Humming Bird Happy Hour Bouncer

6 Hummingbirds drinking together in my yard (1 mature Anna's, 2 juvenile Rufous, and 3 Anna's females)

30 minutes before sunset this evening, I sat down in my backyard to enjoy watching hummingbird happy hour.  Hummingbird happy hour is the bet time of the day to observe hummingbirds in a group setting.  The dimming of the sun's natural day light, combined with the abundant availability of established food (11 nectar feeders around the yard) and the inevitability of the arrival of total darkness, draw all the neighborhood hummingbirds together for one long, deep drink of high energy sugar water before the long night's embrace.  The diminished light makes the Brilliant plumage that the dominant males of all hummingbird species develop look much less spectacular, mottled, dull, which puts ALL the hummers -  the dominant males, the fearful juveniles who sport just a goatee, the confident mature females (who are the same size as the mature males, but look they a lot like juveniles) and the immature new fledglings - on nearly equal footing.

Mature Rufous Male Hummingbird

I've enjoyed dozens of hummingbird happy hours here in California.  In Arizona, I saw 2 Anna's hummingbirds at a feeder, once.  Here in California, I've relished dozens of twilights that included a dozen or more birds all sharing resources, before going into their semi-catatonic sleep for the night high up on a secluded branch that's strong enough to barely hold their own weight (less than 21 grams, in most cases).  Tonight was the First time that I observed a vociferous, possessive, pugnacious male Rufous dominant male who continued to chase all other thirsty birds from the 2 feeders right outside the living room window.  One of the 2 feeders is a 4 holed solar PV lit feeder without any perches, so the birds have to hover as they drink.  Six feet away is 10 holed feeder that has a circumferential perch where I've counted as many as 9 hummingbirds drinking at one time (but I've not been able to take a picture of them in this way, yet), sharing resources, peacefully, and making me a very happy & satisfied human that I could create such an environment where I could 'bring the hummingbird community together', and be lucky enough to see them sharing.

A yellow jacket trying to get into one of the 10-holed feeders

Generally, the 2 feeders outside of Dr Desert Flower's office's window in the front yard are dominated by Rufous hummingbird males.  They hang out in the palm trees looming above, or in the oleander bushes a few feet away, or on the top of a skyward pointing succulent frond, observing the 2 front yard feeders, chasing away any other bird who comes to drink, With The Exception of mature females who the males are trying to woo, court, convince, and then with whom they want to copulate for all of 2 seconds while in free-fall from 200 feet in the air.  So Much testosterone and energy goes into the male hummingbird's daily routine, to bully away, ward-off, intimidate all other males and all other species, and try to romance only the mature females of their own species... it makes the plumage and prancing and jousting of a male peacock look blasé in comparison.  The Rufous males don't normally intrude into the back yard... or so I thought.

This evening, I listened to a proud dominant male Rufous sit up in my neighbor's tree above my backyard, chirp and whistle, claiming his dominance over 3 feeders that could be seen from that high vantage point.  I watched as this proud dominant male Rufous would swoop in, and chase away single birds, groups of females who were sharing the feeder, any creature who came near to the fears he now claimed.  This was ruining my happy hour observations.  Twice, I got up from my chair, glass of wine in hand, and stood near to the feeders.  The mature female visitors, who have been around the block and understand better how the world works, did Not see me as a threat, and they drank nearby, almost within arm's reach.  They were wary of the large hairless ape drinking from a wine glass, and they would have flown away if I had made sudden movements, but the pugnacious Rufous male would still come swooping in, Past My Head, and scare them all off.  This could not stand.  No little Rufous male is going to ruin my evening.

2 hummingbirds enjoying the feeder under my suppressing cover-fire

I thought quickly... how could I ward off this mis-guided cretin who never learned how to share, or get along with any other birds?  I remembered a recent Luther episode where a killer wielded a large orange squirt gun full of acid and blinded witnesses around London.  I recalled I had a large un-used squirt bottle in my laundry room that I'd not filled with anything, and ran into the house to fill it with water (no, not acid...  I am not a monster).  I'd used squirt guns to dissuade naughty house cats in the past, before I realized I'd become intensely allergic to them.  I hurriedly rushed back outside to sit with my wine glass and squirt bottle.  My wait didn't take long.

The dominant male Rufous swooped down almost immediately to ward off a dominant male Anna's and an Anna's female, in the dwindling twilight.  His angle of attack took him around the back of the feeder where I did not have a direct line-of-sight, but after he ran off the two other birds, he tried to get a drink from his coveted feeders.  My aim was exact, and the first squirt of water sent the Rufous off the feeder and back up into his tree observation post.  Two more female hummers came in to drink, and as the male Rufous dove down from the tree, I blocked his descent with a barrage of squirts that the gave him pause, and he perched in the jasmine about 8 feet behind the feeders.  More females arrived, and joined their sisters drinking.  5 visible birds at the feeder... but the Rufous male couldn't contain himself, he tried to drive them off.  I sent a salvo of 5 or 6 squirts that sent him into retreat.  2 of the drinking females rose off the feeder to note what was going on, But Then Resettled onto the feeder to resume drinking!  A dominant male Anna's, the NBA players of the hummingbird world due to the fact that they are generally 20% larger than any other hummingbird, settled down at the 10 holed feeder along with the bevy of females and juveniles.  "Hello ladies!" was the look in his little black eye, as he figured he'd hit the happy hour jackpot.  But it was short lived.

A fully mature, dominant Rufous male, perched outside my office, who thinks he "owns" the feeder there.

A moment later, the stubborn Rufous male Again dove at the feeder.  All the birds scattered, and I zeroed in on the bright white collar the mature Rufous male wore and hit him at least once, got close 2 or 3 times, and he fled again.  3 of the 5 females Returned and resumed drinking, under my cover fire.  The Rufous took up station back in his high tree branch, and I aimed upwards towards the little miscreant, arching far over the top of the feeders where the girls were enjoying happy hour, and the mature Rufous found this rebuff to be "too much" and flew elsewhere.  Finally, success!

So if you're a female hummingbird, regardless of species, you're more than welcome to come drink in my yard at hummingbird happy hour.  If you're an Anna's, Blackchinned, or Costa's mature male or a Rufous juvenile, and you know some boundaries and how to act publicly and behave at happy hour, you're also welcome to enjoy delicious high energy, fresh nectar in my yard.  However, if you're a trouble maker, you will be ejected, and refused re-entry into my yard's airspace.  If you persist, you'll be targeted with squirted tap water, which will make flight more difficult, frustrate your petty attempts to monopolize the abundant nectar in the feeders.  The unexpected wetting at dusk, combined with being chased away form the public feeders, may make it more difficult for you to remain warm over-night, but having a warmer, more friendly demeanor will be in your favor going-forward (over-come your instinctual programming, little punk!)  ... or just stick to the front yard, where the Rufous battles are pretty much perpetual.  The backyard feeders have a happy hour bouncer, who is more than 4000 times your mass, and who enjoys having a peaceful, sharing, community atmosphere at dusk.

In A Dragon Based Economy, Geography Doesn't Matter

In a Dragon Based Economy, apparently geography doesn't really matter.  Or "everything you wanted to know about the Game of Thrones season premier, but we're too afraid to ask".

Dragonstone is near Jamie's feet, Kings Landing is 1/2 way to his sister & lover Cersei

I call it a "Dragon Based Economy" because that what John Oliver called it on Colbert's Late Night show twice last week.  "We're talking some serious dragon money" - when Last Week Tonight bought 5 wax presidents from a closing Ohio Presidential museum.  Game of Thrones is one of the Main anchors that brings in subscribers (and pirates) to HBO, along with Real Time (which I watch, every time it's on), The Leftovers (which I couldn't care less about), and Ballers (which I can't give even 1/2 a sh*t about no matter how hard I try).  Westworld was a good series, and in my mind, Needed to STOP when it stopped.  There's Zero Need to continue with Samurai Westworld, Outer Space Westworld, or Ancient Roman Westworld...  but the bean counters and non-creatives at HBO apparently disagree with my perspective and want to keep raking in the cash from zombified viewers.

Another Danish actor steal jobs from good Americans & Brits

Now, why do I state that "geography doesn't matter"?  Well, the newly usurping & murderous Lord of the Iron Born Euron Greyjoy (putting the "Ew!" in "Euron") shows up with an armada of "1000 ships" at Kings Landing, in an attempt to gain favor with Queen Cersei (and ask for her hand in marriage... ew!!! I think I just tasted some of my own vomit), but his massive fleet somehow doesn't run into the even more massive fleets of Greyjoy deserters, Unsullied warriors, 2nd Sons (I'm actually a 2nd son myself, heh heh), and the Dothraki Horde - not to mention 3 massive and very hungry dragons that have been flying air cover for the invading fleet - that Daenerys Targaryen is leading to the island of Dragonstone.  Dragonstone, per the maps of Westeros, is near the eastern mouth of the long bay that eventually leads to Kings Landing.  The Iron Islands, Pyke, are on the Western side of Westeros, north of Casterly Rock.  THERE IS NO Northern Passage, as global warming has not yet melted the ice caps north of the Seven Kingdoms as it already has in Canada and Russia on this world in this age, where Polar Bear mothers now have to swim for more than a 100 miles with their newly born cubs to reach the pack ice, where upwards of 90% of the cubs are drowning, exhausted, as they used to only have to swim a mile or 2 at most.  At least I got to see a Polar Bear in the zoo when I was a kid, before they all become extinct.

But human driven climate change aside, Ewwww-Euron's 1000 ships would have had to sail Down around the Southern end of Westeros, past Dorne, and then northward UP the Narrow Sea, side-by-side or just ahead / just behind Daenerys's even bigger fleet was sailing through, with 3 circling and hungry dragons who would have obliterated the 1000 Greyjoy ships just as they torched the slavers ships in Slaver's Bay several seasons ago, until the slavers finally surrendered and Daenerys took their ships for her crossing of the Narrow Sea.  I've included a handy screen shot from the episode where Cersei is standing in the middle of a courtyard painted as the map of Westeros, for your reference, above.  Both fleets could no co-exist in the same Narrow Sea at the same timer even within a few days of each other, due to their MASSIVE sizes and the remarkably slow pace that sail driven sea travel has when flying just one or 2 sails, and not a massive array of studding sails, spanker sails, royal, sky, moonraker, and top sails as Only Euron's flag ship tried to set (with aerodynamic inaccuracies, sorry special effects folks who were concerned more with style than substance).  "That which is dead can never die" ... no..  how about "that which is dumb cannot get dumber", or "that which is repulsive cannot get even more repulsive".  So Euron's travel to and appear in Kings Landing was not logistically possible, unless he somehow teleported or owned a T.A.R.D.I.S. with enough capacity to move his entire fleet instantaneously without running into Daenerys's fleet.

Sure, "The Twins" where they Freys slaughtered and then got slaughtered themselves ("poison is a woman's weapon") apparently divides the northern part of the Seven Kingdoms from the southern part, perhaps for lack of any small boats that could traverse the water way southeast of "The Twins", I can understand that.  But the waterway that "The Twins" crosses Does Not extend all the way to the west coast of Westeros, so there's no way Euron and his massive fleet could have sailed down it.

Geography aside, the Season 7 premier was pretty good.  Several other poignant observations I made in retrospect are as follows:

1) what's scarier than a whole horde of decomposing white walkers who can't be killed with steel weapons?  A horde of decomposing white walkers who have in their ranks ancient Giants whom they've killed and then resurrected as blue eyed white walkers before the giant corpses could be burnt.  Undead zombie giants are Far More Lethal than undead foot soldiers or undead calvary.  An undead giant could lob a spear the size of a telephone pole with a big nasty pointy end, far into the air (like the height of "The Wall" as happened several seasons ago when the Wildling Free Folk attacked "The Wall" with Giants at their side)... and such a spear could impale one of the precious 3 dragons, perhaps killing it.  Then... the Night King resurrects the dead dragon as a undead dragon...  and it kills the other two remaining dragons.  That would be Game Over, for Game of Thrones.  

What's worse than one white walker Giant? Three white walker Giants!

2) if you were not watching with closed captioning on (as we do in our house, with hearing impaired viewers  and for clarity), you would not know that the massively gray scaled hand that tried to reach out to Samwell Tarly was indeed the hand of Jorah Mormont (former Lord of Bear Island, then reluctant slave trader to keep his wife comfortable and provide "the lifestyle to which she was accustomed", then kidnapper of Tyrion and rebuked suitor of Daenerys).  Seems that Jorah made his way to Old Town to seek a cure for grayscale from the Maesters, but Westerosian medicine still didn't have a cure for that ailment.

3) if you've stolen the keys to the forbidden & locked up Maester reference library, and you have only a few seconds to lift an ancient book from the bizarrely chained shelves (was Old Town seismically active?), make sure you pick The Exact Tome that has the history of the Last Winter in it, that shows Precisely where a whole mountain of Dragon Glass is on the island of Dragonstone (at the mouth of the bay that leads right to Kings Landing)... it just seems rather far fetched to me, as I am old enough to remember going to the library Before there was a searchable internet, and you had to use the card catalogue, or the headache inducing microfiche, and you spent hours and hours searching to find just one or two gems that you could include in a bibliography.  There was no Google, Yahoo, Bing, Lycos,  Ask Jeeves, AltaVista, Infoseek, or Webcrawler back when I was in school.  If you wanted to find a book in a library, you had to search for it, long and hard, and hope you got lucky and it wasn't checked out when you finally located it.  Samwell Tarly grabs it The First Pick, while under pressure of being discovered a few seconds later by the next Maester who walks in.  Sure... let's keep suspending disbelief.

Voted most likely to be killed by White Walkers by his Free Folk High School

This should be a good season.  Let the white walkers come... depose the angry Cersei who has no allies (let Arya do it, gleefully)... make a bunch of weapons out of Dragonstone's Dragon Glass cache... wipe out the Greyjoys from the surface of the sea and have their octopus god devour their rotting remains... let the alternative lifestyle Dorne and Greyjoy girls enjoy themselves together... sacrifice the Free Folk & their leader Tormund Giantsbane to the white walker hordes just as corporate America does to the middle class without blinking an eye... have Brienne take out The Mountain as she took out his little brother and then she and Jaime can get together... let Samwell Tarly save the day with his book-learnin... and let Jon Snow get it on with his 1/2 sister Daenerys once the Starks and Daenerys armies band together to fight the White Walker horde.  I can't care about Baelish, Bran, Sansa, Qyburn, Podrick, man-bun Thoros or one eyed Beric very much at all.  Sure, Martin can kill off most of the main characters and elevate any of these lesser roles if he wants to... but... that would hurt the franchise at this point, and HBO wants to keep making money.  Please just let it be one or two more seasons... and not 4 or 5 more, or it'll go on far too long as the books have.

Black Lodge Yelp Review, or David Lynch At His Worst

Last weekend, Dr Desert Flower and I spent many hours finishing watching the 1990-91 Twin Peaks CBS television series, on Netflix.  DDF was resting after an outpatient procedure, and I was icing a pinched left elbow bursa that was jammed between the left arm-rest and the Delta 737-800's fuselage on row 14A, after we flew from LAX to Covington Kentucky on July 2nd for DDF's best friend's birthday party.  We were stationary humans last weekend, with considerable time on our hands.  Then, late last Saturday night, we began watching the 2017 Showtime series "Twin Peaks The Return" upon multiple recommendations of DDF's friends and co-workers who heaped high praise upon David Lynch's new work.  (Rotten Tomatoes has their reviews of them here: link, though I vehemently disagree with the tremendously positively reviews you'll find there)

The original 1990s TV series was not bad.  Some slow parts, some meaningless parts, far too many teenage-angst-romance sub-plots that now, as a man in his 50s, I could not care less about... but all in all, not a bad two seasons.  You find out who All killed Laura Palmer, you find out about the nature of the pervasive evil "Bob" represents, and there's a whole bunch of little side plots that progress nicely; many of them wrapped up with a neat bow, some of them left open ended.  DDF and I hoped that the 2017 follow-up would close those open loops.  That was a false hope that never came to fruition.

Instead, we got introduced to Dougie Jones, who when spoken to, repeated the last few words annoyingly.  Repeated the last few words, annoyingly.  This got really old fast. Really old fast.  It was not germane to what was happening back in Twin Peaks, and by all means, appeared to be completely irrelevant.  Completely irrelevant.  I would have rather had another teenage love triangle plot line instead of static-filled Dougie's scenes of endless fragmented repetition. Fragmented repetition.

Then, instead of Twin Peaks Washington, there was a major shocking sub-plot in the imaginary "Buck Horn South Dakota".  [Twin Peaks WA doesn't exist either, but was filmed in Snoqualmine, North Bend, and Fall City WA as well as Malibu CA]  How Buck Horn ties into Twin Peaks, no one figures out.  How does the hole-in-the-wall NYC high rise mutilation tie into anything, no one knows.  How does static-filled Dougie Jones in Las Vegas tie into Twin Peaks Washington, still, no one knows.  Very little happened in Twin Peaks in the 2017 series.  Most of it was putting you to sleep in NYC, scaring you in South Dakota, or making your eyes roll in Las Vegas.

All of this was very Lynchian, disjointed, fragmented, bizarre, mysterious, but it was watchable for the most part until the final episode.  New characters got introduced.  Some of them got killed,  Many good comedians played non-comedic parts.  Lynch pulled out all of his favorite actors and put them in the line-up who were still alive.  That is... until the final episode.  The final episode, for the first 20 minutes (the first 1/3rd), was a real episode.  There was plot, dialogue, progression, continuity... for the most part.  After the 20th or 22nd minute, the rest of the final episode became a masterbation exercise by David Lynch, a platform for him to take Eraserhead (or Labyrinth Man if you're in France) to the next level of inane, unfathomable, nauseatingly stagnant and boring "art expression" that drives an intelligent viewer mad.  I am so glad we watched it for free on our "Free Showtime Trial" which we will cancel next week.

Nuclear explosions in the New Mexico desert... is the mushroom cloud the one armed man's missing arm that is also a stunted growth and leafless sycamore tree in the Black Lodge who crackles with electricity?   Are the ubiquitous and ever-flowing red curtains of the Black Lodge representative of the blood that flows when evil manifests itself in the material world, or the fireballs of nuclear fission?  Are the shadowy black-and-white mobs of "woodsmen" who come out of no where and dive upon motionless, shot, evil, mulleted Dale Cooper in league with the nicotine zombie who takes over AM radio?  The crazy golden shovel Twin Peaks psychiatrist who rants on AM radio, is he supposed to analogous to the nicotine zombie guy?  The doppelgänger who turned into a small golden pea / pellet, is that related to the flying frog creature that hatched on a nearly black screen after the second nuclear explosion?

If those were the only questions, ok, I could grapple with it and wait and see for the next season.  BUT, those snippets took painstaking, excruciatingly slow minutes to get to, as characters slowly, slowly, slowly ascended stairs, or stared into nothingness, or gathered around an inanimate object that made no sense whatsoever.  "Meticulous" is how the Nerdist called these scenes.  Excruciatingly painful while-at-the-same-time eye-lollingly boring was how DDF and I saw it.  We'd fast forward at 4X or 8X for 15 or 30 seconds, and oh-my-gosh, the heavy-set lady had made it to the other side of the room.  Another 15 or 30 seconds, and the elderly giant had turned, 90 degrees.  Another 15 or 30 seconds, and the lady stares at the golden orb.  Arrrrghhhhh!

The final episode of the 1991 series had Kyle MacLaughlin running around the Black Lodge for about 5 minutes too long.  The final episode of the 2017 series had David Lynch and a team of special effects technicians running around for 35 minutes too long, tediously.  I could not care less if Showtime's Twin Peaks continues, or falls on its sword and goes away.  I've wasted far too many minutes of my life watching David Lynch's work on my TV, atrophying my brain.  "Has it given you nightmares?" ... one of DDF's friends asked us.  No, it's made my eyes tired from rolling (Anderson Cooper style), and it's motivated me to warn others to not waste their time watching something that'll squander their time and neurons...  unless... perhaps, they're on acid, and want to enhance their trip, or they're taking a contemporary art class and are forced to watch it as a class assignment.

No thanks.  I have a sock drawer I need to rearrange, or a garage to clean, or a thousand other things to do that are a much better use of my time.

Lackluster Alaska Air

In the last month, I've had the misfortune to fly Alaska Air four times.  I say "misfortune" because I had previously held Alaska Air in rather high esteem when they were a partner with Northwest Airlines, and I was a NW Airlines Platinum member.  "Membership has its priviledges"... indeed.  Lemme 'splain.

The day after Halloween, I had to go to Hong Kong for a business trip.  I booked the trip with Alaska Air on the US domestic legs, continuing onto their PARTNER Delta Airlines for the international legs.  It was supposed to be all one big ticket, and supposed to be San Diego to Seattle, and then Seattle to Hong Kong DIRECT, Non-stop, so I could sleep on the flight and arrive Well Rested to talk to the customers I needed to talk to the day after I landed, 14 time zones away. The multi-national corporation no longer allows business class travel anywhere, so this was going to be 15 hours in a coach seat, hoping to not get deep vein thrombosis from the cramped inactivity of being a human sardine / steerage / valued-slightly-less-than-cheap-cargo-under-the-plane.  I booked the ticket..  and then... my corporate travel agent Split the Alaskan ticket and the Delta, then Delta cancelled the direct flight, routing me through Tokyo Narita.  Well, for an airline with useful IT support and adaptive ticketing, this should not have been a problem.  Unfortunately, Alaska Airlines has terrible IT support - very nice & friendly staff who interface with customers in the airports and on the phone, but abysmal computer infrastructure and inter-connectivity.

When I attempted, on Halloween morning, to check-in online, all I kept getting was an error message online "There has been an error, please contact customer service".  4 times I entered my information, four times I was foiled.  I called a customer service person... they manually checked me in, and then told me "we cannot check you into the Delta flights, our system doesn't talk to theirs. You'll need to check in at the airport with them when you get to Seattle."  WTF??? (Wednesday, Thursday, Friday...)  My $2000 flight over 15,000 miles of this planet, is checked in only from San Diego to Seattle? Seriously?  Great.

So I take off out of San Diego Lindberg field 45 minutes late, land in Seattle with barely enough time to SPRINT from the N to the S gates (along with a snail's pace tram ride, since both the N and S gates are not connected to the rest of the airport, and the underground tram is the Only way to get there = lame), wolf down a Wendy's Baconator without bread or cheese, arrive at the Delta gate to Tokyo, with no boarding pass (since Alaska Air's system doesn't talk to Delta's) and I am told by the gate agent that "I'm sorry, you not checked in"  Exasperated, I told her I was checked in, I'd spent two hours checking in the day before, I'd talked to both Delta and Alaska Air on the phone, and I do have a seat back in row 18.  Another passenger from San Diego who was also going to Hong Kong, had the same conversation with the next agent over at the gate desk... so it wasn't just me.  They printed up my Seattle to Tokyo and Tokyo to Hong Kong passes, and I was literally the 2nd to last person on the Airbus 330 (the other SD passenger was the last), squeezing my luggage into the already over-burdened over-head racks, and sitting down hot & sweaty & itchy in my coach seat.  Awesome.

8 hours later, when I get to Tokyo, and I get security scanned like all the passengers, since Seattle security screening is obviously incompetent and inferior to the Tokyo security screeners - and I am finally queued up to get into the next plane to go to Hong Kong...  Again, my boarding pass is invalid, and I am told that I need to step aside and let the other passengers board.  Incredible, and ridiculous.  Because Alaska's system could not communicate with Delta's system, I am being stopped at every boarding and being told I am not checked in.  Grrrrrrrrrrrr....

On the way back, the same thing happened... every time I tried to board, I was told that my boarding pass was invalid.  Maddening.  My frequent flyer miles didn't post, and I had to waste 30 minutes on the phone with Delta to get them to post when I got home.

Trying to be the eternal optimist, I booked a last minute flight to Portland and back through Seattle via Alaska Air because they had direct flights, it was last minute for a business emergency, and I didn't want to have connections on the busiest travel day of the year, minimizing my chances of being stranded at some connection city too far to drive back to California.  I thought to myself "Alaska used to be very good...  top awards...  excellent safety record... they'll do better the 2nd time."  Plus the fact that they were not part of a 2 airline trip, so at least one variable was being eliminated with the "our system doesn't talk to theirs" excuse.

This Pre-Thanksgiving trip BEGAN very nicely... I was TSA pre-check, bumped up to First Class (because I am now Gold on Delta), got a big comfy seat, used glass glassware, steel knives and forks, and was offered copious amounts of cognac, which I had to refuse after the first one since I needed to drive once I got to Portland.  Getting to Portland was not a problem.  4 days later, when I attempted to fly home, was when the Alaska Airlines fun began.

You see, my incompetent corporate travel agent cancelled my ticket, and re-booked it, for a fare that was $120 cheaper.   This COMPLETELY discombobulated Alaska Airlines.  I was not allowed to check in (again) on my phone the night before.  I DID have a seat... but could not get a boarding pass.    The fourth day of my emergency trip ended 5 hours earlier than expected, so I headed to the airport hoping to get not he 3:50pm flight instead of the 6:50 flight (I got to the airport at 12:30, far in advance).  The Alaska Air desk agent before security worked for a full 20 minutes to get a boarding pass to print for me.  In her words "4000 key strokes later, it worked!"  Pathetic programming.  Completely non-robust.  Any change upsets the fragile software architecture and crashes on the traveller.  Sickening.

The ever-friendly gate agent tells me "we don't wait list passengers.  The 3:50 flight is showing full, but you CAN go to the departure gate and ask the agent there if anyone has not checked in."  Okey-dokey.  I can do that.. I have 3 hours to spare!   I go to the gate...   and the very polite agent there tells me "we are solidly checked in, but you can check again 30 minutes prior to the door closing."  OK...  I hover around... charge my phone... text my friends...  and then I notice the off-duty Alaska Air pilots wearing their hats and leather jackets, but not flying the plane... OHHHHHH!!!  They're the ones who get the last unclaimed seats...  3 of them!  Me, the paying passenger, I am no-body.  Personae non gratis.  The smirking, smug, elderly Alaska Air pilots laugh as I hover, and I hear one of them say "poor bastard thinks he'll get on" and nods in my direction.  Grrrrrrr  (again)

So now I am standing at my 6:50pm Departure gate, adjacent to an Anchorage Alaska departure gate, with a bunch of Alaskans and Alaska visitors all around me, as I rant about how I will never be flying Alaska Air again.  I don't care if they are the cheapest or the most direct, my behind will not be in another Alaska Air seat again.  Their IT system programming is walled off from American and Delta (the friendly gate agents told me "we have the same problem with American...  no one's system talks to ours"), they don't wait-list travelers, and they cater to their own off-duty pilots for the last unclaimed seats, as opposed to paying, ticketed passengers.  I am wasting an extra 3 hours of my life in Seattle because of Lackluster Alaskan Airline's non-customer-centric policies, pathetic IT programming, smug off-duty pilots, and my corporate travel agent's misguided metrics of "cost is more important than the traveler".

It will be good to finally decompress when I get home at 11 or 1130 pm this evening, after working 14 hour days the last 4 days through he weekend, and not give a damn about much of anything.  The Packers can smear the Bears by 40 points tomorrow, and I won't be surprised or sad by it, because I will just not be giving a damn at all this holiday weekend.

Rant over...  now I feel better.   = )

If you fly Alaska Airlines, and you like it, you're probably a Gold or Platinum frequent flyer.  Or, you're one of their smug pilots.

Thank You Justice Kennedy

Swing Supreme Court Anthony Kennedy, thank you for being human, reasonable, and compassionate in your SCOTUS ruling on Obergefell v. Hodges on Friday.  All of my Gay friends can now enjoy the LONG LIST of rights and privileges that Dr Desert Flower and I have enjoyed for the last 28 years, if they find the love of their lives and want to get married as well.  Thank you.  You joined your 4 reasonable SCOTUS colleagues in making the right decision, and you worded your majority opinion so eloquently.

The hyperbolic fit throwing from the religious right - and their ridiculous predictions of being "forced" to act against their faith, or to "go out of business" as Huckabee said on This Week with Snuffleupagus - is amusingly stupid.  No chicken little, the sky is not falling, but legal barriers to basic rights are.

Thanks Justice Kennedy.

Delta, Zone 1, Isn't

I flew Delta Airlines recently, and I was surprised and a little bit amazed to be BOTH TSA-Pre-check AND "Zone 1" boarding group.  "Zone 1"? I thought to myself....   that's reserved for Diamond and Platinum level frequent flyers (neither of which I am anymore, nor have been for a decade), or military in uniform (thank you for your service) or people traveling with children under 2 years of age, or those "needing extra time / assistance in boarding".  What luck!  Perhaps, in the Monopoly Game of Life, there was a computer glitch / error in my favor...

No such luck.  On Delta, Zone 1 isn't one.  Zone 1 is ACTUALLY Zone 3.  FIRST they board "PREM" ....  "PREM" is first class, million milers, Delta employees (Pilots, etc, who are not flying the plane).   Then, next is "SKY" (short for "Sky Priority"), as the 2nd boarding group.   In Europe, where Silver matters on Delta, Silver status Frequent Flyers (which I am one, after flying to Bangalore and then to Warsaw in the last year, both in Coach, narrowly avoiding Deep Vein Thrombosis) are also included in "SKY".  But in the good ole USA, Silver means bumpkus.  Silver, ever since Delta bought Northwest and inherited more frequent flyers than their Medallion Club lounges and priory boarding queues could handle, have ignored and jettisoned their Silver status members as "nobodies".  Gold gets you 1 bag free, and a listing in the "SKY" queue.  Silver, "back of the line bud!"...  persona non grata.  One of the unwashed, sweaty masses.

After printing my boarding pass the day before travel, and seeing I was "Zone 1" I did not check a bag and took my 22" roller bag on, thinking "I'll have a place in the over-head, surely!  I am 'Zone 1" after all!"  [Printing, how archaic you say?  Why not get it emailed to me, and scan it at the gate?  Well... once you've tried to do that, and you're in Zone 3 or 4 and they're out of over-head room, so they have to gate check your bag...  the only way to do it with a cell phone electronic boarding pass is to walk with the gate agent back up the jet way, so she can re-scan your pass with you phone, issue you a gate-check baggage claim ticket, and then walk back down to the plane, wasting another 10 minutes of your life that you could have been AIS [Ass In Seat] and about to fall asleep for the 4 hour flight back home. Having a PRINTED boarding pass, you just give the gate agent the printed paper, and they come back to you with a baggage claim ticket.]

So all the PREMs boarded.  Then the HOARD of SKYs boarded.  Then, when "Zone 1" boarded, the plane was more than 1/2 full, most of the over-heads were already taken, and I had to find a place for my bag 4 rows behind where my seat was... which is such a joy when getting off the plane and no one is polite enough to let you go back 4 rows.  The poor bastards in Zone 2 were all screwed.  No more over-head space.  "Zone 2" on Delta = "Zone 4" on all other airlines.  Or "Boarding group D" on Southwest.  Despicable how Delta ineptly tries to manipulate language to get the beleaguered passenger to temporarily feel better. Just call it "Zone 3" and treat your passengers like grown ups, your stupid Georgia Peaches!

On top of this, I find out in April of this year that EVERY state in which I have to travel for work, will now have State Income Tax withheld, for each day I am traveling to that state.  So in 2016, I'll get to file 5 or 6 State tax returns, to get my money back.  Joy!!!!!!  So much incentive to be a happy traveling employee!!!!  So customer centric!!!  (at Accenture, where a friend of mine works, the COMPANY Files For the employee, in the multiple states to which they have been dispatched to do work for the company..   but not so at my corporate leviathan).  Lamer than a 2 legged dog.

Hobbit 3 - The Battle Of Five Writers

This morning I wasted $7 and 2 hours of my life enduring the bastardization of a film loosely based around the Tolkien mythos, entitled The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.  Eh, it really wasn't a battle of five armies.  And if you've read the book - as most Americans over 30 have - then you won't recognize most of the plot from the movie since it really doesn't have hardly anything to do with the book.  (and Jackson makes it actually 8 armies…  but I don't want to get into minutia) 

Peter Jackson did a great job in the Lord of the Ring Trilogy, sticking as close as he could to the 3 epic novels in 3 epic movies.  In the Hobbit movies, he drew out what could have been done in about 3 hours into 3 separate, painfully embellished films.  This last (thank goodness!) installment could have been wrapped up in about 30 minutes.  Instead, Jackson, and his fellow conspirators Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyen, and the increasingly annoying Guillermo del toro eviscerated J.R.R. Tolkien's beautiful little book, The Hobbit, and turned it in a misplaced love story, a personal blood feud, a father-son-angst conflict, and a mockery of the original Tolkien novel.  

To understand & appreciate how completely divergent The Battle of Five Armies was from the original Tolkien work, all one has to do is to look at the original Tolkien / Jackson ring trilogy epics, and then do a (1-X) calculation, proportionally.   So if in your perspective, Jackson got 98% right on the ring trilogy movies, in this final installment, he gets 2% right (1 - 0.98) = 0.02.  If he got 75% right in your perspective originally, then he's gotten perhaps 25% right on this last movie (1 - 0.75) = 0.25.  

There was no love story, between elves and dwarves or between anyone else, except for Smaug and his gold, in The Hobbit.  Yes, Tolkien wrote dwarves as greedy, and Thorin's grandfather as driven mad by the wealth, but Jackson and his cabal of co-conspirators created ridiculous plot devices that were not needed. 

The physics of a drawn bow, to propel an arrow through the air, are NOT purely the elasticity of the bow string, but the tension in that string and the elastic bending of the bow (as seen clearly in a simple long bow, or multiplied in a compound bow).  So when Bard (the Animated version was So Much Better!) uses his son's shoulder as the bow, that's a cute "father & son moment", but that arrow wouldn't have flown more than a few feet, much less several hundred feet, through the leathery hide of an ancient red dragon, through heart muscle, and killing one of the most vicious and formidable creatures ever to be characterized on the written page (think about it…  what other creature of mass destruction, pure evil & super intelligence have you ever read as much about in a beloved novel, and even cheered for (as I did, in the previous film, and this travesty as well)?  Jackson and his writers needed to spend less time launching water balloons with surgical tubing sling shots, and more time in Physics 101 class.

I half expected to see Paul Atreides (from Dune), riding along with the Northern Orc army - what's a matter Peter, were Wargs too hard to animate?  Or perhaps too deadly when matched against several hundred Iron Hills dwarves (who brought with them, no cavalry, but later, ram sheep conveniently appear)?  So many inane sub-plots and tangents…  I mean… it was great to see Radagast again… but the entire scene in which he appears… was not in the book.  Great to see Hugo Weaving (Agent Smith) as Elrond again… but in The Hobbit he never leaves Rivendell.  

There's so many things incongruent with Jackson's ham-fisted, market-driven re-writes of The Hobbit that it would take dozens and dozens of pages to describe, in even the briefest detail, and frankly, I don't have that kind of time to waste.  I am just delighted that Jackson cannot rape another Tolkien film, since the Tolkien family has not signed over rights to "The Silmarillion", and I hope in my lifetime, they never will.  

In The Battle of the Five Writers, J.R.R. Tolkien is soundly defeated.  Marketers rejoice, globally, and those who have never read the book will likely remain ignorant - reading takes time, and everyone lives connected to their digital devices, with the attention span of an impatient & unrealistic corporate board, expecting immediate results, gratification, satisfaction… which just leads to stagnation and disappointment, long term.  Much better to have video games, and plastic play toys, and to try and inspire fabricated dreams of interspecies romance, than to make a movie based solidly on the original work.  Pathetic & sad.

I was considering titling this "The Desolation of Smug", or "Jackson-itis" (the disease where you get infected with so much hubris, that you band together with other writer-directors [like del toro] who also show the same symptoms, and then you create an abomination, a bastardization, a remarkably ugly and painful vehicle that movie-goers have to endure while they were expecting 'this won't be so bad…  will it?'), but when I saw Jackson had teamed up with 3 other writers, the Battle of Five Writers sounded much better.

Triple Red Crossed, Laguna Hills CA

For the last 30 years, I've been donating blood.  I remember my first Highland High School blood drive, in the big circular gymnasium, and the first time I laid on a lounge chair and got a needle stuck in my arm to have my blood drawn.  I a teenager, and joked around with the phlebotomist that my friend Todd and I would carry cinder blocks and push start his manual transmission Dodge Omni after we ran a 5K race later that day.  They understood we were kidding, and we enjoyed our snacks afterwards, no one passing out.

Red Cross in Indiana.  Carolina-George Blood bank in South Carolina.  United Blood Services in Arizona.  I've never, in more than 7 gallons, been refused as a donor.  I feel it is part of my civic duty as an eligible donor to give, and to give as often as possible.  Many of my friends and relatives with medical conditions or who take certain medications cannot donate blood, so I always try to donate when I can.   I've got easy to find veins, my organically non-GMO fed beef & organic spinach nutrient rich blood always has enough iron, and it's a great way to keep track of my blood pressure & pulse in a 30 year longitudinal study, since they write it on the back of the card after each donation.

Taken by iPhone 5S, in my car, at 2pm 2Dec2014

So today, I go in to give my double red (ALYX they call it, at the Red Cross) donation…  but let me back up…

Back in July (of 2014), I go in to donate blood, at the same Laguna Hills Red Cross donation center (22971 Mill Creek Dr, Laguna Hills, CA 92653 ) and an untrained, over-reactive, histrionic, overly conservative phlebotomist screener tells me I 'have a rash' on my arms, I won't be able to donate.  I tell her I just cut the grass earlier that day, it's a normal skin color for me, and she doubles down on her rejection.   I tell her "look, I've donated for 7 gallons over 30 years, I am fine."  "It's about patient safety" she retorts.  "Get the director" I instruct her.  The director looks at my arms…   they're fine…   and I am allowed to donate (it was a Saturday morning)…  but paranoid phlebotomist got so flustered that she has screwed up the paper work so I can only donate a single unit, not a double unit.  Fine, just take my damn blood, please.  Now I'll have to come back in 56 days instead of 112 days; thank you for the inconvenience as  try to help you.

I then set up an appointment to give in San Clemente to avoid they histrionics of the Laguna Hills site.  At the last minute, the San Clemente blood drive is cancelled…  and they call me to ask me if I can please donate in Laguna Hills.  I tell them of the hassles I had there, and the Red Cross assures me it won't happen again.  I stupidly and gullibly trusted the Red Cross phone solicitor who gets commissions and incentive pay based upon how many appointments they make, not upon how many lies they tell or promises they break.  My 2nd attempt in Laguna Hills at the end of September 2014, where I am scheduled for a double red appointment, have a confirmation email that tells me I have a double red appointment, and I scheduled it on a week day afternoon to avoid being out-of-energy-and-drained-all-weekend after a double red appointment, turns out to be double booked!  Some other guy waltzed in, just before me, without an appointment, and they put him in the only ALYX double red machine they had.  "Can you come back in 3 hours? That's the next open appointment…" they asked me.  I told them my appointment was Now, and no, 3 hours from now I'll be eating dinner and getting ready to go to bed.  Let's make it a single, Again, due to Laguna Hills Red Cross's incompetence and disorganization. Fine.

60 some days later, I make an appointment online with the Red Cross, to donate double red, this afternoon.  "Are you sure it is not double booked?" I ask them on the phone. "Yes, we'll even have the center call you to make sure their machine is available ahead of time."  "Great".   I Was called an hour in advance, told them I would be there on time.  Arrived 10 minutes early (as I am prone to do), signed in, read my donor packet, and began the pre-screening with a new, poorly trained, overly reactionary phlebotomist.  "You've got a rash on your arm".  "No, that's normal, there's no rash" (see the above picture). "I DO have lots of track marks, from the Seven Gallons Of Blood I've been donating, here…….  here…  here…. " (as I point to all the track marks on the insides of my elbows that Red Cross, Carolina-Georgia, and United Blood Centers have left on my skin). "We have a protocol to follow" she tells me.  "Yes, and humans are allowed to operate within protocols and apply rational, sound judgement in situations.  Please get your director."  The young phlebotomist lumbers off and leaves me in the room, unattended for 5 or 6 minutes.  A 2nd phlebotomist comes in, a little bit older lady in her 30s who speaks English with a heavy Spanish accent.  "You ready?"  I tell her… "I am ready, but, the first phlebotomist thinks I have a rash, so she's gone to get the Director" and I show the 2nd phlebotomist my arms.  "You are fine, no rash where we take out the blood, just little red farder away. Is fine." she tells me with a smile.   "Thank you, please tell your director that."  I tell her, returning her smile.

The director comes in, a Dr Susan B, who has a look on her face like 'dealing with a donor is the LAST thing she wanted' to do today.  She looks at my inner elbows for 1 second, and says "do you have allergies?".  "Yes, to my cat" I tell her.  "You have a rash, you can't donate today."  I tell her, does she really realize what a mistake she is making, to turn down a loyal 7 gallon donor, who has no reason to be rejected, other than her very reactionary & poorly trained first phlebotomist's fears, even when a 2nd phlebotomist said I was fine?  And she blandly replies "we can't take the risk."  Well…  you've not only lost this loyal donor, but I spent 45 minutes with the National Red Cross on the phone, where "Kyle" a very patient Red Cross customer service manager at the national call center wrote up an incident report on the Laguna Hills facility.  I've then spent another 30 minutes composing this blog post.  And it really is a shame, since so many truly needful people require blood donations to stay alive.  I want to help those people.  But poor training and total paranoia on the phlebotomist's and the disgruntled director's parts are preventing that from happening.  If I had something physically wrong or my safety as a patient was being compromised, OK, refuse my donation…   but I am fine.  Dr Desert Flower even looked at the pic I sent to her via text, and confirmed I am fine.  It's sad that bureaucrats afraid of California law suits who guide poorly trained phlebotomists can't see that as well.

I've already made another donation appointment, 10 miles further away, later this week, at a small company blood drive.  I will still try my best to donate my nutrient rich, low cholesterol, healthy blood so that needful patients can benefit from it, despite the Red Cross's bureaucracy trying to prevent them from ever getting it.  I hope I get a rational, well trained phlebotomist this time.

There's More Important Things On Which To Focus

I recently got a postcard from COSTCO that warned me that the 30 pack of Mars candy for Halloween I had purchased back in September MIGHT have had the wrong number or wrongly labelled types of candy inside.  And honestly, it took me aback.

First, who gives a damn?
Secondly, it's just candy.  Who found it so abhorrent & unacceptable that they had to complain to COSTCO to the point that they needed to send out postcards to members to "warn" them?
We bought the 30 pack of full sized candy bars.  We had only 6 (six) trick or treaters, and honestly, we were very disappointed to have only 6.  We asked the trick or treating children if they preferred Snickers or M&Ms, and gave them the large, full sized candy bar they asked for.  Dr Desert Flower took the rest of the left over 24 candy bars to her work, where her colleagues and direct reports kept asking if the candy was 'for some fund raiser?'

If the candy we bought from COSTCO had been contaminated with E-Coli as organic spinach that Southern California COSTCOs had in the past, ok, warn me.  If the candy had some serious defect, yes, I want to know.  But there might have been an "incorrect number" or a "slightly different mix"?  Who cares??  And what indignant COSTCO member thought it necessary to complain enough that COSTCO legal thought they Needed to send out warning post cards to cover their asses?

No apology necessary.

Brain Dead Zombie Plot Dead Ends

Frequent visitors to JustJoeP know that I have a fascination with zombies, and post about them frequently (link here).  I want to clarify that I "had" a fascination with zombies, but that "The Walking Dead" has killed that earlier interest, and now, really, I just want the series to end and all the people to die or get eaten.  The premise has shown its limitations, and instead of interesting with a thread of believability, it has devolved into an unintentional comic farce.

Ok, I get it:
There's a viral break out and people turn into zombies.  ✔
Those zombies then are driven to attack "normal humans" who are not zombies, to "eat them"✔
(this "zombie hunger" premise goes way way back, sometimes to eat all of them, sometimes to eat their brains, but either way, 'a zombie's gotta eat', I get it)
If you cut off a zombie head, the body stops coming after you, but the head is still animated. ✔
(considering "The Matrix" premise of the brain as a powerful battery, ok, I could believe this)
Zombies are attracted to loud noises, machinery, voices, etc, ok. ✔
If you burn a zombie to a crisp, you will stop that zombie. ✔
If you destroy the brain of a zombie (head shot) then you will "kill" that zombie. ✔

Those are the standard zombie rules of the genre.  "The Walking Dead" adds in
Zombies have a keen sense of smell, and if you are smelling all "alive" they will follow their nose and sniff you out.
(highly unlikely...  since their lungs are not drawing in air, but the nasal nerve is a short route to the brain, so maybe...)  maybe...  ✔
Grass and shrubs stop growing, all on their own, instead of overrunning the world. ⬇
Dust is apparently Not ubiquitous in every building they enter. ⬇
Getting splattered by zombie blood in the face (eyes, mouth, nose) is not a source of contamination, and the whole 'Blood Borne Pathogen" standard should be thrown out. ⬇
Everyone is really a zombie, and once they die, they'll reanimate if they are not burnt or head-shotted
(a STRETCHED premise, for sure... but at least they have not reanimated ancient grave yards, only the more recently buried, since the viral outbreak) ⬇
One can stop the onset of becoming a zombie if you amputate the leg of the old veterinarian who was bitten on the ankle.
(maybe, if Herschel had Really Poor Circulation...  then maybe...)  ...maybe ✔
No Matter How Long Ago a person turned into a zombie, they will remain animated, "forever", hungrily seeking out the living to feast upon.  It does not matter if they are rotten down to just 1/2 a torso with flesh falling off their bones, the "zombie-ism" is so strong, the craving for fresh meat so powerful, that they will continue "endlessly" to stumble around and seek out people / animals / anything to eat.  ⬇⬇⬇

It is this last "add in" that REALLY bothers me.  Without respiration & digestion (to bring in nutrients),

"Warm Bodies" Boney Skeletons

or a circulatory system (to deliver nutrients and remove waste products), or an immune system (to repair things that get broken) all the zombies are in the process of decomposing into (eventually) skeletons.  At what point does the zombie brain - starved of all oxygen, water, blood flow, electrolytes & nutrients it needs (since even IF the zombie finds a fresh meal, the zombie cannot digest it) - cease to function as this amazing battery that can over-come rigor-mortise, lactic acid build up, parasitic infestation (not enough emphasis has been placed on flies, rats, and crows, who would have a population explosion with so many slow zombies stumbling around unburied), neuro-muscular decay, et al.  And the digestive tract would slowly eat out all the torsos from the inside, with the hydrochloric acid therein eating through the non-replinished stomach walls - remember, all mitosis has stopped, no new cells are being made or added.  Decay & decomposition are progressing.  Nothing is getting repaired.  Lost parts are not "growing back", zombie wounds are not healing, they're festering.

I could understand a "recent zombie" being a fairly formidable opponent.  But a zombie who has been stumbling around the heat of rural Georgia for more than a year, as anyone who has watched CSI can tell you, would be a goopy mess of skin hanging on bone with not enough remaining muscle tissue to move a single arm, leg, or jaw.  It is this "eternal zombie" paradigm and next week's preview of "we're all haunted" being stated that are making me just want to retch.  Please, kill off all the characters except Michonne and Daryl, and let them go live on an island somewhere.  Everyone else has made some really terrible choices, and should no longer be alive.  End the series soon, like "BReaking BAd" did, and stop trying to milk it.  The first two seasons were ok, but now it is just devolving to a bad comedy.

Maggie's use of a "No Parking" sign as a cleaver was hilarious!  But in a meeting of unsharpened sheet metal vs cervical spinal cord, driven by an angry human (not by a speeding school bus) a decapitation would be highly unlikely, even if the zombie had started to decompose slightly.  It was effective at making me laugh, but not effective as an plausible anti-zombie weapon, in a world governed by physics.

And Maybe that's what really bugs me?  They can screw up the biology to the point where Dr Desert Flower refuses to watch it, but I can still keep watching, suspending disbelief about SOME of the biological aspects, until the point where they mess with physics
- nearly every head shot (no matter how dull of the weapon, or how weakly delivered by the human) easily penetrates zombie skull? ⬇⬇⬇
- no matter how many rounds of bullets are fired, 'The Governor' never got hit? ⬇⬇⬇
- no matter how dull an object, or how weakly it is swung, it can easily decapitate any zombie? ⬇⬇⬇
- Daryl's cross bow bolts can take out hundreds of zombie skulls, unscathed, but miss one squirrel and hit just one tree, and the bolt breaks?  ➵ ⬇⬇⬇
Don't mess with physics.  It's a deal breaker.  Toy with biology...  ok...  but not physics.

Sorry Denying Fools, There's Still A Drought

Orange County is one of the most affluent regions of America, and many of its well off citizens spew no shortage of effluent from their mouths about things they do not understand - either willfully or ignorantly.  When I hear some elderly, affluent man, talking to his girl friend / daughter on a walking path in a posh coastal community (like Dana Point's Strand Beach) and he says "They say on a scale of 1 to 10, that this drought is an 11, but then it rained. They don't know anything! Where I live up in Los Angeles County, they have weekend water restrictions, and you can only water on Monday, Wednesday and Friday (dagnabit!).  There's no water shortage, they just need to stop dumping it in the rivers for all them damn fish and give it to the farmers and their farms instead!" ...when I hear such mis-informed, incorrect, misguided statements coming from an elderly man, it really makes me lose respect for 'the greatest generation.'  No Brokaw, this guy was not among them.


There are many really smart, factually well informed retired persons.  I correspond via email with many of them.  I strike up conversations with some of them in person when I am at a grocery store, concert, or family gathering.  But it seems that the (wealthier they are + the older they are)  x (the more geographically concentrated with other wealthy retirees they are) = (the more willfully ignorant & misinformed they are).  As Louis C.K. once said: “A 55 year-old garbage man is a million times smarter than a 28 year-old with three Ph.D.s, especially smarter than him.”


If you are a frequent visitor to JustJoeP, you know I am a fan of rain.  I write about it Often (link here). I used to play in it as a kid.  I missed having it frequently when I lived in Arizona for 5 years.  Rain (in moderation) helps things grow, refills reservoirs, brings life to places that were rather barren previously.  Rain is good.  California is in a HUGE drought, that has been more severe than any drought in recorded 120 year history in California (here the DATA: link)
or, if you don't like embeds:
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/ranks.php?periods%5B%5D=12&parameter=pcp&state=4&div=0&year=2014&month=1#ranks-form
Now, if Americans scored better on basic math aptitude tests, they'd be able to see that "6 inches" is smaller than "22 inches".  And if they scored better on English and Language aptitude tests, they'd know that "Driest to Date" does not mean "bring a chapstick & some lube when you pick me up tonight to go out for dinner".

So when there's an intense storm that sweeps into a drought stricken area, as all of Southern & Central California are drought stricken, and it drops a few inches of rain (1 or 2 or 3 inches, all numbers still much less than the 16 inches we never got last year), the drought is still not over.  It doesn't even become a mini-drought.  It's still a very severe drought.  We'd need 6 more of these massive storms to come through, and dump just as much rain (if it ends up being 3 inches, by the time it is all over Sunday - we got a 'whopping' 0.96 inches this morning... or...  about 15 more of these "1 inch" storms would be needed, for the Faux News watchers who can't do math).


Sure, the weather radar was all angry & red this morning, for about 20 minutes.  Then it passed, and the birds started singing again.  Some drizzle came, some "green radar" rain came, and then it all subsided again.  It's a very wet world outside right now, but we are still in a severe drought.

Just because it snowed in the Midwest & North East today doesn't mean there's no such thing as climate change.  Climate Change, by definition, Will Cause More Severe Fluctuations.

Tell the English citizens living along the Thames that the current variation is "normal".  Tell the farmers in Bakersfield CA that the lack of rainfall is normal.  Tell the polar bears who don't have any ice aged more than 6 months old from which to hunt seals.  Tell the Australians who had record floods last year.  Local weather events Do Not contradict over-all climate change trends.  They reinforce it.  Deny it all you want, it doesn't mean it will go away or that it is not true.

Cannon's Misfire

Last night, Dr Desert Flower wanted to go to a nice seafood restaurant in Dana Point called Cannon's.  We'd been there before, and the food is ok, the service not bad, and the views of the harbor are beautiful.  I made a reservation for 7pm on Opentable.  We arrived 5 minutes ahead of time, and were seated window-side by 7pm.  So far, so good.

The waiter took more than 5 minutes to come over to ask us how we were "hungry" I replied.  We ordered drinks, soups, salads, and main courses, tout suite.  "Do you want them to come out All at once?" the waiter inquired.  "As they're ready" I told him.  DDF ordered (menu here) a Napa Sauvignon Blanc, Cannon's salad, and the Mahi.  I ordered the lobster bisque, Oscar Filet (filet mignon with king crab), and a Mendoza Malbec.  We looked out over the harbor, and chatted about the day's and week's events, at work, locally, on the radio, and about things happening in the world globally.

My lobster bisque arrived solo, and I'd not eaten in about 10 hours, so I told DDF "if it is too hot, I'l let it sit until your salad arrives".  "Go ahead, don't wait".  I sipped it from my spoon, and it was barely above human body temperature, about 15 degrees cooler than I'd expected, but it tasted fine, so I sipped it, slowly, and we continued to converse.  Maybe it was from some other table's order, who changed their mind to have chowder instead, and they sent it back to the kitchen, who didn't rewarm it, and it was re-routed to me.  I don't know.  Soup was done, salad no where in site.  Bus boy takes empty soup bowl away.  Another 5 minutes pass.  Salad arrives, it's fine, DDF begins eating it.  We still have no wine.

Enter another couple who are then seated at the table adjacent to my right elbow.  Window seats are at a premium, so the restaurant has chosen to squeeze as many tables as close together at the windows that look over the harbor some 100+ feet below.  The couple is in their 50s, dressed nicely, and are rather "loud talkers"  Salad is done, wine arrives, with apologies from the waiter for the delay.  The wine tastes fine. The restaurant is 1/2 empty, with loads of additional capacity, it is not tourist season, so I am baffled as to why things are taking so long.  Another 10 minutes or so pass before the main courses arrive.

My filet comes with scalloped potatoes and grilled seasonal vegetables.  I've ordered it "medium" since I do not know where it was sourced, and when I am not familiar with my ranch source, I make sure any microbes have been heated to 165F and killed.  The filet is fine.  The vegetables - red & green peppers, red onion, and okra, have been scorched and blackened by the inattentive chef (he's not over-worked, the place has more empty tables than full ones).  The potatoes have not been cooked - they're hard, raw, sliced, with a yellowish flavorless sauce poured over them.  Not a hint of cheese, butter, cream, or anything that provided any substantive flavor can be detected.  I do not believe the potatoes ever saw an oven before making it to my plate.   DDF states that her mashed potatoes are quite tasty and offers me some, which I decline.  I know she loves mashed potatoes, and...  well....

The couple at my right elbow, have this loud conversation:
man: "so tell me, how that whole thing with IHOP worked out?"
woman in sparkly sweater: "oh I was so angry! When their sign says they are open to 10pm, it doesn't matter that we got there at 9:46.  Those two women, the hostess and the waitress were both so rude to us, saying 'you know it is already 9:46, we close at 10, can you eat quickly?'  So I called the IHOP corporate offices, and they kept thanking me for calling and telling them about what a horrible experience I had.  They said that everyone at that IHOP location were going to get re-trained, and that the two people who were rude to our business party were going to get written personnel file reprimands and verbal warnings.  My friend So-and-so (inaudible) told me 'they're just entry level positions' and I told her that it didn't matter, you can't treat customers like that, and the IHOP corporate customer service agreed."
man: "it just shows you how all of society is degrading, no one wants to work any more or is willing to earn their wages. This whole country is going down the drain"

I .... wanted...  to say and do very unpleasant things to this couple, and unload on them, but I refrained, and just stared at my uncooked, hard, tasteless potatoes and blackened scorched vegetables, and the space on my plate where my filet used to be.  I knew that anything I said to them would not have changed their minds, and it would have ruined DDF's evening.  No desert, just a check, and we got out of there almost 2 hours after arriving for $120 (a dollar a minute?) - which would have not bothered me if both DDF's and my food would have been served promptly, warmly, unburnt, and more than just 1/2 of it flavorful.

Gluten Free Dumb

I am really starting to get tired of seeing "Gluten Free" labels on food items that in no way, shape, or form, could or would ever have any gluten on them.  Take for example, bacon.  Bacon, comes from a pig's belly - a typically fat pig's belly.  Yes, the pig May Have consumed some gluten in it's life time.  Pigs eat alot of things (Leviticus 11, 3-27 warn against them), and they turn the things they eat into delicious pig flesh.  I am a huge fan.

Duh - of course it is "Gluten Free"  

But I also paid attention in my science classes.  And I married an incredibly smart scientist.  In our home, we are "science literate".  To see "gluten free" on ANY meat product that is not breaded, or soaked in a wheat based beer, or cured in a rye whiskey, or in any way influenced, affected, or afflicted with the residues of any wheat, barley, or rye, is a clear illustration of several things:
1) The US educational system has miserably failed to train our kids to be science literate
2) Marketers prey upon the public's general ignorance and lemming / herd like mentality
3) Consumers who SEE the "gluten free" label on foods that inherently could not or would not contain gluten and then BUY them based upon that irrelevant label, should be removed from the general population and not allowed to reproduce, teach children, or hold elected office.

It would be like labeling fruit in the grocery store to say "no artificial sweeteners added" - of course not, mother nature already loaded up all the fruits with loads of natural fructose to entice animals to eat them and distribute the seeds in their excrement.  Such a label would be superfluous and misleading to the uninformed who might start to think (by way of push-marketing) that some natural fruits MIGHT contain artificial sweeteners?

Any gliadins and gluten the pig ate might have damaged its intestines (if it did not just pass through them, undigested), and the residual peptides(if they were even absorbed into the small intestine) we're metabolized, but they did not accumulate in the belly fat that became my bacon.  I know 1 in 133 people have a gluten allergy (and 1 in 3 hipsters, yuppies, valley girls, nouveau riche, Californians, and steam punks claim they do) and many governments Require the labeling on food packages, but really... is it necessary for foods that Cannot contain gluten in the first place to have to be labeled?

Just let me fry (in my cast iron skillet) and eat my Canadian maple cured, thick slice bacon in peace.  I will continue to publicly scoff and mock "gluten free" labels on food that doesn't require them, and mourn for the scientific ignorance of the North American population who fall victim to such misguided marketing.