Posts from — March 2009

Contrary to popular belief, snow isn’t good for sled dog races, but this year’s Iditarod is going to have to deal with it.

From the Anchorage Daily News : Iditarod Trail missing under deep snow

… Out with Oatley somewhere along the trail was Merchant’s husband, Bill, an Iditarod trailbreaker. He went ahead of the Invitational on a snowmobile trying to pack out a route in fresh, waist-deep snow.

Steve Perrin, owner of the Rainy Pass Lodge at Puntilla, said on Monday that Merchant’s new, 120-horsepower Yamaha Viking Professional — a snowmobile designed to go through deep snow — ended up so bogged down that two of Perrin’s sons had to help Merchant dig it out.

That snowmobile costs about $11K and is used by skiing areas to groom runs. It has large, wide-spread steering skis, and a large track. If it is bogging down, think about the two-runner sleds used by mushers. It may be time to think about a toboggan.

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Including the status site that might have told people what was going on you get a 502 Server Error, and a note telling you to try again in 30 seconds which will all fail.

I’m guessing hardware because some sites are visible, but the majority of Blogspot sites on my roll aren’t. C’est la Vie with the big G.

I know it all supposed to be the fault of the Internet, but I don’t see that as even in the top ten of the problems of the print media. Badtux outlined a plan that would have given the newspapers control of their future on the ‘Net, but they didn’t understand the medium or how to use it.

News Writer at Stop The Press!, Susie Madrak at Suburban Guerrilla, and Athenae at First Draft cover the print media from a perspective of insiders, i.e. current or former print media professionals, so there’s no reason for me to get into that.

For me the key to understanding what is going on is the reason that the fall of the Rocky Mountain News has been followed by so many other papers’ reported as being in deep trouble. The reason is simple, debt load. The reason for the debt load is also simple, leveraged buyouts. When media consolidation began in earnest the debt for print media skyrocketed.

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From an editorial to be printed in tomorrow’s St. Petersburg Times: Strong choice to lead FEMA

President Obama avoided one of the most egregious mistakes of his predecessor Wednesday by naming Craig Fugate, the director of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Unlike President Bush, Obama has chosen experience and competence over political connections to lead the national response to hurricanes and other emergencies. Florida’s loss will be the nation’s gain.

Fugate knows his stuff and has managed everything from wildfires to major hurricanes for the last 7 years. Now Florida has to worry about who will replace him, especially if he starts hiring some of his current staff. He will need people with experience in earthquakes, volcanoes, and Western wildfires, but he has done just about everything else. We may not do anything else right, but the state knows disasters.

As I understand it: the President of the United States has sent a letter to the President of Russia that offers not to install the missile defense system [that doesn’t work] in Eastern Europe, if the President of Russian will pressure Iran not to build nuclear weapons [that they stopped working on in 2003].

Sounds fair to me – an equal exchange of paranoid delusions.

The CBC reports on the first real move by the international community to deal with the genocide in Dafur: International court issues warrant for Sudan’s president

Judges with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague have issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir over his alleged war crimes in the region of Darfur in western Sudan.

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I’ve noticed a rise in misuse of the Boston Tea Party on right side of the body politic. The incident was the direct result of a government BUSINESS TAX CUT to assist a favored company in undercutting the prices of competitors. Unless you are protesting tax cuts, especially business tax cuts, you really should avoid invoking this event.

The arrest of Okaloosa County’s Sheriff pushed a local shooting quickly to the back pages of the Local Puppy Trainer, but it was picked up by Latin American media because the victims were Chilean.

Panama City TV was probably the first to run the item:Early Morning Shooting Kills 2 Injures 3 in Miramar Beach. Then a story ran in the Panama City paper owned by the same group as my local paper: Chileans mourn students killed in S. Walton shootings. From a later edition you get the local version of the crime of Dannie Roy Baker. Finally the Keyboard Detective waded in with more details.

The basic story is that a Miramar Beach man, Dannie Roy Baker, opened fire with a rifle at a group of Chilean students leaving a party at about 1:45AM on Thursday morning, 26 February. Two Chileans were killed and three were wounded.

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But apparently the people of California in Malibu, San Diego, Fairfield, and Palo Alto, bless their hearts, are truly interested in Bobby Jindal’s “re-election” bid for governor of Louisiana.

The BBC reports on the snap election to be held in the African nation of Guinea-Bissau.

As is apparently their custom, President João Bernardo Vieira had the head of the military, General Batista Tagme Na Wai, assassinated, and was then assassinated by annoyed members of the military.

The election should be in approximately 60 days.

It’s early Tuesday morning in Melbourne [it is 17 hours ahead me] and they are dreading the dawn: Victoria braces for wild dawn

Victorians are being urged to secure their homes ahead of strong northerly winds expected around dawn.

Around 5,000 firefighters are on high alert with the winds due to hit western Victoria, before extending across the state and reaching Melbourne.

The weather bureau’s Terry Ryan says wind gusts could top 100 kilometres per hour

“Those stronger winds will pick up in the Melbourne area about 6:00 am or 7:00 am, winds 60 to 80 kilometres per hour developing quite quickly, gusts possible to 100 [kph],” he said.

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Rook is right to be upset with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen saying that Iran has enough “fissile material” to make a bomb – so does the state of New Mexico, and the country of Mexico. There are any number of countries in Africa who have enough uranium for hundreds of bombs.

This required a clarification to be issued: U.S.: Iran has material for nuclear bomb but still ‘not close’.

Iran has managed to refine the uranium ore to a 4% concentration. To actually make a weapon it has to be at a 90% concentration. Given how long it has taken them to get to 4%, and the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency says that they have hit a plateau in their refining process, it is highly unlikely that they will actually produce weapons-grade “fissile material” any time in the foreseeable future even if they are pursuing nuclear weapons.

The science of nuclear weapons is very simple, but the engineering is not. Two guys with buckets accidentally started a nuclear reaction in a fuel processing plant in Japan a few years ago. The fuel was in a liquid form and they put too much of it together because they weren’t using the proper equipment. They died.

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PSoTD has moved his archives to psotd.powerblogs.com.

Cup o’Joe has picked up the rights on the old PSoTD site.