commenter wonders if this was posted in response to the helicopter crash/tower collapse in Houston and posts a link to the video.  Nope, it was not; and that video has been widely shared elsewhere.  Video of people's deaths ought not be used idly and I will not post the link.  Many years ago, I was first on the scene of a fatal helicopter crash.  It's terrible to see the results and realize there is nothing you can do for the victims.)
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* The FAA defines the paint job, too, right down to the colors.  You can read about it and the lights here.

What's That Sound?

     There's an intermittent humming from the far side of the street -- sounds like it's in the next neighborhood over, and it sounds like a downed power line.

     There's a lot of juice behind the wires; even a drop to a single house from a stepdown transformer is deadly.  In our neighborhood, the power company gets "a lot of lights from a single match," and four or five homes might share a transformer.  It's protected on the primary side by a big, old-fashioned fuse, often a length of heavy fuse wire clamped inside a ceramic tube.  They're set to pop free of the clamps when they go, making a blown fuse easier to find, and they often let go with a bang.  But it's a big fuse.  It takes a lot of current to blow.

     Downstream, your house has breakers or fuses to protect the wiring.  Upstream, power companies use "reclosers" on the high-voltage wires: they open up on excessive current, wait a bit and try again.  The most common problem on a high-voltage line is a branch or an unfortunate creature, and those problems will usually clear.*

     I'm not sure what's going on across the street -- there's no smoke rising and the sound echoes and carries, but I know one thing: stay away!  Between that big fuse on the stepdown and the reclosers, a downed power line is often live.  It may arc, fall quiet, and then start arcing again, and it may or may not be "live" when it isn't visibly sparking.  There's a voltage potential in the ground under your feet, highest where the current goes to ground and diminishing over distance.  Get too close, take a long step and you're in danger before anything is obvious.

     The sound gnaws at me.  I have been too close to power problems a few times over the course of my work and the more you see what happens when it goes wrong, the less safe you feel.
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* There is a tradeoff between excessive "nuisance trips" and protecting the system.  Reclosers are one of the compromises, and one that works well more often than not.  But they're also why you can never assume that a downed power line is safe.

Oh, Come On

     I'm sitting on a comment.  It's not especially combative, but it's full of spin, and spin that's simply out of whack, with former President Trump and U. S. Senator J. D. Vance (a Peter Thiel protege) cast as outsiders who "owe no one"* and who "both parties dislike."

     We agree on one thing: the Democrats don't like Trump and Vance.  But the GOP loves them; party politicians skeptical of their Presidential candidate are very much on the outs and the party faithful flocks to rallies, even if a noticeable percentage then make an early exit.

     The same commenter tells me "Trump is a moderately successful businessman."  No, he isn't.  Ask the Baptists.  He's remarkably skilled at self-promotion; his "product" is himself and he sells it over and over again, leaving failed businesses in his wake.  Mr. Trump tried to run the Executive Branch like a fast-talking real-estate scheme (I'm being generous), and left a mess behind.

     Former U. S. Presidents include 20 ex-Governors, 9 retired Generals, 18 former U. S. Representatives,  17 former U. S. Senators, 15 Vice-Presidents -- and only five men who had never been elected to public office before becoming President.  (Lots more here.)  Historically, we're not after "outsiders."

     Pity's sake, the guy had the job already, and muffed it.  Don't fall for the flim-flam again.
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* Try telling that to the various contractors stiffed by the Trump Organization and associated enterprises, or the upper-crust techbros who have invested much in Vance and expect a ROI, and you'll get a hearty laugh in response.  Possibly you should ask Egypt, which seems to have misplaced $10 million in the direction of the top of the GOP ticket.

Not Exactly A Triumph

     But it's not a failure, either.  I bought some more time.

     The Ongoing Kitchen Appliance And Plumbing Disaster at Roseholme Cottage has many facets.  The appliances here when I moved in were mostly placeholders.  The electrical and plumbing was done by the previous homeowner and I have been (mostly) fixing it as it fails.  I seem to average one conked-out AC receptacle no matter what I do, but eventually I'll work my way through all of them.  The plumbing has received various professional and DIY fixes, and it's ongoing. 

     The original refrigerator was a floorspace-blocking disaster, and I replaced as I was moving in with search-engine-found wonder: cabinet-depth, freezer on the bottom, British-width.  It wasn't cheap and the only current match for size and arrangement is even less so, but it's the right fit for the space. The stove was old when I moved in and I hope to replace it eventually.

     The dishwasher was old, too.  Six months into the pandemic, it died and I started washing dishes by hand: replacements were hard to come by, service work was tricky to get, and....  I didn't want to deal with it.  Fresh meat and paper goods were scarce and rising in price and who knew what came next?

     Several weeks later, I discovered the drainer side of the double sink was backing up into the dead dishwasher through the garbage disposal (which we'd already stopped using: the drain pipe is long and smallish).  That was nasty to clean.  I did dishes in plastic dish tubs in the bathtub for a few days, working on my knees.*  I proved to myself that the other side of the sink didn't get into the dishwasher, thanks to the way flow is arranged, and graduated to a dish tub in the disposal side for washed dishes, a variation on single-sink dishwashing anyone who's lived in old apartments has used.  There was always a little spillage into the garbage disposal, but it wasn't enough to back up into the defunct dishwasher.

     That was a few years ago.  Lowe's treated me like crap the last time I went shopping for a new dishwasher (I was dressed for weekend woodworking, so that didn't help, but still...!) and I have kept on washing dishes by hand.  Recently, I noticed a little backup in the garbage disposal, but it was draining away eventually.  Until it wasn't.  I tried clearing it with a small plunger last night and made things worse.  Way worse.  I dumped some home-grade hydrogen peroxide in the nasty mess the plunger had brought up and left it overnight.  Today, well, the liquid was clearer.

     My oldest Shop-Vac, the smallest one they made thirty years ago, made short work of it.  I dumped the ick in the back yard, cleaned out everything I could reach in the disposal with strong cleaner, rinsed it and capped the drain.  That'll buy time.  I can mop up any spillage and now I'm going to have to replace the disposal and dishwasher.  It won't be easy.  Aside from the cost, I have to get a lot of books out of the way: the dining room library is an ongoing project, and another ongoing housekeeping disaster.  I've got one new set of shelves built and and about half moved into, and another set cut, measured for routing and ready to complete, stacked up in the garage.

     With the election so close, I think I will wait until afterward.  While I don't greatly expect there to be trouble, I'm not as sure as I used to be, and I'd just as soon flee screaming mobs with the price of a new dishwasher still in my pocket.

     It goes on and on.  I was so down about the sink mess that I slept very late today, with my Mother's voice in the back of my thoughts reminding me that not only does that not solve the problem, it uses up time that could have been spent solving it.
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* Something recent injuries have made impossible, at least for now.  It gets in the way of woodworking, too.  Lacking a nice big cabinetmaker's bench, I use the lovely flat slab of the garage floor, and you can't do that standing.  I can do a lot of it sitting on the floor, but some tasks take knee work or squatting, and those are both out.

Over The Line

     Childish violations of propriety have become a feature of one (1) our political parties, and it's the one that spent most of my life telling me it was "the party of grown-ups."

     Maybe it was, once upon a time.  But grown-up political candidates do not open a public event -- or a private one, for that matter -- by telling admiring stories about the size of a professional athlete's genitalia.

     You can tell me that it's yet another "brilliant, headline-grabbing move," and it's certainly getting a lot of attention, but it's misdirection at best, a distraction from serious issues of policy and plans.  It's bread-and-circuses bullshit, only without the bread (despite plenty of promises of bread tomorrow).

     It's as if a dumber version of Eddie Haskell grew up and went into politics, and darned near half the voters thought he was wonderful, so much cooler than any nose-to-the-grindstone striver, with most of his party's politicians emulating his odious behavior.

     Someone on social media shared a photograph of a drink that's already out at some trendy spots, a 50-50 mixture of lemonade and iced tea, with a swizzle stick made from a hot dog that's had a hole put through it lengthwise by a drinking straw.  And that's clever political commentary, as of October, 2024.

     Fates help us.

Tires

     Car tires have been much on my mind of late.  When I bought my current RX350 in 2019, the tires were well-worn.  It may even have been a bargaining point, "I'm going to have to replace these, you know...."

     Reader, I don't drive that much and while I was paying cash,* I was nowhere near so flush that I was going to be able to replace the tires right away.  I put it off and put it off, and really, were they that bad?  Then the pandemic arrived and I had other things to think about.  Meanwhile, the tires developed a few sidewall bulges.  The left front started a slow leak that required at least weekly topping up, and the rest had slower ones.  It was getting a little skatey on winter streets, but caution and anti-lock brakes cover a multitude of traction sins.  The tires now featured a certain absence of treads at the edges. 

     But I was coping.  Last weekend, I let the car sit for two days and drove to work Monday without a full preflight inspection, thinking the handling was a little mushy.  I walked out at the end of the day to find the right rear very low.  It measured at 5 psi.

     I texted Tam that my trip home might be dicey, babied my car over to my employer's very useful air hose, aired up the tire and listened for signs of leakage.  Nothing.  I checked the pressure at five-minute intervals, and when it was still stable after the third try, headed for home.

     Online, it didn't take a lot of looking to find replacement tires.  Of course, the car is a Lexus, and even at seventeen years old, a lot of the choices are...spendy.  Modern versions of what was already on it (Yokohama all-season something-or-others) were not direly painful, and that set had gone a lot of miles, so I found who had them in stock.  Nobody close, but one wasn't too far away from the North Campus.  I kept watch on the leaky tire, and got new tires a few days ago.

     It took time.  The tire place was busy -- I guess a lot of people had put off getting new tires, or maybe the onset of cooler weather had reminded them that slick roads were coming.  But the work was well-organized, and an hour and a half after I had arrived, a mechanic drove my car out of the bay and turned it towards where I was waiting outside the store lobby.

     The new tires squeaked.

     I laughed out loud and was still grinning when the guy stopped and got out.  He gave me an inquiring look.

     "Those tires squeak," I told him, "just like brand new sneakers!"

     He laughed, too.  "You're right, they sure do."

     I'd put the bill on my credit card, just under a week's net pay with the warranty.  We used to say new shoes squeaked until you paid them off,† but I swear I'll start running the card bill down ASAP.
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* Paying cash, even with a nice insurance settlement -- when my previous Lexus got totalled, the settlement was $90 more than I paid for the car a few years earlier -- there's not a lot left over and I give up luxuries like bacon for a while afterward.
 
† Yes, younger readers, for some of us, once upon a time, good Sunday shoes took time payments to afford.  They'd be bought a little large, so you could "grow into them."  And you had to be careful with them, too, no skipping through mud puddles or like that.

Tariffs Are Depressing

      This is a sloppy graphic.  I have overlaid a chart of U. S. (plus France and the UK) tariffs over time with the worst depressions and panics of the late 19th and 20th Centuries.  Not all of them had names.

     Increasing tariffs is often correlated with the start of hard times.  Reducing tariffs is correlated with ending them.  It's not perfect correlation, but it's close.  There are a number of variables I have not accounted for.  Nevertheless, as muddy as these waters are, they're full of alligators.  Still eager to jump in?

Oh, I Get Letters

     Yesterday's blog post about self-made cipher, Vice-Presidential candidate (and nearly-invisible U. S. Senator) J. D. Vance and his running mate and opponents got some comments.

     For instance: "good to know about you. goodbye."

     I have not made my opinion of Mr. Trump, and of Trumpism in general, a secret: I'd rather have almost anyone else as President.  As someone whose politics lean fiscally conservative and socially liberal, I accept that I'm usually only going to get one or the other -- but he managed to deliver the precise opposite, adding enormously to the deficit while turning the clock back on civil rights.  I never thought he was especially competent, but I thought the elders of his party would step up and keep him coloring inside the lines.  Instead, they knuckled under.  He still looked merely bad, a sore winner when he won and and an even sorer loser when he didn't.  Then came January 6, 2021, and after that, I didn't think he should ever be President again.  His party disagreed, and here we are, with the Presidential election neck and neck.

     That's a fact: Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris are in a dead heat.  Here's another fact: most people have made up their mind who they're going to vote for.  This late in the race, the candidates are courting a corporal's guard of undecided voters in a handful of states -- and they're trying to motivate voters who support them to get out and vote.  On November 6, we're all still going to be here together: Harris voters, Trump voters, Stein voters, Kennedy voters* and the great big block of non-voters.†  Maybe things will get spicy, but if 2022's any guide, probably not.

     I have spent my adult voting career trying to figure out which candidate had the skills to do the job, which of them had absolutely unacceptable policies or irredeemable personal flaws, if I could safely make a protest vote (sorry, kids, but in most races, that's all an LP vote does) and so on.  My vote is not a pledge of total agreement or undying devotion; I'm just trying to hire someone to mow the lawn and supervise the military who won't skimp on the work or steal the good silver.  And that's the thing you should know about me.
* * *
     On Mr. Trump: Aside from alcoholism, he has all the traits of every bad boss I have ever had.  I disliked him before he ran for President, I disliked him much more when his comments about grabbing women by their private parts came out, I disliked him while he was President, and I came to loathe him on January 6.  Some time that day between his weasel-worded encouragement of violence and letting Vice-President Pence swing in the breeze -- very nearly literally -- I grasped the recklessness of his disregard for the norms of decent behavior and of political campaigns.  (I'm not a huge fan of Mr. Pence but he's honest and rule-abiding, as politicians go, and he was unstintingly loyal to the then-President within legal limits.  The President stirring up a mob and shrugging when they threatened his own VP was staggeringly amoral.)
*  *  *
     Another commenter wrote, "I disagree with you on the ability of the Democratic canidate [sic]" and that's a real puzzler, since I did not address the ability of Governor Walz or Vice-President Harris.  In terms of government experience, both of them have more than Senator Vance (a bit under two years, vs. a little under 17 for Walz) or former President Trump (four years, against over 20 years for Ms. Harris): they've done the job longer.

     Senator Vance's book shows him to be a man without a strong identity, engaged in a search for a person to become.  A temporarily faithful son to his mother's succession of boyfriends and husbands, U. S. Marine, diligent student, devoted grandson, political centrist, venture capitalist, atheist, writer, pundit, conservative Catholic, hard-Right Republican.  He writes well and he's an intelligent man, but there's no telling who he may decide to be tomorrow.  He's a palimpsest, restlessly written, rewritten, erased and written over.  Inexperience aside, I do not think this is a personality who should be one heartbeat away from the Presidency.  His performance in interviews has shown a mealy-mouthed arrogance I find appalling.

     Mr. Walz and Ms. Harris are far steadier.  For me, the decision is a matter of "compared to what," and when the GOP runs an incompetent and declining Presidential candidate with a prospective VP who I think is a toady only too happy to reflect even the worst qualities of the top of the ticket, the list of people I'd rather see in the job is very long, and given that the Democratic candidates are experienced, willing to compromise and actually on the ballot, they're at the top of it.

     Your mileage may vary.  I've been wrong before -- at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, I predicted "we'd all pull together" and get the thing under control quickly.  I was wrong.  We made a mess of it.  People I had thought of as friends were insulting and inconsiderate to others, often to people who had no choice, berating store cashiers over their employer's mask requirements and so on.  But I'm not wrong about Mr. Trump's and Mr. Vance's manifest unfitness to serve as President and Vice-President.  They may win the election, but they'll still be the wrong people for the job.
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* He didn't manage to scamper off the ballot in every state.  If the official Indiana ballot guide is accurate, he's still on ours.
 
† "Oh, whatever" remains the largest single voting bloc in U. S. elections.  We had record turnout in 2020 -- which still meant a third of the eligible voters sat it out.  Typically, less than half of the people who could vote bother to make the effort.

A World Of No

     A few times recently, I have encountered people suggesting -- with hope -- that given Donald Trump's age, a vote for him is really a vote for J. D. Vance, and they thought Senator Vance was a much more appealing prospect than Vice-President Harris or the former President.

     Based on exactly what?  His political record consists of service in the U. S. Senate from January, 2023 until whenever he started cutting class to campaign for the number-two job.  His book is self-pitying auto-hagiography and he has the steadfast moral compass of a blade of tall grass in a shifting breeze.  In interviews and debates, he's shown a firm grasp of Gish gallop and an aversion to straightforward answers.  He can't even manage to consistently mirror his running mate's positions.  He's demonstrably intolerant of persons different from himself; if you're not married with children and gainfully employed, he thinks you don't count.  He courts Christian Nationalist extremists and coyly turns away any criticism of it.

     Mr. Trump has the same man-on-horseback appeal as the authoritarians he idolizes, from Orbán and Putin to Perón and Franco. I don't like it but it exists.  In contrast, the Senator from Ohio has the charisma of the night-shift manager of a tire outlet announcing your credit card's been denied.  Having him one heartbeat away from the Presidency is way too close.

     Better Tim Walz than him; better Kamala Harris than the top of his ticket.

These Modern Times

     Found out early this afternoon that my few peers and I will be adding IT support to our regular tech-ing duties.  There are only so many seats available in our game of musical chairs and we're full up.  We may get another genuine IT person the next time someone steps down.  In the meantime, we have the head IT honcho to guide us and I plan to take detailed notes whenever possible.

     And so the wheel turns.  Over 25 years ago, when it started to be impossible to run any kind of an office without a computer network, my department was doing IT support by default.  Our employer brought in an IT specialist and firmly told us to go back to our soldering irons, videotape machines and high-power vacuum tubes.  These days we're out of the tube business, all but out of the tape business, still doing a little soldering and as of today, we're back to explaining to people that the computer probably didn't eat their missing file and no amount of force will fix a broken mouse.  Oh, and "Password123" might not be the best choice for security.

     This means I will have to face one of my recurring terrors: talking to people I have never really met, about things I'm only kinda sure about but that they don't know at all.  It does no good at all to be honest in such circumstances; you've got smile and radiate confidence, or they won't listen to a word you say.  I don't like doing it and I have a terrible memory for names, but this snake oil won't sell itself.

Oh, They Could, Could They?

     A recent article in The Atlantic about the lies politicians assert, and how futile fact-checking can be, included an interesting statement: "Tech and media companies need to create incentives for truth-telling and deterrents for lying. Platforms of all kinds could charge higher ad rates to candidates who have the worst records among fact-checkers."  The article also suggests another way to discourage untruths: lying during a debate could cost candidates airtime.

     Many platforms could, but I'll tell you one that can't: broadcast stations. Take the idea of cutting time for fibbers.  Uncle Sam says it's a no-no.
     "FCC rules seek to ensure that no legally qualified candidate for office is unfairly given less access to the airwaves – outside of bona fide news exemptions – than their opponent. Equal opportunities generally means providing comparable time and placement to opposing candidates; it does not require a station to provide opposing candidates with programs identical to the initiating candidate."
     Trim a liar's time, face an FCC fine.

     You can look on it as self-serving.  Politicians set up the FCC, and they're not going to clip their own wings.  Or you can look on it as preventing a station owner from playing favorites.  Either way, the proposed fix is out.  (Cable and online services still can -- airtime and broadcast frequencies are a limited resource but those cable TV and telcom fibers are a data pipe fatter than a sewer main.)

     When it comes to charging liars more, that's out, too.  The FCC language is fussy:
     "The FCC rules require that broadcast stations and cable systems can only charge legally qualified candidates the 'Lowest Unit Charges' and 'Comparable Rates' for their advertisements."
     Translation is easy: whatever the car dealers or other big clients who run a lot of ads pay for time is what candidates will be charged, and not a cent more.  This, too, can be read as cynical manipulation, pols demanding they all get the best rates.  Or you can take it as a way to ensure the station can't charge the candidate they dislike ruinous rates while giving time away to the one they favor.*

     So, sorry, there's no coercing honesty from politicians, at least not via over-the-air, free TV and radio.  We're back to the eternal question: how do you keep 'em honest?  How do you even ensure that, once bought, they stay bought?  We'd have as much luck trying to breed honest politicians as we'd have trying to create honest preschoolers -- and if you can find one that won't at least occasionally try to feed their Brussels sprouts to the dog so they can enjoy a favorite dessert or fib about doing something they know they shouldn't, you've found one in a million.  Politicians likewise, and they really don't like Brussels sprouts. 
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* It's been known to happen anyway.  One Indianapolis FM frequency was vacant for years after the owner of the station that used to be there gave airtime away to U. S. Senator, got caught (c'mon, it's not like the other guy isn't checking) and lost the license.  A multi-way legal fight among would-be owners followed and took nearly a decade to resolve.

N. B.

     For whatever it is worth, the most likely source of the phrase "roll down the (car's) window" dates back to when automobiles had canvas tops, and flexible isinglass side windows were an option.  Stored rolled up, you would roll them down to keep rainwater from splashing in while retaining some visibility.

     Hardtops and glass side windows came along with cheaper, mass-produced cars, and the crank mechanism to raise and lower side windows wasn't far behind.  You might crank your window down, but the older phrase was already there, and you were turning a thing, after all, so you rolled them down.

     I buy older cars but technology keeps on cranking, and I have been using a switch to "roll" my car windows up or down since my first Lexus small SUV, the same way most people already had for several years.

     Inspired by tab-clearing here and a blog post here.

They Did It

     SpaceX launched Starship this morning, and brought the booster back to land gently in the arms of the launch tower.  It's a big deal -- and a big gamble.  If it went wrong, they could have been out a launch tower and infrastructure.  But it worked.  (It doesn't take a keen eye to spot the second launch tower, some distance away, a backup I heartily approve.)

     They use a "move fast and break things" development model, one that, consciously or not, mirrors the early days of NASA, when explosive failures were more common than success.  It is quick and effective; it was inadvertent at NASA, where the national-prestige exigencies of the Cold War meant that visible success was more important than figuring out what doesn't work.  And it's impossible to apply to human-crewed spaceflight, at least in the West.  (The Soviet Union took the simpler approach of not announcing any mission until success was assured and Red China carefully avoids releasing damming detail even now.)  It takes a team of outstanding engineers and technicians working long hours to even reach the point where the thing lifts off and fails in flight.  Meeting all of the announced objectives is stunning.

     There's a tendency to give Elon Musk all of the credit for SpaceX's successes, but he never turns a wrench or frowns over a hot CAD schematic; he's a money guy, more owner than hands-on manager, running the big picture while being (per rumor) "managed from below" by President and COO Gwynne Shotwell and her corps of administrators and engineers.*  I am occasionally taken to task for pointing this out, as if it were some diminishment of Mr. Musk's role; but he is verifiably not Tony Stark or Thomas Edison, and there's no Buck Rogers without bucks, nor do you get Buzz Aldrin if there's no buzz.  He courts controversy and engages in partisan politics to a degree surprising for a government contractor and the owner of a social media platform, and maybe you don't get the kind of drive a spaceflight effort takes without that kind of personality.  Certainly Wernher von Braun, another big-picture planner (and able manager of large projects in the manner of Ms. Shotwell) had controversies of his own, and calculatingly convinced two very different governments to support his rocketry efforts.  Sergi Korolev navigated the backstabbing politics of Soviet aviation engineering, was very nearly crushed by infighting, and ruthlessly pursued his goals once he got back into a position of authority.  I've only met one of the three, von Braun, and he was quite charming, but none of them were or are people to turn your back on, especially if you are between them and their intended outcome.  The evidence so far is that you have to be something of an asshole to run a successful space program, and if the PRC's "person(s) behind the curtain" ever step far enough into the light to reveal details, I predict their biography will be similar.

     SpaceX has made a big step in turning their enormous rocket into a practical vehicle.  It is a giant leap in space travel, one likely to outlive all issues of personality and politics.
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* There's an inverse correlation between the success of his enterprises and the degree to which the people doing the day-to-day grunt work are able to lure him away from tinkering.  SpaceX does very well; Tesla, less so, and Twitter, I mean X, is still losing users and becoming a one-sided echo chamber instead of the bastion of free speech he had promised.  Being very, very good at promotion, securing funding and getting an enterprise off the ground is no guarantee of skill in any other area.  No one is without feet of clay or the occasional bout of wooden-headedness.

I Don't Enjoy Tenterhooks

     Who does?  --Okay, presumably there's some perv out there who's into the metaphor, and loves being in suspense over serious issues that are likely to effect the rest of their life.  But that person's a statistical blip.  When it comes to our lives (as opposed to a mystery book or a spy movie), everyone wants to know what's around the next turn, or at least that whatever it is, it won't be too awful.

     Of course, we don't all have the same notions of "awful."  We don't even agree on what's going right and wrong at present, so the future and what to do about it is even more contentious.

     As I write, the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election is up in the air, with the two major candidates within a few points of one another and the critical swing states hanging in the balance.  It's a good bet that it's going to stay a mystery down to the morning after Election Day, if not longer.

     I don't like it.  The main thing on offer right now is fear: Mr. Trump wants me to be afraid of "illegals," a category that apparently includes a lot of people who are in this country legally, but don't look like him or speak much English.*  He's also worried about Marxists, "transgenders" and a few other bugbears, all of whom constitute powerless (and often oddball) minorities with scary reputations.  It's a simple formula: wave around a few ooga-booga bogeyman pictures of Leon Trotsky, way-out drag queens, Stalin (not, strictly speaking, a Marxist) or the Assistant Secretary for Health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services -- or, better yet, of some actual criminals whose appearance makes them proxies for ethnic fearmongering.  It appeals strongly to his base, which encourages him to do more of the same, an iterative process that most recently resulted in a "few minutes hate" at rallies out West that would have been cartoonish were it not so unnerving.  I'd say this kind of thing is unAmerican, but our history is not without  low points, from the 1921 Tulsa race riots to 1954's "Operation Wetback" and its Depression-era predecessor that swept up and deported hundreds of thousands of U. S. citizens who happened to have the wrong accent or skin color, along with the undocumented workers and residents the programs were aimed at.

     The Democrats point to the Republicans in justifiable fear of precisely this kind of officially-supported xenophobia, and go on to relatively sober policy offerings: heartfelt, but Vice-President Harris and Tim Walz lack the lurid sideshow appeal of their opposition.

     Mr. Trump keeps finding new kinds of chickens to toss into the pot, promising skyrocketing wages, low prices and a whole slew of things no President or Congress can deliver; Ms. Harris offers a less flashy government of lower deficits, wider attention to human rights and less sloganeering.

     I don't know if that's enough.  I doubt fear is a really great way to get people into voting booths, and I worry that a chance to have some other poor schmuck pushed around is at least as strong a draw.

     So I'm stuck on tenterhooks, at least until the election results are in, and maybe after that, because recent history has shown me that I didn't know my fellow citizens nearly as well as I thought; those gleefully smiling faces in lynching postcards from the first part of the 20th Century were not so long ago as I had let myself be led to believe.  Our worst nature is barely suppressed and, once released, difficult to bottle up again.
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* They'll learn, or if they manage to dodge learning, their kids will pick it up.  For a country without an official language, the U.S. is difficult to navigate without speaking the lingo.

It's The Little Things

     After that lovely breakfast yesterday, I slipped and fell while standing up from the bathtub.  Not very far; I'm careful these days.  But far enough: I came down with most of my weight on my injured left knee.

     Something gave way. It was painful.  Once that had faded. I pressed on -- much to do, after all, and so few hours in the day.  But I was limping worse than usual and gradually ran out of steam.  Denial only goes so far.  My knee had swollen back up in new and disturbing ways.  It was throbbing, too.  Eventually, I had to admit the day was not going to happen.

     I took to my bed still in work clothes, a gel-filled ice pack on my knee and a pillow under it.  I was asleep in minutes and woke only to swap the pack for a fresh one from the freezer.  Hours later, I helped out for trash night and watched a TV game show, then back to bed with ice.

     Today is better, so far.  I slept later than usual and I am hoping to get to work.  It's going to have to be mostly sedentary.

Cornbread Omelet

      The omelets I make probably don't fit everyone's definition.  I reinforce the egg with some cooked starch and water -- often breadcrumbs or cracker crumbs, or even cornmeal.  Frustrated by omelets that break when you fold them?  Try adding some strength.  (I'd love to tell you how much, but it varies.  Start with three or four saltines for a three-egg omelet in a 10" pan.  Mash 'em up and add enough water to form a paste, then beat or stir in the eggs. The gentler you are, the less air in the finished product, and this is a matter of personal preference.)

     Last night, I heated up "leftover stew" using the tri-tip pot roast from Sunday, and made microwave cornbread to go along with it, a box mix jazzed up with an extra egg, a little more milk, some arepa meal and a little pepper and chili powder on top.  It was good; a little denser than I would have liked, even after five minute's rest, but a tasty side to mop up the stew broth.

     This morning, there was cornbread left, so I crumbled a wedge of it into a small mixing bowl, added water and seasoning ("Italian blend" and Bragg's mix), let it set a spell and beat three medium eggs into it.  I'd fried a strip of bacon while the batter was waiting, and snipped it in, with some Fontina cheese and black olives as filling.  The end result was as good as any omelet I've made.  It ends up fairly thick, with an airy texture, and the cornbread notes blend nicely with the egg. 

A Nonlinear Process

     Healing up from the kind of fall I took is not a simple, smooth curve.  There are good days and bad ones.  My left knee had swollen to not quite twice normal size.  As the swelling drops, it uncovers new frontiers of pain and discomfort; likewise, as the bruises fade.  Today has not been one of the good ones.

     My kneecap was already kind of damaged (there appears to be a hole in it) and I'm not looking forward to what coming days may reveal.  But it's already done.  My job is to deal with it.

About Weapons

     In the Star Trek original series episode Amok Time, Captain James T. Kirk has to fight Spock with a Vulcan "lirpa," a spear-sized weapon with a heavy weight at one end and a fan-shaped blade on the other.  It's a nasty-looking thing, but consider: the weapons used by most cultures are hunting and farming tools, adapted for war.

     What good is a gadget with a hammer or bludgeon at one and and a slicer at the other?  Clearly, it's for a creature like a mussel or an oyster, but much larger: Spock's ancestors would hunt the dry and dusty bottoms of the dead seas of Vulcan until they found the buried lair of the Giant Vulcan Clam, dig down to it, give the beast a sharp rap on the shell with the heavy end and it either cracks or opens up to see what all the fuss is, at which point the hunter's helper pours in a bucket of salt and hot sauce (or possibly Worcestershire) while the hunter reverses the lirpa and scoops the thing out with the sharp end: dee-lish!

     Of course, Star Trek's Vulcans are vegetarians, and per the fictional future history, they have been for thousands of years.  The huge molluscs the lirpa was invented to hunt are probably extinct.  But once upon a time, long ago...!

Update: The Calutron

     My -- admittedly cursory -- reading had left me with the impression that nobody bothered with mass spectrometry to produce fissionables these days.  The process was still good for turning out research-level amounts of obscure isotopes, and maybe some medical ones, and that was it.  Real baddies went in for centrifugal separation, since it was relatively simple* and produced the greatest volume for a given amount of hardware and energy to run the system.

     Yeah, guess what?  Wrong.  At least one rogue state would-be member of the nuke club picked up bargain-priced calutrons, apparently of Chinese origin, and used them to crank out some measurable quantity of hot stuff.

     So there's still a degree of "security through obscurity" for these tricky widgets, and my curiosity will have to go unsatisfied.  Any ill intentioned start-up is going to have to work that stuff out the hard way, which takes time and leaves traces.
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* None of this is "Khyber Pass gunsmith" simple, thank heavens, requiring specialized, high-precision technology and skilled technicians working with chemical and radiological hazards that would curdle your hair -- in some cases, literally.  Even at that level, there are degrees of difficulty, and some processes are more efficient than others.  But they're all insanely inefficient.  The Manhattan Project tried every method they could manage (you'd never guess which one they couldn't make work) and ended up running them in sequence, gaseous and thermal diffusion plants feeding (via chemical processes of hair-raising danger) the calutrons, a system of vast industrial works employing tens of thousands of people that had, by the end of the war, produced slightly more than enough material for four bombs; they'd used three and didn't have the fourth ready to go.  This would be an amount of fissionable material that a moderately-good weightlifter could raise overhead.  It's a wheelbarrow load.

Bad Decisions

     Got together with my siblings Sunday, which is always stressful, for reasons that don't have all that much to do with them; they're nice enough.  We grew up in a difficult family dynamic and it's a challenge not to revert to old patterns of thought and feeling.

     It was my older sister's birthday, reason enough to mark the day.  And a nice day for it, too.  We dined outside, at a place not terribly far from my house.

     Parking is limited there.  I could have taken the bus, and walked a few blocks at each end, but with my injured knee?  No.  I'm clever: I rode my bicycle.

     Got down there okay, having dosed up on acetaminophen not long before leaving, had a fine meal and chat, and shortly into the ride home, realized it might not have been the best choice.

     By the time I got home, I was fairly well buzzed on pain endorphins, dizzy and unfocused.  I managed to get everything stowed, took more OTC pain meds, iced up my knee and got horizontal.  I was zonked out within minutes, and didn't wake up until Tamara got home, around cat-feeding time.  I did a few chores, checked the clock and took more pills (I've been alternating aspirin and acetaminophen, which gives me three hours between them), iced up again and went back to bed.

     This morning, my left knee is back down to being only a little swollen and merely kind of painful.  Bicycling is off until it heals.

--

     Comments elsewhere by atomic historian Alex Wellerstein had me, once again, looking up the controls the "calutron girls" of Oak Ridge were operating.  Famously, they they were not told anything about the why of large-scale isotope separation in a mass spectrometer, just sat down in front of a control panel loaded with meters, knobs and switches, told what range to keep the readings within and what knobs affected which readings, and left to it.*

     I have never been able to find an annotated description of the controls, a photo or a drawing with readable labels.  There's an obvious intercom panel, for talking with the techs working at the "racetrack" where the actual process happens; there are a few meters that are clearly at an elevated voltage, isolated behind glass, plus a dozen or more on the front panel, but working from the sketchy diagrams of the process and assuming it's looking at voltage and current for every element of the widget, there are still about twice as many meters as I can account for.  There are hints the "tanks" may operate in linked pairs, and that would work out. (And there are some whacking big vacuum tubes behind the front panel that appear to be water-cooled.  Thyratrons?  Rectifiers?  Conventional power tubes?  I don't know.)

     But I hope you will pardon me if I don't get more specific than that; parts of the Manhattan Project hardware are still classified, and I'd just as soon not have a conversation with our country's nuke spooks over my fascination with this important (though outmoded for the original purpose) hardware that bears a slight conceptual resemblance to the last big vacuum-tube transmitters I was responsible for.
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* The classic tale is that they did the task "much better than Ph.D. physicists," who "got distracted by every flicker of the meters," and I should hope so -- that's not a job for a physicist; it's not even a job for a repair tech.  It's a production job, and "turn this knob to keep that reading between the marked limits" was a pretty normal job description before automation.  A calutron is a complicated beast, though, with over a dozen meters and plenty of controls, and the operator is tracking a changing degree of ionization in a vacuum chamber throughout each batch-process "run." 

There's That

     That darned left knee is making it difficult to go to sleep, even with OTC painkillers and ice.  By the end of the day, it's pretty swollen and running warm.  It's loud, without making a sound.


     On the good side, physical discomfort means I don't sprawl there awake worrying about politics.  Restricting that fretting to the daytime is probably a good thing.  One thing I have figured out: in a de facto two-party Presidential system,* the reality that neither candidate is ever going to be a perfect fit for many voters of their own party means everyone is in the habit of justifying their choice: it's usually a process of picking the least-bad one, heavily influenced by notions of self-image: "I'm a [political party name] voter and I have been all my life/since Carter/since Reagan/since whoever."  So we have to sell ourselves on the notion that the not-ideal guy run by the party we favor is okay, and that the not-great guy the other party ran is a bad, bad choice.  We do it when the contest is between a couple of rich white guys who graduated from top-tier schools, spent years rising through various elective offices and have barely a dime's worth of difference in their policies, so of course we do it when the pairing includes a woman, a person almost entirely without political experience and/or someone dark-skinned.  And because it's our very own personal set of excuses -- oops, reasons -- why we're okay with how we voted or plan to vote, it's deeply entrenched.  Anyone challenging it is pushing back on not just our choices but our sense of who we are.

     I don't have an answer for the problem that presents.  I can counsel making a dispassionate choice, sitting down and listing pros and cons, sticking to verifiable facts and not Internet rumor or what some pundit thinks a candidate might do.  Judge them based on what they have done, judge them on the definite promises they make in their platform and stump speeches and not on glittering or gloomy generalities about happy days to come and bad times now.  Wash off as much of the BS as you can and then decide.

     You still might not make the same choice I have, but at least you won't be voting for your pick because it makes that snoopy schoolteacher down the street furious or it will irk the jerk who drives a vehicle covered in bumper stickers.  Those reasons are foolish.  Find real ones.
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* In multiparty Parliamentary systems, voters don't even get an Electoral College-distance opportunity to elect the Chief Executive.  Instead, the elected legislators have to duke it out, especially if no party won a clear majority.  It's good and bad: nobody feels much obliged to like a leader they didn't personally vote for, the pick often represents a compromise choice and are constrained by whatever coalition put them in place, but "Westminster" systems produce real duds in the worry seat as least as often as "Washington" ones.  Both systems result in regular do-overs and maybe that's as much as we can hope for.

Annoyance

     Fine, I have badly bruised knees.  If I need to do any work near the floor, I have to sit on the floor.  Kneeling is obviously out, but it turns out that squatting pulls my slacks tight over my knees and it hurts like the dickens, even in the baggy, multi-pocket work pants I prefer.

     This is the weekend -- I can just slob around in a nightgown most of the day!  --Except my favorite summer sleepwear hits right at the knee.  That featherweight touch, touch, touch as I move is maddening and if it hits just wrong, surprisingly painful.

     The fall could have been worse.  I probably came close to breaking a wrist, I could have done far worse to my knees and I just missed smashing my face into a concrete curb.  But the aftermath is still unpleasant.

The Universal Campaign Yard Sign

     Here it is, one size fits all, suitable for every voter:

Like Ball Bearings

     Yesterday was a long and busy day.  One of the towers I'm responsible has white strobe lights.  This carries some advantages; since the lights run day and night, you don't have to paint the tower the usual red and white bands and can match the paint color to the surrounding structures.

     Until recently, it has also carried some disadvantages: the strobe fixture itself is an overgrown version of a professional photographer's flash: a strobe tube a foot and a half long and an array of electronics to light it up (at different intensities depending on sky illumination), time the flashes and keep them in sync with the other strobes, and to monitor and communicate the status of all that.  Operating several hundreds feet in the air means it is exposed to the full range of weather -- and producing the high voltages needed to make the thing flash generates copious amounts of ozone.  Electrical contacts that switch brightness levels arc and pit; exposed metal corrodes.  Wires and circuit-board traces eventually melt away into smears of green-blue slime.  The normal life of a strobe fixture is twenty-five years.  These were installed in 1981.  I've been keeping them going (with the help of a succession of skilled tower climbers) since 1987.

     Yeah, I'm pretty good.  So are the tower guys.  But nobody outruns rust.  And nobody outruns technological obsolescence.  These strobes lost manufacturer support fifteen years ago, and FAA rules mandate only OEM parts can be used to keep them running.  There's a thriving cottage industry of what I am sure are New Old Stock and refurbished used parts.  I'm sure of it because I have had to be: there was no budget to replace the old strobes and you can't just turn 'em off and hope the FAA doesn't notice.

     Over a decade ago, the first solid-state tower strobe systems came on the market.  It's a sealed-up widget, no user-serviceable parts inside.  They were fiendishly expensive, but came with a warranty good for the normal life of the system.  And they got a little less expensive every year.  Meanwhile, the cost of sending someone up the tower to do work kept going up, over a thousand dollars per technician: they have to be trained and insured, and fitted out with the right safety equipment.  (You can thank the cellphone industry for this: they kept hiring the lowest bidders and those crews kept having accidents, often fatal, and every time, local, state and Federal governments made moves intended to increase safety.  Now the low bidders are very nearly as safe as the best crews always were, so there's that.  Also, fewer dead guys, which I do count as a win.)

     The converging lines of old, worn-out strobe lights, falling hardware prices and increasing costs of getting anyone up there to swap out parts several times a year finally crossed this year.  We got on the wait list and this week, a crew has been hard at work on our strobed tower, taking down the old stuff and putting up the new.

     The sun was going down yesterday when they needed some semi-obscure conduit hardware to hook onto some existing wiring.  I had dug it out of our supplies and was carrying it to the tower base.  This tower sits next to a paved parking lot, surrounded by oak trees.

     The oak trees produce acorns.  Any more, they produce a lot of acorns.  I was walking across the lot, both hands full, and managed to look one direction  while turning the other way.  I put my foot down on a mess of acorns, and it started to go out from under me.  I took a big step to get my balance back -- and put my other foot onto more acorns.  They might as well have been marbles.  Zip!  I was going over and I knew it.  I tossed the conduit parts away (a condulet and some 1" rigid couplers and locknuts), tried to get my hands up, managed to avoid smashing my face into a curb and came down hard and sliding on my right hand and left knee, followed by right knee and right breast.  Knocked the wind out of me and I laid there.

     The boss of the tower crew, who I'd been talking to at the time, leaned over: "Are you okay?"
     "I don't know.  Give me a second."  I was sore already.  I moved my arms and legs a little -- okay -- and sat up.  Both knees hurt, but no tears on my slacks.  Dirt and -- oh, damn -- a big abraded patch on the heel of my right hand.  I looked around for the conduit parts.  "Did you see where the LB went?"
     The crew boss shook his head. "No."
     I spotted it, stood up shakily, picked up my purse, went over and picked it up along with the other parts, which I gave to him.  "Here.  You take this.  I'm going to go inside and clean up."

     I did just that, walking through the (large) building to the breakroom where we keep the first aid kit while the cupped palm of my right hand slowly filled up with blood.  I washed all the damage (and dirt) with strong soap.  It hurts but it's worth it.  Got it dry, put a bandage on it and some other scratches, took a couple of Tylenol and went back out.  The crew had decided they were done for the day: not enough light left.  Yeah, I could have told them that when I failed to see the layer of dark acorns on the blacktop, right before I fell.

     Got home and discovered the damage to my left knee when I was getting ready for bed.  Washed that with hydrogen peroxide and slept with ice on it.  Today, the knee is much larger than my right one, and we'll see how that goes.

     They'd better have those new strobes working by the time I get in today.

Some Circus

     The ringmasters -- there were two -- mostly looked bored, except when a pie fight broke out between a clumsy magician and a fake strongman with cardboard weights.  A sad clown led out a poodle on a string, walking on its hind legs, but it didn't do any other tricks.  The Human Cannonball promised several times to launch himself the entire length of the Big Top, but he kept falling well short and missing the net.  He even complained about it, saying, "The rules were you guys weren't gonna fact-check."

     The acts didn't strike me as especially well-rehearsed.  Yes, I'm talking about the debate and while I think Senator Vance lost on facts, especially his refusal to admit Mr. Trump lost the 2020 Presidential election and in claiming the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio under Temporary Protected Status are "illegals" (they're not), I wasn't impressed.  I think Governor Walz would do okay if he had to step up to the big job; I'm not too sure J. D. Vance has the chops.  Tim Walz and his opponent would have both benefited from doing more interviews with neutral to hostile press -- and so would we.

     These two are what we have.  Their running mates are what we have.  Most voters have made their decision already.

Circus Comes To Television Tonight

     Tonight -- and for one night only -- the bearded dudebro in the gray flannel suit squares off against the grizzled Dad in a tartan flannel shirt.

     This promises to be interesting, since each man is the ostensible "folksy" member of their respective campaigns and they'll probably be fighting to be more centrist than the other guy, J. D. Vance's Yale degree and hobnobbing with high-roller venture capitalists notwithstanding, likewise Tim Walz's Upper Midwest progressivism.  Why, they're Just Plain Fellows who might live down the street -- surrounded by a phalanx of well-armed Secret Service.*

     Only one of them is yoked to a candidate who most recently promised stealing from businesses would go way down, if only, "You know, if you had one day, like one real rough, nasty day, one rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out and it will end immediately. End immediately. You know, it'll end immediately."  That's former President Donald Trump, of course, and he's talking about allowing police to exercise extrajudicial violence without due process of law -- to control retail theft, based on a misstatement of California's moving the line between felony and misdemeanor theft up to $950.00, American.†  (Draconian punishment has been tried; England used hang people for shoplifting, picking pockets and theft, as late as 1832 for some offenses.  It was not a deterrent, though they did produce some of the most skilled purse-lifters in the world.)

     Senator Vance's challenge tonight is to not come off as a weirdo.  Governor Walz's is to resist the teacher/senior NCO impulse to chivvy his opponent to act normal.  Vance has been marinating in "manosphere" culture, a subset of the Trumpist Right largely divorced from reality; Walz has been enjoying nearly universal acclaim in Democratic circles.  For both of them, success in the debate will depend on how well their preparation has allowed them to look beyond those comforting horizons.

     We'll find out.
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* This is why I'm not chiding any of the candidates for avoiding the areas hardest hit by hurricane Helene and its aftermath: their unavoidable retinues place a big strain on resources wherever they go and any visit would do far more harm than good.
 
† Weirdly, this is the same guy who likes to talk about how bad inflation has become.  So if it costs more for the same stuff (and it does; the argument is over how much more), wouldn't that move the bar for the seriousness of crimes, too?  In 1789, Congress made sure you could get a jury trial if more than $20 was at stake -- about $715 in 2024.

Mushroom Hash?

     I made a variation of  "breakfast hash" this morning with a little bacon, a diced potato, a nearly equal volume of diced white mushrooms, sweet peppers, cherry tomatoes, scrambled eggs and some seasoning, mostly smoked paprika, onion powder and a little truffle flavoring.

     It occurred to me that I have not made a version replacing all of the potato with mushrooms.  It would be simple and possibly quicker to make, since mushrooms need little to no fat to cook up.  The trick would be adding one or more exotic varieties to the mix for best flavor, since standard white or brown mushrooms (the same species!) can be mild.

Catching Up

      No post yesterday.  I chaired the fiction writer's critique group, and that really takes it out of me.  Not because they're a particularly difficult bunch, especially as writers go -- in fact, they're remarkably pleasant -- but because of me.  The isolation during the pandemic, following on the heels of marked political division during Mr. Trump's Presidency, has left me far less able to cope with social interaction.  I didn't exercise that set of skills and they have atrophied.

     Idly browsing social media afterward, I happened on a factiod that sounds made up but isn't:  SF writer Gene Wolfe, a prolific writer of complex, interestingly-told tales, a prose stylist of considerable merit (according to the fans and critics, and I agree), worked for many years as an industrial engineer, designing the things that make things, and he's the father of (according to the company) or a considerable contributor to the machine that make Pringles®.  Seriously -- click on "Who invented Pringles®" or check his Wikipedia entry.

     "We invented the future" is an often-hyped claim made for SF writers, and it isn't always true.  Jules Verne was an "If This Goes On..." writer, who kept extensive files of clippings and usually described perfected (or over-hyped) versions of things that already existed, from big guns and propellants to submarines to airships to the use of compressed air for energy transport and storage.  H. G. Wells made up impossible technologies from whole cloth -- with one terrifying exception.  On the other hand, a young Arthur C. Clarke was an electronics technician for the group that developed ground-controlled approach radar, and George O. Smith helped develop the radio proximity fuse during WW II -- a vacuum-tube radar system small enough to fit an artillery shell! -- but such specific examples are rare.  More often, there are things like James H. Schmitz showing how to use text-to-speech in the 1960s/70s* and Robert A. Heinlein roughly describing -- and as a result, naming -- the waldo, or writing about online search engines and how to construct a search string in Friday (1982), long before Google or even Archie.  But just as I was about to write that Gene Wolfe was surely the only SF writer to have been involved with snack foods, I remembered E. E. "Doc" Smith.

     You see, Edward E. Smith, Ph.D., was a chemical engineer.  He worked in explosives during World War II, but the majority of his career was spent in food engineering.  Specifically, food mixes.  He developed doughnut-batter mixes, among others, and did so long before the first cleverly-shaped chip ever slid neatly into a metallized-cardboard tube. The next powdered-sugar doughnut you enjoy may well be a Child of the Lens!
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* Young Telzy Amberdon adds punctuation on the go when using her voicewriter, comma, period, paragraph, open and close quotes.  You will find your phone or other device works very smoothly with those inputs, with a single exception: I have yet to find one that will start a new paragraph on command.

Hurricanophoon

     By the time the remnants of tropical storm Helene get to Indiana - and we're getting the fringes already -- it will be high winds and lots of rain.  A mess for us, but nothing compared to the trouble the people in Florida where the thing hit with as a hurricane with Category 4 winds.

     I'm not looking forward to it, but if we avoid heavy downpours and the winds don't get too crazy, it should help out my tomato crop in the back yard.

Hey, Remember The Taliban?

     A socially-conservative religious movement that started small and gained influence over a modern country, using war and instability to establish themselves as the loudest minority among factions with only the loosest of common goals?  Destroyers of cultural artifacts, oppressors of women and foes to modernity in all its forms -- except, perhaps, weaponry.

     Their methods are not without admirers on what used to be the far and crazy Right -- and it keeps trying to "sanewash" itself.  They're still nutjobs, out of touch with the wide center of American culture and always looking for ways to ooze in.

     These kinds of movements often get a sort of "piety exception" from people in the culture around them: "I don't agree with everything they say, but they sure are sincere in their faith!"  Don't be fooled.  They reject the notion of tolerance and freedom of conscience.  They want to run your life by their rules, down to the smallest of details.  Our homegrown version is hostile to the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights.

Kaos?

     Netflix released a series in August that I happened on last night.  Kaos retells Greco-Roman myth, apparently (and very loosely) the story of Eurydice and Orpheus (and perhaps others), starting with Jeff Goldblum as an insecure Zeus.

     The world of the series is modern times with a twist: the gods are real and the cities and nations are those of myth.

     This makes for a Pratchettesque environment, including absolutely unrestrained party-boy Dionysus and a grocery store breakfast cereal aisle stocked with Spartan Crunch, Gaea's Granola and Achilles' Heels.  The casting has the potential to go very weird -- in much the same way as Greco-Roman mythology itself: the deities and heroes of Classic myth were a bunch of stone freaks.  (Yes, yes, Medusa, sit back down.  You'll have your turn.)

     I've seen not quite half of the first episode and along with the story, there's some suspense wondering if the showrunners can continue to juggle ancient and modern elements.  It's a delicate trick and it can go badly wrong.  But so far, so good, and if you ever wondered about Zeus and Hera's home life or just how scary Cassanda was in person, here's your answer.

Walkin' The Midway

      Shakespeare told us all the world's a stage.  I think it's more like a traveling carnival, and politics is definitely the sideshow with the media as barkers out front:

     "Alive, alive, alive!  SEE the Amazing Man Without A Heart!*  How does he live and move?  Nobody knows!  Hurry, hurry to MEET the Universal Dad!  He'll warm the cockles of  your heart and find the right oil filter for your Chevy!†  WATCH as a fifty-nine year old woman only five feet tall‡ attempts to pass THROUGH a glass ceiling!  It's never been done!  THRILL to the most amazing self-promoter of all time, the Mystifying Magician!  He transformed an entire political party!  He multiplies audiences!§  Only one small dollar, just a single U.S. dollar to see them all before your very eyes, walking, talking, doing and saying the most amazing things!"

     Yesiree, the one sure thing you can count on is that you'll never get that dollar back.  Don't miss the snake-woman and the vanishing gubernatorial candidate!
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* This is patently untrue.  The real act retired years ago.
 
† He has to look it up in the greasy cross-reference book at the auto parts store, same as anybody.
 
‡ She's 5' 5".
 
§ Only in his own mind.

A Hopeful Sign

     Radio news this morning had a short piece on politics in the workplace -- how most people avoid it (good!) and how some people reported not asking a co-worker for help because they didn't want to be drawn into a conflict over differing opinions (not so good).

     It's food for thought.  At my work, one of our critical (but minor) suppliers is deeply into partisan politics, in a very over-the-top way.  Were it up to me, I'd look for different places to buy the things we get from them, places that stayed out of such deep and murky waters.  But it's not up to me.  When I'm looking for stuff, they're not on my list; I'm not in charge of anyone else's buying decision.*

     The survey underlying the story had another good sign: for all the rumblings of open conflict, despite rumors and punditry, despite calumny season being in full swing, less than one percent of survey respondents were found likely to commit political violence -- and that number overlapped neatly with the people willing to commit any kind of violence.  The guy who'd punch you out for voting wrong is the same one who'd do so over backing the wrong sports team or drinking the wrong brand of beer.  Most Americans aren't rushing to the apocalypse -- among other things, there aren't any Walmarts or Macys there, and who'd look after the grandkids?
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* One of the best things about McMaster-Carr is that I have no idea of what political opinions the company or its management hold, or even who any of them are.  The closest thing to a slogan on their website is the hyperlink at the top that says "Browse catalog."  But if you need industrial stuff, they have it, and you'll probably get your order the next day.

The Real McCoy?

     You know those old-fashioned drip oilers?  A cylinder of glass, clamped between two brass saucers, a needle-valve at the top and a threaded fitting at the bottom, with a nozzle and a little fiber plug so the oil goes drip, drip, drip at a slow and steady rate?  Found all over antique machinery, especially on moving parts where connection to a central oil supply would be tricky?  Common on steam engines?  Used for one of the folk entomology stories about where the phrase "the real McCoy" comes from, a "McCoy Company" being a supposed manufacturer of them?

     Amazon sells them.  A bunch of different kinds.  McMaster-Carr does, too.

Busy, Busy, Busy

     And yet I didn't do much.  Dishes, laundry, minor cleaning; cleaned out the grill and cooked dinner on it -- a grill pan with Boston Butt, rutabaga, apple, potato, carrots, a few quartered cherry tomatoes, onion, red bell pepper, shishito pepper and oyster mushrooms, with a little chicken-mushroom broth in the bottom of the pan to keep it all moist.

     I also roasted ears of corn on the grill wrapped in foil, with parsley and a little extra-virgin olive oil.  That worked out really well, and I recommend it.  They only need thirty minutes.

Always Late To The Feast

     The thing about having been born at the tail end of the post WW II Baby Boom is that you keep showing up after the main bulk of Boomers have already pillaged, and you keep hearing, "Oh, we used to have that," "Oh, they did a lot of those once," "They wore that thing out and it wasn't worth fixing," "Yeah, that was a big deal ten years ago...."

     It gets tiring.  Now they're wanting to start a civil war as my golden years begin, because they're all set and they're feeling bored with that "taking care of the planet" and "the United States is a multiracial creedal republic that embraces a wide range of cultural expressions" stuff and they want to check out the exciting, bloody awfulness they remember from old movies and the elder relatives of their youth.  The Boomers don't care -- they'll be dead or buzzing on dementia's final high before the rubble stops bouncing.  They'll destroy the village in order to save it and once again, it'll be my in-between generation left with the mess.

     Thanks, loads, really.

Heisenberg's Not Sure

     What if one observer determined the position of a particle while another observer measures its speed, and then they compare notes -- would the Universe cease to exi

Dishwasher Safe, Hand Wash Preferred

     Storage-solutions company Tupperware has filed for bankruptcy.  A group of creditors have proposed a novel approach to resolution, in which the company's assets would be placed under an air-tight seal, burped, and left in the back of a cold-storage warehouse until almost everyone has forgotten about them.

     (Seriously people -- we broke Tupperware?  I went looking for a sealable  32-ounce beverage container last weekend, preferably an unbreakable plastic one with graduations down the side like Tupperware made for decades, and there was nothing of the sort at our nearest big-box retailer, not even an imported clone.  I ended up buying a fancy metal thermal water (etc.) bottle, kin to the Stanley mugs that had their day not too long ago.  The future is awkward.)

"Tone It Down?"

     While calls for the opposing candidate to cool down their rhetoric might make sense coming from a peace-and-love candidate -- Eugene McCarthy, say, or George McGovern -- it's a lot less plausible from Donald Trump, who has always campaigned by warning of a forthcoming -- or supposedly ongoing -- apocalypse and recently described Democratic candidate Kamala Harris as "...a Marxist, everybody knows she’s a Marxist," and "she has, destroyed our country with policy that’s insane. Almost policy that you’d say 'they have to hate our country.'"

     That was during the Presidential candidates debate on September 10.  You'll find similar descriptions of her in transcripts of every campaign speech the man has made since she replaced President Joe Biden, and similar dire warnings from the GOP's Vice-Presidential pick.

     The Democrats have often described Mr. Trump as a threat to democracy and freedom; the GOP has claimed that electing Ms. Harris would mean the end of the country.  These are large claims, and per Agenda 47 (Mr. Trump's internally-contradictory plan for action after a possible return to office and not, he has insisted, to be confused with Project 2025), he would certainly attempt a sweeping expansion of Presidential powers, meddle in state governments, and deploy troops against U. S. citizens and other residents.  Conversely, I'm not seeing any such Federal overreach in the Democratic 2024 platform -- except you're not going to like their plans for firearms regulation; but even that is same-old, same-old: universal background checks, red-flag laws and making manufacturers legally liable for the misuse of guns.  It ain't great, but it's all well within existing Federal purview, if they can get laws through Congress for it and if the U. S. Supreme Court lets them stand.  It's not end-of-the-Republic stuff.

     Whatever.  Do your own risk/benefit analysis.  In terms of threats to people standing for office, it doesn't matter.  Red-hot rhetoric doesn't fire up lone-wolf lunatics; and so far,* only lone-wolf lunatics manage to get close enough to try to do harm to Presidents and Presidential candidates.  These are people without coherent ideology, who often form imaginary parasocial relationships with political figures or see themselves as looming large on the stage of history.  Their motivations are murky at best, incomprehensible at worst.

     "Tone it down?"  Not going to happen, not from either side, and anyone who can picture a cool, cerebral Presidential campaign running in the United States has slept through every quadrennial contest in their life, including Bush vs. Dukakis.  It would be hilarious to see the present crop try -- if only the stakes were not so high.
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* With the sole exception of the conspiracy that included John Wilkes Booth's murder of Abraham Lincoln and the wounding of Secretary of State William H. Seward.