Posts from — December 2008

Happy Hanukkah to my Jewish friends.

One of the nice things about Hanukkah is that there are established “gifts”, so you don’t have to rack your brains about what to get: a card and gelt covers just about everyone.

General background at Wikipedia’s entry for Hanukkah and even more at Chabad’s Chanukah page.

[Note: on the Jewish calendar the day changes at sundown, not midnight.]

At 6:04AM CST the winter solstice occurs marking the longest night of the year. If everyone has been good, the days start getting longer tomorrow. Locally, the sun will rise at 6:39AM and set at 4:50PM for a total of 10 hours and 10 minutes of daylight, but tomorrow will be a whole 2 seconds longer.

This also marks HogWatch, so don’t forget to put out the turnips.

Depending on whether you are into the possibilities, this guy is either the apex or nadir of Christmas lighting.

I liked the Carol of the Bells, [YouTube 2007 version] but his taste in music needs work.

The Shrubbery decided to make the GM/Chrysler loans, but the terms attack the United Auto Workers, because if they can’t have real slavery, they’ll settle for wage slavery.

A couple of days ago, Badtux took a hard look at GM labor costs, and discovered the Republicans are basically lying, just as they have lied about almost everything else. The average Toyota line worker takes home about $2/hour more than the average GM worker.

The big differences are that GM has been in business long enough in this country to have retirees, while the foreign car makers haven’t, and, unlike every other industrialized nation, the US doesn’t have a national health system, so employers are stuck with the costs.

David S Morgan, CBS News, covers a lot of the same ground in his piece, The True Price Of Auto Labor Costs. He did find one area where labor costs are excessive at US companies: the foreign companies pay their entire management teams about what the Big Three pay their CEOs.

Mr. Morgan also notes, that unlike the loans the US companies requested, because after $350 billion the banks still aren’t making loans, the foreign companies are recipients of hundreds of millions of dollars in tax incentives to build plants in the Southern states.  These aren’t loans, they are grants.

MSNBC has an interesting piece on April Charney, a Jacksonville Legal Aid attorney who deals with foreclosures

“You ever look into a place where snakes hang out?” she asks in the middle of a conversation about the loan officers, appraisers, investment bankers, attorneys and others that she believes are responsible for the nation’s worsening financial crisis. “That’s what I see here. They’re writhing and oozing and morphing into creepy stuff with slime all over it.”

Then in her quiet, gentle drawl — the kind of voice that could get you invited to afternoon drinks on the finest porches in South Florida, where she grew up — she leans forward and says quite earnestly, “Not to discredit snakes or anything.”

A genuine “bless their hearts” moment from a woman who is saving people’s homes by requiring that those who are foreclosing on them obey the law.

[Read more →]

From Australian Broadcasting things you don’t want to hear on final approach:

Speaking over the address system as the Flybe flight approached Charles de Gaulle airport, the pilot announced to startled passengers “I am not qualified to land the plane” and turned back to Cardiff.

While is was a technical licensing issue, and not competence, it really is not a confidence builder.

Inspection Tour

You cats need to do some housekeeping!

[Editor: Molly, the ALPHA of alpha females comes by during the day to complain about all of the acorns.

Friday Ark

The CBC reports on the death of the most ubiquitous character in the Star Trek series:

Majel Barrett Roddenberry, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s widow and a fixture of nearly every incarnation of the space travel franchise, died on Thursday. She was 76.

Roddenberry, who suffered from leukemia, died at home in Bel Air, Calif., according to a spokesperson.

She was Nurse Chapel in the original series, Lwaxana Troi in the Next Generation, and voice of the computer in all of the programs.

Over at CBS they noticed that the credit card rules are changing.

The new rules, approved by the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department’s Office of Thrift Supervision and the National Credit Union Administration, will allow credit card companies to raise interest rates only on new credit cards and future purchases or advances, rather than on current balances.

The new rules prohibit:

• Placing unfair time constraints on payments. A payment could not be deemed late unless the borrower is given a reasonable period of time, such as 21 days, to pay.
• Placing too-high fees for exceeding the credit limit solely because of a hold placed on the account.
• Unfairly computing balances in a computing tactic known as double-cycle billing.
• Unfairly adding security deposits and fees for issuing credit or making it available.
• Making deceptive offers of credit.

[Read more →]

The first letter in the title “Ц”, is pronounced exactly like the “ts” at the end of “bits” and the transliteration is also “ts”, as in TSAR.

The feminine form is “Царица” which is transliterated as “Tsaritsa”.

It is a shortened form of the Russian transliteration of “Caesar”, “Цесарь”, the full form only existing in references to Roman emperors and in the title of the Russian heir, the “Цесаревич”. “Tsesarevich”, literally “son of Caesar”.

Tsars answer only to G-d. You can’t appoint a “Tsar”, and have that person report to another human, even the President of the United States.

If you insist on using a Russian title, what you are really appointing is a “Ревизор”, “Revizor”, an individual who reports directly to the Tsar about other government officials and organizations. It is similar to, but with more power than the American title, Inspector General, because of the Revizor’s direct access to the Tsar.

Although if you dipped a toy in Flame [AKA eau de Burger King, I kid you not] the cat might forgive you… for a while.

[Why would anyone want to smell like they lived in a fast food place?]

Why not just appoint the CEO of Archer-Daniels-Midland and give up any pretense. Tom Vilsack may have been governor of Iowa, but he is a supporter of agri-business, not farmers, and that includes genetically modified crops.

He supports ethanol which is a disaster, as it doesn’t reduce green house gases and increases the cost of food. We have plenty of lawyers in government, would it be so bad to have an actual farmer as the head of the Department of Agriculture?

Rick Warren and Tom Vilsack on the same day, there are fewer reasons to cut Obama any slack.

Via PZ Myers, a baker’s dozen of snowflake microphotographs at the New Scientist.

Via the ever popular “I forget where I saw it first”, Archaeology magazine’s Top 10 Discoveries of 2008.

“Boldly going

where no man has gone before.”

The Wright Brothers make the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina