Fireworks

If you like fireworks you should LOVE this... it's SPECTACULAR in full screen, 1080p HD!

It's a funny-strange thang, but I don't recall fireworks on New Year's Eve... at least on this scale... when I lived in Ol' Blighty.  The Beeb usually put their cameras in Trafalgar Square to capture the crazies cavorting in the fountains.  The Second Mrs. Pennington and I talked about goin' down there (T-Square) on New Year's Eve and joining in but we never did pull THAT trigger.  Good sense prevailed, thank The Deity at Hand.

It's Still 2012

And speaking of the New Year... the Beeb has a short slide show of New Year's Eve pics from all over the world, these bein' my two faves:

The clocks make the photos, don't they?  I have serious trouble believing the Rooshians partied in Red Square sans wodka.  But then again, I heard alcohol was banned in Times Square,too.  What's this world comin' to?

―:☺:―

The holidays have been hell on blog traffic here at EIP.  Note:

Paradoxically, December was our best month ever...

I dunno what happened but we came within a tick of doubling our visits and page views compared to December 2010.  And I thank you for your patronage!

Happy New Year!

Cue Up Tevye

As in... Tradition!  Blogging tradition, that is.  This year we'll just post a link to our UCR Boxing Day post.  If you've read it, you've read it and if you haven't?  Well, do what ya think is right.  Here's a pic from the sometimes-revised story to whet yer appetite:

To quote myself: "That's SN1, The Lovely Miz Lynch, and YrHmblScrb at a world-famous pile o' rocks, the pic which just might have been taken 20 21 years ago today."  That's not entirely true, it would be more like 21 years ago the day after tomorrow.  I spent Boxing Day of 1990 partying in London.

―:☺:― 

We wound up with a White Christmas after all.  It snowed lightly ALL day yesterday but the temp stayed stuck at 32 degrees or just slightly above until nightfall.  The upshot was we got about a one inch accumulation after sunset, with wet streets and patches of snow prior to that.  We were completely white when I got up this morning but it's melting off rapidly on its way to 40-something degrees.  Still and even: prettier than it sounds.

―:☺:―

I saw this Christmas Eve but didn't wanna ruin Christmas by posting political shit.  After all, Christmas IS a time of peace on earth and good will toward men, and that would include Young President Barry.  But this is pretty good...

Yeah... I've used the theme from Masterpiece Theatre to play the pompous ass myself.  Perfect!

Merry Christmas!

M E R R Y  C H R I S T M A S

God Bless Us, Every One!

Santa Update II

Santa's biggest challenge in Amsterdam might be understated.  Or flat out wrong... keeping Rudolph away from those other red lights might be right up there on the challenge list, too.  I found that to be true.  But I DID enjoy the architecture; that's why I went.  That and other cultural opportunities.

My server at The Bulldog, c. 1999.

Santa Update

I'm surprised the PLA Air Force didn't shoot him down.  Or detain and accuse him of bein' a Runnin' Dog Capitalist spy.  I guess New Capitalism does mellow ya.  Somewhat.

Don't Forget!

I'm getting excited!  We ALWAYS track Santa here at EIP; it's in our blood.

Back when I was in the radar biz we used to do this sort of thing locally for the families of the guys at the radar sites where I was stationed. Back in the day every USAF long-range aircraft control and warning (AC&W) radar site had a video mapping device that fed programmed exercise video to Operations; the normal output from the video mapper was "canned" and consisted of video blips simulating actual aircraft. The video mapper was used to train ground-control intercept controllers and technicians during the course of “normal” business, but we put that video mapper to a much different use at Christmas. On Christmas Eve we'd load up a special video overlay and route it to the intercept control scopes in Operations. While "exercise" video consisted of fake bogeys (simple blips) and tracks to train intercept controllers and technicians, the special Santa video showed a sleigh and reindeer on the scopes, and of course the sleigh moved…traversing our radar coverage area. Not nearly real, but real enough for the kids that saw it! (And for the adults, too…those willing to “suspend disbelief,” as it were.)

The kids always got a big thrill out of the radar displays. Doing the Santa video was one of the most fun things I ever did while I was a radar guy.

My first Santa tracking experience was at Lompoc Air Force Station during Christmas of 1964.  A lot o' water has passed under the bridge since then, but I still get a kick out of tracking Santa. 

I always put this up on Christmas Eve (or close to it).

Surveillance

 First... this, from the Usual Source:

Heh.  Santa did drones before drones were cool.

Second... Another sort o' surveillance.  I'd been up almost exactly four minutes when there was a knock on my door and it was my neighbor, who dropped by to gift me with a bottle o' wine for Christmas.  So there I was, still half-asleep, coffee pot not even lit off yet, and with bed-hair.  Tryin' to be sociable.  I didn't even MENTION the fact I just got up (at sumthin' like 1310 hrs and we have appearances to keep up, or secrets to hide, whichever), I just toughed it out.  I think I did a pretty good job of it, too... as she invited me down to her place to take a look at her new furniture.  The woman has good taste.  She may not think the same about me, given my appearance this "morning."

Third... It sure does look Christmas-y/Seasonal outdoors: it's in the mid-20s with the occasional snow flurry blowing by my window.  That's almost enough to overcome my usual, customary, and not-unreasonable humbuggery, but not quite.  Mainly coz it's dark and gray (requiring indoor lighting; that kind o' "dark") and I'm not fully caffeinated yet.  But we're working on the latter: I just poured my second cup.  

Ho-ho-ho.

The Annual Tilting At Windmills Post

We've run this post every year for three years, mainly because it's sumthin' we REALLY DO believe in:  Thanksgiving comes first.  Without further ado...

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

No Cause Is Truly Lost

It's that time o' year.  The time when we ring up Mr. Panza and beseech him to help us in our annual tilt against the windmills of commercialism.  Well, it's more like me being ol' Sancho to Jim's Don Q (ed: link updated for 2011).  But... lost or not... I'm all FOR what Jim is selling. Here's what I said last year and the year before: 

Blog-Bud Jim, aka Suldog, has launched his second annual “Thanksgiving Comes First!” campaign… and has asked those of us who agree with him… and who are the proprietors of blogs… to join the campaign. Well, I can’t think of anyone who actually approves of seeing Christmas sales, Christmas advertising, Christmas-this, or Christmas-that, before Thanksgiving has come and gone. NO ONE… period, end of report, full-stop (ed:  It has since come to my attention that I'm wrong here.  There IS one person I'm aware of, and only ONE.). I’m quite sure even the employees and management of those businesses who launch Christmas before Thanksgiving is even here have a distaste for the project at hand. I mean… how could you NOT?

So. I’m on board with this. I hope you are, too. Jim has great narrative reasons and not a few rants on the subject at the link above and here, as well. Do go read.

The links in the quoted bits above are older.  Jim has updated his original post and added thoughts at my link in the first graf.  Won't you help us?

As noted in my parenthetical comment in the first graf of my repost, Jim has updated his post for 2011.  And there is progress in this space... companies DO respond when their customers tell them things.  See?

 

 

I stole that from Jim, of course.  Thank you, Nordstrom's!  Now if we could just get EVERY retailer to go along...

Labor Day

What's become my traditional Labor Day post... a re-run from two years ago:

Labor Day

Today is the day we celebrate "Labor Day" which, in times past, was a true celebration of American Labor.  And by that I mean the people who manipulate the "means of production"… the guys and gals who go out and get their hands dirty making this country work, day in and day out.  But "Labor" as both term and concept has become perverted over the past few years.  Actually… Labor has become politicized and has only a shadow of the meaning it used to carry, back in the day.  Who among us doesn't think of unions when one says or hears the word "Labor" today?  Not many of us, I would wager.

I will resist the temptation to turn this post into an anti-union screed, and said temptation is strong indeed, Gentle Reader.  But let me just say this about that… I'm of the opinion that labor unions are the root of all most evil in our post-industrial society.  I'll grant you labor unions have a glorious history and were responsible for righting numerous wrongs in the early 20^th century (you can begin reading here if you're not up on the good unions accomplished during that time).  But like the buggy whip, their time has passed.  What we get from our unions today are things like "card check" —a decidedly UN-American renunciation of free elections in the workplace— and outright political intimidation (can you spell S-E-I-U?  Sure you can…).  I'm not seeing much good in that… and neither are most other Americans, as Ed Morrissey notes in this Hot Air post.  But let us not digress further; I'm sure you get my point.

I'm thinking an appropriate manner in which to observe Labor Day would be to spend a few hours watching re-runs of Mike Rowe's "Dirty Jobs."  About which... the Discovery Channel is running an all-day marathon of "Dirty Jobs" episodes... or you could watch the DVDs.  If you don't have access to either the Discovery Channel or the "Dirty Jobs" DVDs, you might want to watch his (Rowe's) 20-minute lecture on"Dirty Jobs" at TED.com.  Mr. Rowe celebrates "labor" as it used to be… manual labor as an honorable pursuit infused with dignity.  As it should be.  And that's what I'm on about here, Gentle Reader. 

Or perhaps today might be spent reading a book like "Shopcraft as Soulcraft."  The NYT published a review of this book earlier this year, which starts out pretty well but descends rapidly into a typical NYT snarky book review (on subjects of this nature, of course.  Not all of their book reviews are worthless, just some.  Or most… depending on your POV.).  Here's the best part of the review:

It’s especially appealing when you add that Mr. Crawford has a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago and was a postdoctoral fellow — he had an office next to the novelist J. M. Coetzee’s — on the school’s Committee on Social Thought. Mr. Crawford is an intellectual who can probably take you in a bar fight.

Many of the ideas in “Shop Class as Soulcraft” are deeply resonant. Mr. Crawford mourns that shop classes were largely eliminated from American high schools in the 1990s because they are expensive to run, and sometimes dangerous. He takes this as a symptom of a larger problem: We have, as a people, lost our fundamental manual competence. We can no longer fix our own stuff, and we are increasingly steering our kids “toward the most ghostly kinds of work.”

His book, he writes, “advances a nestled set of arguments on behalf of work that is meaningful because it is genuinely useful. It also explores what we might call the ethics of maintenance and repair.”

Mr. Crawford builds his framework by walking us through the soul-killing nature of too much white-collar work; he surveys the “rising sea of clerkdom” that surrounds us. He considers the work of Marx, Heidegger and Iris Murdoch, among other philosophers. He points out, accurately enough, that “when things get really hairy, you want an experienced human being in control.” He connects the current mortgage crisis to the depersonalization of white-collar work.

This is not “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” Part 2. Mr. Crawford isn’t particularly interested in the nonrational mind. “I want to avoid the kind of mysticism that gets attached to ‘craftsmanship,’ ” he writes, “while doing justice to the very real satisfactions it offers.”

You would be forgiven, Gentle Reader, if you didn't chase the link and read the rest of the piece, which is in the end dismissive at best or borders on character assassination, at worst.  I'd rather you spent that time watching the little piece below (from last Friday's "News Hour with Jim Lehrer"), where Mr. Crawford speaks his mind on what we're on about here.  It's great good stuff.





Seven minutes ain't that much time to waste, is it?

And… Happy Labor Day… Drink beer, barbeque, and have a great time!

I added this subject-appropriate tune last year and it ain't a bad ideer to do this year, too:

I've known that girl.  Loved her, too.

We ALMOST Forgot

Today is International Beer Day!  And we are celebrating, much as we do every day around this time.  In commemoration...

Today Is...

... International BEER Day!  Now if ever there was a holiday made just for ME...

You can get one of these tee shirts here.

Happy Beer Day, all y'all.  You still have time to celebrate in an appropriate manner, yanno?

Independence Day

The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton

Massachusetts: John Hancock, Samual Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island: Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery

Connecticut: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott

New York: William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris

New Jersey: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark

Pennsylvania: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross

Delaware: Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean

Maryland: Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia: George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton

North Carolina: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn

South Carolina: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton

Georgia: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton