Gym.

I don't think that I am going to make it to the gym again today. That makes it ten years in a row!

Windy.

It was very windy here last night. Not as bad as it was in the Philipines mind you where they had winds of 200 mph with gusts up to 235 mph and 50 foot waves. We on the other hand had some winds, the strength of which I have no idea, except that it did blow my boat into the water - from on land where it was sitting up on logs. Fortunately I had looped its line over one of the pier poles which stopped it from blowing across The Lake. Also very fortunately I had forgotten to remove the plugs. These I always remove, except this time, to allow any rain water to drain out. But I had forgotten, otherwise it would have promptly sunk, which would have made its retrieval extremely difficult! I have no idea how I would have been able to get it out of The Lake if it had filled with water! Certainly not on my own.
The wind also blew my crab traps into the water from the pier where they had been sitting after I pulled them out last week. Now please bear in mind that crab traps are basically made of chicken wire, so they are about 98% holes, maybe 99%, surrounded by thin wire! That does not give much area for the wind to work on. But there they are, in the water.

Commas can be lifesavers.

Let's eat Grandma.

Or

Let's eat, Grandma.

Looking for companionship.

I like poetry, long walks on the beach and poking dead things with a stick.

My Wife.

My wife says that I never listen to her.
At least I think that is what she said.

Engineers.

Engineers aren't boring. We just get excited about boring things. :)

Daughter.

You can't scare me. I had a daughter!

Guns - again!

Yes here I am again with my "favorite" subject - guns.
What is happening with us? Yet another multiple gun killing yesterday. No I don't expect you to remember which one that is, after all there is one almost every day.
Here we are all up in arms and excited about Assad in Syria killing 1,400 people with Sarin Gas but not in the least bit concerned that here in the US we kill way more people than that with guns every month! 2,500 people dead in the US every single month! More than every other country in the entire world COMBINED. How crazy is that? And we are not in the least bit concerned. In fact I think we may be proud!
We vote against health care and against keeping guns out of the hands of idiots and crazy people. This makes the US, the richest country in the world, also the most dangerous country in the world. With the worst and most expensive health care in the world, (well not really health CARE, more like health BUSINESS) and the most likely place to be killed or maimed by a gun in the whole world.
Just saying.

Garden Harvest.

Finally here we are getting towards the end of June and the harvest is starting to come in. We leave for England early tomorrow morning. Julia made dinner and here is what we had from the garden - Beets, Cucumber, Peas, a pie made with Eggs, Spinach and Swiss Chard. So far everything was from our garden. Not from the garden, yet, were the Tomatoes and of course the Avocados. I also had a Home Made Beer.
This morning we had Raspberries from the garden and yesterday we had our first Squash of the year along with some Fish from The lake. Usually by this time of the year we would have been having Figs too.
Unfortunately we have had some "visitors" - I suspect Deer, who have decimated our Tomato plants, Beans, Lettuce, Beets tops, Potato tops and Sweet Potato tops. Maybe even more. Not a good thing.
There is a pear tree in the front garden with probably several hundred young pears on it. last year I went out there one day and ALL of the pears were GONE! Completely gone. At first I thought that the kids had got into them. But looking around I did not see any sign of pears. If the kids had picked and thrown them they would be laying around, plus they would not have picked every single one. The pears were well on their way, quite big, but still not ripe but apparently ripe enough to be eaten, almost certainly by deer.
Not sure what to do. Very frustrating.

An observation.

This is just a simple observation. Make of it what you will.
I think that the Republican Party is anti education because they know that once someone is educated they vote Democrat!
Doubtless if you are a Republican you will laugh at this and say that there are many educated Republicans. But, if you read any posts on line it is easy to tell the Republicans from the Democrats by the way they spell and the way that they express themselves. While it is not 100%, if the spelling is poor, the poster expresses themselves poorly, puts sentences together badly, it is almost always a Republican/Conservative.
I would say about three or four to one.
Does this explain why the Republicans want to make education difficult? Sure most Republicans can afford to put their children through college. And of course these children are firmly brought up in a Conservative environment and thoroughly brainwashed into the Republican way. They are told how bad the poor are. How being poor is their own fault. The poor are also criminals. No mention of some poor people being ill, disabled, mentally disturbed, and therefore unable to improve themselves, especially as they often have limited access to medical care.
It amazes me how the truly ignorant will vote Republican. To read some posts I really do wonder how some manage to support themselves, they are so paranoid, so hate filled and have so little idea of how anything works!
Many are completely removed from reality, thinking everything that they see on the Internet, on Fox news or hear on Rush et al is true!!
Just saying.

Naive

How naive can Americans be? Twenty years ago a friend who worked at NSA told me about the programs they had to look for certain words in phone conversations, that every foreign embassy everywhere (including our own!) was bugged, that cell phone conversations as well as every other thing that you could imagine was being intercepted and "interpreted". I have assumed this to be the case ever since then. That was TWENTY YEARS AGO!!

And indeed before then! In 1967, soon after we came to the US - 1967 was 46 years ago - we had a telegram intercepted and sent to the Pentagon for examination, interpretation, or whatever. The telegram said Happy Wedding Anniversary, and was addressed to David & Julia Liddle. How did we find out about it's detour? When it was delivered, I commented to the post office man who delivered it that our wedding anniversary had been a day or two earlier and whoever had sent it either didn't know when it was, unlikely, or had forgotten. Then I noticed that it was dated and should have reached us a day or two earlier. It was at this time that the postal carrier told us that it had been sent to the Pentagon before it came on to us. he said that a lot of foreign mail and telegrams went there first.

If there is anyone out there that does not know this happens then I feel sorry for them. It should be obvious.

And, what POSSIBLE use could listening in to our phone conversations, looking at out our e-mails, or any other form of spying be to the US government except to look for terrorists? I cannot think of any reason, except looking for terrorists, spies or internet hackers trying to harm us that the US government would want to know if you were wishing Auntie Mabel a Happy Birthday, were saying "Wish you here" from vacation, Saying "Come on over, my husband just left.", calling to ask you to "Pick up Milk, bread and eggs on the way home." "Go to the library and pick up a DVD for tonight". Etc. Etc. Etc.

Can you?

In case you did not know, there are thousands of nuclear weapons out in the world owned by at least a dozen nations - lets see, The US, The UK, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, Iran, Russia - several States of Russia, China, and maybe some others that I have forgotten or we don't know about?! And there are dozens? Hundreds? of Terrorist groups that would love to have one or several nuclear weapons. And doubtless are trying to get them. And equally doubtless would use it/them as soon as they got them. There are almost unlimited targets, including Washington DC, New York, London, and numerous other soft targets as well as targets that you and I could not even think of but the terrorists will. When that first one goes off, probably within the next ten years, the questions THEN will be, "Why didn't we know?" "Why did we do nothing to stop it?" And so on.

Well folks THAT is what we are trying to do now - stop it. BUT Of course the false indignation about "Our Rights" etc is going to prevent us finding out who, what and where. The news organizations and the Politicians from "The other side" care nothing about anything except getting that scoop or getting them selves into power.

Why do you care about having your conversations listened to or read? Unless you are doing something that you shouldn't be doing. I certainly have nothing to hide. Do you? Is it important enough to stop us looking for nuclear terrorism?

Think about it.

The River Danube.

We took a Danube River Cruise in about 2009. It was in June. It rained every day! We never got to go up onto the top deck where they had chairs to sit and watch the passing scenery, although I did go up there once briefly to have a look. Even though it didn't rain 24/7 the chairs were wet and therefore not usable. The river was very high and the boat barely made it under several of the bridges.
But it definitely was nowhere near as bad as things are there today!
They have record high flood waters. People are losing everything. We thought the water was high when we were there, there was a lot of debris in the water including trees and tree limbs and the water was right up to the top of the banks. But nothing like this.
There are bad floods here in the US as well. Don't know what is happening. What is causing it?

Memorial Day 2013 with Children at The Lake.

After a long cool spring, Memorial Day - Monday May 27th 2013 - was forecast to be fine, sunny and 70 degrees. Bradley had called and asked if he could bring Caitlin and Andrew, two children that he babysits, over to use the kayaks and the pedal boats. We of course said yes.
When he arrived he also had with him his brother Zachary and his girlfriend Kelly. Kelly had come in her own car as she had to go to work in a couple of hours, so she was not able to go out on the boats for fear of getting wet but she did help to get a fire going in the fire pit for hot dogs and smores.
After Kelly left, the boys and Caitlin launched the two kayaks and the two seat pedal boat and all four of them alternated the use of each while pedaling and paddling, frantically at times, around The Lake. Their frenzied paddling/pedaling was in their frantic attempts to escape being splashed by each other as first one and then another joined forces to "attack" their "foes". Finally when all were thoroughly soaked, they made their way back to shore and engaged in more leisurely activities.
I think that it was Zachary that first discovered the presence of clams in the sand and began collecting them. Soon Andrew, Caitlin and Zachary were digging for clams. I explained to Bradley and Zachary that their mother had also found clams there when she had been digging in the sand some 30 years earlier! Fortunately they were all wearing some form of shoes or flip flops because other things began to appear apart from clams. Things like glass bottles, some whole and some broken. There were also plastic bottles, soda cans, a foam cushion, various pieces of plastic and a lot of bricks.
Meanwhile Bradley was busy cleaning up the beach, removing pieces of driftwood etc. He also sawed off and removed some bushes that were covering a large piece of beach, exposing it for the first time in years. He dragged a long straight pole out at right angles to the beach and lifted one end onto a concrete block. This he announced would be the limiting area for his two charges to stay within when he brought them over again.
As the three clam diggers collected clams and trash and Bradley raked the sand under the water the pile of junk built up until we had the best part of a 5 gallon bucket full of rubbish.
When it was time to leave there were 30 large clams as well as a big pile of brush and driftwood and about 15 bricks!
It was decided that it was too late to cook the clams for consumption then, so we put them into a bucket with holes in. Unfortunately the bottom of the bucket fell out, so the clams were transferred to the minnow bucket and put into the water. Hopefully we will be able to cook them up on Bradley's next trip.
A good time was had by all.

Horses head.

While digging in The Lake - I don't know, for clams or to get a rock out or something - we found this really weird bone! It turned out to be a big jaw bone, probably of a horse. Neat, cool.
I imagined that a long time ago before we came here (we have owned the property since about 1976) someones horse died and they dumped it in The lake. Or maybe the horse fell in and drowned. Anyway, at least its jaw ended up just off of our pier. Or maybe the whole skeleton is down there!
I cleaned up the bone and put it proudly on my workbench but after a few days when it dried out it just fell apart. Apparently when you take something out of the water after a long time it does that.
I should have known that because we saw The Mary Rose, Henry the Eight's warship that sank in the Solent and was raised some 400 years later. They keep it in a special room where water is sprayed on it 24 hours a day.
We also saw the Vasa in Sweden, a Viking ship that was pulled out of the harbor and is on display, with water sprayed over it all the time.
Funny story about the Vasa. They found this book on it. Wow they thought, a book more than a thousand years old. After carefully preserving and restoring was started, it turned out to be a modern Oslo telephone book!

Cormorants and Osprey

Once again The Lake is loaded with Cormorants and Osprey. At times there are so many Cormorants that they look like floating islands out there. The Osprey don't exactly blot out the sun, but there are several roaming the skies above The Lake.

I have said before that "The birds are stealing all MY fish. There will be none left for me." But I wonder if perhaps it doesn't mean something else? Namely that there must be a lot of fish out there to attract so many birds to fish here!

Lets hope that is the case because I do love my fish dinner. It will soon be time for me to head out there and bring home the bacon - I mean the fish! It has been too cold lately for me to stand out there for long, but soon, very soon, Winter will be a memory and Spring will have sprung, along with the Season of the Fish.

Minimum wages.

The minimum wage in the UK is around $10 an hour. In Norway it is around $20 and hour. In the US, the richest country in the world, it is just over $7 an hour! And yet the average bank CEO in the US makes at least $7,000 an hour! No kidding! Even if he works 40 hours a week, which is doubtful, that is $7,000 X 40 = $280,000 per week X 52 weeks = $14,560,000. The CEO of my bank makes almost four times that much! And the more than 400 "executives" at my bank all make over $1,000,000, most make several million. Yet they can't afford to pay me any interest on money deposited there. I think the going rate right now is .1% or less. So if I had $10,000 in the bank I would receive just $10 per year in interest. I have even seen where some banks are looking into the possibility of charging their customers for keeping their money in the bank!
The greed in this country is unbelievable.
And the Republicans want to cut taxes even more, especially to the very richest among us, even though our taxes are the lowest that they have been in more than 60 years, we are the lowest taxed country in the world, and we only collect enough in taxes to pay for a little more than half of our expenses.

Discrimination in schools.

We have all heard of NCLB - No Child Left Behind - a commendable effort to improve the education of children who are not as "bright" as others. The discrimination that I am concerned about is to the "bright" students. I have a grandson who is extremely intelligent. He has a very high IQ, but he has to be held back to learn at the rate of the child with the lowest IQ.
I was educated in England in the UK. We had levels in our school. For example the 4th grade would have a 4A, 4B, 4C and 4D. The way it worked was this - the smartest most intelligent were in the A stream, and so on. At the end of each year there were exams. The 10% of students who tested highest moved up to the next grade and the 10% of students who tested lowest went down. For example if you were in 4C and were in the top 10% you went into 5B. If you were in the lowest 10% you moved down to 5D. And so on. This way you were always with students with approximately the same intelligence. So you didn't have to wait until the guy with an IQ of 80 understood. He would be in the D stream and be taught with other students of the same intelligence. makes sense to me.
My grandson has to sit around doing nothing while the teacher spends all his/her time on the students with the lowest IQ's. He could, and should, be pushed to achieve. Perhaps he would be able to do something to find out why some people are of lower IQ's than others. Perhaps he would be able to develop ways to teach these students. We will never know, because he has to be held back, "To be fair to the others with a low IQ." How dumb can we be?

The Invasion of the Cormorants.

We have seen the odd Cormorant or two on The Lake over the last 2 or 3 weeks, but when I looked out today I was amazed to see a large group of birds swimming way out on The Lake. A quick look with the binoculars confirmed them to be Cormorants - about 40 of them!
Oh no, they are going to eat all MY fish!
Boy is it windy here today. A big snowstorm was forecast but so far all we have seen is a lot of rain and wind. It is extremely windy, absolutely roaring, with huge waves out on the Bay. The waves are rolling in and if I were a surfer I might be out there enjoying them if it weren't so cold and rainy and windy.

Sanctions.

I cannot remember any time that sanctions have worked. Think about it, if someone said to you, "I will not xxx unless you don't xxx" What would you, or anyone do? Give in? Almost certainly not.
On the other hand if that same person said to you, "Can I help you xxx".

Just saying.

Subsidies

We are still paying subsidies to the oil and gas industries. In 2011 they made PROFITS of $137 BILLION - more than 1 1/2 times the cuts that we have to make to our teachers, our government employees, our schools, and hundreds or thousands of programs affecting millions of people.

So we can cut help to our poorest, hurt our workers, but we cannot touch huge subsidies to huge companies that make BILLlONS in profits.

We cannot touch people who make obscene amounts of money, but we can cut 20% off of the paychecks of people who work to keep the country afloat and those who manage the workings of the country. That is fine, but do not touch the three million people who make more than a million dollars a year - and pay tax at a rate of half or less than half of what the average American pays!

And you can be sure that Congress will not be losing 20% of their income.

One percent of Americans are millionaires, but 44% of congressmen are millionaires.

Just saying.

Horsemeat.

Hard as it may be to believe, horsemeat may actually be better for you to eat than beef! In America anyway. That is because meat in America is so contaminated by various chemicals and pathogens that 15% of Americans get sick from food carried pathogens. Compare that to Europe where less than .1% get sick from food borne illness - that is less than one tenth of one percent. To put it another way for every person who gets sick from food in Europe 1,000 get sick in the US! That is in spite of the recent scare about horsemeat contamination in burgers etc. In fact the food and safety checks in Europe are so far ahead of those in the US that it might as well be in a different country - oh it is! Or in a different century. In fact there is so little checking in the US that the horsemeat contamination would probably never have been picked up. It is to Europe's credit that it was discovered. But here in the US there might as well not be any checking. There is hardly any anyway, and the US Congress - the worlds most corrupt Congress - is constantly taking bribes to make less and less checks on food and to ignore any problems that are found.
For example, there have been videos made of animals being abused so horribly that most people would stop eating meat immediately. I have seen movies where cows who were so sick that they could not walk to the slaughter house and were pushed there with fork lifts - and not even gently. They could hardly walk, and in fact kept falling down, they were so sick. And not only from being sick, imagine trying to walk when you are standing in your own feces halfway up your legs!! True. And then we get to eat them, including the sick animals and the feces on them, although there is a halfhearted attempt to wash some of it off.
In Europe there is a law about the ethical treatment of animals. Here there is the treatment of animals, or anything else, for PROFIT. Virtually no consideration for anything other than PROFIT. They don't care how the animals are treated as long as they get more PROFIT. And that includes us - humans - we are fed sick animals, animals that eat anti-biotics, animals that are genetically engineered, animals that never see the light of day, that live in cages and pens that don't allow them to move. All in the name of PROFIT. Otherwise known as GREED.
Don't get me wrong, profit is good, but not to the exclusion of all else. To me humanity is important. But to Big Business it seems that humanity and the ethical treatment of animals comes right at the bottom of the list, with profit firmly at the top, above all else.
Just as Bankers put profit above all else including its customers and even the good of the country that has made them rich. You may have heard the story of the goose that laid golden eggs. Well that could be the story of the US Banking Industry, they would destroy the country that gives them such riches just to make even more money for a short time!
Just saying.

Is it possible?

Is it possible that Spring is almost here? The love of my life - Julia, to those who don't know me - said yesterday from her sick bed, she has a very nasty cold, that the maple trees in our back yard are looking very red as their buds are bursting open. And yes it is true. Today they are even more red and bursting, just one day and they are visibly advanced. My window thermometer tells me that the lowest temperature last night was a balmy 44 degrees! Tomorrow it will be March, so yes I really think that Spring is on the way. But I don't think that I will put away the snow blower, the snow shovel and the buckets of salt and sand that I keep on the porch in case of snow or ice. Not just yet anyway.
But soon, very soon.

In Praise of Chickens.

I just took a bag of salad that had gone off and shook it out into our chicken run. You would have thought that it was a bag of Caviar! They looked the way that I think I would look eating a Big Mac after not eating for three days!

What a delight it is to watch them eat. They don't care if it is a half eaten sandwich, left over fried chicken, carrot tops and peelings, uneaten cat food, weeds, a dried out bread roll, the remains of a crab feast, the parts of a cooked fish that you couldn't eat, you name it, if you can eat it or even if you can't, they can, and will!

No sir, there is no waste in this household. And they thank us with nice fresh eggs. (And they even eat the eggshells!)

Can there be any doubt?

Can there be any doubt that the Republican Party's strategy is strictly one of obstructionism?

When President Obama proposes tax cuts, the Republicans vote against it!! When the President proposes spending cuts, the Republicans vote against it!!

In spite of this lack of co-operation he has managed somehow to push tax cuts on both the private sector and business through Congress, to the point that we now have the LOWEST tax rate in more than 60 years! But still FOX, Rush, Beck, Hanity, O'Reilly and the Tea Party in general keep telling everyone that President Obama is raising taxes! A blatant lie.

Now The President, in yet another bipartisan move, proposes drafting a Republican to his Cabinet. How much more bipartisan can you get than that?! And the Republicans are even against him!

No there is no doubt in my mind at all that the Republicans have nothing else in mind except voting against ANYTHING that the President proposes. Even when it is in the best interest of the country - or even the Republican Party itself!

There are no moderates left in the Republican Party. Even the slightest sign of a Congressperson saying anything bipartisan, indicating that they would want to co-operate in any way or even doing anything except voting along strict party lines and they are immediately ostrazised and targeted for replacement.

How can you run a government of the people and for the people in this way? Obviously you can't. Politics is so polarized now that it is almost impossible to govern the country.

Darwinism explained.

OK, Darwinism for Dummies. Just lately we have had a lot of little black fruit flies in our kitchen. Especially in the morning when I go in, there are a lot flying around or just sitting.
So I get a small towel and flick them out of existence. Or as many as I can. But there are always more.
A large area of our kitchen is white - the door frames, refrigerator and cabinet doors. So the little black flies are easy to see and to dispatch, if they land in those areas. But, some of them, maybe even the majority, I really don't know, land on other surfaces and are more difficult to locate.
So my thought is this, if I am successful in killing the flies that land on white surfaces, but not those that land on other areas, will we end up eventually only with flies that land on dark surfaces?
It makes sense. A male fly that for some reason only lands on dark surfaces will be more likely to survive, and will meet a female who also only lands on dark surfaces. As after several generations these will be the majority, at least in my home. Their offspring will be more likely, just more likely, not completely, to have baby flies that will be more likely to land on dark surfaces.
After some time - a hundred generations? A thousand? Who knows. But at some point we will have "bred" flies that only land on dark surfaces.
And that my children is how Darwinism works.

Thoughts on 1967

I was listening to George Wallace on the radio today and his speech of 1963 in which he said "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever" or some such. It made me think of 1967 when my wife and I first came to America. I went to work in a workshop at Koppers company as a machinist. I guess I had heard of the segregation thing, but it was not anything that I was familiar with really. I was 26 years old, we had black people in England of course but I had not really noticed them! Believe it or not I don't think I really noticed that they were a different color (Colour in England!) I guess I must have but I definitely don't remember it being anything that I took any notice of. They were just people like everyone else.
So when I started work at Koppers and one of the guys in the workshop was black i just talked to him the same as all the other guys.
It was a while before I realized that I was, "Doing something wrong", the other guys in the shop who were all white were sort of ignoring me.
I guess it sank in after a while. I used to eat lunch with John - the black guy - and we got on quite well I remember. I think we were talking about a trip to the beach once and it occurred to me to ask him about sunbathing! There didn't seem to be much point in it for him! And it was strange that I would want to go darker - by now I had realized that the others in the shop didn't like black people! Anyway he told me that if he lay in the sun he would go darker, and yes he would burn if he stayed out in it too long.
One day when I was talking to one of the white men I mentioned that I had heard that when a black man met a white man on a sidewalk the black man used to have to step off the kerb. I said it sort of like it was funny or a joke and was surprised when he replied visciously "Yes, and that is the way that it should still be."
John left soon after, I think it may have been difficult for him. I think I may have been the only person who talked to him.
Things are undoubtably different now. But those thoughts came to me about my first real interaction with a black man and the treatment that he received and the way that the white men treated him.
Back in 1967.

30 days since Sandy Hook.

It has now been 30 days since the Sandy Hook, Newtown, Connecticut school shooting on Dec 13 2012. Since then there have been more than 1,000 murders with guns in the US - more than in the next 100 countries COMBINED.

There are over 11,000 murders with guns a year in the US (39 in the UK last year.) Including accidents and suicides, that number rises to over 25,000 a year.

As we all know, the rights of a Nutcase to own an assault gun with a 100 round magazine beats the rights of an 8 year old girl to attend school without being shot and killed so that she does not get to grow up, have birthday parties, boyfriends, trips, get married, have children of her own and generally have the chance at a happy life during which she has the chance to add something to help the US and the World.

Yes, we know that the gun is much more important than the thousands of children that are killed by them every year in the US. The right of the Drunken Alcoholic, The Drug Addict, The Criminal and The wife-Beater to own a deadly assault gun whose only purpose to exist is to kill as many people as possible as fast as possible.

In fact we MUST defend their right to own these killing machines with our own lives if necessary.

Oh, by the way 85% of all children killed by guns in the world are killed in the US.

But defending our nutcases rights is of course MUCH more important than defending our children's lives.

Yes the words of a few men spoken almost 250 years ago in a different age in different circumstances must be defended over the lives of our children. So that men and women with inferiority complexes can own big sticks that make them feel big and strong. Sticks that make loud bangs and enable them to kill people who confront them and call them names or who have different opinions to theirs. And of course as a last resort if people still won't listen to them and they get really pissed off they can go to a Church or a Movie Theater, or a Mall or a School and kill as many of those people as possible.

Yes, we MUST defend that right.

NOT.

Guns

Wanting sensible gun laws doesn't make me anti-gun any more than wanting sensible traffic laws makes me anti-car.

We don't want drunks driving around in cars why should we want drunks roaming around with guns?

We want speed limits, why not limits on the size of guns and their magazines?

The NRA lobbied - successfully - to Congress to vote down a law to spend money to teach gun safety!

There are more guns in the US than any other country in the world and you are more likely to be shot in the US than in any other country in the world. But apparently there is no connection!

Just saying.