Mostly about my amusement

Month: August 2008 (page 1 of 3)

Went to the American Air Power Museum today

Lily went to the U.S. Open today with our son, so I took the girl to the American Air Power Museum.  She had fun and I took some good pictures.  I’ve just made this one my desktop image.

Glamourus Gal

It came out much better that I thought it would.  The P-51 Glamorous Gal was not able to take off because of the weather.  That was a shame, seeing it in the air would have been awesome.  The plane was in fantastic condition.

Governor Palin’s qualifications are what again?

NRO got it right.

Inexperience. Palin has been governor for about two minutes. Thanks to McCain’s decision, Palin could be commander-in-chief next year. That may strike people as a reckless choice; it strikes me that way. And McCain’s age raised the stakes on this issue.

. . .

Tokenism. Can anyone say with a straight face that Palin would have gotten picked if she were a man?

The Corner on National Review Online.

No one can legitimately argue that a woman can’t be president.  That’s just stupid and would eliminate many powerful and capable candidates.  Senator Clinton would have been a great choice in an election had she won the primary.  The Democratic Party did not throw women under the bus; the process worked out and Senator Clinton received fewer votes.

That’s how elections work.

If it’s legitimate to run ads claiming Senator Clinton and Senator Biden were arguing that Senator Obama lacked experience, how exactly does it work when McCain picks someone who has virtually no national or international experience at all?

She was a mayor of a town with 7,000 residents -> Governor of Alaska. She ran on a reformer ticket and is being investigated for allegedly trying to get her former brother-in-law fired.  That a lot of experience alright.

Rooting for Governor Palin purely on the basis of her being a woman does an equal disservice to women. President Palin? Who could honestly say that she can actually be a good president?  Sexual discrimination is not over when a woman becomes president.  It’s over when a woman becomes president and no one notices that she’s a woman.

This continues to be a fun election to watch.

Sigh, Yellow jackets might not be all dead

This morning we had no dead yellow jackets in the bedroom.  We got home after 7 PM tonight and found two new one’s on the carpet next to the door of the closet.  They were both dead but that means at least this morning some of them were alive enough to get out of the closet.

Tomorrow morning the exterminator comes back and we will see if we’ll see if anymore of them are alive or not.

I’m really, really beginning to hate those little monsters.

Holy Larry Niven! Lasers could be used to communicate in space!

Scientists at an Italian observatory this year succeeded in firing lasers at the mirror-covered Ajisai Japanese satellite, proving that a sequence of photons can travel great distances through space.

Quantum Key Encryption Information Security – Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle Quantum Mechanics – Popular Mechanics.

It’s an article about quantum key encryption but the title made me laugh.  Larry Niven has been writing about communication lasers almost as long as he’s been writing.

It’s not a leak

In my closet on the ceiling, the plasterboard is soft and discolored in a small area.  Looks like a leak in the roof and there is this noise which I though was something dripping.  The noise was constant and we just figured that it was some leak from a pipe in the attic.  I had no idea why there would be a pipe there (there wasn’t) but the stain looked like water damage, so it was either a pipe or the roof.

So I go get the ladder and climbed into the attic.  I had to crawl through a small space to get to the top of my closet.  It looked bone dry and the insulation did not seem to have any mold. There was no sign that the roof was less than perfect.

So my Dad went into my closet and pushed a wooden dowel through the soft part of the ceiling.  The hole he made was around a 1/4 of inch wide if that much.

When he took the dowel out approximately 20 wasps came through that tiny hole like dive bombers. I just made an appointment for Terminex to come here TODAY.

I’m glad it’s not a roof or some mysterious non-existant pipe but now I am locked out of my room while I wait for the exterminator.

UPDATE: Well the gentleman from Terminex was here. What happened is this: by poking the small hole in the ceiling, we made a simple extermination job really, really complicated.  If we did not make that hole, then he’d have made it but would have a) covered it up and b) pumped poison into the nest and just kill them.

My closet (with it’s door closed and a towel at the bottom!) has over 100 hornets inside. So he gassed the nest from the outside and then gassed the closet.  There are a bunch of dead hornets in my bedroom.  I’m to NOT go inside that closet until FRIDAY.  At that time either things will go really well and I’ll have a lot of dead hornets to clean up, or things will be really bad.

Either way if I open up that door and a dozen or more are still alive, I’m going to get stung. Can’t wait for Lily to come back home… all of her clothing is in that closet.

John McCain is Hillary’s knight?

Politics sure make for odd reading.  John McCain’s campaign is reaching out for the angry bitter myopic accusatory how can you be so sexist supporters of Senator Clinton.

“She won millions of votes. But isn’t on his ticket. Why? For speaking the truth,” the narrator in the ad says.

McCain Camp Accuses Obama of Passing Over Clinton for VP

That’s really funny.  In 1999 I had so much respect for Senator McCain.  But he wants this too badly and apparently will say anything to get the votes.

I voted for Senator Clinton in the primaries. But as it turns out more people voted for Senator Obama.  Instead of panning and diminishing his accomplishment, why must some (not all) of Senator Clinton’s supporters continue to harp on this?  What was Senator Obama’s camp supposed to do? Crawl hands and knees asking for the approval of the person who lost?

I had thought she was better qualified.  I also thought her campaign just expected a shoe-in and did not really try.  Florida and Michigan?  That was her campaign attempting to cheat. Those states broke the rules and all the candidates agreed to stay clear of them.  So when her campaign tried to play the “but wait! Florida and Michigan want me!!” card, I lost respect for her as a candidate.

If (or when) John McCain wins the election, it will not be due to an effort on his side.  It will be because the Democrats are too in enthralled with their own drama.