Free Airport Wifi - should be mandatory

I guess I am spoiled. Phoenix Sky Harbor, Greenville Spartanburg, and Reno's airport all have free public Wifi. That's how a modern airport is supposed to run. Atlanta has several bogus wireless internet providers trolling for a few dollars, as does Dallas, Cincy, Chicago, and Washington IAD in the US. Heathrow, Frankfurt, Shanghai, Narita, and Hong Kong internationally It's hard enough being jet lagged, or harried having to transfer from one terminal to the next... now some clueless MBA's business plan hopes that travellers will pay anything to be able o connect? No. I don't think so.

Free Public Wifi means that people like me get their data mined at smaller airports - and that's fine. I'm checking email and blogging. Big deal. Free Public Wifi also means that people like me dont have to stalk the hallways outside the First Class lounges, where a few of them still have wireless inside without password protection (Like at ATL's B concourse, IAD's NW / Delta lounge, etc) and squat upon the lounge provided signal.

Make your airports friendlier, and travellers will appreciate it more, and look forward to travelling through your city. Try to charge me $7.99 to connect to the internet, and I laugh in your general direction!

Los Straightjackets & SCOTS in Reno

Last night here in Reno, my buddy Matt and some friends & I went to go see Southern Culture on the Skids, with opening act Los Straightjackets at the JA Nugget casino (Sparks). It was a good show - lackluster table service from an apathetic waitress, but a good venue with adequate acoustics, front row seats adjacent to the stage's dancing area. Fun for all!

I'd never heard Los Straightjackets before, but they were intense, tight, talented, put on an awesome show - completely unexpectedly. SCOTS put on a good show as well, but I've been seeing them for 20 years now, ever since Dawg Gone in Spartanburg and Al's Pump House in northern Greenville (both venues long ago closed). 20 years can wear on a band that's never had substantial lucrative commercial success. Rick's guitar work was as high energy as always, Dave's standing drum rhythm support tight as ever but seeming a little less vivacious. Mary's bass work and vocals were a little "off game" from what I've remember in past performances in SC, NC, and AZ... she didn't put on a bad show, it just seemed that the fire was burning less brightly - I loved the gogo boots and sparkling leggings though! =)

In supporting roles they had some rhythm guitarist who didn't add too much, and a black-leather-mini-skirt-wearing 20-something dancer who invitingly danced on stage for a handful of songs. The traditional 8 Pc Box number went well, but there were several drunk myopic guys who clambered on stage along with the bevy of audience participation beauties. Rick had to scold the drunken guys and instructed them to get on their knees and beg for chicken, which was pretty funny from my center stage dance-pit vantage point.

To the Air Races tomorrow! Already off to the start of a great weekend...

Keep it Stupid America

Image © Austin Cline
Click for full-sized Image
More Propaganda Posters

I'll be not connected for a few days... more next week.

Flame-throwers are perfect for dragonfly hunting.

Jesus' general always cracks me up! Link here, for a letter to the NRA.

bin Laden's Sign Of Weakness

Highly Intelligent and well informed Middle East scholar Juan Cole says that bin Laden's most recent audio statement is a "sign of weakness". Link here. I sure hope he's right. "(only 4% of Arabs say they care deeply about Afghanistan)"

Insurance Industry Profit Protection and Enhancement Act

Thanks Max Baucus, for delivering not 1/2 a loaf, not a 1/4 loaf, but more like a Higgs boson loaf in benefiting consumers, and a wonderful back-to-school gift to the US Insurance Companies, more like a full ride 4 year scholarship with a Hummer and tutors and tutors who give hummers for Insurance Executives. Why the hell are Montana, Wyoming, Iowa, and the Dakotas dictating such impotent health care reform to the rest of the country anyway?

Link to the Reuters news release here. Thanks to JoeM: "I smell the worst of all possible outcomes (mandate, no public options, panty-waist reforms) in the wind."

This should be more accurately called the "Insurance Industry Profit Protection and Enhancement Act".

It took 2 months to come up with this corporate gift? Incompetent & Despicable. It should be vetoed, if it ever gets passed.

People of Walmart - Cousin Itt

"Any logical input would be greatly appreciated here." Link here.
LOL!

Tibetan Sky Funeral

Tibetan Sky Funeral, a Reverse Thanksgiving, in some ways. I was not aware of such a practice existing. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. A low carbon foot print, and extremely efficient. Very patient vultures.

If I was not donating my body to scientific research when I die, or if I lived near many ethnic Tibetans, this would be an interesting way to return my final remains back to the dust it came from. All that vulture poop and feathers though.. not to mention the last minute of the video's ritual... it's gotta be kinda messy.

I axed him...

'He axed me...'
'you've got to axe me...'

These are what come to mind, when that phrase is spoken in the English language:







If you meant "ask" then please, enunciate. Otherwise, you reveal a great deal about your ability to articulate, your dialect, your attention to detail, your disregard for effective communication.

10 Lessons for Tea Baggers

Crooks and Liars has this awesome summary. Link here.
1. President Obama Cut Your Taxes
2. The Stimulus is Working
3. First Ronald Reagan Tripled the National Debt...
4. ...Then George W. Bush Doubled It Again
5. Republican States Have the Worst Health Care
6. Medicare is a Government Program
7. Barack Obama is Not a Muslim
8. Barack Obama was Born in the United States
9. 70,000 Does Not Equal 2,000,000
10. The Economy Almost Always Does Better Under Democrats

"Back in April, the Daily Show's Jon Stewart offered some sound advice for frothing at the mouth Tea Baggers, "I think you might be confusing tyranny with losing." Now five months after their Tax Day outburst, thousands of vein-popping Obama opponents descended Saturday on Washington for Tea Party II. But while Glenn Beck's furious followers alternately slandered the President as a "fascist," a "communist" and worse, they remained unencumbered by either the thought process - or the truth."

Classic!

Eco Maids 4 You - Excellent Service

Looking at my traffic analytics this morning, I noticed dozens and dozens of hits over the last 2 weeks throughout the Phoenix metro area from Litchfield Park on the West Side to Apache Junction and Queen Creek on the East Side. With so many local eyeballs now on the site, I want to put in a good word for the awesome independent business owner Dr Desert Flower and I use for our cleaning service: Eco Maids 4 You L.L.C.

Eco Maids' owner, Carla runs her business efficiently and effectively here on the West side of Phoenix (Goodyear). I found her business on a Yelp site, and she's listed on the cumbersome ServiceMagic site as well, but after having her come every 2 weeks over the last 2 months, cleaning the bath rooms, kitchen, and floors, it's worth the $50 to get back my Saturday mornings, and not have to hurt our backs bending over to scrub the shower floor and bath tubs. Carla's assistants that she brings with her are conscientious, thorough, well trained. She uses Simple green and other ecologically less harsh chemicals. We provide the mop, rags, and vacuum. It's well worth it.

If you're looking for an affordable, reputable, local, reliable cleaning service that's reasonably priced, check out Carla's website and give her a call. Mention that Joe sent you - and let me know if you concur with her, or if the good service we get is an anomaly.

Billionaires For Wealthcare, The 12th-ers

TRMS featured this last night. Rachel crashed their site, it was so popular, and so damn funny.
"Because nothing says 'Freedom' like denying claims"
"Warning: Affordable Healthcare may cause severe loss of profits"
"CIGNA Palin 2012"
"Fight Socialism, End Medicare Now!"
"If we ain't broke, don't fix it"
Billionaires For Wealthcare, keep up the good fight!

Impotent Rage

A gorgeous illustration of double standard hypocrisy in the extreme. It takes TDS to call out Fox on how inane and irrelevant they really are. Video link here.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/

...and then go down to "Mad Men" on September 14th.

Viacom has made it harder to link to TDS videos.

Is Tony Dungy a Vulcan?

Watching NBC Sunday night, I began to wonder. Is Tony Dungy a Vulcan? He's got the ears: here, here, and here.

Michael Christie delivers lackluster, once again

Much earlier this year, Dr Desert Flower and I bought partial season ticket sets for the Phoenix Symphony. Last Saturday night was Beethoven's 9th Symphony in D Minor. When I got the tickets, I thought - awesome! I'd not heard it sung in German for more than a decade. I used to sing in church choir in Jr High back at OLG in Highland IN, and we sang it in English one Easter Season. I even remember one of the superb California drum corps play it as a closer and play very high in the DCI finals one year when I was in High School. I find it a moving piece when performed well. Sign me up.

So much to my horror and bewilderment, director Michael Christie "packaged" this awesome work of the grumpy & progressively deafened Ludwig Van Beethoven with a first act performance of John Adam's minimalist, discordant, disquieting, somewhat disturbing "On The Transmigration Of Souls". "Missing... Missing... Missing..." was the musical genius that Maestro Edvard Tchivzhel brought to every performance of the Greenville Symphony Orchestra's amazing body of work. "Remember... Remember... Remember..." the joy and anticipation that an evening at the GSO used to inspire. I serious caught myself counting the sprinkler heads and doing HVAC capacity and louvered register velocity calculations in my head (page 270) throughout the 25 minutes of recorded street noise and disjointed random chorus chanting that accompanied the minor chords leaking out of the string section. After a painful 1/2 hour, Mozart's short Ave verum corpus was played quite nicely - a soothing salve and relief.

Then a 20 minute intermission, where the Dr and I sat amoungst the living dead - people who were alive during the Coolidge administration, and who moved at the pace of Galápagos tortoises. They seemed to enjoy the Adam's work, but I think they needed new batteries in their hearing aids.

As the Beethoven piece began, Christie once again proved he does not know how to rally his symphony through a crescendo that has any impact, playing a vast range mezzo-piano to mezzo-forte (sarcasm fully intended). Yes, Concertmaster Steven Moeckel is passionate in his playing, and about 1/2 of the first violins follow his lead, but the rest of the 1st, most all of the 2nds, and all the violas are just marking time until they can finish the night. The cellos and double bases make good statements when called upon, following their principals' leads, but it's pretty rare. The flutes and clarinets are barely there. The brass on rare occasion make a statement, but usually it sounds at least one hill away on a foggy morning.

A blasé Allergo entrance piece, followed by a Molto vivace that was more like Molto patetica. The serene Adagio molto e cantabile actually was enjoyable, and that's when it hit me - the Phoenix Symphony plays melodic, flowing, gentle works adequately, even enjoyably. As the Presto - Allegro assai - Allegro vivace began my hopes to be wowed had been pretty much vanquished by this point. The massive chorus that stood on bleachers erected behind the orchestra did a fine job, proving to me that it is not the venue of Symphony Hall that muffles the instruments inside, it's the director and 1/2 an orchestra that bring an energy & majestic, soul moving quality of a 1972 Pacer to the concert experience.

Edvard and the GSO, we miss you. I can only hope that the Tchaikovsky, Vivaldi, Prokofiev,and Mozart tickets we have this season are more enjoyable. Next time, I'll take a flask with me.

O Freunde, nicht diese Töne! - LOL! =)

Anything over Moen, anyday

Last Spring I replaced the crappy, leaking, lackluster, el-cheapo Moen kitchen faucet with a Price Pfister. Dr Desert Flower was delighted, and it's been working well. In the middle of the summer, one of the crappy, lackluster, el-cheapo Moen hall bathroom faucets began leaking as well. It followed suit with the Master Bath Room Moen faucet that also failed within a few months of us moving in. So I went out, and bought the cheapest, but prettiest 2 handled faucets I could find - Glacier Bay 102-856s - with the house underwater by almost 1/2 of it's mortgage, splurging on the property is not really relevant. The Glacier Bay's should be good for a few years, until we can dump this abode. They look sweet, and work very well.

The GB's had much more robust hardware than the pathetically chintzy Moens, for the structural sink mounts, the threaded brass water feeds, and the basin drain stopper controls. Yes, it is cheap made-in-China hardware, but it appears to be a vast improvement over the 5 year old Moens. 3 out of 6 Moen faucets failed to properly function in 5 years - that kind of Quality speaks for itself. "Moen, Built to Last, Built for life" - ugh... yeah, a life in a scrap heap maybe, until it's melted down in a large blast furnace.

May they rot in prison, and never be released

Despite Dick Cheney's premature insistence of arresting Rashid Rauf, the Pakistani leader of the cell of the 4 spoiled, UK born, coddled & unappreciative, fundamentalist Muslims who were stupid enough to be persuaded to try and blow up innocents in contradiction to their sacred Quran (Surach, 18:74), the British justice system today convicted these clueless conspirators to many dozens of years of prison.

If they get a painful cancer while in prison, I certainly hope they are not let out to go to an Arabic speaking country for Ramadan. Let them sit and rot in a prison cell. They've ruined air travel for everyone, going forward. When returning from France, I used to be able to carry a 1/2 case of Bordeaux home as carry on. When returning from Mexico, Premium Tequila and 500ml of pure vanilla bottles would be in my laptop bag. No longer is that possible. All liquids must be under 3 oz? Malarkey! Ridiculous! Aggravating!

And one of the 3, Sarwar, he looks downright stupid, Neanderthal-esque, perhaps Half-Orc (or is that not Halal?). All three are douche bags. It's too bad they can't be sent to a US Super Max prison, where they wouldn't survive very long.

When the story first came out, The Scotsman ran an interview with a former Northern Ireland colonel who was the head of the bomb-dismantling detachment of the British Army who poo-pooed the whole notion of creating a liquid peroxide based explosive in a airplane lavatory that would do anything more than smell bad and make people cough, with a better chance of burning or killing the bomber (and no one else) than anything else. I read it online on the Scotsman site back in 2006, which further aggravated me with the draconian bottle restrictions that year and every year since, but after searching for an hour yesterday, I was unable to find it again - perhaps they pulled the interview from the website. Regardless, these 3 worthless little turds should never breathe air as free men again. And once again Cheney, thanks for almost blowing this whole investigation!

Gyure's "Doggy Energy Theory" Proven: Kleiber's law

25 years ago, my good friend Todd hypothesized the "Doggy Energy Theory". He postulated, that little kicking dogs, like shitzu and daschunds that bark alot and that seem very hyper-actively energetic, have the same amount of energy stored up in them as Much Larger ones, like say a St.Bernard or a Giant Schnauzer. If you were to put a small dog in a calorimeter, and measure it's stored energy, it would approximately equal the energy that a much larger dog would put out, in the same calorimeter. Todd's a very gentle soul, and wouldn't incinerate an actual living dog in a calorimeter, but he based this theory upon years of observation of his own dogs as well as those of his friends and neighbors.

Last, week, I was watching a Nova special I had DVR'ed about Fractals (Hunting the Hidden Dimension), that talked mostly about Benoit Mandelbrot, but it also branched out into a discussion of biological applications of fractals. It turns out, that James Brown of the University of New Mexico, Brian Enquist of University of Arizona, and Geoffry West of the Santa Fe Institute published a paper "A General Model For the Origin of Allometric Scaling Laws in Biology" back in 1997, that proves Gyure's theory, with a slight adjustment. It's a 3/4 power, not a 1:1 relationship.

An elephant is 200,000 times as large as a mouse, but it needs only 10,000 times as much energy. Kleiber's law: E=M^(3/4)






This patterning ratio applies not just to mammals, but to pretty much every living creature - from when cells divide, to how trees branch out, to when bronchial tubes or arteries are programmed to split off, each cycle of growth and decay, in a fixed ratio - something I never understood or appreciated until last week.

Retrospective on 100 days

President Obama's first 100 days - yeah, a real socialist agenda. How terrible, especially after his dry drunk cheerleader all-hat-no-cattle we-don't-torture predecessor.

Fringe, hysterical, guano crazy, vocal libertarian & right wing loons need to look at the actual facts, and not get wrapped up agonizing over imaginary death panels, free medicare for illegal immigrants, and demanding more tax relief for the richest 2% of Americans where more than 1/2 the wealth is concentrated.

Flip Flopping Family Values Conservatives!

Flip Flopping Conservatives!

"In a truly unexpected move, the Washington, D.C.-based political action committee "American Solutions for Winning the Future" (ASWF) has named Allison Vivas, President of the adult entertainment studio Pink Visual, recipient of its Entrepreneur of the Year award for 2009.

"I'm honored, and more than a little surprised, to receive this prestigious award," Vivas said. "It never occurred to me that Newt Gingrich, one of the principal architects of the conservative 'Contract with America' in the 1990's, would be willing to brave criticism from the far right of his party in order to recognize good work done on the part of an adult entertainment professional."

According to the notice from ASWF, should Vivas attend a private dinner being held on Oct. 7 at the historic Capitol Hill Club in Washington, she will "dine privately with Newt," who will then take the occasion to present Vivas with her "well deserved award" and pose for a photo with her."

Tip o the hat to Matt for this gem.

Sadly, once the ASWF realized what an awesome family value selection this was, they withdrew their award!