Quick, while the government's shut down

So I carry a small plastic dongle that opens and closes my garage door. So far, it's basically done just that. You push a button, it transmits a radio signal to the door opener, and there you go.

Last night, we went out and got take-out for dinner. Coming home, I was riding in the passenger's seat and holding the food on my lap. As we drove up to the house, I fumbled around for my opener (which is on a carabiner, clipped to my belt, along with all my other keys). Pushed the button, no result. Again, nothing. Linda dug out her opener and the door opened. "Dammit" I thought, "battery's dead." Nope. Once we were inside, mine worked fine.

This morning, heading out for coffee, it worked properly again.

So, while everybody in DC is otherwise engaged, I'm going to send DARPA a proposal for research into ground and formed and sliced lamb, wrapped in pita bread, as a security material and general radio signal blocker. If all goes well in phase one, phase two will involve surrounding the Pentagon with bunkers of gyros sandwiches.

A third little mystery

Due to being one of the annoying people who send him mail, I'm now on Governor Snyder's email list. This week, he sent me a messzage that said, in part:

“Unlike Washington, we found a way in Michigan to get our fiscal house in order. We've balanced our budget three years in a row, eliminated a $1.5 billion deficit and have saved over $500 million in our rainy day fund. We did it by setting politics aside, planning ahead, and solving one problem after another with relentless positive action."


I am putting together a FOIA request for all documents related to what the Governor's been smoking.

Another of life's mysteries

So we got together with some people I went to college with. The weird thing was, I wasn't a decade older than any of them!

One of life's mysteries

So every time I open a news story these days, I see people being referred to as "coworkers". I didn't know we were still that much of an agricultural society. And what the hell is "orking", anyway?

Every year ...

... along about this time it all goes dry. Nothin' there for love or money that'll get you ...

Wait. Sorry. I shouldn't listen to New Riders while I'm blogging. I'll start over.

Every year along about this time the people who make news and the journalists (or what passes for them) who report on it return from vacation, During their absence, the volume of silly, irrelevant stories, focusing on silly, irrelevant people usually goes way up, and then, boom!, at the end of August, things get serious again. This morning, with my granola, I ran across all of the following, just in about ten minutes reading.

• Snarking about Detroit: First, the Mayor of Boston, Thomas Menino, said that he'd consider living in Detroit, but that he'd "...blow the place up and start all over." He attributed Detroit's problems to poor leadership. Not surprisingly, the man currently demonstrating the accuracy of that assessment, Detroit's lame-ass duck mayor, Dave Bing, says "Nuh-uh!". The best Bing could come up with as a riposte was to criticize Menino's use of the phrase "blow up", considering Boston's recent unfortunate incident. Classy, Mr. Mayor.
  
  Then, not willing to leave well enough alone, the ex-Mayor of Milwaukee, John O. Norquist, weighed in, saying that tearing down the city is a "stupid idea".
  
  This puts Bing in a difficult place, having on the one hand to resent the suggestion from one of his peers that Detroit should be blown up, while simultaneously hearing from another (ex)head of a decaying Midwestern berg-on-a-lake metropolis that his, Bing's, policy of tearing things down is "stupid." Tough place to be, especially since Mayor Bing is now mostly assigned to fetching coffee for Kevin Orr, the Emergency Manager.
  
  
  
• Not everyone, of course, is talking in these critical terms about the city. Beloved musical performer and one-time Pepsi spokesman MC Hammer publicly prayed for Detroit, saying "... Detroit still can't be touched!" We concur, in the same sense that it's inadvisable to touch a rattlesnake or in the sense your mother had in mind when she said "Don't touch that! You don't know where it's been!"
  
  
• Moving up to the state level, Michigan is apparently on a list of states (actually so are almost half of the rest of 'em) that "...do not require schools or day care centers to meet minimum standards to protect children during major emergencies...". This is deplorable, especially in light of recent disasters such as the continued threat from the legislature. "We just don't have any plan for dealing with these statewide attacks on our educational system," said a spokesman for Is-our-children-lerning?, a non-profit organization concerned with cuts in educational funding. "I mean, are you aware that unlike dozens of other states, Michigan has no plan for arming third-graders and sending them to Lansing?"
  

There were other interesting bits of commentary by other interesting nit-wits, including good old Donald Rumsfeld, snarking at the President for not having nuked Damascus yet, but frankly, it's time to get something useful done.

Well, this is going to be boring

This blog has long maintained an editorial policy of fairness and impartiality, not to mention the use of pseudonyms, but recently we have been coerced into convinced to publish a series of political and social rants essays by a famous author and publisher who, as part of the bargain, agrees to attribution. This is the first.

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Clearly, the Olympics exist to sell advertising (same-same the Superbowl). While the claim is that they provide revenue and investment for the cities that host the games, a look at the actual effects shows that to be a blatant lie. Facilities for the games have been widely treated as excuses for slum clearance and displacement of urban populations, and the structures, once the games are over, become decaying reminders of squandered public funds. The games also claim to offer talented amateurs a path to glory and recognition. The facts suggest otherwise. And the idea that the Olympics are somehow a way of achieving peaceful communication among diverse peoples -- well, as the cliche' goes, how's that working out for you? Diverse peoples are at each others' throats just as much as they ever were, whether the diversity is ethnic, religious, political, or gender-based.

So no, the Olympics are a corporation whose product is publicity. They would not exist, at least in their current form, unless corporations with their own products to sell provided sponsorship. And that brings us to a recommendation.

As you have probably heard (unless you're deaf and blind), the upcoming Winter Olympics are planned for the city of Sochi, in Russia. That's Russia, the one with the sub-human social agenda, a country almost if not quite as widely-despised by everyone as we are (albeit for different reasons). Russia's frankly insane laws concerning homosexuality have caused people to poke at the International Olympic Committee, suggesting a change of venue to someplace with a more enlightened outlook -- Texas, for example; Russia makes Houston look like Stockholm. However, the IOC, like the German General Staff in 1914, says it's too late to make a change. The fact that one of the IOC's goals is to "Act against any form of discrimination affecting the Olympic Movement" appears not to be operative, as the Nixon administration once said. For reference, here's their fundamental principle Number 4:

The practice of sport is a human right. Every individual must have the possibility of
practising sport, without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which
requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.

Despite this, on the strength of an assurance from Russia that they were just kidding and everything's going to be just fine, the IOC is adamant.

So what's to be done, if anything, to get them to think again? Probably nothing. The Olympics will go on, in Russia, and civil rights be damned. But here's a notion. Contact the IOC and your own national Olympic committee, plus the network that will be broadcasting the games, plus the major corporate sponsors that sign up, and promise them that if the event is held in Russia:

• You will not attend
  
• You will not watch or listen to broadcasts of the games
  
• You will not purchase products of sponsors (e.g., McDonald's and Coke)
  
• If you own stock in those companies, consider selling it (and tell them that)
  
• If you own shares of a mutual fund that invests in sponsors, contact the fund's manager and complain
  
• And, if you were thinking of it, you will no longer donate to any Olympic fund or appeal
  

In summary, you'll do what an individual can do to reduce the value of their product. And then, most importantly, keep those promises.
Write to: International Olympic Committee Lausanne, Switzerland.
USOC: United States Olympic Committee US Olympic Complex Colorado Spring, Colorado
Coke and McDonald's linked above
Other sponsors
by Joe McConnell

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Coming up next on Lexicographical Mockery

Previously Undescribed: The Journal of Abstracted Breaking Research

In the previous post, I used the term "CONOPS", and a number of readers have asked for a further explanation of that term. In the jargon of the military and of other government organizations, the notion of a brief statement concerning the ways in which a proposed entity would be deployed and used is known as a Concept of Operations. This has been shortened to CONOPS under the requirements of the federal Acronymic or Mnemonic Notational/Operational Theme (which, itself, came into being after an engineering executive characterized his Director of Business Development as a Fuzz-Brained Fumble-Mouthed Imbecile (FBFMI), and the head of BD replied, "AMNOT!"). But I digress.

The CONOPS (which, it should be remembered, doesn't address requirements, design, or production in great detail, but rather talks about how the thing in question will be used, once it's escaped been deployed) has been in use for a long time, but only recently have we come to know exactly how long. In 2010, excavations at a Paleolithic site in Eastern Europe, dated to around 47,000 years BCE, turned up a mastodon scapula (Mammuthus meridionalis), covered with scratches (Figure 1).
Subjected to a lengthy computerized analysis, it has now been deciphered and tentatively identified as the world's oldest known CONOPS. (The authors of the article describing it, which was published last month in the open-access Journal of Hopeful Science, believe it is part of a longer document, proposing a firm-fixed-price program to the Talking Chief of the tribe of The Hirsute One (Figure 2), known from other early epigraphical finds as the center of a notorious procurement scandal, "The Sloth Stew for Sex" affair.)

The proposed (and still somewhat conjectural) translation is as follows:

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Yearly Augmentation of Anti-Animal Weaponry Program (YAAAWP) for the Year-When-the-Auditors-Sleep, respectfully submitted to his unshaven muscularity, the Great Talking Chief. Greeting.

This program entails (might actually read "entrails". Ed.) selection of a number of the currently deployed Tribal Forces and re-equipping them with a new Meat Procurement Device (MPD), based on the Flame-Involved Reconfiguration Experiment (FIRE) concept, proven in earlier programs. The new equipment which is proposed here will be called the Sharply-Pointed-Element Augmentation of Reach (SPEAR). It will require three separate phases and, as noted below, one additional sub-program.

Phase one will call for identifying the individual tribe members who are to receive the SPEAR equipment, and for storing their current weaponry (the BluntInst mark 2 club and/or the BigRox throwing projectiles). Simultaneously, contractors will gather a number of linearly-consistent tree parts (straight-STIX) equal to the number of program participants. Note that successful completion of this phase will depend on the outcome of an algorithm development sub-program, Beyond The Thumb, which will provide a computational capability for handling numbers greater than three.

Phase two will involve training the participants in techniques for weaponry readiness and maintenance, relying on FIRE technology to render the distal ends of the straight-STIX pointier and more robust. Each SPEAR-equipped meat acquisition specialist will be issued a maintenance and user's guide covering topics such as "Starting a fire", "Finding a flat rock", "Rubbing things on rocks versus hammering things with rocks", and "Reading".

Phase three will provide final training in the use of the SPEAR technology. This will require construction of a simulator, including a large circular enclosure made of very big rocks, in which SPEAR-equipped trainees and one or more volunteer mammoths will be introduced. (This may be seen as "final" training in more than one sense of the logogram.)

Phase four is considered out of scope of this document, since the Beyond The Thumb sub-program has not yet been ...

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At this point, the writer of the CONOPS ran out of room on the scapula he (or she) was using, and no additional pages have been identified. An almost-unmarked femur of Ursus spelaeus (Figure 3) was found in association with the scapula, but all it said was "This bone intentionally left blank."

Summer pasta

CONOPS: use up some of the vegetables obsessively purchased at the Farmer's Market.

Ingredients
Summer squash and/or zucchini, 1 or 2, diced
Sweet corn, 2 ears, kernels cut off, cobs reserved
Tomatoes, 1/4 cup, diced
Dried porcini mushrooms, 2 TBSP, tied up in cheesecloth
Onion, diced, 2 TBSP or scallions, 3 or 4, chopped
Fresh greens (any kind), 1/2 cup, torn
Pine nuts, 2 TBSP
Butter, 1 Oz
Parmigiano or Romano, 1/4 cup, grated
Bacon, 2 slices, finely diced
Mild pork sausage, 1 cup, diced, sliced, or crumbled
Heavy cream, 1 1/2 cups
Beef bullion concentrate, 1 TSP
Garlic clove, 1/2
Dried pasta, 1/2 lb
Olive oil

Prep
Prepare the ingredients in 7 batches:
Batch 1: bacon and sausage
Batch 2: corn cobs, cut in two so as to fit in a sauce pan, and the porcini
Batch 3: cream, beef bullion concentrate, garlic
Batch 4: squash / zucchini, corn kernels, tomatoes, onion, pine nuts
Batch 5: cheese, butter
Batch 6: greens
Batch 7: pasta

Add Batch 2 to a large sauce pan. Add 2 cups of water, bring to a boil, reduce to simmer, and cook, uncovered, for 30 minutes. Drain, reserve 1 cup of the water, and discard solids.

Firing
Heat oil in a large saute pan. Cook Batch 1 until slightly browned - 10 to 15 minutes. Remove to a bowl. Do not clean the pan.

Combine Batch 3 in a large sauce pan. Heat gently, covered. Check frequently to avoid boiling over or boiling dry.

In a stock pot or pasta pot, boil water for the pasta.

Add Batch 4 to the saute pan (with more oil if necessary). Cook, stirring occasionally, over low heat for 30 minutes.

12-15 minutes before the vegetables will be done, add the reserved corn cob/porcini water to the stock pot and cook the pasta. When pasta is done, remove cream sauce from heat, discard the garlic, and stir in the cheese. Add the meat back into the saute pan for a minute or two to re-heat. Drain pasta and place in a large bowl. Add vegetables and meat. Toss. Add sauce. Toss. Add greens. Toss. Serve immediately.

As if wage disputes weren't bad enough

While fast food workers across the country agitate for higher pay and for working conditions that are not modeled on sodium chloride mining operations in Siberia, smaller groups are also demanding recognition and, unusually, better lexical treatment. Here are three stories from recent news coverage.

Spain is a major source of wine corks, and the industry provides substantial employment for agrarian workers. However, some specialists in the work force object to the dismissive manner in which management addresses them. Specifically, the teams of skilled technicians (many of whom suffer from severe speech disorders) who gather the shaped final product and bulk-package it are asking for a more dignified term for their profession. They object strongly to being listed in personnel rosters as "that bunch of dumb cork sackers."

Closer to home, US obstetric facilities are experiencing periodic spikes in demand, days when large numbers of women simultaneously go into labor (usually during full moons or nine months after widespread power outages). When this happens, normal ambulance service can be overwhelmed, and other vehicles are pressed into service, including delivery vans and even semi trucks. In order to regularize the employment status of the temporary personnel who operate this ad hoc patient transportation, a study was done and the age, sex, income, ethnic background, and other attributes of the operators were collected and analyzed. One individual, a man in New Jersey, was identified as having all the average characteristics, and there were plans to use him as a spokesman, but he refused to participate after an NIH administrator referred to him as "a mean mother trucker."

Finally, concerns over semantics are not limited to the human species. Here in Ann Arbor, a quadrupedally-advantaged person of fur is involved in a close primary race for a city council seat. After his opponent made what would, under other taxonomic circumstances, have been a derogatory reference, Mr. Hamilton "Ham" Mudd stated for the record, "Yes! I admit it! I'm a son of a bitch. So is he. And that guy over there. We're all sons of bitches! Now, can we get on with it?"

Management at Wood-Charles regrets that it finds itself unable to find better material than the above, but it promises to try.

Will the congregaton please rise?

I take my text today from the book of Camping, chapter 21, verses 119-223.

And there were three men who came unto the Campground of Wilderness, by the shore. The first man brought his wife, who was comely and well-shapen, and golden of hair, and scanty was her raiment. The second man brought also his wife, who was similarly golden of hair, though her robes were more modest, and brought he also bicycles of many gears, bound with bonds of bungy to the posterior of his SUV. The third man came in his richly caparisoned pickup truck, and hitched to it was his fishing vessel, shiny and new, gleaming like the cohorts of the Assyrian.

And the first and second men did pitch their tents near to one another. The second man and his wife unpacked their goods, and they unstrapped their two-wheeled steeds, and prepared they to ride forth upon them. The first man and his wife also unpacked their belongings, and they did strew them in an untidy manner upon the ground.

Then the third man came by, riding in his pickup truck and dragging behind it his splendid boat.

And God prepared for the faithful a lesson. Lo, the second man nearly fell off his bicycle, so did he covet the first man's wife, while the first man saw this not, so busy was he that he nearly tripped over his baggage, coveting the third man's bass boat. And the wives took no notice, so accustomed were they to their husbands' ways.

And God did laugh. And he forbore to punish them for coveting each others' bling, but instead he summoned Moses and ordered him to tighten up the wording of the tenth commandment. And Moses did protest, saying "Verily, we are ready to ship!" And God said unto him, "Oh, come on. It is but a small matter of programming."

Here endeth the lesson.