Gardening is hard

 

Seen at SFO airport while returning a car. I know their pain.

Italian Apple Cake

 In response to popular demand (one person asked), here's my apple cake recipe.

New Hope for the Dead

 My father got an e-mail from Chase Bank encouraging him to check his credit score. Since I have all his passwords, I logged in and took a look.

As you can see, his credit is pretty good. You may ask, why do I have all of his passwords? Because he's been dead for two years.

But with a credit score like that, he clearly needs some new credit cards.

My high security debit card

Square Cash is a personal payment app from Squareup, the people who make those iPad credit card terminals ubiquitous at coffee shops and farmers markets. Once you've signed up for the Cash app, you can ask them for a debit card, so you can pay people who don't use the app and they can of course pay merchant processing fees and Square can encourage you to leave money in your account to fund the debit card.
I applied for the card, and as part of the process their web site gives you a rectangle in which you're supposed to write something with your finger, I suppose a signature or something. I don't want people messing with my card in case I lose it, so I wrote this:

We'll see how it works.

Derby Day

We didn't have a chance to enjoy the rain, the mud, and the 7.80:2 odds on the winner, but we did have a suitable beverage.

This is so wrong

Found in today's junk mail.

The Financial Times in an article on water theft

Stuart Orchard, an ex-Surrey police detective employed by the company, said:

“We’re not out to get people, but it’s against the law to dig up the road, find our water mains and illegally connect to our network."

See https://www.ft.com/content/e8cc9670-00f4-11e8-9650-9c0ad2d7c5b5

Live from the collander-cam

In our yard in upstate New York

A little musical history

Our new historic sign

I live in Trumansburg NY, a small village in the Finger Lakes, just north of Ithaca where Cornell University is. Bob Moog was a Cornell engineering PhD with an interest in electronic music.  He'd been making Theremins, the original electronic musical instrument from the 1920s, but was constantly experimenting with other instruments. After he graduated, in a storefront here in Trumansburg he built modular synthesizers played from a keyboard, which were a lot more versatile than a single-voice Theremin.

A few years later Walter Carlos (later Wendy Carlos) produced an album of familiar Bach works played on a Moog Modular, called Switched on Bach. It was huge and unexpected hit, both for its novelty and its musicianship. Almost 50 years later, it still sounds great. Listen to a copy at the Internet Archive.

Pretty good pizza

The storefront has gone through many tenants since Moog moved on and is now a pizza place. Everyone in town knows that it was the location of Moog's shop, but few people anywhere else did. Now, at least anyone driving through town can find out.

Boris for President

I presume everyone's heard that President Obama made some surprisingly direct comments in London saying that the UK should stay in the EU, and outgoing Mayor of London Boris Johnson, the most prominent proponent of Brexit, wrote a humdinger of a response in The Sun, mentioning among other things "the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire."

It occurs to me that Boris is answer to the Republicans' ongoing primary disaster.  Boris for President. Let's look at the facts:

• He's been a very successful Mayor of London.  If you like Mike B., you'll love Boris.
• He shares the Reps' visceral dislike of Obama, but his rhetoric is several notches up, since it is at least somewhat consistent with reality. (The colonial government in Kenya really did torture Obama's grandfather.)
• He's never been elected to anything in the US, so there's no pesky Senate non-career to explain away.
• Plummy English accent makes him a shoo-in to win debates.
• Natural born US citizen, unlike Cruz
• Much better hair than Trump.

Caption contest

Seen in a hotel in Buenos Aires. What does it mean?

Much, much too true

http://dnsreactions.tumblr.com/post/119671568358/90-of-the-posts-on-any-random-ietf-group

Crusty

I made another tourtière using the rendered lard. Turned out OK. The lovely yellow tint is an egg wash.

For the culturally backward, the maple leaf, telephone, and airplanes are an obvious reference to Alexander Graham Bell.

Render this

We bought half a pig, all nicely cut up and stashed in the freezer. That includes a fair amount of lard, which the butcher gave us in its original form:

Before one can make it into tasty baked goods (see the Tourtiere from a few years back), you have to render it. So first you grind it into tiny shreds:

Then you put the tiny shreds in a heavy pan in the oven at very low heat, like 275 F, for a few hours. The recipe said to stir it to keep it from scorching, but with the heat that low in a convection oven with no heating element under the pan, that didn't seem to be a problem. The fat quickly melted, and started bubbling as the water boiled away. Eventually the bubbling stopped and the cracklings sank to the bottom.

So I took the pan out of the oven and poured off and strained the liquid fat, leaving the cracklings, which focused our dog's attention like nothing ever has before.

The liquid lard was fairly yellow, but they promised it would turn white after it cooled in the fridge.

Once it's chilled overnight, I'll see how it works in a pie crust.

In keeping with the theme of this blog

We noticed this sign in Lawrenceville NJ last week.

Progress in e-mail

The Atlantic Monthly published a fine article Email is Still the Best Thing on the Internet, laying out all the reasons why e-mail, no matter how often people have claimed it's dead, is still thriving.

On page 2 of the article is a picture of what mail looked like in the 1990s, pointing out how much it's advanced since then.  By golly he's right. Here's his picture of 1990s mail, and a screen shot of the mail program I use every day:

Applying the Hobby Lobby decision

A friend notes:

The company simply does not want to be forced to pay for something to which it objects.

Since it's the Supreme Court, other courts have to apply this ruling in future cases.  So here's a few:

• I'm a Christian Scientist, and believe that all conventional medicine is wrong.  Does my company have to pay for any of my employees' healthcare?
• I'm a fundamentalist Mormon who rejects Spencer W. Kimball's 1978 revelation and believes that black people are cursed with the mark of Cain.  I don't like EEO law, but understand that my company has to hire qualified black people. Does it have to pay for their healthcare?

At least they're warm blooded

Seen in Slate, the online magazine:

Correction, Dec. 10, 2013: This article originally misidentified penguins as mammals. They are birds.

(The article isn't bad, though.)

The Velikovsky Rule

Immanuel Velikovsky wrote a 1950 best seller called "Worlds in Collision." In it he argued that legendary events such as the parting of the Red Sea were due to close encounters by the earth with other planets. These theories were, to put it mildly, highly contentious.

Velikovsky lived in Princeton NJ, which at the time was a small town where everyone knew everyone else, at least in passing. The head of the Princeton University astronomy department told me that one time he was talking to an anthropologist and Velikovsky's book came up.

"The astronomy is nonsense, of course," said the astronomer, "but the anthropology is really interesting."

"What a coincidence," replied the anthropologist. "The anthropology is nonsense, but we think the astronomy is really interesting."

Nobody's perfect

From page 8 of Friday's Financial Times:

Correction:

• The chief executive of Cathay Pacific was misquoted as saying "overseas parrot" instead of "overseas parent" in an article on September 16.