The Dougloid Papers

Memo From The Tundra To New York: Get Over Yourselves

2012-01-03T06:13:00.000-08:00

Along with the hot air and swamp gas of the runup to the Iowa caucuses, we hear and see a lot of stuff in the papers (and from people who should know better) that can be more or less characterized as the following whinge:

"Why is a place in flyover country, the dark space between N'Yaark and Los Angeles that's mostly made up of white bread bible thumpers, hillbilly klan types, meth crazed whackozoids in pickup trucks, animal buggeristas and divers categories of midwestern dimwits get to do the initial sort of presidential hopefuls? I mean, no diversity to speak of and nothing important has happened there since 1857 more or less, if ever, which is a dubious proposition. Let the Big Places Make The Big Decisions And Let The Flyover Types Be, Well, Flown Over. Sheesh."

The hubris is unmistakable, as is the implication that if N'Yaark is not the navel of the universe it damned well should be. It smacks of social darwinisim of the kind that Herbert Spencer peddled but I digress.

Jules Steinberg, the eminent cartoonist, captured that in his now famous cover of March 29, 1976, which we reproduce for your delectation.

The attitude's pervasive. I was watching an episode of House Hunters last night (we do have televisions, y'know, and cable and that there internet) and it featured a couple living in Jersey City who wanted to buy a crib in Manhattan and do it on $400k. The real estate agent, a N'Yaarker, opined that he was not licensed to flog his wares in New Jersey, didn't care to be, and considered Jersey City "the tundra".

The takehome from the show was that the couple bought in Jersey City and the N'Yaark sophisticate got no commission from people over in the Tundra.

I think the Grant Wood painting here seems apropos-it's titled "The Appraisal" and it depicts a farm woman with a fat hen listening to the city lady's pitch for said fat hen with a certain amount of cynicism.

One of the reasons we're First Here is because we're first and despite caviling and whingeing from New York and similar tottering edifices, we're first. It is what it is. Get over yourselves.

That would usually be enough to silence most doubters and midnight skulkers but hey! This is the age of the internet.

Sure, it is kinda whitebread (not necessarily always a bad thing), and it is pretty spread out in winter, and we do drive a lot of pickup trucks, and we're slow to anger, and we're not embarrassed to salute the flag or stand up for a lady, and some of us start nearly every sentence with "well, down on the farm Dad allus said..." and there are an unseemly number of men named Galen and Eldon, but we take an interest in the affairs and processes of governing.

We want to see our-and your- potential leaders up close and personal, and not for a weekend either. We want to see politics sold retail like a fan belt for the Farmall or the blue plate special at the North Side Cafe. When the candidates come here, we make sure they're fit to go the distance and by the time the good people of New Hampshire step up to the plate the candidates will stand naked before the electorate, exposed for all the world to see-as Mr. Santorum was recently.

That raises another point. Judging by the level of participation in the primary circuit and the general elections in the rest of the country, Mr. Lupica and the rest of his similarly inclined crew of whiners and kvetchers might as well clean up their own Augean stable of public indifference before bitching, as they do every four years, about how we do things here.

Me and Greg and the Dog Cart

2011-11-22T06:01:00.000-08:00

We here at the Dougloid Towers read with much dismay and sadness of the passing of Gregory Papalexis recently.

Mr. Papalexis started his business with a small G.I. loan, buying the bakery his father had started in Manhattan and in time, branched out into building the hot dog carts you see on every street corner in Manhattan.

In 1969, he acquired the Sabrett's firm, which is undoubtedly the finest hot dog obtainable at any price. I know, I know, adherents of Vienna Beef and Nathan's will cavil and obfuscate-and they are fine dogs indeed, but only when you cannot get a fix of Sabrett's.

Mr. Papalexis knew all this, enjoying the delectable canines four or five times a week-which undoubtedly contributed mightily to his long life, devotion to his wife of 63 years, and happiness. If it wasn't for this damned issue of geography I'd do the same-Sabrett's carts are few and far between in Iowa but I can and do get Sabrett's dogs mail order every time I think about it. Imagine-owning your own hot dog company, and Sabrett's at that.

When you think about the philosophy of it all, it is clear that Gregory Papalexis brought much happiness to many people, far more so than any number of soapbox preachers, hectoring high school assistant principals, angry traffic cops, draft boards, store detectives, and numberless other wet blankets and buzz killers of every type and size.

For that this modest resident of Norwood, New Jersey, deserves our everlasting thanks. When the roll is called up yonder, this will all weigh heavily in his favor. Of that there is absolutely no doubt.

What could be better than a fall afternoon in Manhattan, a park bench, and a couple of Greg's best safely nestled in their buns? It is surely a Manhattan thing, and New Yorkers can be justifiably proud of this minimalist yet complete culinary tour de force.

Tenterhooks Demystified

2011-11-10T06:06:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while you'll see a reference to somebody being "on tenterhooks"-that is, a state of extreme uncertainty. When I saw that this morning I asked myself "What in the hell is a tenterhook, anyway?"

Well, it's a sharply hooked nail that is used to stretch wet cloth over a frame so that it dries flat. A person whose job it was to put the combination of tenterhooks and wet wool over a frame was known as a tenterer-as are the workers in the picture.

The fine folks at the Trowbridge Museum have put together a website that provides much detail on the various now forgotten trades associated with cloth making. It's well worth your time to have a look.

The Return Of the Soup Nazis.

2011-11-07T18:10:00.000-08:00

You recall we had a little discussion here a while ago about Dillards'-you know, the people with the department stores-firing a person over two hot dogs they didn't even want, and we mused over the kind of company that could be that petty?

At the time I was feeling a little bit holier than thou, figuring it'd never happen in Iowa.

Well folks, I'm here with a plateful of crow, and as Joe Hammond of Eagles' Nest, New Mexico used to say "Hell, that crow don't taste too bad if you put salt and pepper on it. Hah!"

In Tompkins-Kutcher v. Employment Appeal Board, 11-0149 (Iowa Ct. App. Aug. 24, 2011), a woman who worked for Casey's was fired and was denied unemployment.

It seems that she took outdated soup from the store as she was directed to, placed it in the dumpster outside the store and then removed it, took it home and used it to feed her dog.

Tompkins-Kutcher was initially awarded unemployment benefits but Casey's resisted because she had violated company policy, to wit: employees are required to pay for any item they intend to use, whether outdated or otherwise, trash or whatever. The administrative law judge concluded Tompkins-Kutcher was discharged for misconduct because she'd signed for a copy of the employee handbook wherein this policy was set out.

The district court affirmed, finding that she intentionally disregarded the standards of behavior employers have a right to expect from their employees.

Atta way, Casey's. You sure showed 'em.

Of course there's the small matter of the secret video camera that was set up in a Casey's office to observe a woman employee who was, as she thought, expressing breast milk in a private place. It's been removed to Federal Court, but stay tuned.

A gentle reminder

2011-10-25T05:50:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader, this is a gentle reminder to you that if you are a parking garage, your comments will be deleted without comment, as are the comments of all spam whores.

The 99 per centers and the Quislings

2011-10-24T06:49:00.000-07:00

I guess I'm a ninety nine per center-I mean, who isn't, when their next paycheck or contract job contains a soupcon of doubt-and that's assuming that there's some sort of opportunity to get paid in the immediate future?

Not to mention a student loan overhang the size of Mount Rushmore, either. It's not just for twentysomethings any more. If it wasn't for President Bush and his pen back in 2007, I'd be in a lot worse shape than I am now. There's some comfort in knowing that the balance of my student loan debt will be forgiven when I'm 87.

Where was I? Oh, I remember. Too much parallel thinking this morning, which is how I tend to roll.

We've all seen the "I am not the 99 per cent" screed that was allegedly written by some college student somewhere, which has become a focus point for the credulous, kind of like a psychic bug zapper-it looks pretty, but get too close and Wall Street'll have your ass on a plate by lunch time.

There's no future in being a Quisling.

For those of you who've been out of the country, Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian Nazi (there he is in the photo on the left, schmoozing with Himmler) who, when the Nazis had no more use for him because they'd become extinct, became extinct himself at the hands of a firing squad in late 1945.

The moral of this part of the story is, as my old man used to say "It is never a good idea to rise too far above your station in life." To that, because I'm the family patriarch (and what a thought THAT is) I would add it is never a good idea to forget where you came from and who your people were. Being Wall Street's bitch will inevitably bite you in the ass, just as being Hitler's bitch settled old Vidkun's hash for good.

The following illustrates the principle.

Back in slavery days, ole Massuh told the house negroes that they were better than the field hands because they slept in a bed, dressed in real clothes, and worked in the house instead of out in the field or the stable with the heat and the sweat and the stink. And a lot of the house negroes believed this gross canard, to their discredit. But when ole Massuh had lost his roll at the faro tables, having been righteously skinned by riverboat card sharps, all the negroes without exception, field hands, house negroes, and even some of old Massuh's progeny from his late night drunken rambles in the slave quarters went on the auction block to be sold to the highest bidder without exception.

The Great Commoner and the Huckster

2011-10-14T08:49:00.001-07:00

Sometimes you see stuff that just makes you cringe. This campaign button from the 2008 presidential campaign makes me wince.

The usually unimpeachable source tells us that Bryan was a devout Presbyterian, a supporter of popular democracy, an enemy of gold, banks and railroads, a leader of the silverite movement in the 1890s, a peace advocate, a prohibitionist, and an opponent of Darwinism on religious grounds.

The Huckster, as they called him in Arkansas, is none of these things and never was.

Bryan was a deeply religious, principled midwesterner who attained high office but never became President in three tries, and he always fought for the oppressed and the victims of corporate greed. Huckabee, by contrast, is a bible thumping tea bagger who got a talk radio job and decided he'd rather boo from the sidelines than fight for principle in the blood and sweat of the arena.

Bryan never gave up.

Another president, Theodore Roosevelt, once mused on the difference between fighters and quitters:

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

Parol evidence rule-DOA or still showing signs of life?

2011-09-09T08:38:00.000-07:00

Remember when you slept through the discussion of the parol evidence rule in Contracts? If that's you, read on, because a recent Iowa Court of Appeals decision indicates it's still important.

Gemini Capital Group, a buyer of bad debts through mesne conveyances, sued Philip New on an account they'd bought from Sears Roebuck wherein New had obtained a charge account and stopped paying in 2004. At trial, New asserted a statute of limitations defense, alleging that the agreement was an oral contract that is governed by a 5 year limitation.

Gemini disagreed, alleging that the agreement was a written one. To support their argument, Gemini introduced 1) a statement showing New's balance, assignments of the debt through several buyers, and a standard Sears revolving credit terms and conditions document.

The district court found in favor of Gemini and New timely appealed.

Iowa Code section 614.1 governs causes of action. An unwritten contract is governed by a five year statute of limitations and a written contract has a ten year window. However, Iowa case law tells us that if an action is founded on a written contract, the essential facts showing liability must be established by a writing containing the essential elements of the agreement. Without evidence of New's written acceptance of Sears' offer, the action is one to enforce an oral contract, which had a statute of limitations of five years.

The United States of Euro, Part II

2011-08-17T07:25:00.000-07:00

You are familiar, dear reader, with our previous post on this subject but now it seems to have really come a cropper.

Let's review.

When a common currency for the European Union was promoted the idea was that it would simplify the problems of exchange rates-an impediment to the free flow of commerce in Europe where countries are packed in like so many herring in a barrel, to use a vaguely nautical metaphor.

Henceforth, there wouldn't be any more exchanging currencies, pesky drachmas to francs to marks to guilders-all at a price levied at every currency exchange window, mind you. And there would be no more being beholden to Uncle Sam and his hated dollar for a universal currency, either.

We would all proceed to the broad sunlit uplands of prosperity as only Europe, under the wise tutelage of the likes of Deutsche Bank, could do it, thus proving yet again the moral and financial indiscipline of the yanquis.

Some countries didn't swig the kool-aid, though. There's the British pound, the forint, the zloty, the Norwegian kroner and a number of others.

You see, the great disadvantage of a common European currency in the context of the European Union was that on the one hand it offered a stable currency, but it divorced currency from sovereignty. One way of dealing with your debts is to inflate your currency-print more money, in other words. And of course, under the benevolent hand of the Germans and to a lesser degree French bankers, that would never be necessary.

All of this seemed a mere flyspeck on the windshield of European progress in the halcyon days of national borrowing to support social program spending, all premised on the mortgage backed security payoff, property values appreciating 20 per cent per annum, world without end, amen.

Well. Unless you've just emerged from an extended vacation in Greenland sans a radio, you know what has happened, starting in 2006. Somebody's got to support the program, and when the minister intones "for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, as long as ye both shall live" you damned well had better pay attention. He's talking to YOU.

When you forego the ability to write down debt as a means of getting yourself through a bankruptcy, you're in a pickle that's as bad as somebody who's got student loans up the wazoo-something I'm familiar with.

And that's what swigging Euro kool-aid did.

Lately it seems that to a lot of people in the more prosperous parts of northern Europe the smell of decomposition hangs over the entire common currency project. They're grudgingly having to ante up the cash to the bail bondsman to get all those awful spendthrift brown people out of hock. You know, the Greeks, the Spaniards and Portuguese, the Italians and the Irish-although they ain't brown but they might as well be.

Where this is all leading is unknown. But it's an unfolding story, so stay tuned.

The King Of Harlem

2011-08-12T17:11:00.000-07:00

In the era of the big bands, William Henry "Chick" Webb may just have been the greatest band leader that ever lived as well as the greatest drummer that ever lived.

Chick suffered from spinal tuberculosis as a young boy, which left him permanently crippled. He made his way from his home in Baltimore to New York Chick took up the drums and rapidly rose in the New York music scene. Unable to read music he nevertheless mastered the intricate business of arrangement and presentation and built a powerhouse of a band with which he ruled Harlem from his stronghold of the Savoy Ballroom when he wasn't making forays across the country.

His playing was so powerful that his drum set had to be screwed down to the floor of the Savoy's stage.

It is said that his greatest moment came when he faced off Benny Goodman's band at the Savoy and send them packing. Chick was reputed to have told his sidemen "If you miss a note you're gone, because this is my night."

Which was only right because the Savoy was Chick Webb's house.

Chick Webb died in 1939 at an early age because of health problems. His career was like a shooting star in a way.

And with him his band was always about the drums.

Give a listen.

For "Dillard" Substitute "Prick".

2011-07-08T13:07:00.000-07:00

Koewler v. Review Bd., Indiana Dep't of Workforce Development, no. 93A02-1012-EX-1431 (Ind. Ct. App. July 7, 2011).

Theere's an interesting outcome in an otherwise garden variety unemployment appeals case out of Indiana the other day, and it serves to illustrate how rotten and petty people can be, and maybe who the Boss from Hell might really be.

At the July 4, 2010 cookout for Dillard's employees, Mike Marz instructed the employees to take the leftover hot dogs and put them in storage for Labor Day. Koewler, an employee removed two leftover hot dogs and had them for lunch or something the next day

Marz reviewed a security video which showed Koewler removing the offending tube steaks, and reported him to the store manager who thereupon summoned police and instructed Koewler that he was to either sign a statement admitting he'd stolen two hot dogs, or be taken to jail. He signed and was thereupon fired.

Koewler filed for unemployment and the administrative law judge determined he'd not been fired for cause and was therefore not disqualified from receiving unemployment.

Dillard's appealed and the appeals board reversed the ALJ.

There was conflicting testimony as to whether the hot dogs were intended for the freezer or the refrigerator, and whether Koewler knew about it or not.

Under Indiana law the employer bears the burden of establishing that the worker was terminated for just cause.

The court of appeals reversed, determining that no factfinding was made as to whether Koewler's reaching into the fridge and grabbing two tube steaks was a knowing and intentional exertion of unauthorized control.

This case raises two or three questions. Filming the break room? Firing an employee over two hot dogs? Even bothering to waste time over it?

What a penny ante outfit.

Further Tales From the Tonal Fringe: The Sherwood 84-22

2011-04-25T06:16:00.000-07:00

I acquired a Sherwood 84-22 a few years ago in a state of disrepair-deshabille might be more like it-and some stinkiness about which more anon, mostly because I liked its looks.

The Sherwood dates from the late forties and was probably sold by Montgomery Wards. It was clear from the beginning that it had been made by Danelectro back when they were in Red Bank and before they'd discovered the uses of Homasote as cabinet material.

The circuit is interesting, as it uses the filament of the first preamp tube as a cathode resistor, in conjunction with a resistance on the ground side-which keeps the filament above ground and dumps the detritus into the center tap of the filament winding. It also runs the 12SJ7 pentode pretty hot which makes for some crunchy sounds-not the typical late forties thing.

Along with the Rola field coil speaker, with modest voltages provided by the iron from the House of Freed, it's got its own groove that owes little to anything else of the era.

The overhaul resulted in some head scratching because the stinkiness got worse and finished up with a cloud of evil smelling smoke and lots of distortion. After puzzling over it I realized I had a similar amp in the collection and on opening it up, it was easy to see where the last owner had bodged the circuit which accounted for the stinkiness and lousy vibrato.

Of course, experimenting with odd circuit ideas was something that happened a lot in the House of Nat Daniel. I've seen several variations on this theme, including one which uses a power tube to modulate the field coil current for a Leslie type vibrato effect, and one that uses a potentiometer to adjust the preamp tube filament voltage for yet more cool Danelectro edginess.

The circuit is the same as the Silvertone 1303, and I've seen it in amps from Wabash, Noble, and Danelectro. As part of a cooperative project I dug up an original copy of the schematic and it was redrawn by Sean Weatherford of Bean Amplifiers, so that was probably the last one the seller got five bucks for.

It is now the world's property, and it would make a great home brew project. Why make yet another tweed Deluxe? This'll get you there in style, plus vibrato to boot.

I've got an 84-23 which is the same amp with an extra 8 inch PM speaker, and it's undergoing a refit as we speak.

How's it sound? Sharp, edgy, and full of fight. It's not smooth at all like a Deluxe but edgy and in your face like you'd expect a guy from Jersey to be.

Requiescat

2011-04-18T07:52:00.001-07:00

As described in the New York Times At War blog, Clay Hunt, a marine who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan, took his life March 31 of this year in Sugarland, Texas.

I'm inclined to think Clay Hunt was killed overseas even though he died by his own hand.

My son's a soldier and a healer and has served in the hot zone, and I am often reminded when chatting with him that all we see of most people is what's on the surface, seldom what's stirring in the depths.

Father Martin, having been a chaplain and a world war 2 veteran may have known a lot about this story, even though he's been gone thirty years and more.

Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord; and let Light Perpetual shine upon them.

Image courtesy of CNN.

Judybox Revival amp

2011-04-08T10:05:00.000-07:00

I finished up the Judybox Revival amp and powered it up today. It got topped off with a nice set of vintage Dakaware chicken head knobs I'd been saving for a special occasion.

Here's what I did to it.

Replaced all the ceramic dropping resistors with a 3w metal film, a 2w metal film, and a 2w carbon comp.
Replaced the ceramic 5w screen and grid resistors with 2w Dale metal film and the grid resistors with 1/2 w carbon film from Rat Shack.
Replaced the pilot lamp assembly with a Fender item. This was broken
Replaced the power receptacle. This was broken as well.
Replaced the 40-22-10 e'lytics with 47-22-22 450v items
Replaced the three ceramic octal sockets with bakelite.
Installed 5 standoffs of the proper length to support the board level and not preloaded.
Revised the ground scheme to a star ground setup
Replaced the chassis screws with new stuff from the hardware store.
Installed a smooth plate Tele in the first position.

How's it sound? About the same-bright and sparkly with a lot of depth on the bottom end. Sounds a lot like an AB165 with the bass and treble dimed and the switch on bright.

The builder used Tocos (Tokyo Cosmos) pots-very good stuff-but they're all linear. I may change them out for audio taper, at least the volume controls. All the connects from the pots to the board are shielded wire. I didn't see a nfb resistor but maybe it's there somewhere. I'm thinking that the first two preamp tubes share a common filter capacitor, because if they did not there would be four and there are only three e-lytics. Both preamp tubes have small electrolytics on both cathodes.

I don't know whether I'm qualified as an expert-I'm in the middle of doing a schematic layout and a bill of materials and when I'm done I may be an expert in which case if you find this drop me a line.

I am in a position to make some recommendations in order of importance.
Ditch the power receptacle and pilot light for something good.
Install proper standoffs to support the board and level it out.
Dump all the ceramic resistors except the power tube cathode resistor. They look stupid.
Revise the grounding to a star grounding common-it was strictly from hunger.
Replace the octal sockets with bakelite, Beltons, or military Amphenols

If you've got any questions about this amp, drop me a line.

Tales From the Tonal Fringe, Continued: The Judybox Revival

2011-04-01T09:26:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you stumble over something, and as you follow the trail, an entire new world is revealed. People who dig quirky guitar amps are no different, and that led me to the Judybox-partially because it's named after my wife. I decided I had to have one.

The story's quirky. The amps were developed by Al Nelson down in Austin, Texas about six years ago or so, and that's where you'll find most of them. A pretty big splash was made at the 2006 NAMM show which was held in Austin that year, and from what I read on TGP and other forums, the wheels started to come off the project soon after. Deposits were taken and whether they were returned or anyone got amps is anyone's guess.

Suffice it to say there were and are a lot of unhappy people in the Austin area who'd ordered amps and didn't get them.

There are stories of illness and mismanagement, a transfer to shadowy investors, some or all of the assembly being done in China, and that's pretty much where the story ends, in 2007.

The registered address of the business, 8804 Chisholm Lane, looks a lot like a residence with a stable out back. It's owned by a gentleman named Stanley Phillips and has been in his hands since 1972 according to the Travis County Assessor.

Entity Information: JUDYBOX, INC.
8804 CHISHOLM LN
AUSTIN, TX 78748-6378
Status: NOT IN GOOD STANDING
Registered Agent: AL NELSON
8804 CHISHOLM LANE
AUSTIN, TX 78748
Registered Agent Resignation Date:
State of Formation: TX
File Number: 0800639464
SOS Registration Date: April 10, 2006
Taxpayer Number: 32019547028

Well. What's the story on this orphan?

It's cathode biased, two channels each with its own volume, bass and treble, and reasonably well equipped although looking like it was done in a bit of a hurry. There are no identifying marks on the transformers which look a bit Asian. There are extra taps on the power transformer that could prove interesting.

The tube layout is conventional: 5AR4, 6L6GC, 6L6GC, 12AX7, 12AX7, 12AX7. The voltages are relatively low, with a B+ of only 369v and 309vAC on the legs of the power transformer. Some of the fitments are a little cheesy-the pilot light and power inlet socket are pretty much low grade schmutz plastic, and shot, but overall it looks pretty decent.

Sound wise, this amp does clean in a big way, and it's got a nice deep bass tone that's right for single coil pickups, particularly P90s. The original speaker's been replaced with a Celestion Super 65 that gets the job done well.

Where the story ends, I don't know. If you've got some information feel free to post a comment.

UPDATE 4-7-11
Since I wrote this piece I've been doing the work required to get this amp in serviceable condition and here's what's been done so far..

I replaced the pilot lamp assembly with a military surplus item that the original looked like it had been copied from, got rid of all the ceramic resistors except the cathode resistor, replaced the electrolytics with suitable replacement values, and went up to the hardware store for enough hardware to cook up proper standoffs. This required modifying a few holes and drilling others, but now the board is level, well supported and not preloaded at all.

When you think about it, the screen resistors and grid stoppers do not need to be 5w ceramics, and the dropping resistors do not need to be 10w. 7w and 5w ceramics. Fender did just fine for the last sixty years without that stuff. Plus, smaller resistors make for a cleaner installation and that's the look I'm going for.

Even as we speak the UPS man is supposed to be bringing me a new power socket to complete the job. Then, I can reassemble it and survey the grounding.

One interesting thing I found was the control pots-they're all linear, made by Cosmos Tokyo and very nice looking stuff. I shall try and find a source.

Two Wheel Fever, or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Asphalt

2011-03-17T07:21:00.000-07:00

This is a bike that's similar to my old Cannondale, which as near as the factory can figure out was made in 1985. I picked it up for twelve dollars at a police auction and commenced to getting myself into shape a few years ago.

And thereby hangs a tale.

On the subject of tires, I had a nice pair of Mavic tires that I'd had since I got them in California in the late eighties. They looked great, but they were hard as solid oak.

One fine day I figured it was the day to attempt a thirty mile road trip, and off I went up the Neil Smith bike trail. At the fifteen mile mark I turned around, and on my way back I made a wrong turn and headed down a road that led to a rest area overlooking Saylorville Lake.

Not wanting to lose headway I decided to make a wide sweeping turn and head back out of the parking lot.

That's when I went across a crack in the asphalt about 2 inches across and those rock hard Mavics went out from under me. I remember thinking "This is going to hurt like hell." and then I hit the pavement. The helmet protected what otherwise would not have been an ear anymore.

I crawled across the ramp to that little tree to the left, propped myself up and took inventory. The fingers worked (good) but my right arm could not be raised (bad). I couldn't ride home, but I also didn't know where I was. I had a wash and a patch up with alcohol and gauze at the campground and walked down the hill across the field and parking lot and found a park ranger at the boar ramp. I phoned Judy and when she answered handed the phone to the ranger and said "tell this person how to come and get me."

A couple hours later I was getting patched up by Doctor Jeff, and I ended up with a broken scapula. A lot of pain pills and PT later I was ok. It was hell driving the pickup and changing gears.

There are a few important points to take away. First, new tires every year, even if they look good the rubber dries out and gets hard and you're without traction. Second, helmets are necessary. Third, a cell phone and a basic first aid kit plus a few hard candies in your under seat bag can make all the difference in what could be a bad day.

Is technology value neutral?

2011-03-06T08:52:00.000-08:00

I've come to the conclusion that technology is not always value neutral.

It's only value neutral if you believe that a Glock is no different from a radio or a brick or a typewriter. The nature of the instrumentality and what it invites by its very nature controverts the 'value neutral' notion.

A typewriter can be used as a weapon but its primary purpose is to make a neat job of writing.

A brick can be a weapon but its primary purpose is to become part of a wall.

We've seen this during last summer's tea bag ragefest where one crank urged his adherents to hurl bricks through Democratic windows and presumably at Democrats themselves. Some of them did.

Here's what he said:

We can break their windows,Break them NOW. And if we do a proper job, if we break the windows of hundreds, thousands, of Democrat party headquarters across this country, we might just wake up enough of them to make defending ourselves at the muzzle of a rifle unnecessary.

This demonstrates that bad intent is, in fact, in the mind of the user-but that doesn't divorce the object from the primary purpose.

A radio can be a weapon but its primary purpose is to inform, entertain and educate, so 'tis said-although I have problems with radio talk shows.

A Glock, on the other hand, has no purpose but to hurl a projectile downrange and hurt whatever gets in its way-that's what it does and that's why it exists. There is no other reason at all for its existence.

A guillotine has no purpose but to kill people. You can't re-purpose it as the word of the week has it.

There's an old saying: If you have a hammer, sooner or later everything starts to look like a nail.

Condo Onwers Up a Creek

2011-02-16T07:30:00.000-08:00

The Register informs us today of a bit of fallout from the late great Grand Educational Mortgage Banking and Housing Explosion, illustrated at the right.

Where was I? Oh. I remember now.

It seems that when Regency Homes, you know, those wild and crazy guys who were the biggest home builders in Iowa until they exploded in 2008 went bust, a number of the properties they owned were foreclosed on and repossessed by the banks.

One of these was a condominium project in Johnston known quaintly as Providence Pointe. The Two Rivers Bank, which repoed the project, sold it off to Haverkamp Properties, which promptly turned the project into apartments, seeing as condominiums aren't selling very well.

The only people left were 12 owners in two buildings, and thereby hangs the Problem. Although these folks would like to refinance and obtain the benefit of very attractive 30 year interest mortgage rates-currently below 5 per cent this morning-but in the interim Fannie Mae changed its regulations concerning condominium mortgages to allow for writing mortgages only if 70 per cent of the units in a condominium project were owned or under contract.

The takehome from this is that the owners can't get refinanced because the project is now a mere apartment complex.

They're suing the Two Rivers Bank, alleging that the bank should have known that selling the property to one individual would cause problems for the existing owners-don't expect an answer anytime soon.

Cranky Five Year Old, Still Not Ready For Prime Time?

2011-02-07T08:18:00.000-08:00

This month more or less marks the fifth anniversary of the founding of the Dougloid Papers.

You can tell this by the ceremonial use of the photo of the little guy, no idea who he is, but it seems to fill the bill pretty well. Is he squawking because he's really angry, or because his diapers need changing? You can speculate all you like.

I haven't been scratching the itch as much lately-politics is hibernating here on the prairie but there indeed are stirrings in the ashes. A parade of Republican hopefuls all channeling the shade of St. Ronald Reagan is set to descend on the Tall Corn State.

Over on the Hill, they're up to their usual antics. Elected on a promise of good responsible government, they're wasting their time bloviating about gay marriage, the health care reform bill and making sure everyone's packing heat whether they want to or not.

Anything but getting down to the business of running a state that's overspent a little but not to the extent some places like Texas are. That paragon of Republican good government is in deep deficit, to the tune of 31 per cent of projected revenues.

People just love free lunches but don't like paying for them. So the challenge for Republicans who've climbed up on the back of that tiger is whether they take the kid's cookie jar away, whether they start charging what it's worth, or whether they shove the whole mess down the road into the future.

They're talking like they're going to take the kid's cookie jar away but in reality it's going to require more than an act of will-much more-to get anything of substance accomplished.

I think I know the answer, and that is in the willingness of the tea party to suspend disbelief, particularly when it comes to miracles.

The Figure On The Wall: A Play In One Act

The scene is an office park somewhere in south Florida. Many people have come to believe that a large water stain on a window is a representation of the Virgin Mary. A large crowd has gathered, bringing offerings and praying loudly for miracles to heal the sick.

A Cynic: Sorry to disappoint you all, but that's not the Virgin Mary.
The Crowd: Well, who is it then?
A Cynic: Well, it's nobody. It's a water stain that left deposits on the window glass.
The Crowd: How do you know this, you nattering nabob of negativity?
A Cynic: I'm the building maintenance supervisor. That window's been leaking for years.
The Crowd: Shut up. You're the last person we want to hear from.

Reflections On the Little Pink House.

2011-02-02T09:02:00.000-08:00

Word has reached the Dougloid Towers that Pfizer-you know, those wild and crazy guys who gave us dirty old men with hardons courtesy of Viagra-are in the process of a retrenchment or maybe some re-engineering or maybe rightsizing their operations in mesne places, including Groton, Connecticut.

It seems that Pfizer has shed around 40,000 jobs in the past six years or so, and many of Groton's jobs are on the chopping block.

And thereby hangs a tale.

The Little Pink House is the story of Suzette Kelo and her battle with Pfizer to keep her home in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood of New London, Connecticut-a hardscrabble town like a lot of other ones along the coast of New England.

The city, it seems, had taken an extra large swig of koolaid and determined that if they could assemble a large enough parcel of land in New London, right along the waterfront with all those nice views, you understand, that the folks at Pfizer would see fit to locate a research center right on that spot.

Along with this would come fancy condominiums, restaurants, and other amenities for the kind of folks who extend their pinkie when sipping their tea, don't you know.

The problem was, of course, that there were all these pesky people like Suzette Kelo and others of modest means with small houses in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood who liked the water views just as well as the folks who, the city was assured by Pfizer, would be coming to spend oodles of cash and thereby bulk up the coffers of New London.

The city instituted the process of eminent domain condemnation against the homeowners, and in a hard fought battle, prevailed against the pesky people.

The struggle made it all the way to the Supremes in Washington, and to his everlasting credit Mr. Justice Clarence Thomas said this in his dissent to the majority opinion:

"The consequences of today’s decision are not difficult to predict, and promise to be harmful. So-called “urban renewal” programs provide some compensation for the properties they take, but no compensation is possible for the subjective value of these lands to the individuals displaced and the indignity inflicted by uprooting them from their homes. Allowing the government to take property solely for public purposes is bad enough, but extending the concept of public purpose to encompass any economically beneficial goal guarantees that these losses will fall disproportionately on poor communities. Those communities are not only systematically less likely to put their lands to the highest and best social use, but are also the least politically powerful. If ever there were justification for intrusive judicial review of constitutional provisions that protect discrete and insular minorities, surely that principle would apply with great force to the powerless groups and individuals the Public Use Clause protects.

The deferential standard this Court has adopted for the Public Use Clause is therefore deeply perverse. It encourages “those citizens with dis-proportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms” to victimize the weak."

To her credit, Madam Justice O'Connor had this to say:
Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms. As for the victims, the government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more. The Founders cannot have intended this perverse result. “[T]hat alone is a just government,” wrote James Madison, “which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.”

After all was said and done and the modest homes had been bulldozed, the Pfizer caravan abandoned New London, to place its money in Groton-a much tonier zip code for folks who probably didn't want to move to a shot and a beer sailor's town like New London anyway.

In the end, it was vain to have imagined they would. It is never a wise idea to rise too far above your station in life, and that's as true for cities as it is for people.

The Fort Trumbull neighborhood at last report was still a bunch of vacant lots alongside the water treatment plant, and Pfizer has itself a new chief executive who brings with him a whiff of a fellow whimsically called "Chainsaw Al".

Ian Read has promised to slash the budget and to close their research facility in Sandwich, England among other things.

If there's a moral to the story it is this, and the city fathers of New London and a thousand other wide spots in the road ought to heed it well: When you lie down with dogs, you'll get up with fleas.

Memo to Tom Miller-Keep It Simple, Part Two.

2011-01-07T09:40:00.000-08:00

We became aware of a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision released this morning that fleshes out the direction this subject is going and makes some important points

In U.S. Bank National Ass'n v. Ibanez, no. SJC-10694 (Mass. Jan. 7, 2011) the bank and Wells Fargo (hereinafter the banks) foreclosed on and purchased two properties as trustees for asset backed securities-for which read sliced and diced securitized mortgage pools.

The plaintiffs asked the Land Court to declare that they held title in fee simple, but the court opined that the banks had not made the required showing that they were the holders of the mortgages. The Supreme Judicial Court, on review, agreed.

In both cases the homeowners did not answer the complaints (I suspect that this is pretty typical) and the plaintiffs moved for default. The Land Court, Judge Keith Long presiding, entered judgment against the plaintiffs, ruling that the foreclosure sales were invalid because the sales named the banks as mortgage holders when they were not, in fact, the assignees of the mortgages at the time.

The banks moved to vacate the court's judgment, but this was denied.

There's an interesting trail here.

The Ibanez mortgage originated in December 2005. Rose Mortgage executed a blank assignment to Option One, which assigned it to Lehman Brothers, which assigned it to Structured Asset Securities Corp., which pooled the mortgage with 1,220 other mortgages and assigned the whole package to U.S. Bank as trustee.

U.S. Bank was unable at the time to show that the mortgage had been assigned to them, and this did not happen until nearly two years after the foreclosure sale. They argued that the securitization documents established the assignment prior to the foreclosure and sale. The court did not agree.

In their concurrence, Justices Cordy and Botsford remarked that what was surprising about the cases was not the principles set forth by the court, but "...the utter carelessness with which the plaintiff banks documented title to their assets. There is no dispute that the mortgagors had defaulted on their obligations and that the mortgaged properties were subject to foreclosure. Before commencing such an action, however, the holder of an assigned mortgage needs to take care that his legal paperwork is in order."

The principle's simple. If you cannot show that you owned it or were the legitimate assignee at the time of the foreclosure, you can't have it and ratify it later on.

Isn't Science Wonderful, or, How I Joined The 21st Century

2010-12-19T10:55:00.000-08:00

I'm a confirmed friend of General Ned Ludd, but every so often something comes along that is a real eye opener and a great use of technology-at present that is a Kindle e-book reader my lovely wife gifted me with recently.
I had resisted it for all the usual well thought out reasons, but a couple of tools and some information changed my mind about it.

First of all there is the idea that the Kindle can carry in excess of 3,000 books within-that's right, folks, an entire moderately sized library in a platform the size of a memo book.

But what really made it for me was a program called Calibre, which allows you to manage your electronic book forays and translate them into the format of your choice, being as Kindle isn't the only game in town.

Amazon thoughtfully provides a page with links to several open source free book repositories, and they do not mention google books which also maintains a large collection of public domain works.

And that's where the interest started, because if something's in the public domain it's free for public use.

At present I have sampled and downloaded the collected works of Ambrose Bierce, a manual for the Liberty V-12 aero engine, Across America By Motorcycle, written by a British army officer in 1921, Three Years in the Confederate Horse Artillery by George Neese (1911), Mr. Dooley's Philosophy by Finley Peter Dunne, The Long Arm of Lee-A History of the Artillery of the Army of Northern Virginia by Jennings Wise (1913), The Long Road to Baghdad by Edmund Candler (1919), a biography of Glenn Curtiss, the aviation pioneer and motorcycle racer deluxe, and a raft of other stuff.

This is a rare opportunity to build the library of your dreams.

Memo to Tom Miller-Keep It Simple.

2010-12-15T05:37:00.000-08:00

It looks like Tom Miller is heading up a fifty state charge that seeks to address the number of bogus residential foreclosures that have become notable lately. Most notable have been the number of affidavits that were signed in bulk by people recruited from homeless missions and fast food outlets.

There's a very simple solution and I know exactly what it is.

Iowa R. Civ. P. 1.413(1) states in part "Counsel's signature to every motion, pleading or paper shall be deemed a certificate that counsel has read the motion, pleading or paper; to the best of counsel's knowledge, information and belief, formed after reasonable inquiry it is well grounded in fact and law and is warranted by existing law or a good faith argument for the extension, modification or reversal of existing law..." 1.413(3) states that any motion asserting facts as the order it seeks and any pleading seeking interlocutory relief shall contain or be accompanied by an affidavit of the person or persons knowing the facts requisite to such relief...

An affidavit, of course, is executed under penalty of perjury.

This places the responsibility for assessing the accuracy of the pleadings squarely on two people-the plaintiff's bar, and the affiants.

It seems clear-discipline the lawyers up to and including disbarment and send the perjurers to prison.

It also places responsibility on the defense bar-put the plaintiffs to their proof. They're the ones with the burden here.

It also places the ultimate responsibility on the judiciary to enforce these precepts and impose sanctions, which are mandatory under Iowa Code Section 619.19. In addition, if a party has filed three lawsuits in the past five years that were unsuccessful, the court may deem these to be frivolous and require the plaintiff to post a bond before proceeding sufficient to pay all costs accruing to opposing parties.

Health Care Legislation And You

2010-11-24T06:17:00.000-08:00

I've had a conversation going on with a self professed libertarian friend of mine on a well known social media website about the health care reform bill.

Since I mine this blog for material that goes there I figure I can reverse the process.

What goes around comes around, people.

I think that the thought was, get something done while the majority is there, and fix it later. Little did they know that a lot of the opposition for various and sundry reasons, some good, some bad, and some downright in the pay of the insurance lobby, were going to do their level best to shit can health care reform of any sort.

It's interesting to note that the American Medical Association supports the administration's health care reform efforts. They figure that it's something they can work with and improve.

Obviously if your employer provides good insurance you're sitting pretty, but remember Danny Bogart's First Law of Insurance: Insurance companies are not there to pay claims.

Had we not had insurance, the prevention would not have been in place and she'd have ended up at Broadlawns for a double mastectomy in a couple of years and no good chance that it'd fix the problem, all courtesy of the taxpayer. It's really no different than preventive maintenance on your car. Either you budget for it now or it eats your lunch later.

On a personal level, if we had not had insurance to pick up the tab we'd be back in a one bedroom apartment on the poor side of town and I'd be trying to scratch up the cash to file bankruptcy-it's that simple and obvious.

As a country we've come to the end of our road in this process.

Nobody on earth can afford more health care than two aspirins. Every graduate from a third rate medical school in Guadalajara thinks they're entitled to $300k a year to start, and they won't settle for less.

Up to this point they've been able to charge whatever they wanted. But we're up against being able to pay for it. The medical people thought they could charge whatever they wanted, the insurance companies went along with it because they knew they could always soak the employers, and they all use med mal cases as their whipping boy to divert the attention of the lumpen proles when the dollar amount that med mal yields is so small as to be ridiculous.

Do y'know that there has only been one med mal judgment in Iowa that went over a million, and it was reversed?

Thing is, now, the employers are getting tapped out-courtesy of the insurance companies- and they also know that they can dump the benefits as easily as they dumped defined benefit pension plans for "fund your own retirement. Buy stocks and you'll all be rich."

So OK. "Be a contractor and get 1099s-figure out your own salvation."

Those who are fortunate enough to have good health care benefits are a dying breed-and they're scared to death that somebody's going to take it from them. In retrospect they were easy prey for right wing scaremongers.

The rest of us are the walking dead only in the main we're too stupid to realize it.

The wheels are coming off this project and it'll bankrupt the government in a few years if left unaddressed.

That's the reality-it's far worse than I supposed until I got a little taste of it.

Big Joe Has Come And Gone

2010-11-13T10:17:00.001-08:00

Did you ever have one of those moments when you're looking for something but you don't really know what it is, and then you hear it? Guitarists do this all the time, and they call it looking for the sound inside your head.

Me and Big Joe-we're like that.

Joe Turner was born in Kansas City in 1911, which would figure large in his musical evolution. Kansas City was a juke joint, barbecue, boogie woogie piano town like no other that has ever been.

Folks from Chicago may cavil and protest, but before Chicago was, Kansas City is. Los Angeles and New York City never were, and the only city that compares is New Orleans.

The music reflects the city-and while New Orleans is all weddings, parades, and funerals, Kansas City was all business when it came to music.

Joe was never a singer of country blues as many other bluesmen were, because his roots were urban and fixed in the time of pre war big bands and boogie woogie.

His blues wasn't hip and urbane like T-Bone Walker's was, or tongue in cheek like Louis Jordan, but its grit and power is unmistakable, like the roar of the daily nonstop 747 from Los Angeles to Paris that struggles off the runway, rattling windows for miles around.

A big man at 6'2" and north of 300 pounds, his music projects like some primal, unstoppable force that drags you kicking and screaming to your feet.

By the time rock and roll came around in the fifties, Joe wasn't a teenager any more and although he had some songs that made it onto jukeboxes, other folks like Bill Haley mostly made the money.

Bill was no spring chicken either, but a galvanized cowboy singer and deejay who knew a good thing when he heard it, and ran with it.

Joe was, in the end a product of the prewar era and his time had come and gone-at least for a time, until an new generation of people like me rediscovered him in the back shelves of dusty used record shops in out of the way places.

I have this mental picture of Big Joe leaning against his brand new Hudson Terraplane looking sharp in his suit and snap brim fedora, thirties all the way.

Reading the Tea Leaves

2010-11-07T10:56:00.000-08:00

Some musings on the next two years and where I think we're headed.

Unless they come through on the economy the republicans will lose the tea baggers and the independents.

Lack of jobs is more or less is what they got elected to fix.

Given that the problems with the economy are structural and also the product of 40 years of what is inartfully called 'free trade', there's not much they can do to change the course of this mighty river-this recession's been coming for a long time-and the republicans are ideologically incapable of doing anything that looks like a solution that has a chance in hell of working.

In fact all they've got to sell is tax cuts, and how they can cut taxes when the government's bankrupt is anyone's guess-it really is straight from Cloud-cuckoo land. If you don't have an income, how in the hell can tax cuts do you any good?

Real estate will not come back any time soon. It's on life support, and there's nothing that anyone can do about that until phantom equity and excess inventory is purged out of the system and people start being able to afford a mortgage again. Manufacturing will not come back until we revisit our trade policies that unfairly and persistently favor the Walmartization of America.

The other big debt overhang, which nobody dares speak about, is the revolving credit nightmare. The average default rate on credit card accounts runs around 5 per cent, according to Forbes, and the amount of unsecured debt out there is massive.

All of which give me cause for optimism, so here's my prediction. The republicans will fail, miserably.

It's the economy, stupid. The republican vendetta against the Democratic party will not put one more cheeseburger on a paper plate anywhere, and people will figure that out sooner or later no matter how obtuse they are.

Likewise, people will realize sooner or later that the entire social policy agenda of the republicans will also not put one cheeseburger on a paper plate for anyone. What two gay women do in San Francisco and whether they have a piece of paper that allegedly unites them legally will not give anyone in Pittsburgh or Detroit a job or put one can of soup on the shelf at the local food pantry, for that matter.

In short, the things that they ran on are not going to fix the problems we've got, and sooner or later the stupidest of us will realize this.

Hey Barak: Grow Some Stones, or, Why We Need National Health Insurance

2010-11-06T21:05:00.000-07:00

Something's happened lately that has brought the entire health care reform issue into clear focus, and it wasn't the election or John Boehner's threats to set progress back 75 years once he and his gang of thugs complete their putsch.

A couple of weeks ago the Dragon Lady had her annual mammogram and after two different people told her what they saw was nothing to worry about the phone rang.

That was on a Friday afternoon, and by the following Thursday the offending lump was on its way to the incinerator or whatever they use in hospitals to get rid of nasty stuff, along with a couple of lymph nodes. They stick a needle in and inject a bunch of radioactive dye that says "Listen. If anything escaped these are the places it would go. Walk this way."

We showed up at 8:00 am and by 4:00 pm we were back home.

We expect that things will go well. There will be a daily administration of Doctor Roentgen's favorite radiation products that starts in the end of this month and it will go on for about six weeks.

"Fine" you say. "What's this got to do with me and Obama's n****r care plot to drain off our vital national bodily fluids? Think about that while you're bowing to the effigy of St. Herbert Hoover and thinking how good it is to be a rugged individualist, you liberal sap!"

Here's what it's got to do with you.

We got the first statements from the hospital today. They're going to the insurance company, and they're north of $30,000 for one day's work.

That's right, 30 large and we're not done.

If we did not have good health insurance we would be screwed, blued, and tattooed as the saying goes.

And I can guarantee if we did not get health care reform this past year, the chances of her getting affordable insurance in the future would be flat ass zero.

Do you think that there is a chance in hell you could pay for that without insurance?

Not on your life.

Lowered Expectations In Washington

2010-11-03T08:49:00.000-07:00

The problem with elections is that they're like tying one on with Sterno-the comedown is among the most wretched experiences commonly available, and that's if you survive the initial buzz, which is by no means a given.

The saving grace, however, is that in most cases the electorate has to live with the mess it improvidently made, all of which means that the losers are entitled to a double sized helping of schadenfreude. Retiring to the bleachers and thumbing my nose at the latest crop of Sterno drinkers promises to be very enjoyable work.

For every tea bag wearing self styled real american patriot, there'll be that realization that this victory was akin to crapping your pants. The blessed release and warm feeling will last a short time before the discomfort sets in, and nobody will remember much except the god awful smell.

Electing people whose stock in trade is that they don't know anything and they've never cared to learn how to work with people of differing views is a sure guarantee that they'll be ineffective in the job they were chosen to do. The business of government will go right around them as if they were rocks in a stream.

Marginal people do marginal work, if you're lucky. Most times they're pretty dismal failures.

There is no post coital afterglow to this story-just a damned nasty hangover.

Memo to Ben Bernanke: When Fishing In Troubled Waters Bring A Harpoon

2010-10-25T17:50:00.000-07:00

We're reliably informed that Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve and a seemingly nice fellow is sticking the federal oar in the murky waters of foreclosures and debtor creditor wrangling. It seems that he's not satisfied with the way Bank of America and all those other wonderful folks are handling things.

I think it's a lot simpler.

Let me lay it out for you all.

An attorney's signature on a petition-which is how a judicial foreclosure starts-represents that he personally has verified the allegations of the petition and that they are true. If that signature's falsely applied, that means you don't have to look farther-the attorney's on the hook and the petition, as written, is of no value and needs to be revised or dismissed and refiled.

That also goes for affidavits where the affiant states under oath and on penalty of perjury that they have personal knowledge of the contents of the financial records as it relates to this petitioner's transaction.

If that's false, the result's got to be the same-the petition's suspect and needs to be repaired or overhauled and refiled. And, the affiant ought to be prosecuted for perjury on an industrial scale. Anyone who signs an affidavit under oath that they know to be false ought to wear the red badge of perjurer, and branding might be a salutary correction. Anyone who notarizes something they know to be false also needs a spanking.

As a practical matter, many of these foreclosure actions are pro forma-the debtor's gone to who knows where, the home's empty, and the bank's stuck with it. That much I understand and I'm not saying they should not be able to exercise the rights they contracted for. Fair dealing demands that the banks are not any better subjects for abuse just because they're bigger.

But lying on a petition, and that forming the basis for foreclosure? That's another kettle of fish entirely, even assuming that you could even demonstrate who actually owns the mortgage-not an easy task these days.

For debtor side lawyers, the message is clear, assuming that you've got a client with some fight still in them and the cash to put something in the collection plate.

It is this. Put the other side to their proof. That always has produced results in secondary or tertiary collection cases, and the collectors not infrequently could not actually come up with legally sufficient proof.

After all, that's the plaintiff's burden, and if they can't sustain the burden they should be sent home with a stern admonition to do a better job next time. That's the fairness part of the equation, that he who cannot sustain his burden takes nothing.

There. I have spoken.

The Glazier's Art

2010-09-13T06:17:00.000-07:00

Saturday I started a project I have known about and have been avoiding for more than two years, and that is a comprehensive renewal of the window glazing compound on the Casa de Dougloid.

Of course the Dragon Lady did her part by staying out of the way and refraining from offering helpful suggestions, for which she earned a tip o' the hat from yours truly.

The time consuming part is chipping out the old glazing putty that's deteriorated but still hanging tough, without inflicting too much damage to the window frame and glazing strips. I knuckled under to the temptation to try an electric sander to speed up the chore and succeeded in breaking one window pane which now must be replaced today or I will die a horrible death.

It will give me a chance to try out my heat gun and see if that speeds the process any. I hope it does because the windows at the front of the house have 12 panes each and they are up off the ground an injurious distance.

The way to remove the balance of the old putty, or as much as you deem safe is with a sanding block and some 40 grit paper for digging out and leveling what remains of the old stuff. There are also some temperature and time constraints-the glazing putty must be repainted, it cannot be applied at low temperatures, and it takes a week to cure enough to paint it.

There are allegedly rapid cure latex products on the market and I even have a tube of the stuff, but for right now I am using good old fashioned Dap 33 oil based stuff.

One trick I figured out on my own is that if the surface of the glazing putty looks grainy after you've run the knife across it, it can be made pretty by lightly brushing it with a clean paint brush.

Thus the esthetic sensibilities of all true artistes are satisfied.

What I really need and can't afford is new windows all around.

The Wild Places

2010-09-11T09:10:00.001-07:00

I woke up about three am this morning with this in mind. No idea where it came from.

I want to go to the wild places
Beyond the end of the road.

I want to feel the cold wind on my face like brook water.
I want to wash my mouth out in a mountain spring and drink deep.
I want to smell a wood fire in winter.
I want my legs to hurt and quiver from the climb up the trail to Old Smoky.

I want to go to the wild places
Beyond the end of the road.

I want to feel the panting and the sweat and the bugs and the bitter taste of insect repellent that Mother would anoint us with.
I want to breathe deep until my lungs ache.
I want pain to be earned and not just received.

I want to go to the wild places
beyond the end of the road.

the winter of our discontent

2010-09-10T06:47:00.000-07:00

I've been away from my desk for a while but my intentions are to get back to more important things here at the Dougloid empire.

We're coming up on some important anniversaries here, and as is the practice here at the Dougloid Towers we mark the occasion and try to do it with some original thought.

The most important one of course comes tomorrow on the ninth anniversary of the attacks on our beautiful city of New York, and in remembrance of all those who perished. As long as one man remembers, you live on.

And somewhere along in here is the third anniversary of the recession, although nobody;s really sure when it started and a lot of people probably should have seen it coming and bailed out before the Great Skedaddle and Educational Explosion Of Life As We Knew It.

Suffice it to say it is a new and cold world we find ourselves in, but one thing's indisputable about hard times-it focuses the mind wonderfully on what's important and what's not.

Recessions end in time, as will this one-and in another fifteen or twenty years there'll be another one because people forget-just like Sunday's hangover repentance morphs itself into Friday's cocktails.

It's worth remembering the quote from Richard III is incomplete, and the focus has been on the part mentioned but there's more:

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this Sun of York;
And all the clouds that lowered upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean is buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.

Richard III, Act 1 Scene 1.

In a sense, the message is one of hope although in the play things went downhill from there.

So, hope to you. Do not fret too much. The harvest comes. Liberation has arrived for a small child I know.

Change is in the air. Ramadan's ended, everyone on that side of the house has a chance to tuck into some victuals, Rosh Hashanah is underway with its celebration of life, and summer's heat is nearly over. The harvest is coming along nicely and my apple tree's doing better than last year.

The United States of Euro, or, A Homily On Being Careful What You Ask For.

2010-07-16T06:01:00.000-07:00

The long running soap opera of European unification seems to have come a cropper and is presently on the reefs because of ....you guessed it....money.

Let me explain. One of the pillars of European unification-not to mention a way to smack the yanquis and their pretentious ugly dollar that had become the world's default currency-was a common currency movement that would prove that there was strength in numbers and beauty in currency.

The Germans were very much in the forefront of this because it was said that financial policy would keep otherwise spendy folks in line, and financial policy would be written by Deutsche Bank and its allies, all nicely tied up with legislation from a compliant European parliament.

Well. This is not the first time that the Germans entertained imperial ambition in Europe. In fact, it occurred several times in the last 140 years. Think I'm wrong?

Signal-that was the magazine of the Wehrmacht kinda like Yank for the GIs, and there was an English edition published mostly for the edification of folks in the Channel Islands and the 'useful idiots' in Ireland who were pretty quick to take a kick at John Bull's shins. All the while their meat and drink was being carried in British bottoms and protected by British sailors, many of whom never came back from the wild and desolate Atlantic at the hands of Hitler's U-boat men.

But nevermind-I'll save that rant for some future occasion where Irish hubris is demonstrated and an apology is called for, and I will of course at that time except those brave Irishmen who took up the King's and democracy's cause because it was the moral and honorable thing. He whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad and all that.

I've got a nice coffee table book, five years of Signal, I'll drag it out some time for you. I'll bet the editorial staff at Signal was making with the inconspicuous like when things started turning sour in the winter of 1941 and thereafter too.

The recurring theme in those dusty volumes of Signal is "One Europe-Led by Germany". Starting to sound familiar? I thought so.

Well-before the recession of 2007 alles was in ordnung with the Euro project, values going up daily against the dollar, and the self congratulatory tone was evident for folks like me who used to hang around sites like a.net until they got expunged with extreme prejudice and cast into outer darkness for having the audacity to point out the errors in this sort of thinking.

So what's happened? Does the phrase 'Potemkin Village' come to mind?

This morning was the first time I heard the term "PIGS countries"-Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain, although we could add Ireland because they've gotten a taste of Euromalaise themselves and are on short commons as we speak.

It seems that underpinning all this growth in government employment, fat pensions for civil servants, public works projects like everything that's come out of Airbus in the last 40 years, social spending, free medicine, housing boom, all this driving the value of the Euro ever higher-all of it was misread in places like Dusseldorf and Berlin as prosperity under the wise tutelage of folks in Germany who of course know how to lead a project like none other.

We have a saying here: If it ain't broke don't fix it. Of course the error is in thinking it ain't broke yet so nothing needed doing.

It was because of the same stuff that went on here in the US-borrowing on every level from consumers to the governments without a clue as to how repayment was going to be made, in the firm belief that property values rising a steady 20 per cent per annum every year would continue indefinitely, world without end, amen.

Just roll that hedge to arrive contract forward, for my farmer friends with long memories.

Not to mention the dodgy derivatives, credit default swaps, mortgage backed securities that were portrayed as an American invention which of course European institutions would never do. Well. They did, and it was just as bad as anything Goldman Sachs or AIG did.

It now seems that only the Canadians were thinking straight-it's to their credit as solid conservative and modest people. Of course there's that whole Quebec thing but we all have our problems.

Safe banking wasn't one of theirs and it's like safe sex. Not adventurous at all but intelligent if you're all about survival.

It also now appears that the Germans are starting to think that they'd like to step away from what they created, when it isn't paying regular profits and won't shut up and go away.

All of which is a homily. They wanted to run Europe, now they are, and it's nowhere near as much fun when the new relatives start with the money problems because they blew their roll at the casinos on Wall Street. And, they can't call on the Wehrmacht or the Kriegsmarine to straighten things out as they did in the last century-for which the rest of us can be grateful.

The Short Life and Unlamented Death of the Tea Party

2010-07-15T11:20:00.000-07:00

Recently we've been treated to a dustup over the tea party movement's reaction to the NAACP calling them out with a 'put up yer dukes' resolution recently.

One of my libertarian friends questioned me on this over on facebook where i was wasting time instead of working, so, here's my response.

I may just do that and I will refrain from using the word 'teabagger' for now because this is a serious discussion.

The tea party movement, whatever it is or purports to be or aspires to be, has a serious problem if it wishes to put people on platforms in elections and have a hope of winning except in places like Mississippi or Alabama where klandom is alive and well. The problem is the people in the pictures and the videos. In this day and age, it is impossible to get away with this stuff.

Oh, they may win the occasional rejectionist election from nowhere, but in the larger scheme of things it will have no more significance than when Jesse Ventura got elected governor of Minnesota. The common thread there was "Oh. We wanted to send a message to the politicians in St. Paul and that's why we voted for him-we never thought he'd get elected, you see."

The problem as I see it is that the tea party movement is at another defining moment in its populist history.

It either has leadership and purports to be a legitimate political movement and they disavow the racist elements that they have been playing footsie with, or, as some of the alleged leaders say when backed into a corner "Well, no. We're not a party or an organized movement, just a state of mind or maybe that there angst that Goethe feller is allus yappin' about. Yeah, that's it, angst."

Unfortunately you cannot have it both ways-either it means something and goes mainstream or it means nothing in the grand scheme of things.

I am of the view that it is the latter because tigers don't change their stripes and leopards don't change their spots. The people in the pictures and the videos give the lie to the denials of what passes for leadership, and they are the engine of the vicious and hateful energy that makes the tea party movement what it has become.

In the historical context, the tea party movement is no different than the antisemitic, anticatholic, anti irish, antioriental rage that doomed all the Nativist movements- the Know-nothings, the populists of the 1890s, the klan, and the white citizens' councils. That rage is also the stain on the reputation of Democrats that is left over from the Dixiecrats-which, unfortunately, the Republicans have inherited along with Dixie. Well, bad luck to them all, and they are welcome to that wasteland.

As a Democrat and a Yankee to the bone, I of course will raise a glass to all who aspire to grab this wolf by the ears and classify all this under the rubric of 'confusion to our enemies'.

From here we can see their true colors shinin' through, as the song goes. I really do hope that Sarah Palin runs for president-that oughtta set them all back fifty years or more.

And of course, the whole sorry episode makes the tea party movement look extremely silly and evasive when it alleges that the people in the pictures and the videos do not exist.

Which is fine by me.

Memo to Faisal Shahzad

2010-06-22T09:00:00.000-07:00

We're reliably informed hereabouts that the putative Times Square Bomber has struck a blow for common sense and pleaded guilty.

I understand this was something of a surprise to the court and Faisal's lawyers who will now miss their chance to milk the case for all it's worth. Bad luck to them.

What followed was something of a colloquy, I guess the court wanted to nail the guy down on the elements before he got back to his cell and got some more advice and buyer's remorse from the jailhouse bar.

What's missing was the obvious question, so I'll ask it....

Fozzie, what were you thinking? With 2 degrees and some cred not to mention a wife and kids, you could have devoted your life and career to righting whatever wrongs you see, and they were many, and retired heavy with honors and respect.

You had it all within your grasp, the ability to make some real progress and a real improvement in the lives of your countrymen. All of it.

And you traded it all for a basement cell in Florence, Colorado and a buck's worth of grits?

I guess you guys really are as stupid as we think you are.

Perhaps you can ask the people who trained you and sent you for a refund, because they didn't do a very good job. You did inquire about their success ratio, didn't you? Oh. I see.

See, the first law of success in crime is you pull off the score and then you get away clean. Was that left out of the syllabus, or did they know what they were setting you up for, or were they oblivious to it?

There was a fellow like you in our Book.

His name was Esau, and he traded his birthright for a mess of pottage. You should read it-you'll have plenty of time now.

Photo credit EPA.

Memo to President Obama and the new hire: Free my people

2010-05-10T09:44:00.000-07:00

This is a post I first did back when Judge Sotomayor had acceded to the highest bench in the land.

The situation sucked then, and there are no signs it's gotten any better since. So here at the Dougloid Papers, we recycle.

Pardon me while I fulminate.

Memo From the Red Brick Universities: Free My People.

I've read a trenchant and worthwhile commentary on CNN.com today which raises an issue that nobody ever wants to talk about and that is the monopoly stranglehold-a deathgrip, really- that Yale and Harvard Law have on the Supreme Court and the judiciary in this country.

There are about 193 or so ABA approved law schools in this country and a number of other good ones in the great state of California that do not parrot the ABA party line and so are denominated as lesser lights, suitable only for training courthouse johnnies, rude frontiersmen and ambulance chasers.

The people they graduate, for the most part, go on to demonstrate that they have what it takes to get the job done. They are what you call "lawyers".

Most of these schools have rarely had a graduate sit on a federal bench, and even fewer have had graduates elevated to the federal appellate bench or the Supreme Court.

It gets worse. Brian Leiter has collected data on which law schools have had a student clerk for a supreme court justice. There are exactly 33 schools that have had a student clerk for a Supremo since 2000, and the lion's share of those assignments went to a handful of schools. Of the 319 clerks. the top ten schools accounted for 274, and the top five accounted for 220.

That kind of numerical distribution is not only damned unfair, it's scandalous. In any other context that kind of statistical skew would be prima facie evidence of outrageous discrimination. It stinks of cronyism and an old boy network that makes the White Citizens' Councils look like a bunch of liberal commies.

Yo, Supremes, I'm talking at you.

It's the kind of patent unfairness that limits the future of students from the red brick universities. Parenthetically it cuts at the heart of egalitarian notions that many of us aspire to, and that was one of the reasons that some of us got into this line of work anyway-out of a sense of righting great injustices that were hoary with age.

What it is is a message: don't attempt to rise too far above your stations, o ye unwashed.

And it sticks in my craw.

Professor Timothy O'Neill teaches at John Marshall School of Law in Chicago and he's got this to say:

It is certainly true that the court needs more racial and gender diversity. Yet the homogeneity of the work résumés of the current justices is unprecedented. The right nominee would help to correct this.

Many commentators have noted that this is the first Supreme Court in American history in which every justice has come from exactly the same job: judge on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

But there are other "firsts" that are equally disturbing.

For the first time in American history, not a single justice has had any legislative experience. Not one has ever been elected to Congress, a state legislature or a city council.

For the first time in American history, not a single justice has ever held -- or even run for -- any elective office at any level of government. (Although Souter once served as a state attorney general, that is an appointed office in New Hampshire.)

For the first time in American history, eight of the nine justices attended one of only two law schools: Harvard or Yale. (Although Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg graduated from Columbia, she transferred from Harvard Law School.)

The point's well taken but Professor O'Neill doesn't take it far enough.

The whole structure is ingrown, incestuous, and stinking with injustice.

Update: The current nominee, Elena Kagan, is at present the solicitor general and until reaching that post, she'd never- never ever tried a case in court. But she was the dean of Harvard Law.

What the hell kind of experience is that supposed to be? I've tried more cases.

When I Go To Grace And Winter

2010-04-27T06:55:00.000-07:00

When I go to Grace and Winter
speak my name but once.
Speak me a simple song
and then go about your day.

Belle Fox-Martin.

I've hesitated tackling this project for a while because to do so would mean digging through the overstuffed attic that is my mind and doing a little bit of cleaning and dusting-organizing, really.

As most of you know, my mother came to grips with mortality this last Easter Sunday-which was not a coincidence, as she loved Easter better than any other holiday-perhaps because of its message of redemption in the face of all the odds.

It would be the understatement of a lifetime to say that Nancy was a remarkable woman who'd led an equally full life in her adopted home. The outpouring of wellwishers and friends from near and far had Grace Church in Vineyard Haven stuffed to bursting, and the parish hall and the steps of the church were crowded with more friends. I suspect that there was also a minor traffic jam in the neighborhood as well.

It was a joyous occasion tinged with sadness because we all knew that we were not going to see Nancy again this side of the Divide and we all realized what a great friend we'd lost with her passing. As it happens, I acquired a stepsister, a new brother in law, two nephews and a niece, all united by our mother and her good works. It was said by many there that Nancy was the kind of person who saw what needed doing for the people around her and just went ahead and got on with the job.

She lives on in all of us, in our DNA and in our thoughts as we all walk the path to Grace and Winter.

Mother had not been well, and her frail old body gave out on her-although, knowing her, she'd made her peace with G-d and did not go fearfully or with great regret, but with courage and strength and trust in the Resurrection and the End of Days. One day her ashes will be laid down in a quiet and peaceful place along the Cedar River, in the company of her family.

In the end her adoptive home was an allegory for the islands that the rest of us live on for a time, one day to take the last boat at midnight over to a dark and brooding Mainland.

I've my own epitaph for my Mother, and it is from the pen of A.E. Housman.

The Lenten Lily

'Tis spring; come out to ramble
The hilly brakes around,
For under thorn and bramble
About the hollow ground
The primroses are found.

And there's the windflower chilly
With all the winds at play,
And there's the Lenten lily
That has not long to stay
And dies on Easter day.

And since till girls go maying
You find the primrose still,
And find the windflower playing
With every wind at will,
But not the daffodil.

Bring baskets now, and sally
Upon the spring's array
And bear from hill and valley
The daffodil away,
That dies on Easter Day.

What Do You Do When You Bet the Ranch On A Turn Of the Cards And Lose It?

2010-03-22T05:50:00.000-07:00

That's the conundrum that the GOP faces this morning.

It is what one would call a Political Hangover Writ Large.

Of course I'm talking about health care reform and the bill that passed the House by six votes. What's in the bill? I'm sure we're going to learn about it in excruciating detail over the years of its gradual rolling implementation, but one thing's for sure-implementation is going to make turning the Jahre Viking on a dime child's play by comparison.

But those are what we call Details.

The legislative process, or, How We Got Here, is well summarized by a story in Mr. Dooley's Philosophy entitled "Platform Making", written by Finley Peter Dunne 100 years or so ago. It's worth a look see for perspective's sake.

One thing's for sure, though. The GOP pulled out every stop, and handed out markers all over the territory to stop this thing. Whether it was Mrs. Palin's 'death panels' or Chuck Grassley's 'pulling the plug on grandma' or the wholesale mobilization of an army of irredentist teabagger yahoos for street theater, threats of voter revenge in November, calls for a do-over, and the efforts of an army of talk radio fuhrers, they did it all.

They mortgaged everything on the expectation that they could cause the Democrats in Washington to blink. After all, the theory goes, anything resembling a liberal or a Democrat is by nature a waffler who can be bluffed off a flush by a pair of deuces, steely resolve and sufficient amounts of nerve.

It didn't work. The suckers, or so they were perceived to be, stuck to their guns.

If you're part of the GOP this morning, what you need to ask yourself is "What did we create, and what do we do with it now?" Enabling the tea bagger National Lower Intestinal Tract Movement was a strategy that was a part of betting the table and it came up short.

But having brought this hulking, angry, petulant child into being, and thereby enabling every discredited crank, conspiracy theorist, birther, tenther, sixteenther, John Calhoun states' righters, Alaskan Joe Vogler neanderthals, gunslingers and plain old country racists to find a voice and a platform, now the GOP has to figure out what to do with what they gave birth to.

And that's not going to be an easy task, any road. There's no reason to think that whatever passes for leadership in the tea bagger movement is going to suddenly change course, get with the program, and buckle down for the long slog.

After all, when you've hurled a brick through a window and set the house on fire, what's next for you? Another part of the hangover for the GOP will be "How can we possibly have any input here if we arm wrestled and lost? We've burned a lot of bridges fer Chrissakes."

Well. They created this stinking mess and they've got the unenviable task of making with the sackcloth and ashes here for a while.

My old man was a pretty smart guy, and when I'd come home with some mess on my hands that I'd created he'd look up from his Newark Evening News, look over the top of his wire rimmed glasses and he'd say "You bought it-now fix it."

That seems to describe the GOP this awful hungover morning.

We Make What We Make When We Make It, And We Can Call It The Same Even If It's Different

2010-03-15T06:29:00.000-07:00

We are, of course, referring to the newly released Vox AC15C, and thereby hangs a tale.

The star-crossed history of the AC series of amps from what we'll call the Vox people is pretty well documented in several nice coffee table books, the most recent by Jim Elyea for which I've yet to scrape up the C-note that it'll cost to get it here.

When the Jennings empire folded after an ill advised toxic marriage to the Thomas Organ Co. in the US-a classic case of brand dilution that many a business school MBA ought to take note of-the manufacture of the flagship model AC30 passed through several owners with a gradual decline in build quality until it was naught but a shell of its former self.

When the Korg people picked up Vox in the mid nineties, they set about rehabilitating the brand, using the signature AC15 and AC30 as leaders for a line of forgettable modeling amps that are suited for lesser tasks, but the AC15 and AC30 retained much of what people bought them for.

When Korg reached the ultimate decision to move production out of the UK, they moved it to a factory in China owned by something known as the IAG group-a vertically integrated facility that actually makes a lot of the components that were used in the AC15 and AC30 Custom Classics as they were known. Although built on a printed circuit and incorporating solid state reverb drive and vibrato, they held true to the original Dick Denney inspired dual chassis build.

According to Denney and Peterson's "The Vox Story" Denney built the prototype AC15 on a standard box chassis but realized that they couldn't take a pounding on the road. Ordinarily the answer would be to build on a steel chassis but because the amplifier is high gain, that presented a risk of undesired hum and oscillation. Denney's solution was to put the power supply on a steel chassis and the higher gain stages on an aluminum chassis attached at a right angle to the power supply chassis-all of which served to reduce crosstalk and made the resulting chassis robust and easily serviceable. Air circulation and overheating was always a problem however.

Apparently there was some sort of a falling out between Korg and the IAG Group, as evidenced by the departure of Steve Grindrod, the designer of the Custom Classics, to employ with Wharfedale, an arm of the IAG Group, and the departure of AC15 and AC30 production to an as yet undetermined production facility.

The new amps are being made with MDF cabinets rather than the Baltic birch plywood of the IAG built amps, no more Wharfedale speakers (fancy that), but what's notable is the layout and construction of the chassis, which appears to be a much more production oriented, reduced labor setup. The two chassis approach is gone, perhaps for good.

Which brings us to the ultimate question: When is an AC15 not an AC15 even though the people who make it and are entitled to the name call it so?

We haven't yet seen gut shots of the new improved AC30C, but if what we see here is a portent, it's going to be quite different.

Photos courtesy of ampaholics and oddjobpeters, whose PM bounced.

Sorry, man, they said you don't exist.

The Party's Over But The Swamp Gas Remains

2010-03-11T09:51:00.000-08:00

By now,nearly everyone who's had the radio on knows that the Northrop-Grumman-EADS effort to capture the Air Force's future tanker contract has ended not with a bang but a whimper-a snivel, really. A brief recap, maestro.

Very well.

The air force's flying gas station has been the KC135, ever since the KC97 was retired. The KC135s as a generality are getting awfully tired. Deliveries started in 1956 and ended in 1965, and they're a derivative of the B707 civilian airframe-which owed more than a little to the B47 in the picture nuzzling up to a KC97.

Although a number of KC10s were delivered, they weren't a replacement for the kind of work that the KC135 did and as a result a new tanker was called for. Back a few years ago, that looked like the selection was going to be an aerial refueling version of the civilian Boeing 767 which would be leased to the military.

All those grand plans collapsed over the small matter of corruption in high places-in a word, at Boeing headquarters. There were the mandatory beheadings and the occasional prison sentence to serve as an admonition to miscreants but the take home was the stink was so bad the contract was cancelled.

But the need remained.

A new RFP was drawn up for what the air force called the KC-X program and the folks at Northrop Grumman teamed up with EADS to offer a tankerized version of the Airbus A330, a considerably larger aircraft than the 767.

The advantage to the government, it was said, was greater flexibility. In order to satisfy the nativists and flag wavers, it was alleged that a plant would be built to manufacture these aircraft in Mobile, Alabama so that they could be said to be 110 per cent Amurricun.

We here at the Dougloid Towers, of course, never believed that this would happen. Any such 'manufacturing plant' would be little more than a glorified completion center. Green aircraft ferried from the Toulouse Airbus plant would be received, painted and equipped with the requisite aerial refueling equipment and such avionics as the air force did not want the Frenchies to see.

Any resemblance to actual aircraft manufacturing would be purely cosmetic.

The Northrop/Grumman/EADS offering won the competition, but an appeal by Boeing succeeded in sending the entire mess back for regrooving.

When the revised RFP came out recently, Northrop/Grumman/EADS decided to take its dollies and dishes and go home, alleging that the contract had been written with Boeing in mind, and that their entrant could not compete on that basis.

It's probably true, too. Recasting the RFP with an eye toward mission utility demanded it. Granted the Airbus offering would have more cargo space and accommodations for passengers and the like, but that's not really what is needed or wanted when you already have enough in the way of freight haulers anyway-as the air force does.

And of course, there's the issue of cost and escalation. Anyone buying anything from Airbus these days pretty well knows that the sticker price is treated as a point of departure for further negotiations rather than a firm statement of "Yes. This is what it costs and this is what you will pay the cashier. Thank you."

I'm quite sure that that thought has occurred to the Germans as they get ready to take a shower-a bath, really- on the A400M program.

On the other hand, the Germans always wanted to be wearing the financial pants in Europe. Truth be told, they've always sort of had that ambition if the last century was any indication. Many and varied were the pitches for a European economic zone with-you guessed it-Berlin as the center of it all. They came right out and said so between the pages of Signal, which was Germany's version of Yank magazine. The footsloggers on the Eastern front probably didn't pay too much attention to all that-survival and all that, y'know-but the idea's been kicking around Berlin for a while now.

Well. You can't complain too much about getting what you wished for. But nevermind.

At the present, there are dark mutterings in Europe of protectionism and unfair lobbying advantage in Washington, and much of this swamp gas is emanating from-you guessed it-Airbus 'spokespeople'.

The grousing continues unabated, viz: 'a scandalous, unacceptable act', 'regrettable' and so on.

This hypocrisy has been ably documented by the fine folks at Der Spiegel, which also notes that Europe has been more or less guilty of the same things in its defense contracting-in particular, in the field of military aircraft procurement, most notably the A400M debacle.

Fancy that.

Men Running Amok

2010-03-05T07:56:00.000-08:00

When I was a small boy, I had a neighbor who'd been a jar-head in the Phillipines before the second world war. One time Mother was having coffee with Louie and his wife and I tagged along.

Louie looked at me and said "C'mere, kid. Let me show you something." He reached into a footlocker doing duty as a coffee table, pulled out a wicked looking knife with a heavy blade, and said "This is a real machete, the kind that village blacksmiths would make out of a leaf spring from a Ford. I took it off a Phillipine rebel who'd been laid out. Y'know, these fellows would run amok as they call it. They'd go crazy and start whacking anyone and everyone with their machetes, and it'd take several of Uncle's best .45 rounds to get their attention-nothing of lesser caliber would do the job like a big assed slug of .45 caliber lead."

The phrase stuck with me, and there it sat until I thought about it a few moments ago on my way out the door to retrieve my phone from the Ford Ranger.

A little Googling produced the following from the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1911 on the subject of amok:

A Malay will suddenly and apparently without reason rush into the street armed with a kris or other weapons, and slash and cut at everybody he meets till he is killed. These frenzies were formerly regarded as due to sudden insanity. It is now, however, certain that the typical amok is the result of circumstances, such as domestic jealousy or gambling losses, which render a Malay desperate and weary of his life. It is, in fact, the Malay equivalent of suicide.

The reason this came to mind was the breaking news story of one John Patrick Bedell, who approached the Pentagon yesterday and, when asked to show identification, pulled out a pistol and opened fire. He didn't get far, and was cut down in a hail of bullets.

What of this Bedell fellow? It seems he was a computer programmer from California and a physics graduate of U.C. Santa Cruz who had an interest in smoking pot, right wing conspiracy theories, and cooking up something he called "information currency", although a gander at the youtube video he posted on the subject is a pedantic migraine producer.

"B-b-but Sparky!" you say, "w-w-where's this all going?"

Simple. This week it was Bedell. Last week it was Joe Stack, a right wing fantasist computer engineer crashing his airplane into an IRS building in Texas over some fancied tax avoider freeman type grievance. Also last week was the case of Ricky Ray Liles, that wild and crazy California gun crank who shot two police officers attempting to serve a search warrant to death and then blew his brains out.

Three white men, running amok, in the space of a few days? Clearly that's what happened.

As Joe Leaphorn, Tony Hillerman's fictional Navajo detective opined, if you believe in coincidence you're not looking carefully enough.

There is a common theme here, and it's right wing teabagger Koolaid in large economy size packages that's getting swigged. I keep coming back to one of Grassley's town meeting teabagger rantfests and some old guy got up and said "Well, the only thing to do is get a gun and go to Washington."

Loose talk, perhaps? Maybe, but the fact that a person's so disconnected as to be willing to get up in public and say such a thing speaks volumes about the madness that's taking hold in the National Lower Intestinal Tract teabagger movement.

It's a stunning reprise of the recently released George Romero inspired flick "The Crazies".

Memo to Tea Baggers: Words Have Consequences

2010-02-22T06:23:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine has presented the following question on his facebook page.

When did questioning government become unacceptable and calling people "teabaggers" become intellectual?

Here is my expanded response.

I disagree with your fundamental premises. There's nothing to suggest that questioning the government has become unacceptable or that calling teabaggers teabaggers is intellectual.

On the other hand when some senile old man gets up in public as he did at one of Grassley's Town virtual Obama lynchings and says "well, the only solution is to get a gun and go to Washington" I, and a lot of people like me, stop listening.

Certainly the teabaggers haven't stopped doing whatever they think they're doing and I don't feel real smart when I kick a teabagger in the shins.

It's not an intellectual exercise and as long as they keep trotting out the likes of Sarah Palin, tenthers, birthers, Ron Paul antisemites, states' righters, John Calhoun inspired irredentists, southern secessionists, know-nothings and so on, they're not entitled to any sort of high minded deference.

If they're going to wave the bloody shirt of revolution, well, they should dig up all those AK47s that they've got hidden in PVC pipe buried in the back yard that they've been threatening to use and put their money where their mouth is. Either that or shut up.

I suppose it is unfortunate that the teabaggers chose to pick a name for themselves that has such unfortunate associations but "them's the breaks".

Lest you think I'm unaware of the distinction, the only Tea Party I'm aware of that is worthy of the name is the one Lewis Carroll described in Alice in Wonderland-which seems curiously apropos these days.

The Death of a Blue Water Sailor

2010-02-14T14:38:00.002-08:00

We're informed that a blue water sailor has passed from this earth. I never met Phil Harris but shared some of his life and times vicariously as a lot of us did.
In my mind Phil was a person who was completely attuned to everything around him, and made no distinction between the human, the physical, the social and the mechanical. One season he had engine trouble and referred to the engines in the Cornelia Marie as the good girl and the bad girl.

I guess I feel a bond existed because my grandfather was a blue water sailor as well, and you always had the feeling that those eyes had seen things far away that the rest of us shorebound folks could only speculate about.

Through the wonders of television and the stamina of film crews we got to see just a little of what the life of a blue water sailor is about, and the joys and sorrows that accrue to 'the finest kind'.

In the end, it was the physical that let Phil down at an early age.

As was true for missing friends I offer the pen of A.E. Housman to this blue water sailor.

Home is the Sailor

Home is the sailor, home from sea:

Her far-borne canvas furled

The ship pours shining on the quay

The plunder of the world.

Home is the hunter from the hill:

Fast in the boundless snare

All flesh lies taken at his will

And every fowl of air.

'Tis evening on the moorland free,

The starlit wave is still:

Home is the sailor from the sea,

The hunter from the hill.

The Club Just Got Bigger By One

2010-02-09T16:24:00.000-08:00

The exclusive superjumbo (I hate that word, don't you?) airliner club just got a little larger as Boeing's newest remix on a well matured but certainly not obsolete theme took to the skies a few days ago.

The B747-8F flight test aircraft-which is a re-winged, re-engined, re-systemed and stretched 747-took wing the other day and it marks an important milestone, not the least of which is that it exists at all.

Offering a viable-although slightly smaller- alternative to the A380 is something that's sure to cause some sleepless nights in Toulouse. The mere fact of its existence creates pressure on Airbus and the A380 program that wasn't there a few days ago.

This iteration on a theme is reminiscent of Kaiser Bill's 'fleet in being', which was the idea that as long as the German Navy had a credible battle fleet capable of inflicting serious damage, it would keep the Royal Navy parked in Scapa Flow waiting for the sorties that almost never came.

Did I mention it can carry cargo? Yes, friends, the -8F can carry freight-lots of lovely freight that never complains about airport security or delays, doesn't demand in flight movies and free refills on the drinks, and rarely needs a blanket or an extra pillow.

And freight doesn't carry explosive underpants either.

Photo courtesy of Wired News.
Photo of SMS Posen courtesy of U.S. Navy

A400M GretaGarboLiner Contract Remix

2010-02-09T10:09:00.000-08:00

For this occasion I have chosen to include this image because the photoshopper who produced it died from an overdose of Propofol and is slated to be interred alongside the late, unlamented Michael Jackson, a/k/a the King of Pop. The only place you will see this flying is in some rilly good hallucinations.

Well nevermind. And I promise I'll shut up about this when some sort of decision's made.

As we've been pointing out, the A400M program has had some problems that have caused long delays and numerous efforts to remix the fixed price contract that everyone agreed to when the project launched. That agreement now seems to have been hopelessly optimistic, and Airbus is losing its shirt on the project, which is overdue and over budget in a significant way.

My own suspicion is that Team Airbus didn't appreciate the problems inherent in launching a new airframe and a new engine-particularly when that new engine was not a derivation of anything now in existence.

There's much finger pointing over who was responsible for the engine choice, now that it's turned out to be a turkey of epic proportions. And thereby hangs a tale, if you're a Canadian, a believer in conspiracy theories, and you don't like being played for a sucker.

The fellows at Bloomberg tell us that the buyers may offer 2 billion euros toward the cost overruns and another 1.5 billion in loans, but whether that is enough to make the deal is something we'll have to wait to see. It's far short of what Airbus is asking for, and there's very little chance that the A400M will ever make a dime for Airbus.

The original project cost was pegged at 20 billion euros in 2003, and the cost overruns are admittedly somewhat west of that figure. The pundits over at Reuters opine that the project is 11 bn euros over budget and deliveries cannot be expected until 2013.

I'm all about public works and good paying jobs, good liberal democrat that I am, but I would have a hard time selling this to the taxpayers-which was what happened with the cancellation of South Africa's order in 2009. I think that the south Africans got out while the getting was good.

Either way, the next month or so ought to be interesting-if one of the major buyers (Germany, France, Britain, Spain) bolts, the program will likely collapse. In view of the financial issues rocking the PIGS countries in the euro zone, pouring more cash down this dry hole may prove to be a very difficult sell.

That's particularly difficult because the A400M, if it ever gets delivered, will not end European mission dependence on the American fleet of C-17s and dodgy Il-76 operators from the old Combloc.

Tom Tancredo and Tea Party Sewage

2010-02-05T11:41:00.000-08:00

We're reliably informed that the inartfully named "Tea Party" Party, or whatever it claims to be, is holding its Konvention in Nashville complete with Konstitooteyonal Skollers to explain what it all means.

Tom Tancredo-you know, that wild and crazy guy who wants to grab this wolf by the ears sooooooo bad-stated "People who could not even spell the word 'vote,' or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. His name is Barack Hussein Obama."

I guess there's nothing that cuts like an old canard, no matter how discredited. In one sentence he managed to smear blacks, immigrants, muslims and the Prez-who knows, he probably got in a few jabs at the homos as well. A supersized bucketful of tea bagger sewage to be sure.

Tom, wouldja hit that "Hussein" thing about 30 more times just so the Skollers in the back of the room get the joke? Attaboy.

I'm quite sure Joe Vogler's ghost sat up and took notice-this was just his speed.

Interestingly enough, some of the attendees took this stuff at face value, saying that their movement/expression of angst is not about name calling and that Tancredo's rant did not further dialogue.

Maybe some folks in this national lower gastrointestinal tract movement want to have a serious discussion about policy but the chances for such a dialogue went down the crapper along with the town hall meetings last summer and Sara Palin's death panels, and the old fool around these parts who said the only solution was to get a gun and go to Washington.

The water's been polluted but good. It's damned dirty, and the tea party types own it. All of it.

After last summer and fall, expect no dialogue.

Well, nevermind. Health care reform is as dead as last month's coleslaw, and good riddance to what it was likely to become with the public option stripped out of it.

Whatever this exercise in national peristalsis turns out to be, mainline politicians should be very wary of grabbing hold of a party whose platform seems to be "Awwww fuggit-I don't like nuthin' or nobody."

Now, That's Moving You Forward!

2010-02-02T07:15:00.001-08:00

What happened to the Toyota advertising slogan?

I dare you to cross this line! No, this one! Wait a minute. I double dare you to cross THIS line! I double secret on pain of instant death dare you !

2010-01-29T11:53:00.000-08:00

As is true with all good soap operas, the decedent suddenly emerges anew, who, having been written off for dead was really spirited away and confined on a Greek isle with no telephones, or was knocked unconscious and woke up in a dumpster in Spokane six months later trying to figure out how he got there.

That's the case with the A400M GretaGarboliner.

After the last 'final round of talks' in which the Germans decided they weren't going to pay anything more than 2 billion euros more than they expected to pay for the A400M airlifter comes word to us that there will indeed be another 'super double secret round of talks' on February 4 in which Airbus will attempt yet again to wheedle another 5 billion euros out of the buyers.

The last round of talks, which was the third and final round of talks, ended on the 26th with no clear winner and no indication that the people who bought this thing are going to pony up more than they already offered to.

What's all the palaver about, you ask? Simple.

The A400M, as we have opined, is something of a super sized Herk with a filet mignon price tag. In addition to it being a clean sheet of paper design, the engine is also a clean sheet of paper design, and it's in a class where it's unlikely to ever find a home on a civilian airframe, unless it's in the cargo bay. The aircraft came with a limited order book, about 184 frames at last count.

Overweight. It's been reported by Financial Times Deutschland as cited by AFP that the aircraft is 12 tons overweight and the payload is 4 tons less than advertised.

Over budget. The initial order book was for 20 billion euros for approximately 180 airframes more or less, and it now seems that the project is over budget by anywhere from 5 billion to 11.2 billion euros depending on who you believe. In addition, Airbus has asked that the contracting governments ante up 5 billion euros to cover cost overruns on the project, essentially trying to renegotiate a fixed price contract it had the bad fortune to sign. The folks from Price-Waterhouse-Coopers have audited the A400M program and concluded that the cost overruns could be anywhere between 7 billion euros and more.

Over due. At the present time, the program is at least four years behind schedule. One of the major problems has been repeated delays with the engines-which anyone who's ever been involved in an engine development project could tell you was inevitable.

So....what could the buyers have gotten for the extra funding that they are about to have extorted out of them?

Depending on how much of a shellacking they're willing to take, anywhere from 25 to 45 brand new, shiny C-17 Globemaster IIIs.

And that's the price for European mee-tooism. The only question is whether and when Dandy Don Meridith will start tuning up the pipes for a chorus of "Turn out the lights, the party's over."

What's Love Got To Do With It?

2010-01-25T08:14:00.000-08:00

There's an old saying around here: "I may be an Okie but I've been to town."

"Do the math" is another way of saying that something doesn't add up.

Of course the big question on everyone's minds around the Dougloid Towers is "when's the other A380 shoe going to drop?" I suspect that we rude frontiersmen may be more sensitive to such things, perhaps because we're in such bad shape, economically.

A brief recap.

The A380 is a conventional structure, 4 engined, double decker bus of an aircraft that is the largest cattle hauler ever built, and which promises to hold that blue riband indefinitely. Others will never be developed. Passenger capacity, depending on configuration is running at about 550 maximum with some room for expansion-how much is a subject of dispute as well.

The A380 development program costs in 2000 were projected to be about 8.8 billion euros, but that had escalated to nearly $20 billion US by the time the first aircraft was delivered according to James Wallace, the Seattle PI aviation wizard. It's reasonable to suppose that development costs have declined but not disappeared, as the first production airplanes required significant major rework and customization for the buyers.

At present, Airbus projected the 'break even' poin t for the project at somewhere west of 420 completed and sold aircraft. Assuming that's correct, the sunk development cost on each frame is just shy of $50 million per aircraft, exclusive of escalations and the economist's bugbear, the time value of money. That's money that's required to pay the lenders and refill the piggy bank.

Parenthetically, that's also money that you don't get to allocate to other projects like the A350 and the A400M. Oh, you may squeeze out the money but it's definitely going to have a chilling effect on those programs.

The cash cow that is the European taxpayer has its limits, whatever they happen to be, and even reasonable people can be inspired by a Howard Jarvis type. Nobody likes to see good money thrown after bad, even if it is for la gloire, as they say.

At present the order book stands at 202 firm A380 orders, with 23 deliveries as of December 2009. There may have been a couple more deliveries in the interim, but the order book has been stagnant-since 2007, only 13 aircraft have been ordered. 25 aircraft have been delivered since the first delivery in 2007.

There it is, folks. Unless Airbus acquires another 220 or so firm orders for the A380 that are not loss leaders, the program's not going to make money, and loss leaders are, in many cases how the orders thus far have been acquired. It's not only going to not make money, it stands to lose a crapload of money before this is over.

What this all tells us is that what happens at Farnborough in July of this year may well be make or break time, given Airbus' predilection for announcing large orders at airshows.

As we opined elsewhere, it is going to be an interesting year. Some folks took that to mean I had no clue as to what may or may not happen this year.

Well, it's true. We're all clueless.

"Super Size Me!" Brings Sticker Shock at Airbus

2010-01-22T08:52:00.000-08:00

We've commented about the future prospects of the A400M-you know, the Euro airlifter that is four years behind schedule and $7 or 8 billion over budget....but it seems as if matters may well be coming to a head. Airbus, it seems, is requesting that the contracting parties who ordered the airlifter ante up an extra 25 per cent to help subscribe the increased cost of the project.

The contracting parties are not happy, particularly the Germans who have the biggest dog in this fight.

Airbus agreed to and sold the project on a fixed price contract basis back when the project was put together-which in retrospect was the very apotheosis of a "bad idea", because the one constant in aircraft projects is that they always go over budget and over weight, particularly when there's both a new airframe and an unproven powerplant in the mix.

Always. It has never been known to fail. Ever.

Going over budget is the polestar of every aircraft project-that, and figuring out how to get the customer to eat the difference, which usually consists of getting the customer in deep enough that they feel they can't back out.

I did work on part (a very small part to be sure) of the Canadair Challenger project-which was both a new airframe and a new engine (the 'born under a bad sign' ALF-502), and it was only the availability of the General Electric CF34 that saved the Challenger from the rubbish tip when the ALF502 turned out to be one of the greatest airborne turds of all time. So I know whereof I speak.

So how anyone could have thought that this project was going to be any different is, well, mildly stunning.

At the present time, there are about 190 or so aircraft on order, and the projected price of the contract amounts to $28 billion give or take, which comes out to about $150 million each, assuming that costs do not escalate further. An additional 25 per cent would put the price per unit closer to $190 million per unit. The project is also four years behind schedule and the first flight was recently accomplished.

So what are the people who ordered it going to get for their money, if ever?
A super sized C130 with a C-17 price tag attached is what they're getting. Looking at it another way, it's like getting a quart and a half of milk but paying for a gallon. Hardly anyone likes that kind of math, even if it is a 'buy fresh, buy local" Europork project.

It must hurt, knowing that you are tied to this project when any number of C17s can be had for about the same price, out the door, drive them away.

It's the very definition of throwing good money after bad, which seems to be popular among government types these days. The notion of getting what you want, on time and on budget never seems to have occurred to the players.

I suspect that if one of the major players bails (i.e., the Germans) then the project will be ready to stick a fork in.

Come to think of it, Alex Pajic could probably make a pile by selling his domain and website to Airbus-truth in advertising and all that.

Image courtesy of Alex Pajic-best damn barbecue chef ever.

UPDATE:

One of my correspondents suggests that the over-budget cost of the A400M is on the order of $15 billion USD that Airbus may be asking the contracting governments to eat, and mentions that at $280 million each that money could buy them 4o or more brand new shiny C17s.

Just a thought.......

Me and Artie and Vinnie and Green Livin'

2010-01-08T12:02:00.000-08:00

Artie is, of course, King Arthur's flour-as fine a grind as ever came out of Vermont, more of which anon-not the least of which is that King Artie is owned by the employees and is as all-American as you can get.

Vinny is the KitchenAid mixer you see before you which shows that all good things come to he who waits-in this case, it took two years of going to auctions to get this one for $15.

That was a couple of years ago but Vinny's done for baking what google did for the internet-the gap between the idea and the concrete expression of it is painless, easy and rapid. Time was that baking involved a lot of beatings and effort. No more.

I gave Vinny a run through a couple weeks ago in an idle moment and today's going to net me two loaves of home made bread with less effort than it takes to describe it. It sounds better than paying three bucks for a single loaf of Mr. Wonder's best.

And that's what green living is all about, folks-using or recycling things that are already there for us to take hold of, if we but imagine it.

Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is: the Last Angry Man Speaks Out

2010-01-08T09:26:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while, if you live long enough, you have one of those moments of clarity that explains everything-well, it's food for thought maybe.

I've been thinking about aviation this morning, particularly the sparring going on between the twins of Orwellian duopoly, Boeing and Airbus over the air force's future tanker program.

And, I've got a small axe to grind-otherwise why would I be rapping about this?

Some symbology is appropriate. You can figure out which image belongs to which player....

In considering the ruckus that's gone on with the Air Force's requirement for a future tanker, we're confronted with two flawed producers and some bit players.

You can count Northrop Grumman out as they're merely the stalking horse for Airbus, the French aviation combine. (Parenthetically, anyone who thinks Airbus is not a French combine run from Toulouse can now leave the room.) You can also count out the Alabamians-they're noisy teabaggers who've bought into the notion that the French are actually interested enough in what goes on in this country to put their money where their camembert hole is.

So-Airbus and Boeing.

As we already know, a few years back, Boeing had the tanker contract sewed up, in the bag, deal done, and all they had to do was tote the cash to the bank. Then, there was that unfortunate business of people going to jail, malfeasance in high office, suborning perjury, bribes-you get the picture.

The takehome was that the KC767 contract got cancelled. And there things stood for a while, until an allegedly squeaky clean new regime of management people who had "seen the light"arrived to restart the process.
Airbus, on the other hand, has trailed its skirts with a canard of dangling a 'production facility' in front of the Alabamians who, showing that they're as dumb as they were back in 1865, actually believe that this is something that's going to happen as advertised.

We here at the Dougloid Towers are not uninformed about such matters-there was the "second 737 line" for Long Beach, there's the "second 787 line" for what? South Carolina?, there's the Chinese Airbus plant and the Chinese MD80 plant-you see where this is going, right?

We're confident that if Uncle bites the Airbus cyanide capsule, a building will be erected in Alabama for a "production facility". What that means is that shortly thereafter someone will "announce" that Toulouse is actually a county in Alabama, a Confederate flag will be raised there to convince doubters, and newly naturalized Alabamians in berets, brandishing baguettes and reeking of brie and garlic will be adding "y'all' to everything-"après moi, le déluge , y'all."

The airplanes will be flown in to Alabama green with a ferry pack of avionics, and they'll be outfitted with the rest of the tanker gear and a paint job. It may be a completion center but it most definitely will not be building airplanes, and when the order's completed the "aircraft plant" will be "repurposed" to a chicken farm quicker than Cinderella's coach turned into a pumpkin.

Why is this going to happen? For the same reason we'd do it if the shoe was on the other foot, and for the same reason there was really no chance at all for that "second 737 line". The workers won't have it-and I can respect the French aircraft workers for it. They're not going to train Americans to do their work for them in any substantial way-to do what? To lose work they'll never get back once it goes offshore?

Which brings me to my main point. Boeing, for all its flaws, is an American company. It builds most of its planes here, it spends money on infrastructure, it pays its workers well, and it's here for the long haul. It hasn't tried to insult the French people with transparent charades like this 'Alabama aircraft plant'.

Hell's bells, as my father would have said, they had the chance to buy McDonnell Douglas' commercial operations at a fire sale price in the early nineties when even Taiwan Aerospace-whatever that is-got cold feet. They would have had their assembly line and their tanker program right there.

Even now, I think it's a lead pipe cinch that if Airbus was really interested in the American market as a place to tap expertise and skills, and actually construct aircraft from the keelsons up, and had made that investment in Alabama or anywhere else-they'd already have the tanker contract in hand.

That's the view from here.

A reminder from the editor to spammers and hustlers

2010-01-05T05:47:00.000-08:00

Just a gentle reminder. If you had any sense, you'd read the stuff in the masthead and realize that a spam message to my comment inbox is wasted effort and time you'll never get back. If you waste enough time you'll die.

All posts are moderated-not just some of them. That means that the only person who sees them is me, to start with. If they're not ready for prime time they get canned. Spam is automatically deleted without comment in a matter of hours. Nobody here thinks that if you just click on the link in the message that you'll be taken to a wonderful website where all our problems will be solved. We know that what you're really doing is trying to get paid per click and you don't care whether we live or die.

Do I think it'll make any difference? No. Does that mean you have an advantage? No.

I'm running things here.

Are we clear?

Big Stuff In Dubai

2010-01-04T05:56:00.000-08:00

We're reliably informed that today is the official opening day for the Burj Dubai. For those of you who have been on special assignment, the Burj Dubai is without a doubt the tallest building in the world, and may or may not be the tallest structure ever built-it is without a doubt the tallest building in Dubai, anyway. Among big buildings, the Burj Dubai steals a march on its nearest competitor in Taiwan.

In a world where wretched excess and the next! biggest! thing! is commonplace, the Burj Dubai is without a doubt a big deal, and everything about it is so massive in scope as to leave our cities looking like Omaha by comparison. We can take some comfort in the fact that it was designed by the Chi-town architectural firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill-which means that the architectural bragging rights, and more important the repository of technological excellence-are right here in the midwestern heartland. As we've said on other occasions, reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated.

One may well wonder where all this is leading, or, as Fr. Martin used to opine, that the folks in Dubai have the outward and visible signs is undeniable-whether they have the inward and spiritual grace is undetermined. Framed against the general malaise in world economic affairs and a steep downturn in local development, the short term prospects are daunting, and it remains to be seen how long the Burj Dubai will own the bragging rights.

At any rate it's Dubai's day to shine and welcome to it they are.

The Tribune has an excellent retrospective. It is well worth your consideration, and I commend it to your kind attention.

Photo Chicago Tribune.

Beafore You Beat That African Djembe Read This

2010-01-01T14:00:00.000-08:00

We're reliably informed by the New York Times that a New Hampshire woman managed to get herself a severe case of gastrointestinal anthrax (you know, that nasty critter that's been around since forever minding its own business until someone decided to make a career out of mailing it to post offices).....where was I?

Oh, yes. Now I remember. It seems that the woman was among sixty or so like minded folks who attended a 'community drumming circle', whatever that is, in Durham at the United Campus Ministry. I did a little recon, as you might say, and I discovered that among its other activities the UCM-Durham sponsors a monthly Drum Circle and Free Pasta Supper the first Friday of each month.

It is supposed that the enthusiastic whacking of the hides on their Authentic African Djembes dislodged anthrax spores which were inhaled or ingested-perhaps in the Free Pasta-by the victim in this case-assuming that the Free Pasta came after the Drum Circle. The possibilities are endless and the implications are troubling.

It seems that this drum circle thing is bigger than I thought, if the usually reliable source is to be believed. I do not know if the master himself, Chick Webb, would have identified with this drum circle business.

The Dougloid Papers-Cranky Four Year Old, Not Ready For Prime Time

2010-01-01T11:42:00.000-08:00

This month marks the fourth anniversary since I began this project, and as we did last year it's time for a little self analysis-scrutinizing the old navel, y'know?

Since last year, Jake returned from his all expenses paid tour of Paktia province in Afghanistan. As we expected he's learned a lot since he left, he had his bell rung more than once, but for the meantime he's parked at Campbell. He's also set sail on the sea of matrimony and we've got plenty of good things to say about his choice in womenfolk-this one seems to be a keeper as near as we can figure, and talented and smart in the bargain.

Jennifer seems to go from strength to strength, and she has turned her setbacks into positive things that others will benefit greatly from. We're proud to have had a part in that, small though it is, and what comes through loud and clear with both of these folks is the commitment to service to others. I don't know where they got it from, but the world's a better place for it.

We are not happy about the choices some people around us have made-they're offensive, dangerous, and poisonous, and we earnestly hope that they will see the error of their ways, although the chances of that are slim to none, based on past performance.

The economy has not gotten a great deal better, and it's removed at least one part time job I had-which led to me starting another enterprise which has shown some signs of life-it is in a state of becoming but you can check in occasionally and see what's going on at http://www.elderly-amplification.com. I'm always bemused that occasionally people will pay me to do things I like to do and be with people I like to be with.

We've had a lot of snow here, so I've had more than enough shovel time than I like. If I had a few cans of hair spray I'd go outside and try and hasten global warming.

The motor vehicle fleet has improved mightily and we are happier for it. This past year we acquired a new Honda Fit, which is "the berries" as Al Capone sometimes observed, a nice serviceable Ford Ranger pickup for suburban chores and general schlepping, and a self propelled Snapper mower that takes what was a tiresome chore and turns it into a stroll in the garden with a friend. It also does a better job cutting the grass.

The Snapper was quite a find-it had been moldering in someone's garage for four or five years, covered in cobwebs and dust, and followed us home from an auction for a mere twenty smackers. Not expecting much, I changed the oil, dumped a quart of Mr. Mobil's best in the tank, gave a tug on the cord and it started on the first try. Fifteen bucks worth of parts put it in fighting trim, and we sold the old hand bomber Murray for twenty five bucks. We came to find out that the Snapper sells new for about $700, so that put us about $650 ahead, tax free to boot.

We were wrong on our last year's prediction that bankruptcy judges would get the ability to cramdown residential mortgages, and nobody seems to be talking much about it anymore. The economy's like a punchdrunk fighter, operating on reflex and instinct but little else. It remains to be seen whether we'll make any progress this coming year, but if the past is prologue, the Walmartization of our manufacturing is going to continue bearing dark dividends.

Film at 11, as they say.

Rich Kid Terrorist

2009-12-29T06:41:00.000-08:00

Here's a shot of ADX Florence, the federal government's maximo del maximo prison in southern Colorado, and I have no doubt the most recent aspiring plane bomber, Mr. Abdulmutallab is headed there on an all expenses paid one way ticket.

However, he will not be able to wear the skivvies of his choice. During the course of this journey he was toting a package of PETN explosive in his jockey shorts, and only his inartful attempt to detonate the explosive and the quick actions of passengers opening up a can of whoopass saved the day.

The aforementioned skivvies on the right seem to indicate that the ...ahem....combustion may have had some therapeutic results, when you take into account positioning and male anatomy.

However Umar fumbled the ball on the goal line, it did raise the entirely more frightening threat of people keistering in explosives, and in fact al Qaeda pulled off this schtick in Saudi Arabia a while ago in an attack on the Saudi anti terrorism chief. In that case the package was a pound or so of high explosive with a cell phone detonator.

On the subject of post 2001 airport security I'd just had my first experience with it the week before the Crusader Holiday and it was not nearly as burdensome and onerous as I'd supposed. The TSA people were uniformly polite and professional, gave clear and concise instructions, and even when they decided to give my vintage Nikon and my can of tea bags a second scoping, they didn't make me feel as if I was being imposed upon.

That said, I suspect things will be somewhat different in the future, particularly if the flight is inbound from overseas and most importantly from places where security is lax. We can add Schiphol to that list.

It seems that Mr. Abdulmutallab managed to get on an inbound flight despite all the markers that should have set up red flags-particularly in paying cash for a one way ticket. I guess those al Qaeda fellows are ever the pennypinchers. A one way ticket says "I ain't coming back."

It turns out that there are a fair number of photographs of Umar Abdulmutallab floating around, and most of them seem to have that curiously vacant, head slightly cocked to one side eyefuck stare. It looks as if he'd worked on it, and the message it conveyed.

Reports in the National Post seem to suggest that what we have here is a teenage angst ridden spoiled rich kid wannabe who got in way over his head. I mean, what son of the oppressed Muslim masses lives in a 2-million pound apartment while studying at a ritzy Crusader university with a private tutor no less?

I seem to remember a few rich kid wannabes from my first college who chatted idly about bombing government buildings back in the days of SDS. Then they went back to the suburbs and showed up in January with new Volvos and Head skis.

I think had Umar had to make his own way in the world by the sweat of his brow on the mean streets of Lagos he might well have valued other people's lives and property more highly. In any event I am not aware of any passage in the Koran that instructs people that it is their sacred duty to fill their britches with explosives and attempt to murder innocents. Or stuff it up their butts either.

Well. Things will change but young Umar won't know it because he will be out of the picture permanently, and I'd wager he will spend his best years talking to himself in solitary in Florence.

I wonder what he'll have to say to himself. I have a feeling I know the answer.

New Heavy Lifter Takes A Bow.

2009-12-24T10:15:00.000-08:00

Almost completely overlooked in the to-do over the 787 and its revolutionary first flight/proof of concept was an equally important first flight-at least to the people whose jobs are on the line- and that was of the Airbus A400M military cargo lifter. The first flight occurred December 11 of this year from Seville.

It's rare enough when something that's so new the paint isn't dry gets airborne with propellers these days-and what propellers they are.

In addition, the A400M's Europrop engine installation is a clean sheet of paper design that's got enough power to haul the goods.

Now. You know that I have a major weakness for big muscular props, and I consider the Convair 580 to be the finest aircraft ever made anywhere. But this is light years ahead of the 580.

All this may be moot, however, as cost overruns and delays have put the program at a substantial risk of cancellation.

It seems that Airbus agreed to a fixed cost contract (something we don't do anymore here in the bumptious rude frontier republic that is the United States because we clearly don't know anything), and when the development budget spiraled out of control that left Airbus holding the bag and under a threat to have the countries that ordered it eat their lunch for them.

It reminds me of a case I worked on a number of years ago. A guy out west of here operated a custom feedlot. Here's how the deal worked. You sign a contract, he acquires the cattle, feeds them to market weight at a fixed cost, merchandises them and you split the profits.

All of that was wonderful-until, in 1996, corn, which had been selling at about average prices of $2.50 a bushel spiked to $3.90 a bushel. The end result was that the feedlot owner simply stopped buying feed and by the time people woke up, he had disappeared into the nether world of the Poky feedlot in Garden City, Kansas, knowing a lot more about the perils of fixed price contracting when you have no way of meaningfully predicting the cost of inputs going forward.

Upwards of 900 cattle died in the winter of 1996-1997 in his feedlot.

Images courtesy of and property of Airbus, Reuters.

The End of the Aluminum Age

2009-12-21T18:43:00.001-08:00

We're informed that the much heralded, oft-delayed and widely watched first flight of the Boeing 787, a/k/a Dreamliner went off

without a major hitch recently.

Sighs of relief all around, no? A bit of flag waving as well? You betcha, as Mrs. Palin says.

We're also reliably informed by a gentleman in the country of unimpeachable integrity (Saj) that the test flight of the second aircraft will take place tomorrow morning-all of which promises to accelerate the flight test schedule significantly.

It's rare when two aircraft are delivered to a flight test program in such a short time, and it speaks to Boeing's determination to ramp up the flight test program and thereby make up some lost marches. It also tells us that the flight test program is the first priority.

The Dreamliner, of course, represents a completely new departure for manufacturing large civil aircraft, being constructed largely of carbon fiber composite material, including the wings and other structural members.

In fact it's the first major advance in aircraft structure and coverings since aluminum skin and structure confounded the purveyors of dope and fab, plywood skinned, wooden wing stuff like the Curtiss Condor or the Fokker Triplane back in the thirties.

It's been rumored that the Ford Trimotor was a reverse engineered Fokker in corrugated aluminum, and so it may be. Reasonable minds may differ-although the resemblance to the things Dr. Junkers was doing at the time is more than coincidental.

Of course, as we have noted here in the past, we in this country do have a pretty good track record working with carbon fiber composite structures in large aircraft- albeit in military programs such as the F117 fighter and the B2 bomber-that spans the last twenty five years, none of which expertise was acknowledged by the competition.

There was plenty of "It'll never work", "You won't be able to maintain it in the field", "Our experts assure us it's unworkable" and similar canards from the usual suspects, to be followed shortly by "Well, we can of course show you impetuous colonials how real experts do it."

Well. It flew. Another one's flying tomorrow. There'll be more before 2012 or whenever the A350 emerges blinking in the watery sunlight of Toulouse. And they'll be piling up a record of revenue service by that time.

It was also significant to us here at the Dougloid Towers when the fellows at Vought in South Carolina-now part of Boeing-signed a check for the world's largest autoclave. They're committed to the technology, for good or for ill.

The only thing on the horizon that's even in the same ballpark is the proposed Airbus A350
which is not slated to fly until until 2012, barring any delays. The A350 as it is currently envisioned will be made up of carbon fiber panels mounted on structure where the 787's fuselage structure is monolithic. In the quest for weight reduction, this will prove to be lighter and thus stronger, pound for pound.

We're not fans of idle speculation here, but we think that the introduction of this technology will fundamentally rewrite the commercial aircraft construction and engineering book.

There will be problems to remedy as we've already seen, and there will also be serendipitous discoveries that will accrue to the benefit of American engineering genius-which has been getting a bad rap lately.

As Mark Twain once opined "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." Words to live by? We think so.

Photo credits ASC Systems, Boeing,

Rare Victory For Renters in Iowa

2009-11-23T09:37:00.000-08:00

A recently delivered opinion of the Iowa Supreme Court does a bit to redress the power inequity between landlords and tenants that's worth a nod.

We here in the Dougloid Towers are not unsympathetic to the problems of tenants, as we grew up in apartments, and lived in apartments and rental properties until fairly recently. It's worth remarking that the single best reason for owning your own place is that you can drive by the landlord's crib as many times as you like making obscene gestures and pig type oinking and grunting. "F**k 'em if they can't take a joke!" as my old crew chief Wayne Hawkins used to say.

In War Eagle Village Apartments v. Plummer, no. 07-1217 (Nov. 20, 2009), a tenant was short on the rent and the landlord instituted an eviction proceeding. The landlord followed the procedure, sending a certified letter to the tenant which she never received, and a hearing was had a week later-at which point a default judgment and a writ of removal were issued.

Plummer appealed, contending that the statutory scheme embodied in Iowa Code in Iowa Code section 562A.29A was a violation of due process. The Supreme Court agreed, holding that the scheme established was insufficient to give a person notice and an opportunity to be heard.

The Court states, "There is no set of facts under which the FED statutory notice scheme could be found to provide adequate notice. When receipt in time to meaningfully respond is unlikely, a statutory scheme that deems service complete upon mailing if the notice is by its very terms not reasonably calculated to give adequate notice to tenants that a hearing on their eviction has been scheduled. Given the statutory requirement that a hearing be held no later than seven days fron the order scheduling a hearing, Iowa Code section 562A.29A(2) is unconstitutional on its face."

image courtesy of the Independent.

Channeling Sputnik

2009-11-18T06:59:00.001-08:00

From Radio and TV News, Feb, 1958.

The first announcement by Radio Moscow indicated that there were two transmitters in the satellite (launched October 4, 1957-ed.), one operating at 20.005 mhz and the other at 40.002 mhz. The pulse of each signal was 0.3 seconds, followed by a pause of similar length during which the other signals were transmitted. On Oct. 8 the signals were not received for several hours. Later, signals resumed but became continuous. The transmitter was specified to be 1 watt. U.S. Monitors agreed that the signals were modulated with telemetry data.Appropriate instruments within the satellite reported on atmospheric pressure and density. Also, information on micrometeorite bombardment was probably transmitted.

First U.S. radio reception of the satellite's signals was reported by RCA Communications, Inc. at Riverhead, L.I. The observation occurred at 8:07 p.m. EDT October 4, the day of the launching. At 8:15 the signal was strongest from the south. First reception at the Naval Research Laboratoryin Washington, D.C. was at 8:30 p.m. By October 6, six of ten Minitrack stations had been converted from 108 mhz-the frequency to be used by U.S. satellites-to 20 and 40 mhz to track the USSR satellite.

Radio reception was soon general and reports of continuous monitoring were received from Antarctic IGY (International Geophysical Year-ed.) stations including the South Pole-which is in a position to hear the satellite on virtually every passage-as well as from IGY drifting station A, an ice floe located about 500 miles from the North Pole.

Reports from the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station indicated that the satellite's radio signals cut in abruptly but faded out gradually and that there were numerous variations in signal strength, duration and pulse rate.

The USSR was reported to be encouraging amateur assistance, offering special cards to hams reporting receipt of the satellite's radio signals.

Radio Moscow announced on October 26 that the satellite's radio had used up its power and had stopped working. On the same day, the Naval Research Laboratory reported that no signals had been received by Minitrack stations since 5:50 p.m. EDT, October 25, and that no other information had been relayed to NRL from other receiver sources since 7:10 p.m. EDT October 25.

Thus, after 3 weeks of continuous operation, space's first radio transmitter had gone dead.

Editor's note.

This was big stuff when I was a kid. We all watched with bated breath as the Navy launched Vanguard TV3 on December 6, 1957 , which got about ten feet off the deck and exploded in a spectacular fireball. There is a fascinating history of the Vanguard program by Constance Green and Milton Lomask located here, and it's well worth reading-not the least important part is the foreword by the Lone Eagle, Charles Lindbergh.

In 1958 the Army strapped its first Explorer 1 satellite to the nose of a Juno 1 rocket , followed thereafter by the first successful Vanguard launch of what Premier Khrushchev snidely referred to as a grapefruit, weighing only a few pounds. TV4, equipped with solar cells, transmitted until 1964 and is still happily tooling along in earth orbit today, 51 years later.

As technology goes, about all Sputnik 1 did was thumb its nose at Uncle Sugar for three weeks, until its tiresome bleat "I'm here! I'm here!" went dead. Shortly thereafter, Sputnik 1 burned up in earth's atmosphere on January 4, 1958.

New London Confidential

2009-11-12T08:59:00.000-08:00

I think we're all familiar with the Supreme Court's infamous Kelo v. City of New London decision, in which the Supreme Court held that as long as a taking of private property bore an (arguably) rational relationship to a legitimate governmental purpose, eminent domain could be used to kick people out in the street in the name of government making nice to their corporate masters.

A subject of a book (The Little Pink House, written by Jeff Benedict) is the story of one of the litigants, a paramedic named Susette Kelo, and her efforts to save her home-which ultimately proved unsuccessful. The images are of the Pfizer research center-shore looks nice, don't it?-the vacant lot where Susette Kelo's home once stood, an aerial view of where the Fort Trumbull neighborhood used to be, and Susette Kelo in front of the home taken from her.

The stated reason for the condemnation was that surely pharmaceutical giant Pfizer would make better use of the land than the owners of the homes had, why, they'd even build a wonderful research center and there'd be a high toned hotel, rich folks' condos, and no more of these rundown homes and their pesky landowners clogging up that delicious waterfront property.

Parenthetically, the dissents of Justices O'Connor and Thomas are worth sober consideration.

It's something that today's generation of anti Obama conspiracy theorists, Birthers, Tenthers, gun toting cranks, Palinidiots and tea baggers seem to have forgotten all about-yet the decision remains as a vivid reminder of how onerous the abuse of governmental power can be. It's to these folk's discredit-here's a real story of economic imperialism and government trampling property rights, and they wouldn't even have had to make anything up about Evil Negro Barack.

Justice Thomas:

The consequences of today’s decision are not difficult to predict, and promise to be harmful. So-called “urban renewal” programs provide some compensation for the properties they take, but no compensation is possible for the subjective value of these lands to the individuals displaced and the indignity inflicted by uprooting them from their homes. Allowing the government to take property solely for public purposes is bad enough, but extending the concept of public purpose to encompass any economically beneficial goal guarantees that these losses will fall disproportionately on poor communities. Those communities are not only systematically less likely to put their lands to the highest and best social use, but are also the least politically powerful. If ever there were justification for intrusive judicial review of constitutional provisions that protect “discrete and insular minorities,” surely that principle would apply with great force to the powerless groups and individuals the Public Use Clause protects. The deferential standard this Court has adopted for the Public Use Clause is therefore deeply perverse. It encourages “those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms” to victimize the weak.

"But Sparky!" you say, "W-w-what's all this have to do with this 12th of November, 2009?"

Quite simple, little feller. It was announced a couple of days ago that those wonderful folks at Pfizer, having gobbled up Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, will close the New London research facility and plans to shed nearly 20,000 of those high paying jobs for which Kelo and others were turfed out of their houses.

Thanks, Pfizer.

Memo to Dick Pound: Is it Dopers You Want?

2009-10-19T13:04:00.000-07:00

Der Spiegel informs us today that German cops have discovered that Jan Ullrich, retired former cyclist and Tour de France winner, made at least 24 trips to the home of Doctor Eumianto Fuentes, a/k/a Doctor Steroid. Ullrich also paid Herr Doktor 80,000 Euros for the privilege.

So OK, Dickie-are you going to petition for Ullrich's 1997 victory to be expunged?

Gonna hunt up some old bottles of pee to test? How about some more flatulent statements?

Hmmmmph.

One Night In The Hangar: How One Huckbolt Saved Six Jobs When The Boss Wasn't Looking

2009-10-12T06:24:00.000-07:00

One night in the hangar, way back past the statute of limitations the crew was installing the wing planks on an ex-Federal Express Falcon 20 freighter. It was part of a five or was it ten? year tank and plank inspection. The planks had been treated and recoated, the 12 hour 1422 sealer had been applied, the planks were in place and installation of the securing screws had started.

The lower wing planks are secured with screws going into nutplates-lots of screws, several hundred at least. Six of us had stayed over to finish the job, and the customer was due the next day.

One plank had gone pretty well, and midway through the second one of the guys looked at Jose, the crew chief and said "We've got a problem here."

One screw had galled itself and stripped out the nutplate, and it couldn't be retapped. It meant removing the wing plank again, ordering a nutplate, and taking a gamble that it wouldn't happen again on another of the many hundreds of nutplates.

Then Jose said "I've got an idea." He pulled a small depth gauge out of his shirt pocket and took a quick depth measurement.

He went to the tool crib and came back with a drill and bit, a microstop countersink, a countersink type huckbolt, and a pneumatic puller. He said "Watch this shit."

Carefully countersinking and slightly enlarging the previously metric hole he test fitted the huckbolt and said to the rest of us "Are you guys ready? Remember, NOBODY knows anything."

Jose dipped the huckbolt in a pot of 1422 sealer, inserted it in the hole, applied the pneumatic puller and.......and.........and........

A diversion. When installing huckbolts or any other type of blind fastener you listen for the noise when the stem separates. A nice kaPOW! tells you the rivet pulled and clinched. A dull thud tells you you'll have to start removing it and rethinking your strategy.

Jose pulled the trigger and kaPOW! the stem broke as cleanly as the picture in the instruction manual.

He smiled and said "Button her up. Somebody put a click patch over that thing. There's some Coronas in the fridge."

Exeunt.

The picture was stolen from some Chinese company or other. They steal our IP, so who cares?

Ford County Confidential

2009-09-30T08:24:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting and timely decision (Landmark National Bank v. Kesler) out of the Kansas Supreme Court that's worth a look for what it says about servicing agents and nominees where the underlying mortgage has been chopped, sliced, diced, pureed and sold off as some sort of financial smoothie to gullible 'investors'.

The ubiquitous notices of foreclosure in the papers may soon have foreclosure petitions recast to remove MERS as plaintiff because of this decision, and one of my spies in a downtown law firm tells me this is, in fact, the case.

Kesler owned real estate in Ford County, Kansas secured by two mortgages-a $50,000 first with Landmark and a $ 93,100 second with Millennia Mortgage Co., both mortgages having been recorded in Ford County. Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (MERS) was named as the nominee and Millennia as the creditor in the second mortgage, and Sovereign was a putative assignee of the Millennia second mortgage. (MERS functions as an electronic mortgage tracking system).

Kesler filed for bankruptcy in April, 2006, and Landmark filed a petition to foreclose its mortgage, naming Kesler and Millennia but not MERS or Sovereign. In the absence of answers the trial court entered a default judgment, and the property was sold at a sheriff's sale.Landmark filed a motion to confirm the sale on November 14, 2006.

Contemporaneously Sovereign filed a motion to set aside the default judgment and an answer asserting an interest as Millennia's assignee. It was said that MERS was a necessary party and because MERS did not receive service, Sovereign did not receive notice. MERS also filed a motion to set aside the default and a motion to intervene.

The trial court found that MERS was not a real party in interest; therefore Landmark was not required to name MERS as a party in its foreclosure petition. The court also found that MERS was only an agent or representative of Millennia. Sovereign had also failed to register its mortgage with the Ford County Registrar of Deeds, thus depriving itself of the right to intervene after judgment.

On appeal, the Kansas Supreme Court determined that the trial court was obliged to consider whether MERS would have had a meritorious defense if it had been named as a defendant and whether the outcome at a trial would have been different.

Because MERS was a nominee, its legal status depended on its relationship to its principal, Sovereign. The Court described that relationship to be that of a straw man. It had no stake in the outcome of the action as it did not function as a lender to Kesler and was in no sense an economic beneficiary. MERS did not demonstrate, and did not attempt to demonstrate that it possessed any interest in the mortgage beyond the bare designation as a mortgagor. It did not lend money or receive payment from the borrower, and it suffered no monetary loss as a consequence of the underlying litigation.

The Nitwit's Fandango

2009-09-09T21:04:00.000-07:00

South Carolina's GOP pols are completely off their rockers lately.

First there's the embarrassment of a soon to be former governor Mark Sanford who can't seem to keep his dick in his pants or tell the truth but thinks that neither of those things ought to disqualify him from the governor's mansion.

Tonight something different happened when a hitherto unknown GOP Representative from the Palmetto State, Joe Wilson, shouted at the president "you lie!" during his speech tonight. I guess he thought he was at a town hall meeting, Klan shindig, or something like that, kinda forgot where he was and who he's supposed to be representing.

What was stunning, too, was, the rapidity with which Wilson got in the cafeteria line for an extra large helping of crow, served up just the way he likes it.

Of course, we fully expect that, in a line stolen from Hamas recently, the usual suspects will declare victory on the airwaves tomorrow.

Be that as it may, it's worth noting that this sort of stuff renders the effectivity of these two nitwits at something less than zero, and I'm quite sure that a lot of people in South Carolina are asking themselves how in hell they got elected and why they're still getting paid.

They're an embarrassment.

Of course our Steve King is no slouch himself for opining that if Barack Obama got elected the terrorists would be dancing in the streets, or the Senile Senator hisself for indulging in a little town hall theater lately, stealing his lines of course from Sarah Palin.

On that note, I wonder why anyone thinks he's capable of or willing to negotiate anything at this point.

I guess the Dems have been out of power so long that they forgot what it's like to use that damned majority.

The message from every Democrat to the GOP and its adherents should be "Push, pull, or get the hell out of the way." My next stop is over at the party website where I am going to offer my services in any capacity for any candidate who runs against Grassley.

Here's the rendition of the staged episode from the Times:

"Mr. Wilson seemed rattled in the wake of his comment, and quickly left the chamber at the end of the speech.

His office later issued an apology, saying: “This evening I let my emotions get the best of me when listening to the president’s remarks regarding the coverage of illegal immigrants in the health care bill. While I disagree with the president’s statement, my comments were inappropriate and regrettable. I extend sincere apologies to the president for this lack of civility.”

Mr. Wilson also phoned the White House and reached Mr. Emanuel, who accepted an apology on behalf of the president."

Kittyhawk M5 gutshots: The Hangar 51 report

2009-09-03T10:34:00.001-07:00

Seeing as Sean Huston's Blues Deville is going out on the road here, I decided it was time to start refurbishing the Kittyhawk M5 you see here.

This amplifier is some kind of ultimate orphan, as very little is known about them and the German manufacturer is long since out of business, as far as I know. I do have a partial schematic and I can probably figure out the rest. Some voltage mapping will be in order, and then eliminating the patented plastic "DestructoPots".

If the power transformer is capable of it, it might be fun to plug in a couple of the new JJ 6V6S tubes, as we hear they're more robust and capable of delivering an improvement in wattage.

If you've got any information or documentation on this amp, please send me an email.

Further Adventures From The Technological Fringe, or, How I Became A Country Gentleman

2009-08-18T14:30:00.000-07:00

Behold the latest addition to the fleet.

It is a mid nineties (I think) Snapper self propelled electric start mower that came out of a garage where it had unaccountably taken early retirement. It was festooned with cobwebs, covered in dried up baked on schmutz, and it cost me a cool twenty bucks. For me it was a high stakes gamble.

After a short ride to the casa de Dougloid, in short order it had had what passed for engine oil drained. There is a school of thought that this stuff had escaped from the La Brea Tar Pits but nevermind. After a refill with the tag ends of several quarts of miscellaneous engine oils, it was time for the official test run.

I dumped a quart of Mr. Phillips' finest in the tank, selected the choke, reached out not really expecting anything, but it sprang to life on the very first pull.

After a half hour run and some inspection I shut it down, disassembled the rear wheel drive, and headed over to Bruce's for fifteen bucks worth of parts-a rubber tire and a ball bearing. On the return trip I picked up a quart of O'Reilly's best quality 10W30 engine oil and gave it another drain and change and treated it to a comprehensive scrub down and reassembly of the power train.

Since then we have mowed the back lawn twice, I sold the other mower to the neighbor for $25, and it has proved a tractable and efficient piece of machinery that is worth several hundred bucks, or so I'm told. Nowadays, mowing the lawn is about equivalent to going out for a nice walk with some good company, rather than a contest of wills. The electric start feature remains to be reassembled, but we will see if the battery can hold a charge long enough to do its work.

Birthers Punked

2009-08-07T08:33:00.000-07:00

It seems that an article appeared on WorldNet, a birther website, seeming to have uncovered a Kenyan birth certificate demonstrating that President Obama was actually born in Kenya.

Aside from the problem of how do you fake local newspapers from 1961 in Hawaii that have sat in library archives since then, it turns out that the entire project was a prank that has made the birthers look foolish and credible which has the birthers busily parsing and examining effort to validate their copies of the Hitler Diaries and the Salamander Letter.

The whole thing is starting to appear laughable-which means we need to keep it going.

The only question I have is what sanctions will be applied to Attorney Orly Taitz when she files this fraudulent document in court as she's threatening to do.

When someone like Ann Coulter says you're a crank, you've got serious issues.

Memo to Mitch Stewart at BarackObama.com

2009-08-07T08:15:00.000-07:00

I received the following email yesterday,

"Robert --

Members of Congress have been home for just a few days, and they're already facing increased pressure from insurance companies, special interests, and partisan attack organizations that are spending millions to block health insurance reform.

These groups are using scare tactics and spreading smears about the President's plan for reform, trying to incite constituents into lashing out at their representatives and disrupting their events.

The goal of these disruptions is for a few people to get a lot of media attention and hijack the entire public discourse. If they succeed, all Americans -- Democrats, Republicans, and Independents -- will continue to struggle under the broken status quo.

It's up to us to show Congress that those loudly opposing reform are a tiny minority being stirred up by special interests, and that a huge majority strongly supports enacting real health insurance reform in 2009.

Your representative, Leonard Boswell, has been fighting hard for real health insurance reform. Can you call the local office in Des Moines? Let the person who answers know that you're a constituent. Then tell them: "Thanks for working to enact real health insurance reform this year. Voters like me support your efforts."

According to our records, you live in Iowa's 3rd congressional district. Please call:

Rep. Leonard Boswell at 515-282-1909.

Once you've made your call, click here to report it.

(Not your representative? Click here to look yours up.)

Calling should only take a few minutes, but it's a huge help. These local offices serve as the main connection between a member of Congress and voters in the district. And with representatives home on recess, the staff there are in daily contact with your member, keeping them updated on how many calls they receive that are for or against reform.

Once you've called, please tell us. Knowing how many calls are coming in from all around the country will help us better plan our campaign -- and help us show that the American people overwhelmingly want health insurance reform this year. Let us know you called:

http://my.barackobama.com/districtcall1?district=IA3&postal_code=50309

Thanks,

Mitch

Mitch Stewart
Director
Organizing for America"

After ruminating on the subject for a day or so, here's what I've got to say on the general subject here and over at FB.

I received a communicade from Obama HQ saying that I should call my Congressman and tell him I want health care reform. My Congressman's Lenny Boswell, and I have no worries about where he stands.

What's needed, Mitch from Obama Central, is not for people to call Democrats who are already on board, but people who will speak out and refute the specious, silly cant and tribal superstition of the Limbaugh-Palin wing of the Republican Party and its fellow travelers at every opportunity.

What does that mean? In practice, speaking out on the internet and blogging at every opportunity. The handlers of these people are waging a savvy media war with their scorched earth positions on every conceivable area of social reform-perhaps they fear the Evil Negro hisself will sneak into their homes and screw their daughters with an impossibly huge manhood all the while looting the refrigerator only to slink off to the slave quarters leaving armies of clones...

We've simply got to argue, speak out forcefully and agitate at every opportunity. We've got facts and logic on our side.

Every time we have a discussion in print with one of these people they look inarticulate, superstitious, paranoid, vengeful, racist and foolish, because that's the very nature of what they believe. They don't have the facts at hand.

I'm still trying to get ONE of Senator Grassley's Facebook nazis to tell me they've read a single god-damned Sotomayor decision and none of them have. They're not into facts, they're into themselves and the bullshit inside their empty heads.

The puppet masters who have had such success lining up armies of dupes to run interference for them have done well thus far muddying the water hole by shouting us down in public, and I will be surprised whether health care reform with a public option survives unless we reach back to our radical roots of the sixties and shout back and shout them down for a change.

UPDATE:

Interestingly enough, when you get into a verbal slugfest with one of these people and you start challenging their assumptions the first thing that happens is they say "Wull, you're intelligent and overeducated and far smarter than I am, we're just good christians who hate babykillers and homos so yer just picking the fly shit out of pepper here, by the way where in hell is Obamma's Certificate of Live Birth?"

Then when you ask them "Why didn't you make the effort to learn how to think your way out of a brown paper bag? You can't blame me, for making you look like a horse's ass-it was easy."

Then they clam up and find some fellow traveler to commiserate with.

National Arbitration Forum: Good Riddance.

2009-07-24T10:19:00.000-07:00

There's been a stunning development in the consumer collection trade that should be of interest to all the people who, like myself, labored in the trenches and got our asses kicked by kangaroo court consumer "arbitration" mills like the National Arbitration Forum and other similar monstrosities.

In my case, I got to a point where I headed for the showers because I just couldn't take the drama any more after four years of the stuff.

Lori Swanson, the Attorney General of the great state of Minnesota filed suit against the National Arbitration Forum, charging that it had violated consumer fraud, deceptive practice, and false advertising laws by concealing its ties to collection agencies and law firms. The NAF crumbled inside of a week and agreed to exit the consumer debt arbitration business.

Mike Kelly, chief executive of NAF said that now, consumers will have no alternative to costly and unpredictable litigation. He says the NAF did not have the resources to continue defending itself against state attorneys general, class action lawsuits and the like.

Well, Mike, with your crew of kangaroo court stooges on the case, what did consumers have except a deck stacked against them? In this context, "unpredictable" represents a significant improvement for consumers over NAF-style adjudication-in which the consumer invariably got hosed no matter what the merits of their cases were. If it was me, I'd say that the consumer is almost always better off with a sitting judge and the full range of rights and remedies, in a forum where judges listen to arguments and make decisions based on the facts presented.

As Billy Mays said "But wait! We're not finished yet!" Here's a standard argument I used in every arbitration case I handled. The National Arbitration Forum found for the claimant 99.6 per cent of the time, and marketed that statistic to collection side law firms such as McCann Bracken and Wolpoff and Abramson.

This is a good day for ordinary folks everywhere, and I would like nothing better than to see all the people that the NAF and McCann Bracken and the rest of that crew get haled into court to defend what they did to people and the perversion that they made out of arbitration.

One thing's for sure-it'll never be the same.

High Summer

2009-07-23T07:06:00.000-07:00

Today would have been my late father's birthday-he would have been 90. We miss him, with all his faults.

The small child in the baby dress was him as a young child. The other folks are some of my favorite people.

He rarely talked about his childhood or his growing up years in south Florida, and he was always a very private person-to the extent that sometimes I think I never really knew him very well.

What he believed in was character and endurance and taking responsibility for your actions. All of which are good values to live your life by, even if you come by them by a process of trial and error as I did.

Parenthetically, his declining years demonstrated that living under someone's sufferance is a harsh regime indeed, and one which we will not forget and do not forgive.

Bastille Day

2009-07-14T13:18:00.000-07:00

Today is the birthday of our sister republic. Of course it could be none other than France, which may well be the only place in the world I would choose as an alternate place to reside, if Iowa should ever become uninhabitable.

Bastille Day commemorates, of course, the storming of the Bastille, the prison fortress and hated symbol of royal privilege and tyranny, and the promulgation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man shortly thereafter in the year 1789.

Of course we here have a special bond with the people of France, because of her support of our own contemporaneous efforts to remove the boot of royalty from our necks.

It's also a date that is important to me personally because it was about this time we declared our independence from credit card hell 2 years ago, and the two of us declared our independence from tobacco in 1980.

High summer is the season for great liberations, and we're grateful. Ever has it been that the hopes and aspirations of people the world over have looked to both republics for inspiration, and even in the darkest hours the flame has flickered, but has proved unquenchable.

Long may she wave. Let her light burn brightly.

Just When You Thought Things Couldn't Get Stranger

2009-07-08T12:21:00.000-07:00

Honest, folks. I'm not making this up. It sorta reminds me of the old science fiction movie Donovan's Brain.

According to people of unimpeachable integrity, the Person Formerly Known As Michael Jackson's brain was....ahem....removed for further study and investigation before the mortal remains were delivered for the festive occasion.

Tales From the Tonal Fringe: The Kitty Hawk M5

2009-07-06T06:57:00.001-07:00

This is an orphan amp that followed me home this weekend and a price that couldn't be passed up. It's the Kitty Hawk M5 in a low power configuration and it's in more or less working order.

Kitty Hawk was a German production of the 1980s, and it did much to destroy the notion that Germans don't make crap from time to time and foist it off on an unsuspecting world. The build quality was indifferent and low quality components led to the exit from the market of Elektroakustic GmbH from what should have been a cakewalk.

I do not see how the fellows who built this amp with the components they used thought it could survive the rough and tumble world of the traveling musician. Woody's Quad Reverb survived a tumble down a flight of stairs and soldiered on for another ten years before he ever got the idea of fixing it up and sent it to me. The damage was truly astounding.

All that having been said, it's got some good features that should make for some interesting noodling on the tonal fringe. The tone's clear and bright, but volume is a little less than I expected which makes me think it needs some massaging. The old RCA glassware I plugged in last night is a start but more is needed.

Film at 11, as they say. If you stumble over this blog and you've got some technical information on these things, like a complete schematic diagram, you have earned some coffee. Please drop me a line.

The New Frugality In Action: Columbus Firefighter Sweeps Horse's Ass Awards

2009-06-25T08:24:00.001-07:00

We're reliably informed that David Santuomo, a firefighter with the Columbus, Ohio fire department, decided that he and his sig other would take a vacation.

In order to practice the new frugality we've been hearing so much about lately, Santuomo cobbled up a silencer for his rifle and then proceeded to assassinate his two dogs in the basement of his house rather than pay to have them boarded or supervised by neighbors.

He dumped the bodies in a dumpster behind his duty station and bragged to friends about it. The entire affair came to light via an anonymous tip. How much you wanna bet it was one of his mates at the fire station?

It is said he fired 11 shots, which tells you he doesn't know doodley squat about killing dogs or anything else for that matter. A single shot at the base of the skull is sufficient.

Well, nevermind. He pled guilty to animal cruelty and manufacturing a criminal device (a home brew silencer) and was sentenced to ninety days, to be served in ten day increments-which means he'll have to explain it all to a new group of cellies at least nine times.

The jury's still out over whether he gets to keep his job. Anyone that stupid doesn't need a cushy city job.

Talk about giving self respecting criminals a bad name-there oughtta be an entrance examination.

Mark Sanford UPDATE

2009-06-25T06:21:00.000-07:00

Seems that in reality Mark was steppin' out and hound doggin on the little woman.

They Always Kill Their Children First

2009-06-24T07:30:00.000-07:00

We here at the Dougloid Towers have been watching events unfold in Iran, as a crooked election looks to be on its way to a done deal-at least, for now.

I suspect the great tide of history will wash these rascals out of office-maybe sooner, maybe later, quietly or kicking and screaming, but go they will.

One of the things that's notable is that the Boss Hog in Iran these days is always and forever being referred to, even in western news reports as "The Supreme Leader".

One of the telling hallmarks of oppressive government is its penchant for referring to the chief power wielder in such laudatory and self abasing tones: El Caudillo, Maximum Leader, Il Duce, Fuhrer, The Great Helmsman, Dear Leader, Great Leader, and so on.

It appears that although the Iranian state and its thugs and goon squads have succeeded in stifling dissent for now with a combination of prisons, truncheons, and rifle bullets, they've got to know that that is a temporary fix for what ails them, and that is that they stand foursquare against the inalienable right of people to a government of their own choosing that respects the rights of man and the essential dignity of all people.

The picture, of course, is of a demonstrator in Berlin holding a photo of Neda Soltani, gunned down in a Teheran street by the Islamic Republic's gunmen and thugs.

Shame on them.

They can no more hold back the press of events than King Canute could command the tide to halt. Parenthetically, they're proof positive of the abysmal failure of Islamic government to show the world that it's an idea worth considering. Every day, with every tweet and pirated video from a cellphone, the word's getting out.

I am in mind of the last letter Thomas Jefferson ever wrote, to Roger Weightman in late June of 1826. Jefferson was to die less than two weeks later.

Respected Sir

The kind invitation I receive from you on the part of the citizens of the city of Washington, to be present with them at their celebration of the 50th. anniversary of American independance; as one of the surviving signers of an instrument pregnant with our own, and the fate of the world, is most flattering to myself, and heightened by the honorable accompaniment proposed for the comfort of such a journey. it adds sensibly to the sufferings of sickness, to be deprived by it of a personal participation in the rejoicings of that day. but acquiescence is a duty, under circumstances not placed among those we are permitted to controul. I should, indeed, with peculiar delight, have met and exchanged there congratulations personally with the small band, the remnant of that host of worthies, who joined with us on that day, in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword; and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact, that our fellow citizens, after half a century of experience and prosperity, continue to approve the choice we made. may it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings & security of self-government. that form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. all eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. the general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view. the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god. these are grounds of hope for others. for ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

I will ask permission here to express the pleasure with which I should have met my ancient neighbors of the City of Washington and of it's vicinities, with whom I passed so many years of a pleasing social intercourse; an intercourse which so much relieved the anxieties of the public cares, and left impressions so deeply engraved in my affections, as never to be forgotten. with my regret that ill health forbids me the gratification of an acceptance, be pleased to receive for yourself, and those for whom you write, the assurance of my highest respect and friendly attachments.

Th. Jefferson

Where's Waldo, Reloaded

2009-06-24T06:42:00.000-07:00

Let me first preface this by saying that political events in South Carolina are ordinarily of little importance to folks on the prairie, but this is different.

The governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford, disappeared for five days last week and didn't bother telling his staff where he was going-or his wife or anyone else, for that matter. Turns out that when his staffers said he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, they didn't know where the heck he was either.

All anyone knew was that he'd dumped his state provided Suburban at the airport.

Sanford showed up in Atlanta and breezily informed stunned onlookers that he'd been in Buenos Aires-that's right, the one in Argentina, and he was surprised that anyone had noticed, let alone had any concerns.

Sanford is being talked about as a potential GOP candidate for the Big Show in 2012. I don't know about you, but I'd want to know that the chief executive, chief law enforcement officer and commander in chief for my state is, at all times, ready to take action if it is called for without worrying about where he is.

A couple questions, Mark.

What action would you take if your secretary or gardener decided to spend the week in Argentina, leaving their duties and obligations in a heap in the airport departure lounge?

That's right, Mark. You'd fire them, and you'd be justified in doing so. You simply don't down tools and wander off the reservation.

What should we do with you?

Photo courtesy Esquire.

Fixing Stuff, or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Transistor

2009-06-24T06:00:00.000-07:00

A journeyman musician of my acquaintance left a Music Man guitar amplifier here for repairs and I finally got around to digging into it last weekend. After some routine maintenance type repairs that any 30 year old amplifier would need, I figured I couldn't avoid troubleshooting any more.

The procedure for setting the power tube bias voltage level is to measure the voltage developed across the two resistors in the picture and adjust the level with the potentiometer that is in the tip of the picture.

Doing this revealed that there was no voltage being developed on one tube. Releasing the circuit board from captivity revealed that one of the bias transistors had a broken lead.

At least I had the common sense to order up some integrated circuits and bias transistors while I was dithering over what to do.

It works great.

All That Jazz, or, How I Became Qualified to Fix A Refrigerator

2009-06-18T10:49:00.000-07:00

Herewith is presented a cautionary tale for folks who own an Amana ABB1927DEQ refrigerator with the freezer down below.

The problem began when the freezer got iced up and the refrigerator compartment stopped cooling. I figured that the freezer door had inadvertently been left open. It was in need of vacuuming all the previous owner's collection of cat fur out of the vents and off the heat exchanger coils and defrosting for a day.

A week later, we were back with the same problem and this time I figured I'd have to get it right or face the prospect of buying a new fridge.

The conventional wisdom suggested that the fault lay in the auto defrost system, in particular the timer.

Let me explain.

When frost free refrigerators came on the market the defrost cycle was controlled by a mechanical clockwork timer, and that's about how things went for 30 years. Then we entered the brave new world of adaptive defrosting, which incorporated a small circuit board with a proprietary integrated circuit made of unobtainium. The idea is that the refrigerator learns your door opening habits and adjusts the defrosting cycle accordingly.

There is, in addition to the control mechanism (timer or Jazz board) a limiting thermostat (pictured) that ends the defrost cycle if the temperature rises above a set point, and a heating coil that wraps around underneath the cooling coils. Any water thus generated during this cycle is drained off to a small pan for evaporation.

I don't know about you, but I'm not real happy having something that spends its days in the kitchen ruminating on my habits. What's it going to do? Tattle on me to some group of militant vegan energy cops in earth shoes if I slide in for a midnight snack?

Well, nevermind.

In order to do this you have to gain access through the freezer compartment. Removing the baskets, the door, and the slides is simple and easy to do with a small (1/4 inch I think) nut driver. Once the rear panel is exposed it can be removed. Remember everything's plastic and it snaps apart and together, except for stuff that is held together with sheet metal screws.

It also helps to have a schematic diagram handy. I found this one on a website that sells refrigerator parts.

Once the back panel of the freezer compartment is exposed you will see the defrost terminator pictured, and the heater element which is a black insulated thingy that goes around the lower parts of the coils.

With a multimeter you can check the heater from one end to the other. If the resistance is infinite, the heater element is broken and needs to be replaced.

At the same time you can test the defrost terminator by connecting a multimeter to it and then immersing it in a mug full of ice water and salt. If the terminator goes from infinite resistance at room temperature to about 55 ohms it's working properly. In my case the resistance never changed, so the terminator was bad-although it would have let the defroster run all the time, so that wasn't why this fridge iced up.

If you've eliminated the defrost terminator and the heater coil as the sources of your problem you know what's coming because either the timer is bad or the Jazz board has failed.

Opening the upper door there's a panel that houses the temperature selectors and the Jazz board. Popping it open (all plastic, snaps together) exposes the board which is actually two boards permanetly held together with a flat cable. It's easily changed by removing the connectors (white) and opening the plastic tabs.

A new board cost me $83 plus tax and a defrost terminator was about an additional $25 at Allparts in Des Moines.

You can install the defrost terminator thermostat as I did by cutting the wires and using crimped on butt connectors. Tie everything up out of the way with some tie wraps.

Once the Jazz board is installed and the rest of the refrigerator is reassembled you can power it up.

You have to program the Jazz board, and an instruction sheet should be provided with the replacement part. I've reproduced it for you.

Parenthetically, some engineer at the Maytag works where this thing was made must have had a few laughs naming it a Jazz board and using a proprietary integrated circuit that can't be found or duplicated.

Jazz indeed. I hope that person enjoyed losing their job when Maytag closed its doors forever.

Karma is truly a bitch, as they say.

It's been a week or so, and it hasn't iced up again so I'm declaring this one fixed for now.

Koko Taylor

2009-06-04T10:06:00.001-07:00

The last moments of Flight 447

2009-06-04T09:43:00.000-07:00

We're told that the last fifteen minutes of automated telemetry tell a stark tale of the last fifteen minutes of Air France flight 447 that went down over the Atlantic.

At this point it looks like they flew into a wall of thunderstorms.

I remember my old flight instructor Martin Englebreck telling me about a scud running trip he took to Indiana in a C172 one summer day when the thunderstorms start firing up around 2:00 PM. He'd been dodging them for a couple hours until one came along that he couldn't avoid and couldn't turn back from.

Martin said he'd gone in at about 6,000 feet and it was like being in hell's own freight elevator. The thunderstorm spat the C172 out at about 27,000 feet and it had gotten there at an astounding climb rate. Of course the C172 had some pretty significant hail damage and skin wrinkles but the people at Wichita who put it together had built well.

Martin was a lucky man that day, and he knew it.

The moral of the story as he taught it to me is always have a way out, even if it means retracing your steps.

Frederick Luedemann

2009-05-21T07:18:00.001-07:00

Frederick Luedemann (10th from the left in the upper row I think) was a Fireman-First Class on the United States submarine Shark, which was sunk with all hands near Hainan Island October 29, 1944.

Or near Luzon. One account states the following:
SHARK was lost during her third war patrol, probably in the vicinity of Luzon Strait, while participating in a coordinated attack group with submarines SEADRAGON (SS-194) and BLACKFISH (SS-221).
On 24 October, SEADRAGON received a message from SHARK stating that she had made radar contact with a single freighter, and that she was going to attack. This was the last message received from the submarine, and all subsequent attempts to contact SHARK failed.

She was reported as presumed lost on 27 November. According to Japanese records examined after the war, on 24 October 1944, in Luzon Strait, destroyer HARUKAZE made contact with a submerged submarine and dropped depth charges. After losing and regaining the contact, the destroyer dropped another 17 depth charges which resulted in “bubbles, heavy oil, clothes and cork” coming to the surface.

The Shark was a Balao class submarine, and the photo of another Balao class sub, the Lagarto, gives some details of her appearance.

This was brought to the attention of yr obd't servant by one of my namesakes-of whom there are five that I know of and one who I actually paid some bills for without knowing it. It's all good.

Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord, and let Light Perpetual shine upon them.

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends-John, 15:13

____________________________________

UPDATE:

From the Indianapolis Star:

Local Pilot Gets Navy Cross for Sinking Warship

An Indianapolis navy pilot credited with scoring a direct hit on a Jap destroyer and sinking it June 20, 1944, has been awarded the Navy Cross at the Miami (Fla.) navel air station.

He is Lieut. Carl F. Luedemann, 25 years old, brother of Miss Martha Luedemann, 1009 Villa avenue.

The citation accompanying the award read, in part: “Lieut. Luedemann distinguished himself by extraordinary heroism in operations against the enemy as a pilot of a carrier-based torpedo plane in an engagement with the Japanese fleet.

Despite heavy and intense anti-aircraft fire and the presence of enemy fighter planes, he successfully maneuvered his plane into a position to attack an enemy destroyer, obtained a direct hit, sinking the destroyer.”

Lieut, Luedemann, a graduate of Arsenal Technical High School, was enrolled in the school of engineering at Purdue University prior to enlisting in the navy in May, 1941.

He left for overseas duty in August, 1943 and returned to the United States last September.

A brother, Frederick Luedemann, Fireman first class, is serving aboard a submarine in the South Pacific.

Rollin' Rollin' Keep Them Tumbrils Rollin'

2009-05-15T06:52:00.000-07:00

Today 789 or so Chrysler, Dodge Truck, and or Jeep dealerships learned their fate under a new and harsh reality, in the form of a letter delivered by the UPS guy who usually brings the parts to the receiving door.

It is said that before the day is out, the General will announce which of its dealerships will not survive.

Of course, single line Pontiac, Hummer, and Saturn dealerships are done for in the same way that single line Plymouth and Oldsmobile dealerships found themselves without a line of cars to sell not all that long ago.

That reality is that they will no longer have the Chrysler franchise to sell and service new vehicles. Even though that hasn't exactly been setting the world on fire the last few years, it's been a modest living for a lot of folks. The National Auto Dealer's Association-inartfully abbreviated as "NADA" estimates that the combined shutterings from Chrysler and the General will cost 140,000 jobs.

I still haven't figured out how this is going to help whatever comes out of the Chrysler bankruptcy, because in the average auto dealership the dealer's the one with the financial obligation and the inventory of parts and vehicles. If one guy in one little town somewhere sells one car, how's that harm Chrysler?

No doubt the brainiacs from the Harvard Business School have the answer to that, too. Between the trade in derivatives, AIG, the sub prime mortgage debacle, and the banks all on respirators courtesy of the taxpayers, they're doing a helluva job, wouldn't you say? The world would be a far better place if these jokers had a practicum written into the curriculum-you can't graduate until you spend a year working in a factory or servicing cars or picking lettuce in the central valley.

Which of course will never ever happen, even when pigs learn how to fly.

Although no doubt some of the operations that are getting the axe are moribund, still, the pain's going to be felt with the avalanche of pink slips that are sure to follow shortly.

Some notables who are walking up the stairs to the guillotine are Westminster Dodge in Dorchester, Mass., which has been in business selling Chrysler products since 1927 and carried the torch in the bad days of K-Cars and the gas crisis.

Des Moines Chrysler, right in the middle of the auto district, is getting the boot, which is passing strange because Adel Chrysler, a much smaller operation also equidistant from Stu Hansen's is not getting the bum's rush.

Lest we forget, ask yourselves what happened to American Motors and its dealers after Chrysler gobbled them up? People in Kenosha are still angry about that. Paybacks suck, but it's poor and bleak comfort to see more people done out of their livelihoods, at least some of which have supported Walter Chrysler's badge for longer than many people have been around.

It seems that the efforts of the band AutoSalvage, in their signature and only album in 1968, were prescient when they asked "What kind of person owns a fifty-nine Ford?"

Ultimately, we're starting to find out that sustainability is the same thing as a seat in one of the Titanic's lifeboats.

Not everyone's going to survive and a few people are going to get thrown overboard.

Memo From The Red Brick Universities: Free My People

2009-05-07T07:42:00.000-07:00

I've read a trenchant and worthwhile commentary on CNN.com today which raises an issue that nobody ever wants to talk about and that is the monopoly stranglehold-a deathgrip, really- that Yale and Harvard Law have on the Supreme Court and the judiciary in this country.

There are about 193 or so ABA approved law schools in this country and a number of other good ones in the great state of California that do not parrot the ABA party line and so are denominated as lesser lights, suitable only for training courthouse johnnies, rude frontiersmen and ambulance chasers.

The people they graduate, for the most part, go on to demonstrate that they have what it takes to get the job done. They are what you call "lawyers".

Most of these schools have rarely had a graduate sit on a federal bench, and even fewer have had graduates elevated to the federal appellate bench or the Supreme Court.

It gets worse. Brian Leiter has collected data on which law schools have had a student clerk for a supreme court justice. There are exactly 33 schools that have had a student clerk for a Supremeo since 2000, and the lion's share of those assignments went to a handful of schools. Of the 319 clerks. the top ten schools accounted for 274, and the top five accounted for 220.

That kind of numerical distribution is not only damned unfair, it's scandalous. In any other context that kind of statistical skew would be prima facie evidence of outrageous discrimination. It stinks of cronyism and an old boy network that makes the White Citizens' Councils look like a bunch of liberal commies.

Yo, Supremes, I'm talking at you.

It's the kind of patent unfairness that limits the future of students from the red brick universities. Parenthetically it cuts at the heart of egalitarian notions that many of us aspire to, and that was one of the reasons that some of us got into this line of work anyway-out of a sense of righting great injustices that were hoary with age.

What it is is a message: don't attempt to rise too far above your stations, o ye unwashed.

And it sticks in my craw.

Professor Timothy O'Neill teaches at John Marshall School of Law in Chicago and he's got this to say:

It is certainly true that the court needs more racial and gender diversity. Yet the homogeneity of the work résumés of the current justices is unprecedented. The right nominee would help to correct this.

Many commentators have noted that this is the first Supreme Court in American history in which every justice has come from exactly the same job: judge on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

But there are other "firsts" that are equally disturbing.

For the first time in American history, not a single justice has had any legislative experience. Not one has ever been elected to Congress, a state legislature or a city council.

The point's well taken but Professor O'Neill doesn't take it far enough. The whole structure is ingrown, incestuous, and stinking with injustice.

Friends of General Ludd

2009-04-28T06:31:00.001-07:00

I saw this posting on one of my online hangouts and here's my response to it.

Consolidated ideas from a few threads below and my recent take on it: Went into a "standard" electronics store in town a week or two ago looking for a cap can wafer or cap can clamp (this was before Tom Pierce sent me one--Thanks again Tom!). The electronics store is a few notches above Radio Shack and sells ICs, switches, solder, shrink tubing, etc... you get the picture. They also do repair on stereos, VCRs, etc. I walked in with my cap can and asked the "twenty-something" behind the counter if he had a wafer or a clamp for the cap can. He took a glance at at and said "oh, that's for a starter motor, isn't it. We don't have anything for that." I had to explain to him what it was and he responded that there's no application for that type of thing, so therefore the store wouldn't have anything like that. And I'm thinking to myself that the sign in the window says they repair stereos, etc., and stereos have capacitor banks, and those capacitors are either held down by a wafer or a clamp... After he recommended going "on line to look" I responded that there certainly is application for the cap can and that I could have purchased the wafer from several on-line sources, but wanted to keep it local. And this kid works in an electronics store...

That's what Father Martin always talked about when he said that something had the outward and visible signs but lacked the inward and spiritual grace. The rule applies to matters temporal as well as spiritual, methinks.

I mean, why is anyone really surprised here? What's interesting to me is how fast the technology disappeared from general usage and from the lexicon of most people along with the tube testers in the drug store.

Looking deeper, I'm in mind of a fellow-a sociologist-who did a study of welfare families in Washington, D.C.. He found that there were families in which three generations in a household were on welfare-which is neither here nor there-but what he discovered was that in such families there was no one in living memory who had ever held a job or had the slightest inkling of what that was all about.

In fact, when you bring up this general subject (three generations and out), most people bridle at the notion: "What the hell are you talking about?! It's always been this way!" when really, it hasn't always been that way. We haven't always been addicted to video games and McDonalds, and at one time you could cross the entire country on the interurbans and trolley lines.

I think you can take that rule-three generations and out-and apply it to a lot of things: horse drawn agriculture, steam engines, public transportation, home canning, Sunday dinners with the family, home cooked meals, one earner families where Dad was always home on Saturday, newspapers, local brewers, the Borden's milkman and the Sunshine breadman, cobblers, tinkers, and the Italian cutler who'd come around every few months and sharpen Mother's kitchen knives and scissors. The truck had a bell which the cutler would ring in a special manner-ting ting ting-ita tingity ting and repeat.

Of course, when you do succeed in eliminating a base of knowledge you also reduce the number of people who knew what the reasons were that it existed in the first place and what advantages can be gained from it.

This phenomenon serves the interests of some folks too. If you're McDonalds, you sure as hell don't want people eating at home or going to cooking classes.

Parenthetically, the present economic contretemps is compelling people some to start looking at a lot of ways of doing things that are economical and thrifty (where did THAT notion go?) and calling it the 'new frugality' when in reality it never really went away.

Bobster, I think you are a friend of General Ned Ludd. So am I.

Rollin' With Bone

2009-04-21T11:49:00.000-07:00

I figured out how to get the CD player working in the Ford Ranger this morning and loaded in T-Bone Walker: The Complete Imperial Recordings from 1954.

I do not think there is much to top tooling down the highway listening to the blues.

What do I mean?

Give ear, o ye multitude.

Iowa Supremes Step Up

2009-04-03T08:15:00.000-07:00

Varnum v. Brien, no. 07-1499 (Iowa April 3, 2009)

In a decision that is sure to provoke commentary among a lot of people, the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously held today that the state's statute that limited civil marriage to a man and a woman was violative of the equal protection clause of the Iowa constitution.

In doing so, the court affirmed the lower court ruling handed down by Judge Hanson in Polk County last year.

The court applied a standard of intermediate scrutiny and determined that none of the stated objectives of the statute banning gay marriage had been met, and determined that none of the objectives of the statute were being met by exclusion, and did not further any important governmental objective.

Iowa thus becomes another state where there appears to be a newly emergent consensus about the right to marry under equal protection principles.

I'm quite sure the folks who are in the business of issuing marriage licenses just got a boost in their custom. And the folks who find demonic possession under every bedstead in the land just had an uptick, too.

For a Florida Boy

2009-04-01T19:39:00.001-07:00

Way down south in the Everglades
Where the black water rolls and the saw grass waves
The eagles fly and the otters play
In the land of the Seminole

Dougloid Booted Off Of A.Net. Life Goes On

2009-03-19T12:55:00.000-07:00

I've been permanently banned from posting on airliners.net for the silliest of reasons.

Here's the commo I received, and my response to it.

----- Original Message -----

From: VC-10

To: rwluedeman@mchsi.com

Cc: Moderators

Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2009 1:14 PM

Subject: Dougloid - A.net Account Terminated

Dear Dougloid.

I write to inform you your a.net account has been permanently closed. The reason for this is your very long history of posting flamebait/disrespecting posts. We had tried discussing this with you but your latest response to us was -

I will take it in good grace and I shall leave the arena bloody but unbowed. Sometimes you just have to stand up to people even though you know it's going to have a cost.

This demonstrates you have no intention of changing your post style to comply with a.net rules

I suspended you in 2006 and your response then was

Hey, no problem....I can't promise I'll wash my mouth out with soap-only my mom gets to do that-but I shall mind my Ps and Qs henceforth.

Here we a 2 and a half years later and the moderators are still having to tidy up after you. Well we are not going to do it any longer.

Rgds
Paul
VC-10
Head Moderator

Here's my response.

You know what? I couldn't give a damn. I've got work to do here.

If you people are so scared of whiners that you won't back me when I take some Hitler/SS fanboy like Caltech to task because you're afraid that some Germans might be offended then you're running a pretty piss poor shop.

Fact is, what I told him-specifically, historical matters that were the objective of the Nazi state-is probably something that no present day German could be offended by because they are matters of fact-people DID get turned into lampshades and bars of soap, courtesy of the SS.

Somewhere or other you people decided that it was your personal mission to ride herd on me and get my ass booted off and you succeeded. Whatever.

Have a nice life.

In the Name of God, Go.

2009-03-15T11:18:00.000-07:00

CNN informs us this morning that AIG-you know, the "insurance" company that did such a good job with credit default swaps that they had to run whining and sniveling to the taxpayers for relief from the consequences of their greed and stupidity to the tune of $170 billion because they were "too big to fail"-where was I?

Oh, I remember. AIG, which managed to lose another $62 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008, is now prepared to hand out $165 million in bonuses to their employees.

Barney Frank thinks we can't violate legal obligations to pay. What in the hell is the US Attorney's office doing? Tell the bastards to sue if they want their bonuses.

Wait a minute. In my world, you get a bonus if you exceed expectations and produce more than you're expected to.

Apparently, in AIGworld, you get rewarded for f**king up, and you get more the worse you f**k up.

Lose money? Get a check. Fail to perform? Get a check. Lose billions? Get a check.

This has simply got to stop.

You know what I think? Here's my recommendation.

Break that bastard up.

Take it over, sort out the business units, sell off the ones that make money, scrap the ones that do not, and get these shameless sons of bitches the hell out on the street where they belong.

I'm in mind of the words of Cromwell to the rump Parliament all those years ago: "In the name of God, go. You have sat here too long for the good you have done. Go, I say, and let us have done with you."

Stephen Harper on Who To Blame For the Recession

2009-03-14T07:19:00.000-07:00

Here's what he said.

"We are in a global recession principally-and we have to face this-because a lot of people on Wall Street, because of a lot of people in the private sector more generally-homeowners or consumers-pushed or bought into a very unconservative idea:that they could live beyond their means.
Regulators may have failed to prevent it, but in the end, it was a failure of the private sector to live according to the values we conservatives know to be true."

He goes on to say that Canadians showed more restraint-although I've been watching Property Virgins and The Property Shop and Buy Me for the last year or so and I see nothing but a real estate bubble in Toronto and Montreal that has not yet burst and one that did blow up with the decline in housing prices in Alberta-that damned petrodollar, y'know-but nevermind.

The human drive to live without working for it is alive worldwide, and perhaps the inherently risk-averse nature of Canadian lending practices served as a useful check on the excesses that people would have otherwise indulged in. It's no sign of moral superiority, however, that people restrain you from your natural tendency toward wretched excess.

And be it remembered, part of the reason Canada did so well and now is suffering such high unemployment is that there was a knock-on effect as the Europeans say, the money tide washed north along with the flood of bootleg handguns, and now that tide is receding.

We're joined at the hip like tenants in the same apartment building and that's unlikely to change anytime soon.

The point is well taken about living beyond your means though, and there is much wailing, piteous yowyowing and various and sundry other kvetching noises here. The gnashing of teeth is becoming tiresome background noise in these parts.

Having said all that, it occurred to me that perhaps the problem lies, not in the fundamental belief that one could prosper without working for it-as speculators do-but in the belief that what was good for Wall Street and Citigroup was good for Joe and Jane Doaks-every man a speculator-and the money vault being unaccountably unlocked and unguarded.

That, I think, should be the fundamental inquiry: not whether average folk had more temptation placed within easy reach than a person could ordinarily resist, or that they had the understandable urge to live as large as they could grab, or that they saw housing prices escalating 20 per cent every year and thought the party could last forever-but why and how that notion was allowed to exist.

The breakdown of lending standards was a necessary precondition to the orgy that followed, methinks.

Ultimately, value has to come from somewhere, and it is only grown through productivity. The rest of us are merely moving stones around the board of the greatest game of Go ever invented.

It's no mystery that Yahweh says to Adam 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

There's much sage thought on the human condition in that Book.

Photo courtesy of the Department of Culture-bes' li'l ole political advocacy group in the North, because they've got soul power, doncha see?

Get the resemblance?

2009-03-07T21:31:00.001-08:00

See the likenesses?

Thank you, Mister Atkins.

2009-03-03T19:29:00.000-08:00

Jake's home from foreign shores and we're all glad to have him back, like Job, in the bosom of his family.

Thinking about this reminded me of Kipling's musings on the life of a soldier man. Not much has changed from the Widow's day.

I went into a public-'ouse to get a pint o' beer,
The publican 'e up an' sez, "We serve no red-coats here."
The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I:

O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, go away";
But it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play,
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play.

I went into a theatre as sober as could be,
They gave a drunk civilian room, but 'adn't none for me;
They sent me to the gallery or round the music-'alls,
But when it comes to fightin', Lord! they'll shove me in the stalls!

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, wait outside";
But it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide,
The troopship's on the tide, my boys, the troopship's on the tide,
O it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide.

Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap;
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.

Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, 'ow's yer soul?"
But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll,
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll.

We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;

While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, fall be'ind",
But it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind,
There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
O it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind.

You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool -- you bet that Tommy sees!

His Heart Was In Sweet Eleuthera: A Memory

2009-02-20T09:50:00.000-08:00

RTL, 1919-2001.

There's a grave where an old man's body lies among strangers. Nobody visits it much.

It's odd how people the old man lived with and loved and died among were strangers to him as well but it is so-save only one of his who was there at the last.

In the end, they turned out his pockets for spare change and forgot all about

who he was

and what he'd been

and the place he came from

and the battles he fought

and the dreams he dreamed

and the dreams that died

and what he thought about

and what he stood for

and who his people were

and what he'd done in his life

and the things that angered him

and the children he'd held

and the women he'd loved

and the feel of sweet Eleuthera's soft sand under the bare feet of his boyhood

and the smell of sweet Eleuthera's blossoms

and the slap of sweet Eleuthera's ripples against the hull

and the cries of sweet Eleuthera's market women

and the heat of sweet Eleuthera's noonday sun and the shade of her plazas

and the silence of sweet Eleuthera's circling gulls

and the roar of sweet Eleuthera's long Atlantic combers

if they'd ever thought about it at all.

He lies on a snowy hillside in a sad and brooding northern place where winter's gray clouds press up against dark forests far from sweet Eleuthera.

Sweet Eleuthera-in the blue southern ocean-is where his spirit rests.

*Eleuthera is Greek for "freedom".

Arrrrrrrrr, Ye Scurvy Dogs!

2009-02-16T09:41:00.000-08:00

We're reliably informed by a gentleman in the country of unquestioned veracity....well, OK, it was a newspaper....that the folks behind Pirate Bay are going on trial in Sweden for wholesale copyright violation facilitation.

Here's how it worked. The site does not actually store copyrighted material in its servers but merely provides a medium whereby members may exchange files among themselves-kinda like Napster, Kazaa, Grokster and a passel of others did, before they were shut down.

"B-b-but Sparky!" you say, "I-i-isn't it good for people to share?"

Well, of course it is, little feller, but what we are asking the court to decide is whether providing a medium for people to evade copyright law and rip off the owners of the intellectual property therein is sufficient provocation to bring the law down on them.

The issue's been settled adversely in this country, and the Swedes tried to shut the operation down but it now seems that it's not going to be that easy because it's decentralized itself you see.

To add insult to injury, the fellows who are behind all this have an archive of correspondence from people who would like them to stop facilitating their being ripped off, and their....ahem....responses thereto. It makes interesting, if somewhat juvenile, reading.

The takehome will be interesting.

Taliban Scores Incredible Victory

2009-02-11T08:45:00.000-08:00

We're reliably informed by the Times that once again the Taliban have demonstrated that they sure know how to get things done in Pakistan.

Why, in the quest to prove their point and to liberate the Ummah and drive the hated Crusaders into the sea and to show those furriners that they're not going to take any more crap they.......a drum roll, maestro!

They beheaded a Polish geologist and made a snuff flick. That's right, folks.

Piotr Stanczak, a Polish geologist working in the area adjacent to the northwest frontier territories was kidnaped four months ago. He was beheaded by Taliban operatives who of course memorialized it in film.

Great work, guys. You're sure to bring Judgment Day one step closer. Seventy two virgins are on the way, rush delivery, courtesy of the good people of Poland.

Doin' the Monkey

2009-02-09T18:52:00.000-08:00

We're reliably informed by no less than the Washington Post that drugs have been found that will block HIV in monkeys.

Fellows, you've been warned about the company you keep. And it also demonstrates that maybe on the simian scale we're not as advanced as we seem to think.

A rose by any other name

2009-02-05T11:41:00.000-08:00

We're reliably informed that the great "What the hell's that smell? It smells like maple syrup!" mystery has been unraveled by Hizzoner, Michael Bloomberg, mayor of the self styled "big apple".

Bloomberg also called a press conference to announce the joyous news.

Don't worry. It isn't. The big apple, that is.

Now. Let's see, where was I?

Oh. I remember. The smells.

As it happens, nearly every time something smells in New York, the N'yaarkers find a way to blame it on people in New Jersey, and it looks like this is no different.

It seems that the olfactory malefactors have been identified as Frutarom, a firm in Bergen County that processes fenugreek seeds, a spice that is used in mideastern and asian cooking.

Well. Let me serve notice on Hizzoner.

The prevailing winds blow from west to east, so nobody in Manhattan gets to breathe it before we're damn good and done with it.

Next time it might not smell like maple syrup either.

So there, Mikey. Shut yer pie hole.