Perspective

The Afghan war is costing us $80 Billion a year. That's like a $1,000 a year for a family of four, EVERY year. The Mars lander project cost that same family $10, once. I know, Mars is boring. There aren't any ragheads to kill. Who cares about a bunch of rocks? We really should be looking at Venus. It might be poisonous, but at least it has an atmosphere. If we can poison our own atmosphere, maybe we can unpoison Venus's.

Via Stu and St. Eutychus

Mexican Extravagence

From Ricas y Famosas, 1999. Daniela Rossell/Greene Naftali, New York.

Google Photos album here.

Via Burro Hall and Slate dot com.

Update March 2020 replaced dead Picasa album with image and link.

Snafu

Sometime around mid-morning I went to get a drink and the water that runs out of the tap is a mere trickle compared to what I usually see. Try another faucet, same thing. What's happened to the water? I call the water department and they tell me the water has been shut off for non-payment. I'm thinking and/or hollering "that's crazy" on account of the bill being paid automatically every month. Turns out the bill is $400 for two months which is twice what it normally is. This in turn explains the insufficient funds notice I got from my bank, which couldn't have been the water bill because, after all, the water bill is only $200, not $400. Since it wasn't the water bill, it must have been some commercial outfit that would try again and find that there was now money in the account and everything would sort itself out. But I had forgotten about the runaway sprinkler. An indefinite time ago I noticed that one sprinkler head seemed to be stuck on, but I thought it was my neighbor's. A week later I found out that, no, it was mine. Doh! Anyway, I paid the bill with a debit card and a couple of hours later the water was back on.
    The last couple of weeks I have racked up around $500 in avoidable expenses. However, compared to this month's airfare bill it's a drop in the bucket. It may not be raining here, metaphorically speaking, but it's certainly drizzling.

I'm back

Got back Monday night actually. Went to Iowa for my mother-in-law's memorial service. Daring daughter flew in as well. She has recently gotten a couple of part-time data mining jobs and she wanted to get started on them, which meant she needed an internet connection. My inlaws had a DSL connection, but only one DSL modem, and darling daughter drug it up to her room and plugged it into her Mac. Since I wasn't about to order an ethernet hub to use for just one week, and since work trumps blogging, I was effectively cut off from the world for the week I was there.

Iowa Adventure

Sunday we had a pretty good blizzard. By Monday things had calmed down but there was still snow on the side roads and patches of it on the highways. I'm taking the new highway 20 East towards I-35. Just past the exit for Kamrar I am in the left hand lane getting ready to pass another vehicle and this patch of snow shows up. There are tire tracks running through it so there are dark and light stripes. I pick the ones that I think were made by previous traffic, as opposed to the stripes left in between, but just as I get to it I realize I have chosen wrong. The car starts rotating off course. First it drifts a few degrees to the left, and then a few degrees to the right (perhaps in reaction to my trying to control it) and then we regain traction and zoom! Off the road and into the ditch. The whole thing took about two seconds.
    I call 911 on my wife-mandated cell phone and they tell me they'll send someone along. Before too long a highway patrol car shows up and tells me to bring my stuff. The snow is a foot or two deep. I look at the 20 feet to the road through the deep snow, and the 100 feet up the track left by my car, and I hump my big, fat suitcase up the longer, car-plowed route.
    We're heading down the highway when we get passed by a tow truck, which annoys Officer Friendly. Seems that tow truck company is not supposed to operating in this area, so he calls another tow company and arranges for them to come tow my car. We take the next exit and double back to my car. There are patches on snow on the road and the Crown Victoria gets a little squirrely, but just for a fraction of second. I wonder if rear-wheel drive cars are more stable in situations like this, or whether I just happened to hit a really bad patch. Whatever. We get back to my car and I hump my suitcase down the plowed track and stow it in the trunk.
    Tow truck shows up and instead of pulling me out backward, which I thought would be the logical, easy thing to do, he digs down in the snow by the left front wheel until he can get a hook on something underneath. I ask him about this and he tells me that pulling the car out backward would pull the plastic nose piece off of the car. I can believe that. He proceeds to start dragging my car sideways. I would have thought this would be a fairly smooth operation, but it's more like a series of tugs. Eventually I figure out that periodic movement is related to the tow truck rocking on it's tires. The winch winds up putting tension on the line and taking up all the slack in the truck's suspension, tires and whatnot. Eventually the tension becomes high enough to overcome the resistance from the wall of snow and the car moves, where upon the line goes slack-ish, the truck rocks forward on its suspension and the whole process is repeated.
    You might think that it would go smoothly from here on, but no. The driver had to re-position his truck half a dozen times. At one point my car is parallel to the road, the truck is pulling at maybe a 30 degree angle, but the car persists in going straight ahead, heading right for one of the steel roadside marker poles. It would be a crime to run into that now since so far we have no real damage. The driver resorts to pulling out into the highway, which finally gets me on the shoulder.
    The bill was $200 plus $14 tax, and they don't take American Express. I thought it was a little high for 30 minutes work, but he did crawl around in the snow, and he got me out in time for me to catch my flight.
    I saw at least two dozen cars stuck in the snow off to the side of the road. Most of them looked like they had been there since yesterday (they had red or yellow tags stuck on them). Officer Friendly told me he had 25 cars stuck just today. I wonder whether the that errant tow truck was really the cause of my getting instant service, or because I told him I had a plane to catch and he figured, hmmm, airline traveler, has at least $2, probably willing to pay a premium to get his car unstuck, I'll call Willy. Or maybe it was: airline traveler, a delay for him is going to be a real pain. Ordinary folk can afford to hang around for a bit, but it will cost this guy real money. Who knows? I maybe could have saved us all the fuss if I had told them up front that I had a plane to catch, but at the time (I'm not dead!) it didn't seem all that important.
    That patch of snow that sent me in the ditch? That was the last patch of snow I saw on the road. All the way to I-35 and then South to Des Moines and the airport the road was perfectly dry.
    Coming into Des Moines I happen to look at the gauges and notice that the needle on the temperature gauge is right at the top. I figure I better pull off and take a look. I do not want to stop on the side of the road: if the engine dies I don't want to be stuck there, so I drive on looking for a gas station or something. Naturally there is nothing, nothing but big highway interchanges. I go through two before I finally find something that looks promising. Well, there are businesses, but no gas stations. I head off sideways and come across a convenience store. I open the hood and discover that the whole space between the grill and the radiator is packed with snow. Doh! Snow has even come up behind the radiator and clogged the electric fans. (I knew there was a reason I didn't like electric fans.)  I'm looking for a stick or some kind of tool that I can use to dislodge the snow but the only thing I can find is my comb. I poke and prod at the snow I can reach and I let the car sit with the hood open for 10 or 15 minutes. This is enough because the temperature gauge falls to the middle and stays there all the way to the airport.
    It is 30 minutes to flight time and there is a line six people long at the Dollar counter, so I drop the keys on the counter and say Hi and Bye to the clerk and head to the ticket counter to check my mighty suitcase. It's 15 minutes to flight time when I get to the gate but they have not started boarding due to some kind of foul up, so I'm good.

P.S. It now occurs to me that the little ride from Officer Friendly may have just been a chance for him to evaluate my mental state, and when he discovered I was shaken, but not stirred, he decided I was competent to resume my travels, and so dispatched the tow truck. If I hadn't of passed his evaluation I would have found myself sitting in a truck stop.

AUDREY A. GRAY

My mother in law.

ROCKWELL CITY - Audrey A. Gray, 84, passed away Tuesday, February 26, 2013 at the Paula J. Baber Hospice Home in Fort Dodge. Abiding by Audrey's longtime request, her remains were gifted to the University of Iowa, Carver College of Medicine, in Iowa City. Memorial services will be 11:00 a.m. Monday, March 4, at St. Paul's Lutheran Church, Rockwell City, with Pastor James Hoover Mossman officiating. Visitation will be 3 to 6 p.m. Sunday at the Palmer & Swank Funeral Home, Rockwell City. In lieu of flowers, memorials can be made to the Rockwell City Public Library, or the South Central Calhoun Elementary School Library.
Audrey is survived by her husband Jack Gray of Rockwell City; son John Gray and his wife Di of Sioux City; daughter Anne Pergiel and her husband Charles of Hillsboro, Oregon; five grandchildren, Joe (Stephanie) Canny, Ross, Kathryn, and John Pergiel, and Jack Gray. She was preceded in death by her son Todd Gray in 1988; and parents, Dr. Edwin "Doc" and Emma (Kirchoff) Langland.
Audrey Anne Langland Gray was born July 10, 1928 at Story City, Iowa. She graduated from Story City High School, with the Class of 1946, and the University of Iowa in 1950. Although she was then engaged to Jack Gray, she made him wait two years while she taught elementary school in California and traveled Europe. The couple married on September 7, 1952 and for the rest of her life she made their home in Rockwell City and Twin Lakes. Audrey left home to earn her Masters Degree in 1970 and to visit the world. She saw the 99 counties of Iowa, all 50 states, the seven continents, and nearly 90 countries. She went through eight passports. Audrey taught at the elementary schools in Lohrville and Rockwell City until her retirement in 1989. She instilled a love of reading in her classroom and, after retirement, at the men's reformatory and in the classrooms of others. Audrey started the Reading All Stars at the South Central Calhoun so that many more adults could help beginning readers. She was a longtime member of the Library Board, PEO, American Association of University Women, St. Paul's Lutheran Church, and to her husband's chagrin, the Democratic Party. - Des Moines Messenger

When Audrey & Jack came out to visit us at Christmas she was fine, and now this.

Big Brother

    E.B. Misfit put up a post today about a Supreme Court ruling about electronic surveillance. There was a movie not too long ago about the East German Secret Police listening to everyone (back when there was an East Germany). Then there was the bit about the Soviets listening to everything everyone said and you had to mind your P's and Q's if you didn't want to be sent off to the Gulag. Now we have the NSA listening to everything.

Points:

1. The Soviet Union collapsed because they could not continue to fund their national security apparatus, which meant mostly the armed forces, but you can include the KGB and all their apparatchiks as well.
2. The NSA may be recording everything and stowing it away in some vast great server farm, but how much of this stuff is anyone actually going to look at or listen to? Not much. What they'll do is wait for the computer to highlight something and then they'll go look at it, and it won't be of any interest, so they'll go on to the next highlighted item.
3. Occasionally, someone will realize that all clandestine communications will be done using code words, so all conversations will become code. "Picking up the kids from soccer" will mean picking up the terrorists from the safe house. "Going to the store for groceries" will mean stocking up on fertilizer and fuel oil. Now every conversation will be suspect and will have to be investigated, which means absolutely nothing will get done.
4. The Soviets only listened to people who mattered. If you didn't do anything to get noticed, no  one paid you any mind.

    Remember the old Pogo quote? "We have met the enemy and he is us." It costs the USA about a million dollars a year to put a soldier in the field, mostly for the same reason that it costs a $100 million dollars to make a movie. It's an expedition. You need to bring everything with you, and you need to bring a bunch of people to bring the stuff, and then you need to feed them, which means more people and more stuff. It's like a pyramid scheme.
    I keep thinking the Taliban is couple of guys walking around with a shovel and a gun, but it's not. It's actually a sizable organization, and like any big outfit it takes money to run it. I imagine it probably takes about $10 thousand a year for the Taliban to put a soldier in the field, or about ONE PERCENT of what we are spending.
    We hire contractors to build things in Afghanistan. The contractors have to deal with the local people in order to get things done. Pay off the local warlords so their workers don't get shot on the job. I would not be surprised if ONE PERCENT of what we spend to put our own troops in the field ends up in the hands of the Taliban, who use that money to put one of their own soldiers in the field. In effect we are paying the enemy to fight us.
    We are all going to hell.