Roasted Green Tea….Beef….Oatmeal

I’d like to make an acronym out of that title, but can’t think of one.

Was up to Huckleberry’s, our local pretentious yuppie organo-exotic food store (kindof like Trader Joe’s, without the stage direction). It’s off our normal routes, so we don’t go there often. Their Asian food selection is better than Safeway, which is damning with faint praise. E’en so, they have lots of good stuff, at only moderately high prices, and I usually come away with a wide selection of goods. This month it included a box of bancha hojicha, roasted green tea. That’s a doubling up of the names. Bancha (番茶) is green tea. Second pick, lower quality. Hojicha (ほうじ茶) is roasted green tea. That repeated 茶 is the kanji for tea. BH tastes nothing like green tea. Its flavor is dominated by the roasting (so making it with a lower quality tea isn’t a problem), and it has, so Wikipedia tells me, less caffeine than regular green tea, which of course has less caffeine than black tea. It tastes like a wartime tea substitute.

I, of course, tried it in oatmeal. Two ways. First, plain tea (made with water), with sweetener. Second, using beef broth instead of water when making the tea.

Setup: 1/3 cup of stone ground rolled oats, two dinner teaspoons of potato flakes, one cup of tea, made with water or beef broth, salt.  Cook for 10 minutes or so, depending on the exact style of oats.  Add the potato when you take it off the stove.

Results: The plain version was really needful of something. The sweeter helped. The beef version was better, with the tea adding a roasty overtone to the hearty beef flavor. A few grinds of pepper helped. Neither one was great, but I’m likely to do the beef/tea combo again, maybe once per box of teabags.

Rating: *****

Happy Birthday Ethernet

This May seems to be the month for decadal anniversaries. The Ethernet protocol turns 40 today. It started out running on coax cable that was about the size and stiffness of a garden hose, with the pressure on, and gave only 10MB/s throughput. Now, it’s up to gigabit speeds over twisted pair. Not only is it incomparably faster, but you don’t have to worry about your drop-ceiling ….dropping… if you have a long run of it across a room.

As the article says, it’s not every technology that can claim to be cutting edge, 40 years later.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer, ten years on.

One of the best series in the history of television ended ten years ago this hour. I don’t have time to write the in-depth analysis it deserves, but I wanted to mark the date in some way.

The series started out as a monster of the week program (I could write a whole essay on how they covered all the horror movie tropes), and then morphed into an exploration of the ambiguity of good and evil (another five or six essays), finally dying at the end of its seventh season, when the star got tired of doing it.

There were some great characters in the series, and the actors who played them seemed born to fill those roles. Where are they now? Well, a quick sweep through IMDB shows:

Sara Michell Gellar: After a brief stint voicing cartoons, she’s scheduled to appear this Fall in a new comedy series with Robin Williams.

David Boreanaz: Still going strong in Season 9 of Bones

Alyson Hannigan: Still going strong in Season 9 of How I met your mother

Anthony Head: Busy making little five-episode series for UK television, most of which don’t seem to have made it over here

James Marsters: Appearing in one-shots on three different series this year, with a film in post-production

Nicholas Brendon: Has three movies in post production and one in the process of filming

Emma Caulfield: Mostly one-shots in different series, with a film in post-production

Charisma Carpenter: Starring in a “Christian, Christmas” film, released last month, in France.

Mercedes McNab: Is notable because her Harmony character was the only one, other than Angel himself, to make it from Buffy’s first episode to Angel’s last episode. She seems to have dropped out of acting and gotten married.

I’m going to stop there, despite the fact that there are six or seven other actors who deserve listing — that shows you the basic strength of the show.

The man behind it all, Joss Whedon, of course went on produce a couple of other series, and this year has a series and a film in post-production, plus a new film announced.

Green Thumb Up My Nose

Garden Report for 130520

Ah, this is more like it. The weather this week was cool, lows in the mid 40s, highs in the mid 60s, and rainy. After all, it is only May.

The seeds I started weeks ago have finally sprouted. The miniatures I have planted in containers on the deck. The corn I transplanted to Section 2 — and the squirrels promptly started digging them up. I need some help from James Bond’s old nemesis, SMERSHQ (Smert Shquirrlem). Tomatoes are settling in nicely, as tomatoes always do, bar frost, and the squash is mostly doing OK. My first tranch (trench, get it?) was looking good, but now seems a little peaked. The store bought plants are doing fine. My second tranch of homegrown has survived.

I’ve got a few more squash coming up in the seedlingizer. I’m thinking of clearing some …. clearings … in the ground cover, and planting them there. I also have another 25 corn seeds what I just started inside. I’m bound and determined (did you know that doubling of statements like that comes from when England had just been occupied by the French, and the two languages were jostling side-by-side, as in cease and desist?), bound and determined I say, to bring in at least one crop of corn this Summer.

The hops are keeping on keeping on. No real change. I put some rougher sticks up for them to climb, and stuck a couple of plastic water bottles, trimmed top and bottom, over them, to help them hang on to their climbing stix and not be knocked around by the wind. Pix next week.

PS: Happy Eliza Dolittle Day.

Green Thumb Up My Nose

Garden Report for 130513

The weather this week was hot and dry. Highs in the mid to upper 80′s (coming within a biscuit-toss of 90F on Saturday). Forecast is for cloudy/60s/showery for the coming week.

The garden as she looks today

The garden is pretty well set for the summer. Here’s what it looks like right now. Foreground is Section 1, which is all brassicae, except for I’ve direct seeded corn and some peas. Section 2 is chard and lettuces — most of which haven’t come up yet. I also planted some beets there, on Sunday, and I’ll be planting corn seedlings there, as soon as I have any). Beyond the watering can is Section 3, tomatoes and squash, then Section 4, blueberries, strawberries, asparagus. Section 4 has chickenwire over it. The chickenwire and plastic frost covers are hanging on the fence at the far end.

Planted one of the Husky Gold cherry tomatoes into a hanging basket. Was going to plant a Hillbilly in the other one, until I looked it up and found the fruit ranged to a pound or more. The hardware store got a new shipment of squash in, so I have two yellow squash and two acorn squash planted in Section 3 of the KHG. I thought I was picking up zucchini, but I grabbed two pumpkins, instead. I put one in the ground next the Unkillable Rhubarb, and one in a pot under the sakura.

MJ was out on a shopping sweep of the Airway Heights area, and came back with a bunch of peas in a pot, plus an S-100 cherry tomato for my other hanging basket, a Celebrity (Beefsteak size, determinate), and a strawberry hanging planter. Put the S-100 in the hanger, the Celebrity in a pot, and started on the strawberries. The box had a cheap green plastic bag with holes, and a bag of dirt. Inside the dirt was a rubberbanded clump of strawberry roots. Instructions were to fill the bag with dirt, plant the strawberries with the roots buried and the heads showing, lay it on its side, and keep it wet for two weeks. The heads were small and kept breaking off. The dirt didn’t begin to fill the bag. We shall see.

Meanwhile, the hops are pretty much unchanged. One has grown a couple inches. One may have grown. One hasn’t grown and is having trouble hanging to the stake. Two are an inch tall and look healthy. Two have fallen over and look brown at the dirtline. I covered those two over, hoping they’d put down new roots.

My attempts to start my own seeds are having mediocre success. Admittedly, half the seed is last years.

Old seed: 16 corn, 4 sprouted. 20 squash, none sprouted. 10 peas, none sprouted. 7 miniatures (2 squash, watermelon, pumpkin, 2 cucumbers), 2 just sprouted.

New seed: 20 corn, 20 squash, 5 peas. Too soon to tell. Also direct seeded about 20 corn in Section 1. About half of them companion planted with Dow Gauk seed from last year.

Now that the danger of frost is past, I’m having to store those 4x8ft plastic and chickenwire covers. I’ve draped them over the back fence. My neighbor on that side never goes into the yard, except to cut back the weeds every couple of weeks.

I survived the Winter of 2012

Speaking of frost, last winter we had highs below freezing for much of December and January, and in mid-January we had a week where the lows averaged about 10F. Fortunately, we had a heavy snow-pack as well, and a surprising amount of chard survived the winter and are now ready for eating.

Judge Ruth vs Judge Judy

There’s been a flurry of comment on a recent Reader’s Digest poll showing that Americans trust TV judges more than they trust the Supreme Court. It also shows that President Obama falls in the bottom half of the list. Given a little thought, anyone could have predicted this a priori.

Reader’s Digest didn’t ask about TV judges (like Judy Sheindlin) vs real judges (like Ruth Bader). Instead, they asked people to rate 200 “opinion makers”. Essentially, it’s a name recognition poll. Quick, no peeking, name the nine members of the Supreme Court. I’m not sure I could, and I’m a news junkie. My list is likely to start with William O’Douglas. The commenters pooh-pooh the dumb Americans, glued to their TV sets, but ol’ Judy has a high name recognition with me personally, just based on seeing the ads as I tune through all the sports channels, looking for some cricket coverage. Given that, you’d expect well-known personalities to rank high, unless they’re the notorious flavor of well-known. Unknowns would tend to float around the middle.

As for Presidential placement, Reader’s Digest doesn’t say how Reader’s Digest chose the 1,000 people who Reader’s Digest thinks are a representative sample for their Reader’s Digest poll, or what their average age or political party is, but, you know… Reader’s Digest.

Green Thumb Up My Nose

Garden Report for 130506

The weather this week was finally warm enough to take the frost covers off. The forecast for the coming week is highs in the upper 70′s low 80′s, lows around 50. A surprising amount of chard survived the winter, and we are starting to have some of that in our salads.

Went down and bought a bunch of tomato plants — 8″ high Better Bush (2), Beefsteak (2), and Early Girl (2); flats of 3″ high Hillbilly and Husky Gold. Put most of them into Section 3, with a few held out for deck plants. On deck I also planted one each of the Abe Lincoln and the Oregon Spring. There was only one of each that looked like they’d live. Also planted three summer squash seedlings that looked survivable, into Section 3. They are expecting a new shipment of squash on Monday, so I’ll likely buy some more then.

I started 20 of last year’s corn seeds, but only four sprouted. Started 16 pea seeds, but none have sprouted yet. This year is turning out to be a bad one for home-seeded plants. Trying again with leftover seed from last year’s miniature plants: dwarf watermelon, melon, squash, and cucumber. I’ve got space for 25 new seedlings, but I’m not sure what I want to plant. Four each of six things, I guess.

Counter-squirrel ops seem to have worked. Last week I planted ten strawberry plants, and the next day one had been dug up and one had been chewed off at the dirtline. I draped two of the frost panels over them, and covered the ends with wire fence (2×4″mesh). The fencing probably won’t keep out a determined rodent, but it seems to have discouraged them for now. I’m working on some straight chicken-wire panels to use in place of the frost covers. Same design.

The hops are surviving but not thriving. One has started to grow. The other six look OK, but are no bigger than they were last week.

Girls und Panzer – the anime 4

This is the fourth and last installment of my writeup on Girls und Panzer. Here’s the links to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Possibly the most interesting character outside of the Ankou team is Kadotani Anzu, the Student Council President. Wikipedia describes her as manipulative, childish and carefree. Well, they got one right. She is certainly manipulative, but the carefree childishness is a front, part of the manipulation. Anzu is also short

The President Appears

but as I said in an earlier essay, she doesn’t let this bother her. Only after trying to climb onto a tank and failing does she call on Kawashima for assistance.

Yeah, I’m short, but I have tall friends

Her management style is to shove people into a situation and let them sort it out. It’s called delegation.

I know they can do it.

Boston Bombing 4

So the federal prosecutors are now treating a bunch of college kids as if they were major felons and filing life-destroying charges because they allegedly took stuff from Tsarnaev’s room and lied to the FBI. When you were 19, did you know it was a crime to lie to the cops?

Meanwhile, Tsarnaev’s defense team is starting negotiations over whether or not the prosecution will ask for the death penalty. Knowing Carmen Ortiz, the woman most responsible for Aaron Schwarz’s death, Tsarnaev will ultimately be charged with three counts of murder, and 26,893 counts of attempted murder.

Savory Azuki Oatmeal

Azuki* beans (あずき, a.zu.ki) are interesting. I’ve never had them plain and fresh, always from a jar — which means sweet, presumably because of the preparation. Aside from the sweet, the beans have an earthy taste, as in “tastes like I’m eating dirt, only not so gritty”. It’s similar to turnips…. or maybe rutabagas. An acquired taste. The sweetness means the only recipes out there are for dessertlich things. The last time I tried azukis with oatmeal I went the sweet route, and thickened them with mochi flour instead of potato. This time it’s different. This time it’s savoury all the way.

I started out with beef broth, because its hearty enough to stand up to the beans. I rinsed the beans beforehand, to get the sweet syrup off. To thicken it, I used potato flakes, and I added about ten grinds of the ‘SW BBQ Mix’, that seems to be mostly various kinds of peppercorn (its main ingredient is ‘spices’), but also mustard seed and parsley.

Setup: 1/3 cup of stone ground rolled oats, two dinner teaspoons of azuki beans, two dinner teaspoons of potato flakes, one cup of broth, salt, quant suff pepper and spices.  Cook for 10 minutes or so, depending on the exact style of oats.  Add the potato when you take it off the stove..

Results: Fair to middlin. The sweet/savory flavors didn’t heterodyne the way I was afraid they would. It still needs work, but it’s worth trying again.

Rating: *****

*Also spelled ‘Adzuki’. That’s not the way the Japanese is written or pronounced. I think it comes from the way a Western tongue handles the a-z combo.

Walpurgis Night, et al.

So, tonight is May Eve, when bonfires are burned, and maybe witches also. Walpurgis Night is, of course, a Christianized version of Beltane, the Celtic celebration of the start of summer, when bonfires were burned and people and cattle walked between them for purification, and witches would dance all sky-clad (or sometimes they would dance in shifts, because there wasn’t room for all of them). Tomorrow is May Day, dear to a certain generation as the date for large displays of new equipment in Red Square. It’s also, depending on how the moon tends, the first day of Ðrimilcemonað, the month that Anglo-Saxon cows had to be milked three times a day.

This month, on the second of May, 2013, the moon is a waning Last Quarter Moon. If you go out at sunrise and stand on the Earth’s terminator, you can look up at the Moon’s terminator. This means the Moon is directly ahead of us in our orbit, which means that where the Moon is, is where the Earth will be, three hours later.

Green Thumb Up My Nose

Garden Report for 130429

The weather this week finally warmed up, with no frost predicted. So I went mad in the garden.

On Thursday (which is a break day for me, after night class), I went out and spent a chunk of money on plants: three blueberry bushes, ten strawberry plants, seven asparagus plants (oops, I already had six dried rhizomes at home. oh well). Spent the morning getting them into Section 4 of the KHG. That’s the one I’m reserving for perennials. Also planted my hops plants along the south wall. One was a foot high. The others were about four inches. If reports are correct, they’ll be over the roof, this time next week.

Asparagus and berries (say the bells of St Merrie’s)

Friday, the madness continued. After dinner I ran down to our local hardware store and bought a bunch of plants — white cabbage, red cabbage, cauliflower. The stuff I’ve started isn’t doing anything to indicate it has a well-developed will to live.  Spent the remaining hours of daylight planting them in Section 1, which is brassicaville this year.

Cauliflower and cabbage (say the bells of St Babbage)

As of Sunday, everything is in, and most things are under cover — Section 4 excepted. High winds Sunday night, higher winds for Monday, at which point we get one night more of wind and two nights of frost. My plan is to put up the cover for Section 3 as soon as the wind allows, maybe Thursday, and then try some early tomatoes. That gets them in a month early, and if I use store-bought plants, it gives them an additional eight weeks. None of my home-sprouted seedlings are worth bothering with. Will also plant some squash. That’s the plan.

Only Nixon could go to China

That’s an old Vulcan saying. It means that only someone who had a solid history of opposing communism would have the power to tear up the rulebook on our country’s relationship with a long-time communist foe.

I’m not a big fan of Noam Chomsky. He has too often taken a black and white view of things that are really shades of grey, and inserted himself into arguments he doesn’t have the background for. I wouldn’t trust him to ‘go to China’ because I don’t trust his instincts. Having said that, I find myself agreeing with a recent interview he gave over on AlterNet. In it he takes strong issue with President Obama’s attacks (and they can’t be characterized as anything less) on American civil liberties — everything from indefinite detention without trial to the criminalization of whistleblowing. Go read the article

What Obama has done is continue the erosion of the constitutional rights of Americans that began with Bush’s exploitation of 9/11 for political ends. He’s given the police unprecedented power, not just by what’s mandated by law, but by what’s tolerated, day-to-day. He’s skillfully used cases against people we were told were really bad guys — Kim Dotcom, Bradley Manning — to condition us to violations of law by the government, in pursuit of higher values. They might well be really bad guys, but the point is, the government doesn’t get to pick and chose which laws government follows based on how the government feels about the case. Except now it does.

The sad part is, Obama knows better. He has a better understanding of the Constitution than any President since Jefferson. He’s a constitutional scholar. He taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for over a decade.  He has, in other words, a solid history of constitutional study.

Are you ready for another old Vulcan saying?  Only Obama could….

Congress, the Sequester, and the FAA

As everyone has said, Congress voted money for FAA controllers, just in time to catch their planes.

There’s been some controversy over the FAA furloughs. FAA says they are mandated. Congressional Republicans say they are playing the old DC game of cutting high visibility programs — just the way the NPS does every budget cycle “Cut our budget? I guess we’ll have to close the Washington Monument.” It’s the way the game is played.

I think the President isn’t playing hardball enough. Were I he, and there’s 300 million reasons why I’m not, I’d threaten to veto the bill. “Congress broke the budget system. Congress can’t just glue the handle back on and say it’s fixed. Send me a full fix for the budget, or go stand in line.”

Of course that gives them plenty of ammunition back home, once they get off the bus, to blame the President for the delays, but I’m sure the American people are smart enough to give credit where credit is due.

Girls und Panzer — the anime 3

This is the third installment of my writeup on Girls und Panzer. Here’s the links to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 4.

Herewith a collection of miscellaneous thoughts on GaruPan. I really should let it go, but there’s so much more that can be said.

For example: The real Goosefish hunts birds.

For example: There are twenty-one characters in the initial episodes of GaruPan. Another ten join by the time all fourteen episodes have run. That’s way too many for the usual rounds of individual character development, so one of the things you might expect to see is how the characters of the teams themselves change — or don’t. A couple of the teams don’t have time to change, Anteater (the World of Tanks girls) isn’t around long enough to even establish a baseline, let alone change. Team Mallard, the hall monitors, has not much more time, and doesn’t grow much beyond Sodoko’s personality. Four more of the teams, Turtle (Student Council), Hippo (History Club), Duck (Volleyball Club), and Leopan (Auto Club) come to us fully formed and effective. They existed before Sensha-Dō, and will presumably continue to exist afterwards. Except for Team Turtle (about which more in a later post), none of the individuals stand out, and there’s not much team development, because it all happened somewhere else. That leaves one team to talk about:

The coming-of-age of Team Rabbit

Run Away!

This is the group that progressed farthest as a team. In the third episode, the six first-year students of Team Rabbit attempted to flee the practice match, shouting ‘run away’ (actually, I think it was にげお — ni.gi.o — escape). In the fourth episode, in the match against St. Gloriana, they abandoned their tank, and in episode five, the first formal match, they almost forget to load shells for the M3′s guns. But gradually they become more confident and more capable, and by episode ten they are starting to show some teamwork

And make sure you have the shells loaded this time!

They demonstrate their maturity in episode 11, when they volunteer to be abandoned in the river in order to not hold back the side. In the last episode they come into their own, displaying skill and daring and courage unthinkable six episodes earlier. First, they play picador on the giant Maus, lashing it with machine gun fire to get it to turn its turret, and then sliding artfully away from its gunline, shouting ‘run away’, while Team Duck drives up on its rear deck and blocks the turret in position. When the Kuromorimine team arrives in town, they volunteer to be the ones to attack the rear guard, doing so with a trick they learned from Kelly’s Heroes.

An Elefant is no match for a killer Rabbit

At the end, they play matador with a JagdTiger, attacking it head to head and enticing it to push them backwards until they slide aside, in in the panzer version of suerte de muleta, upon which it rushes past them and head first over an embankment.

That’s Right!

Considering that these girls are at the bottom of the pecking order, both as individuals and as a team, GaruPan manages to jam a lot of character development into the few minutes of screen time they are allotted.

For more of my reviews, check out the Anime tag, below.

Green Thumb Up My Nose

Garden Report for 130422

The weather this week has been nice, in an autumnal, great-weather-for-football kind of way. Next week will be the same. Unfortunately, that’s meant lots of mild frosts. Midweek it is due to warm up, and that’s when I start planting in earnest.

The coldframe covers are helping, but not a lot. Soil temps seem to be running around 50F, against air temps that haven’t topped 45 or 47 all week (and that have bounced around freezing at night). Nothing that I’ve set out has died, but not a lot has come up. I think I’ll be buying a bunch of plants this year.

Got one more section hosed this weekend. Used up the last of my 1/2″ drip hose and have moved on to the 5/8″ stuff. Had to use a hose clamp to fit the bigger hose on the littler adapter. Tuesday is when I build a frame on Section 3 and start prepping for the tomatoes and squash. Speaking of which, the tomato seedlings are still only about an inch high. The squash is closer to three inches, with four true leaves each, but on a couple of them the bottom two real leaves have turned yellow. No idea.

I dug up my hops the day after I planted them in their temporary containers, and replanted them with just the tip of the green part showing. Previously, they’d been covered. Seems to have worked. The big one is a foot high, and the six little ones are about three inches each. Wednesday is the first unfrozen night, but I”m in night class, so I’ll plant them out on Thursday. I’m wondering how they’d grow on the deck itself, in containers (one each) to provide shade to the south.

Boston Bombing 3

So, it’s over. The younger brother is in custody, and unless he has a fall in the ambulance, he’s likely to survive to be questioned. Let me put on my talking head and describe one possibility:

We have two kids who come to the States at the ages of nine and 16. The younger one seems to have no trouble fitting in. His older brother is just the wrong age to move — he’s at a vulnerable, idealistic age, and he’s starting as a senior at a strange high school.

I can empathize (I almost said sympathize, but no sympathy here).

Horse Soldiers

Paul Krugman reminded me that yesterday (17th) was the 150th anniversary of Grierson’s Raid, a Civil War cavalry strike from Corinth, TN, to New Orleans, and that the raid was the basis of the John Ford movie Horse Soldiers, starring John Wayne and William Holden.

I love a good cavalry story

One of the things the raid demonstrated was that the South was pretty much a hollow shell, and once the shell was penetrated it didn’t have forces capable of stopping the invader. A friend gave me the three-volume history of the Civil War by Shelby Foote. I’m not even halfway through the first volume, but I might have to skip ahead, to see how it ends.

Boston Bombing 2

Bruce Schneier says the same things I do, only earlier and better. Keep calm and carry on. It’s our actions from here out that decide if the terrorists won this round.

And John Cole, over on Balloon Juice, says the same thing, only with more emotion: I refuse to give up another right to prevent another “Boston,”

Orange Oatmeal Curry

The Japanese love their curry. Unfortunately for them, they don’t grow a lot of oats, and so never hit on curried oatmeal. Today I thought I’d try oranges again. Last time I used orange sauce, and it was a strong mediocre. This time, I cut up a whole orange.

Setup: One medium orange, peeled and chunked, one tablespoon of Golden Curry, chunked. 1/3 cup of stone ground rolled oats, two dinner teaspoons of potato flakes, one cup of broth, salt.  Cook for 10 minutes or so, depending on the exact style of oats.  Add the potato when you take it off the stove.

Results: Still in the mediocre range. Hot lumps of orangy fiber amongst bland lumps of oaty fiber. Not inedible. Not worth repeating.

Rating: *****

Boston Bombings

It was bound to happen. There is no way to keep it from happening. It will happen again, despite all our efforts and no matter how much liberty we give up in a vain attempt to achieve 100% security. That’s the first lesson.

The second lesson is, Don’t trust any initial reporting on a major incident like this. Look at what we got wrong in the first hours:

TL;DR — Anime I never finished

Attack on Titan, 進撃の巨人, which is literally something like Attack’s Giants (where 進撃 is a military advance, の is a possessive, and 巨人 is giant, like the Tokyo Giants), is the story of a boy who lives in a medieval walled city, which protects the last of humanity from the giants who live outside the walls.

Our Story So Far: Young Eren is your typical idealistic overexcitable early teen, who lectures the city guard to be more alert (yes, it’s been a hundred years since the last attack, but you never know), yells at bullies who don’t want anyone to leave the walls, and says he wants to be part of the Survey Corps. The SC mission is to learn more about the giants and their world. They do this, from what we are shown, by going out and attacking the first giant they find. This particular giant is strolling along, head down, oblivious to the world, looking like he’s worried about his mortgage. The SC executes their cunning plan by splitting into five groups, including a decoy group and a air attack group, plus three unspecified others (battle group, striking group, covering group?) and converging on this guy.

As a historical aside, this was a typical failing of the Japanese Navy in WWII. They’d come up with these complex plans requiring close coordination of five or six battle groups, and invariably get their ass handed to them.

The Survey Corps gets their ass handed to them. Their latest ‘survey’ comes back all bandaged up and minus several of their members, who are also minus several of their members. Nothing daunted, Young Eren still wants to be in the Corps, presumably because of the chance for a quick promotion.

Too loudy (as one of my Japanese students called this type of anime), too shouty, too much fangs-out-and-brains-in-the-helmet-bag. Young Eren has two settings — sullen and enraged. The Survey Corps has been working their side of the problem for a hundred years, and still can’t get it right. On the plus side, the artwork reminds me of Spice and Wolf, and the mechanized spiderman web-spinners looks like a fun way to do airborne, as long as you have a lot of trees around and don’t get tangled up.

Beware the Ides of April

Income Tax Day. We have someone do ours. They send me a worksheet. I fill it in, using information from the various forms the banks and employers send out. My accountant then transfers the numbers, checking against the various forms the banks and employers send out. Then they calculate my tax and send the whole package to the IRS, who transfers it to their forms and checks it against the various forms the banks and employers send out, and calculates my tax. If they agree, I get my refund. If they disagree, I get a letter.

Does anybody else find this stupid?

Howsabout the IRS takes all the various forms the banks and employers send out and calculates my tax. Maybe I fill out a form detailing the things the IRS doesn’t get from elsewhere, like the mileage my wife expends driving out to judge AKC dog shows and stuff. If I get a refund, they send it. If I owe additional, they bump up my withholding.

I’d be willing to forego a lot of deductions in order to save my time spent filling stuff out, and the money I spend on accountants. Of course anti-governmentistas will say it’s another intrusion of government (how? they know this stuff already), and that it’s garnishment of wages (which it is, but so is your regular withholding).

Sadly, it will never happen. As one article pointed out, the savings to me are mild and vague. The costs to accountants and the people who sell TurboTax are significant and pointed. They’ll always be willing to spend the money necessary to buy enough congressmen to keep this from happening.

Green Thumb Up My Nose

Garden Report for 130415

Weather’s been cold and rainy and snowish and windy. Highs in the 50′s. Lows have bounced along the freezing line. Next week is more of the same. I guess we’ll find out how well my cold frame works. So far it’s doing OK. It survived gusts to 35mph, and Saturday I stuck a meat thermometer in the soil (don’t worry, I washed off the BBQ sauce first) and it measured right around 60F.

Cut up a bunch of soaker hose to make a customized installation. I found that the various fixtures designed for home-built in-ground sprinkler systems work as connecters and such.

Designed to fit over the central basket

The squash I started inside is doing well. Maybe too well. I don’t plan to put it out for another two weeks. The tomatoes, not so well. I’ll repot them and put them out in early May, but I might have to go the store-bought plant option again.

Planted a bunch of letteces, lettecoi, …. greens.

Picked up another six hops plants. Last years rotted in their bed. This time I have them in containers inside, and won’t put them out until early/mid May. Picked up another six asparagus plants. They’ll go into Section 4 once the weather warms up.

TL;DR — Anime I never finished

Devil Survivor 2, The Animation. Given a name with that many modifiers, you know it’s a long way from home. It’s an Evangelion knockoff, based on a sequel to a game with magical apps instead of mechs.

Our Story So Far: Earth is being attacked by demons. Secret underground government organization recruits teens to help fight them. Three teens — hero boy, clueless sidekick boy, passive girl — have downloaded other-demon summoning-apps to their smartphones (at least the Japanese are now moving away from blade phones). When summoned, the other-demons fight the demons. Secret underground government organization won’t use their secret underground government organization transport system to evacuate Tokyo after the demons start destroying things and eating people, because it might cause panic.

I get the same vibes from this that I got from Blast of Tempest, which many people liked. I don’t really care about the characters. They haven’t done anything so far to make be interested in their future, and when they are doing things, they aren’t doing anything that surprises me. Not that I can predict their actions, but that once something happens, I say ‘Oh, yeah, that’. If you liked Blast of Tempest you might like this. If you liked Evangelion, you might not.

TL;DR — Anime I Never Finished

The first to be dropped this season is Majestic Prince, a combat mech story that one reviewer described as “an old-school space opera through and through that is full of heart and intelligence“. If they had said “has more heart and intelligence than your average mecha” I’d have agreed with them. But that’s setting a pretty low bar.

Our Story So Far: Crew of losers from an Academy prep school dropped into major battle as a rear guard, covering a retreat. Obviously because they were expendable. Fights off the enemy fleet (well, they were leaving anyway) and saves the base. Their group leader’s stated goal is to be a hero. As another reviewer said, in any army in the world, that goal will get you pulled from combat immediately — heroes get people killed. In the second ep they are accosted by the bad guy equivalent of their own cutting edge mechs — who proceed to fly rings around them, but don’t kill them because they are not worthy opponents.

If you are a mech fan, and I’m not, this will probably be right down your beamline.

CocoKefir Oats

When I make a run to the supermarket I sometimes grab something at random from the shelf, just to try it. This has resulted in several new additions to my cooking repertoire, and the occasional call out for a dinner pizza. This week it was a bottle of coconut-flavored kefir. I hadn’t had kefir before, or maybe I was just suppressing the memory. It was tart to the point of almost, but not quite, undrinkableness. Of course, when I have something I’m about to pour down the sink I have trained myself to first think of it as a potential oatmeal ingredient — at least, for things that are not going to fight back when I tip the bottle over the drain.

So, I took a quarter cup of kefir and 3/4 cup of water, and made oatmeal. Since it was going to need sweetn’ing I used mochi flour instead of potato flakes.

Setup: 1/3 cup of stone ground rolled oats, two dinner teaspoons of mochi flour, one cup of thinned kefir, salt.  Cook for 10 minutes or so, depending on the exact style of oats. I added the mochi a few minutes before I it off the stove, to give it time to cook.

Results: Needed sweet, so I put in a packet of Splenda. Needed something more, so I drizzled a couple teaspoons of coconut syrup (that we bought to make piña coladas with a while back, in honor of the 150th anniversary of the Gadsden Purchase) on top. The end result was an OK breakfast, if your taste runs to sweet/tart. I still think I’m going to dump the rest.

Rating: *****

Girls und Panzer — the anime 2

This is the second installment of my writeup on Girls und Panzer. Here’s the links to Part 1, Part 3 and Part 4.

After a three-month unexplained production break, Girls und Panzer came back with a roar. Oouri High is outnumbered 20:7 and in the middle of a fight with a much better equipped Kuromorimine Girls Academy (黒森峰 Black Forest Peak, three symbols together, see the trees in the middle?), led by Nishizumi Miho‘s older sister, Maho.

Episode 11: When we last saw GaruPan (the abbreviation based on the Japanese title ガールズ & パンツァー Gā.ru.zu ando Pa.n.tsā), they had just started their championship match. Over the previous ten episodes the teams had bonded, had become experienced, and they now know just how much is at stake. The night before the match, each tank crew quietly prepares in its own way — which for each one seems to include eating karaage of some kind. The scenes are a poignant reminder of how far they have come.  Team Duck is playing volleyball in a darkened gym, while Team Rabbit spends their  time watching nostalgic old movies like Kelly’s Heroes, and crying when the Tiger tank gets blown up. As the contest starts, the girls are already under pressure, because the Germans Kuromorimine have taken an unexpected shortcut through the forest.

Kuromorimine advances

Fast forward three months, and the chase is on.

Drone Strikes and Openness

Last month, President Obama reportedly said, in response to Senate questions about lack of oversight of the drone program, that he was more open to oversight than the previous administration — “I’m no Dick Cheney.“

That misses the point.

There’s an old saying about why you need a lawyer when you start a partnership. “You may be the best of friends, but assume you’re both killed in a car crash and you children inherit the business…and they hate each other.”

If there was one recurring theme in the original discussions about the US Constitution, it was that the framers didn’t trust individuals. They wanted to make sure that no one man could aggregate power to his office, whatever that was, by making it hard to do something unless the whole of the government agreed.

Obama might not be Dick Cheney, and Hillary Clinton might not be Dick Cheney, but what about the President-after-next? What happens the next time there’s an exploitable crisis? The whole reason that openness and oversight should be strong, institutionalized processes is so that Dick Cheney’s intellectual heirs, or Dick Nixon’s, have no lever to exploit the people of the US.

I’d like to think that we’d learned enough not to elect a Dick to office, but that might not always be true.

Green Thumb Up My Nose

Garden Report for 130401

Running a little late on this, just like with all my other gardening chores. The weather this week was cool to cold. I spent the weekend setting up a cold frame around two of the KHG sections, and seeing if I could kill my seedlings by failing to water them.

My first attempt at a cold frame ended in failure, as I reported last week. This week’s experiment went much better, given that we haven’t had any wind yet to test it. My cunning plan was to build a simple 2×4 ridgepole over each section of the KHG, and drape the plastic/chicken wire over that. The object of the exercise is to keep in heat, and keep out squirrels. I decided to do this by making a sandwich. Then I got to work on the cold frame.

Fortunately, a four foot wide swatch of chickenwire will stretch from the top of my lo-rider ridgepole down to the cinderblocks. That means I didn’t have to do too much cutting — just clip off enough to run the length of the KHG section. It was the same with the plastic. The package I have is 10×50, so if I cut it in half I have enough to drape down over the cinderblock and act as a rodent deterrent. So the first layer of chickenwire supports the plastic. The second layer blocks the rodents, and keeps the plastic from shredding into the wind. Here’s the process:

Lay out the chickenwire, and two boards, long enough to run the length of the KHG (remember, mine is rectangular).

Boards and chickenwire

Staple the chickenwire to the boards

Alignment is easy if you use the hexes

Iraq – The Real Failure of Intelligence

On this, the tenth anniversary of the disastrous invasion of Iraq, the BBC has a retrospective on a small part of the Intelligence picture that was available prior to the war. In a nicely balanced report — balanced from a literary standpoint at least — they discuss two low-level defectors who fabricated stories, and the two high-level sources who reported accurately on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. The US, with the UK in tow, accepted the fabricators and ignored the truth-tellers, and so went to war. At the end of the BBC-USA clip on the report (but not in the on-line version), they ask the rhetorical question “If more people had listened to these two, would the US and UK have still gone to war?“

The answer is, yes, of course we would have.

Green Thumb Up My Nose

Garden Report for 130318

The weather this week was threatening rain and unseasonably warm (50s), what the local weather mavens call a pineapple express, followed by very windy and cold. I broadcast many of last year’s seeds into an area of ground cover that I dug over. We’ll see what grows.

Midweek the soil temperatures were in the 40′s. The one KHG section that had clear plastic over it was up to 47. I have found that a 10ft length of thin walled PVC tubing will arc nicely from one side of the KHG to the other. The problem is, I need to have a ridgepole for it, because I need to drape things. Tried cutting the tubing in half and sticking in a + shaped connecter. Glued it good, let it dry overnight. Did four of them. Three of them broke when I tried to curve them. I guess the problem is that the connecter is sitting at the point of max curvature. Another problem was that the base of the PVC wants to push the cinder block out from the wall. I am rethinking my approach.

Currently, I’m favoring a simple set of T posts with a ridgepole across them. The chicken wire/plastic sheet would be tacked to two boards and simply draped over the ridgepole. Like a pup-tent. Still thinking about it.

How to Defeat the F-35

The US military seems to be afflicted with simultaneous cases of nostalgia and amnesia. We forget the lessons of history, and keep doing what we’ve been doing, historically. Part of it is institutional/organizational. A lifetime ago, the entire inventory of weapons could turn over in a decade. Today, it takes more than a decade to get a new weapon approved for production. That means we are stuck with a military infrastructure and inventory designed for the world as it was, not the world as it is, or might be.

Case in point was last week’s discussion of low-speed turn performance of the F-22. This week it’s the F-35′s turn, no pun intended. Both the F-22 and the F-35 were designed to solve last century’s problems of penetrating dense patterns of advanced SAM systems, the kind of thing you’d have to do when fighting WWIII. For both those fighters, a great deal of traditional fighter wisdom was sacrificed on the altar of the stealth gods. As a result, the F-35 has out-of-the-cockpit visibilty problems. Interestingly, the old Soviet fighters tended to have the same problem.

F-35 pilot drops bomb, wonders if he should do a “Crazy Ivan” maneuver to clear his six, given that the external Sidewider has destroyed his stealth characteristics

You see, the Russian approach was to build the smallest airframe possible that would still hold the engine and cockpit. That’s why the triangular wingspan on the MiG-21 Fishbed was almost exactly the same size as the triangular horizontal stabilizer on the F-111. As they modified their aircraft they had to add bumps and lumps and cableways on the outside of the fuselage, to hold the new equipment. For example, the Fishbed D and later versions had additional fuel and electronics in a large bulge along the spine, one that ran right up to the back of the cockpit, and totally blocked rearward vision. How did they solve the problem? With the addition of a periscope/rear-view mirror.

CAF Fishbed J. The mirror is in the little dark bump on top of the canopy

It’s better than nothing, but I’ve sat in a Fishbed cockpit, and I can tell you that the mirror is not very useful. And the “Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear” doesn’t help at all.

The solution for the F-35, the article says, is to have the 21st Century equivalent to that rear-view mirror — a 360° multi-screen networked camera system, projected into the pilot’s helmet. If it works (and it hasn’t yet), and if it doesn’t increase the pilot workload (how do you switch between/among views?), it would still seem to require extensive training if it’s to become a natural part of the pilot’s task flow.

Lost in the Food Desert 2

USDA has updated their food desert map, the one that shows where people live who don’t have access to transport yet don’t have nearby supermarkets. It’s a much finer grain than the first one, and it fixes most of the errors I found two years ago– US military bases are no longer automatically deserts.

With all the changes, you can get a much clearer picture of how poverty is concentrated in pockets in this country. Washington, DC, is infamous for the fact that you only have to travel a few blocks from Capitol Hill to be in what looks like a third world country, to be where it’s possible to get mugged while trying to hold up a liquor store. The map there no longer shows all of NE as a food desert, just the patches there, and in the areas of MD between NE and the Beltway.

Let me speculate and say I think one reason we don’t provide more social services in this country is that poverty is pushed aside, into little refugia, as if protecting the last of the Neanderthals. You don’t see it, so you don’t think about it, except on an intellectual basis, and most Americans are very stingy when it comes to supporting intellectual causes.

The data itself looks better, but the user interface is a little ugly. You can’t doubleclick to zoom in, you have to drag the map center to where you want to be, and then click on the zoom tool. Unfortunately, the map wants to drift along with your pointer as to move towards the tool. In addition, while it’s nice that clicking on a tract brings up a data window, clicking on the (x) for that data window doesn’t make it go away, at least not in Firefox or Opera.

They say you shouldn’t buy a software product with a version number lower than 3.0, and it looks like that’s the case here.

Deviled Oatmeal

My rule of thumb for these recipes is that there shouldn’t be any cooking in the preparation other than the cooking of the oatmeal. Of course, if you’ve cooked something earlier, for a different purpose, that’s leftovers, that’s OK.

A friend of ours gave us a large tupperware box of deviled eggs – boiled eggs cut in half, with the yolk mixed with mustard and mayo and returned to the yolkhole. What could be better for your morning oatmeal? I mean, the mustard will make up for the oatmeal’s lack of flavor, and the yolk and mayo will make up for the oatmeal’s lack of cholesterol.

I scooped the filling from one half a deviled egg into the oatmeal and stirred until it mixed. Then I chopped up the egg. Or tried to. Cold boiled half-eggs are slippery and rubbery and don’t like being poked at with sharp objects. Our banana slicer was in the wash, so I just chunked it up as best I could.

Setup: 1/3 cup of stone ground rolled oats, two dinner teaspoons of potato flakes, one cup of broth (I used a mix of mostly chicken with a splash of beef and a dash of shoyu), one half of a deviled egg.  Cook for 10 minutes or so, depending on the exact style of oats.  Add the potato when you take it off the stove..

Results: Not bad. Not great. The mustard flavor was barely detectable. Most of the counter-bland effects came from the beef and shoyu. The eggchunks were there, but were not really noticable, either in feel or flavor — they could be left out for no loss. We have a lot of these things, so I may get to do some more experimenting. Or, I might just mix up some mustard and mayo and use that.

Rating: *****

That DHS Ammo Buy

I’m no great fan of the Dienst Heimat Sicherheits, but this latest kerfluffle over their RFQ for 1.6 billion-with-a-B rounds of small arms ammunition is overblown. But not a lot.

The original report was Denver Post quoting AP. Then Forbes picked it up in an opinion piece that talked about DHS arming up for a twenty year war against America, using a Belfast Telegraph item on US ammunition expenditures in Iraq as a basis, and getting some of their numbers wrong (Army expenditures during Iraq were closer to 125 million/month; there’s no information on expenditures in Iraq).

As far as I can tell, the fact is that DHS wants to buy 1.6 billion rounds of small arms ammunition over a four-year period. That’s about 400 million per year. I tried looking for details in FedBizOps, the new 21st century name for the Commerce Business Daily, but that only shows postings over 30 days old unless you register with them.

How do those numbers compare historically? Well, according to a student paper (1.2MB .pdf) at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, the Army bought about 1.5 billion rounds per year during the height of the Iraq war, and about 400 million per year during the interregnum between the end of the Cold War and the start of the GWOT. The latter figure therefore represents the training requirements of the peacetime Army, while the former includes more active training and actual combat usage.

So no, DHS isn’t preparing for a twenty year war. They are just preparing to burn ammunition at a rate comparable to the peacetime Army. You know, the entire forty-five combat brigade, machine gun and automatic-rifle-equipped peacetime Army. That’s bad enough.

The Forbes article is a little overwrought, but its conclusion still stands — we need to have a national conversation about the militarization of the police.

How to Defeat the F-22

Turns out, the much vaunted USAF F-22 fighter has a weak spot. A Wired article talks about how the F-22 is great at Beyond Visual Range (BVR) fighting, but is too heavy to do well in a close-in turning fight. While things have changed a lot, this reminds me of a bit of Viet-Nam era history.

F-22 kicks out a flare, knowing that he can’t out-turn the Luftwaffe fighter.

You see, back in the day, the USN bought the F-4B (this one, not that one) as a fleet defense interceptor, meaning that it was designed to keep Soviet bombers away from the task force while the carrier launched a nuclear strike. That being the case, the best armament was a heavy, long-range air-to-air missiles (AAM), like the Sparrow. It also meant that guns would be of little use. The USAF, enamoured of the AAM idea, bought the gunless aircraft as its primary fighter. Along came the Viet-Nam war, and we found that AAMs were not as reliable as we thought, and that a supersonic fight soon degenerated into a low-subsonic furball. Two years into the conflict, the USAF F-4Cs were equipped with 20mm gun pods — high drag, low accuracy, insecurely mounted weapons.

12th TFW F-4 over VietNam with centerline gunpod

They were novel enough that the 366th TFW at Da Nang (where I was, with the 20th TASS) took their new squadron patch and logo from them.

Even the patch shakes

It wasn’t until two years after that that the F-4E appeared, carrying an internal centerline gun. Only about 15% of the air-to-air kills in VN involved guns, but who knows how much higher that number would have been if the F4-E had been available four years earlier.

The current situation is not exactly like Viet Nam, because the F-22 does have an internal 20mm gatling. On the other hand, its relativly high wing loading — understandable tradeoffs for stealth, supersonic cruise, and internal carriage — makes it not nearly as nimble in a low-speed turning fight. “But”, you say, “we don’t do that any more, because, you know, technology. We’ll kill them BVR, just like the…” See?

The problem isn’t just technology, either. It’s politics, and Rules of Engagement, and quite rightly. I’m not sure we’ve ever fought full weapons-free BVR, because we’ve never been really sure that we knew who that blip was. It’s embarrassing to shoot down an airliner. If the USSR was still around, and NATO was going toe to toe against clouds of Warsaw Pact fighters in Central Europe, yeah, I can see it. If it’s us involved in some kind of altercation between China and the other China over the Formosa Straits, with Dreamliners full of tourists headed from Japan to Singapore passing through, maybe not.

Ah, Students

The students in my classes are, by and large, very good. The tests I give them are all open book, and if we’re in a computer lab, open Internet. This works for me, because if you have to look things up on one of my tests, you’ll flunk anyway, because you won’t finish. Now and then I’ll see one of them copy/pasting one of the questions into Google. Now and then I’ll get what’s obviously an Internet answer. Obviously, because (a) we never covered that answer in class, and (b) they didn’t change the font. UPDATE: Welcome students who are just starting on this homework. This post has been up a while

Happy 4th on the 5th of the 3rd

I almost forgot. Today is the 4th anniversary of the start of this blog — 05 March, 2009.  Since then I’ve published 480 posts (ten per month), and had just over 10,000 visitors — about seven per day. I probably wouldn’t have had that many if it weren’t for my two entries on Highschool of the Dead.

I think I’ve lived up to the goals I’ve set for myself: Write more. Write more interesting. When I have time, I express my strong opinions on geopolitical affairs. When I don’t have time, I write about oatmeal.

Bottom line: I am having fun, my ego is having fun, and I’d like to thank my loyal reader, who makes all this worth while.

Green Thumb Up My Nose

Garden Report for 130304

Spring, such as it is, has come to the NENW. The weather was in the 50′s this weekend, and the last most of last Thanksgiving’s snow has melted. The ground has thawed to a depth of perhaps two inches (at least, that’s how far the pick goes in before it bounces). Still not transplant conditions.

Using my Gantt chart as a guide, I started my early brassicae indoors a couple weeks ago. The seedlings are approaching 2″ now.  If I can find time, I’ll start some more seeds on the warm tray this evening.

I’ve started the spring cleanup around the garden. It’s amazing how much trash the snow hides. Also started repairs on my compost cage. Plastic cable ties are not quite the thing for making it through a cold winter, so it’s trying to disassemble itself.  As I roll it over I’m replacing the plastic with steel hose clamps. The ends are also coming out, and I’m not sure what I’m going to do about those. One lesson I’ve learned is that you don’t want to fill a 6x4x4 container full. I can roll it over, but I feel it the next day.

I’m working on a cold-frame/mini-greenhouse for the KHG. A ten foot length of 3/4″ thin walled PVC will nicely arc from one side to the other, with length to spare for stuffing into the cinderblock. I plan to drape chickenwire over the top, and then plastic sheeting on top of that. Or something.

Monogatari Music

This is a two-CD import from Japan, with music from Bakemonogatari, arguably the best of the two seasons released so far. It has 56 tracks, and runs just over two hours. You can listen to samples about halfway down the page at this Japanese site. The best part about it is that it has all of the OP/ED songs: Staple Stable, Wonderful Day, Maoi Snail, Surugu Mokey, etc. Usually, you don’t get this music on a sound track CD because of licensing issues, so I’m glad they were able to get those sorted out. These tracks all run around four minutes, and if you liked them in the series you’ll like them here.

A second category are the tracks that form something of a leitmotif for the various characters. Most memorable, of course, are the various guitar / piano / harmonica blues backgrounds to Arararage’s encounters with Oshino Meme.

Third, we have a few additional renditions of the OP/ED music, but on different instruments. If you’ve ever wondered how Nadeko Snake would sound on a music box, here’s your chance. Also in this category is the unforgettable piano rendition of Staple Stable that always seems to make its way softly into the more romantic moments. This alone makes the album purchase worth it.

The final category is what I’d call incidental music: simple tunes that form an aural backdrop to one scene or another, and useful most for recalling those scenes. The music isn’t designed to stand on its own. Most run about a minute and half, are childishly simple, and repetitive. The last track on the second disk, for example could be mapped as something like:

xylophone: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
accordian: ____BBBBBBbbbbbbB’B'B’B'B’B’
marimba: __________CCCCCCcccccc

with each letter representing an identical six-second/ 12-note sequence.

If you then replace those instruments with various combinations of tubular bells, marimbas, autoharps, pianos, drums, or their electronic equivalents, you get the pattern for about two thirds of the music on the discs. Nice tracks to build ringtones and time alarms with on your cell phone. Nice background to other things. No thought required.

Conclusion: I like it. I’m glad I bought it. I’m not sure it’s worth buying if you’re not a Monogatari fan. Even the Staple Stable piano cover gains most of its value through its romantic associations.

Corned Beef Oats

I’ve written before about using corned beef cooking broth in oatmeal. This time I used the packaging fluid from a pre-cooked corned beef from the super. Cutting one end of the plastic and draining it into a bowl gave about a cup of liquid. I tried it two ways — once with beef broth and once with vegetable broth. Since cornedbeefandcabbage is all one word around this house, I also added a third of a cup of shredded cabbage about three minutes before the end.

Setup: 1/3 cup of stone ground rolled oats, two dinner teaspoons of potato flakes, 3/4 cup of broth, 1/4 cup corned beef liquid, no salt.  Cook for 7 minutes or so, depending on the exact style of oats. Add 1/3 cup shredded cabbage. Cook for 3min more.  Add the potato when you take it off the stove..

Results: Not bad. Not exciting. Good enough that I’ll do it again the next time we get a corned beef, but not good enough that I”m going to run out an buy one for the packing liquid. Cabbage gave it a nice crunch.

Rating: *****

Only Connect

Two months almost to the day from when the trouble started, it appears to have been fixed. Short form: it was the DSL modem…plus.

To summarize (the deets may be found via the Only Connect tag). In mid-December, our connection started acting wonky, and our mail clients could only receive, not send. CenturyLink came and did their best — whole house filter, dedicated DSL line, lots of activity at the back end. Some problems were fixed, others (email), not. After a week of work, including having techs spend hours in the house, they went away, beaten and confused. They said they tought it might be an ethernet port configuration issue…which, for various reasons, was just silly.

We limped along with workarounds (get mail via the mailer, reply via gMail…). I kept poking at the problem as time allowed, building logic trees of things I’d tried — it’s not a LAN wiring problem because my wife’s macbook works fine through the same switch/cable that her PC does. Her PC talks to the network printer fine, so her cable to the switch is OK…etc.

Finally, I borrowed a DSL modem from the university. It didn’t totally fix things, but it fixed enough for me to go back to CenLink and ask for a new one. They sent it via UPS and it was here within 24hrs. How’s that for service? Half an hour on the phone with their internet folks getting things set up (it was being cranky about passwords), and everything seems to work. I’ve been able to sign into my sites, MJ has been able to do our online banking, and email works all ’round.

The repair guy had tried a modem off the truck earlier, and it hadn’t helped, so we swapped back. I’m thinking there were multiple problems, like with the house wiring and maybe a config at the Central Office, and we fixed those after we tried the modem. The old modem hadn’t failed, it was just flaky, and however the Win and Mac boxen talk to things, they must be a lot more forgiving than Linux. So that accounts for the OS issues.

One remaining problem is that my wireless AP doesn’t seem to recognize the new modem. I can log on to the wireless, but if I type in a webpage, I get an immediate ‘can’t find server’. It’s prbably a simple configuration issue, and in any event it’s not a real problem, because the new router has a wireless capability, it’s just not positioned optimally for the house. It just barely works in the bedroom, for example, and not at all in the back yard. Since I don’t plan to sit in the back yard with my Nexus and a glass of Piesporter Goldtröpfchen until, you know, the snow melts enough to find the deck chairs, I’m going to give up on that until Spring Break.

UPS attempts to monetize inefficiency

Every now and then we get packages that have to be signed for. Every so often, we’re not home. Recently, in an attempt to improve our hit rate, we’ve signed up for email notification from UPS, telling us what day they will be delivering a package. It’s a great idea. Unfortunately, the marketeers that put it together went a little too far.

What’s the cost to UPS of missing a delivery? That is, showing up with a package that needs a signature, only to find there’s no-one home and having to come back tomorrow. At a minimum, it’s excess travel time on the truck from point A to point B to point C when they could have just gone from A to C, plus excess driver time, plus the run-up-and-knock time. Not a lot, in the overall scheme of things, but it mounts up.

One way to cut down on this cost to UPS, at some hidden cost to the customer, is to let the customer know that their copy of The Heterodyne Boys and the Race to the West Pole will be delivered sometime between 8AM and possibly 7PM next Wednesday (God forbid that they should actually be able to predict AM or PM). That way the customer can hang out at home all day, under the entirely correct assumption that their time is worth nothing…to UPS. Of course, the customer might just decide to blow off the delivery that day in favor of a previously scheduled prostatectomy. In that case, UPS has to come back the next day, and possibly the next.

Even with the advance notification, this is an inefficient system. What’s needed is a system whereby the customer can inform the carrier of when they’ll be home, and the carrier can then schedule the delivery for that day. No missed deliveries, no irate customers, no problems.

Well, UPS has such a system. When you get your notification email, you can go to their website to check on the status. If the scheduled delivery date is a problem, you can go to another page to reschedule. On that page you find you have two options. (1) arrange for you to drive across town to their facility for pickup, or (2) specify a delivery date. By the way. the ‘specify a delivery date’ option costs you $5.00. That’s right. In order to help them improve their delivery efficiency, you have to pay them.

Our next package is due Monday. We might be home. If not, well, c’est le’guerre. They can come back on Tuesday, and if they are really unlucky, on Wednesday — the day we really wanted the delivery on.

Girls und Panzer – the anime 1

This is the first installment of my writeup on Girls und Panzer. Here’s the links to Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

I was originally going to do a double-feature writeup and compare this program to some other, based on a shared topic or trope or something. I didn’t do it, because from the jaw-dropping pullback at the end of the first episode, to the equally jaw-dropping arrival of the instructor, to the musical in the snow to the cliff-hanger battle before their spring break, Girls und Panzer is simply incomparable. It may not be high art. It may not be the greatest anime ever written. It is unique. (This is Part 1. Part 2, the exciting finale is here, and Part 3, post season commentary, is here)

I’d like to make my classroom arrivals this dramatic

The setup is simple: in a slightly-alternate-history version of our world, small unit tank combat has become a varsity sport for high-school girls. One can see why. Sensha-Dō (戦車-道) is literally the way of the tank, with way (Dō, long o) being used in a philosophical sense, like Tao (the symbols are identical), or like other martial arts (弓道 kyūdō, way of the bow). The localizers saw fit to translate it tankery, probably in parallel with archery, but tankmanship might be a better phrase. What better way to turn young girls into strong, resolute women? Women who are every bit as kawaii as the clatter of a caterpillar tread.

There’s nothing cuter than a girl and her tank

Olive Oats

Every now and then we open a can of pitted olives, for use in salads and sauces and such. This time it was Kalamata olives (a large, slightly bitter olive, packed in a mild wine vinegar). There was about a cup of the packing liquid left over. It was dark and murky, with bits of olive and fragments of what I sincerely hoped were olive leaves. Obviously something you’d want in your breakfast oatmeal.

Well, no.

Setup: 1/3 cup of stone ground rolled oats, two dinner teaspoons of potato flakes, one cup of olive packing liquid, salt.  Cook for 10 minutes or so, depending on the exact style of oats.  Add the potato when you take it off the stove..

Results: The first truly inedible oatmeal I’ve made. Overwhelmingly salty. Overwhelmingly sour/bitter. It would be hard to produce a worse product without special training.

Rating:  -*…****

Obviously, the problem was that I should have added it by the teaspoon rather than the cup. I still needed breakfast, so I made some plain oatmeal and started folding in the Kalamata Oatmeal, one heaping teaspoon at a time. Three teaspoons later it was about as olivy as I could stand.

Results: Since it was an oatmeal/oatmeal mixture, the flavors didn’t blend the way they normally do. Still, it wasn’t….bad. Too much of one flavor. If I try this again, I’ll use a tablespoon of the liquid, and maybe chunk up some olives. I think I will try this again, but I don’t have high hopes.

Rating: *****

Note to self: flavors don’t always have to blend. Swirling flavored and plain oatmeals might make for an interesting breakfast
Note to others: In an effort to bump up my hit count, I will tell you there was no nudity in the label art for the olives.

Costs of College, and Bad Reporting

There’s bad reporting, and then there’s egregiously bad reporting. Slate’s Matthew Yglesias seems to specialize in the second variety.

In Friday’s Slate MoneyBox, he has a brief item on “The Real Problem With Colleges’ Business Model“, two paragraphs long, with one chart, and one five year old photo of students drinking beer on Spring Break.

The chart shows how young college graduates real earnings have declined since 2000, and says that colleges can’t continue to jack up the cost of college at rates higher than inflation.

The picture makes it look like college students are wastrel ne’er-do-wells that don’t deserve the education. The analysis makes it sound like colleges are are greedy spendthrifts — the only link is to another Yglesias article on amenities that new students are demanding, illustrated by another Spring Break photo.

What’s the reality? Well, the reason that college costs to students have been rising so fast is that skinflint legislatures have been cutting back state support for higher education, and dumping it on the student. They then make it easier for students to load themselves up with debt, and call it improved student aid.

What’s the reality? Well, the decline in real earnings is part of the hollowing out of the American middle class. Over the years in question, pretty much all under Republican administrations, the increases in productivity have all gone to the top 1%.

The reality is that we are systematically destroying the foundation of higher education in the U.S., and shallow articles like this one do nothing but pander to those who would continue to do so.

Guns and Games, an Update

A while back I blogged about the relationship between video games and gun deaths. The web comic Virtual Shackles does a better job of it than I did.

Chickenfatoats

MJ baked chicken thighs the other night. I got one spindly thigh and a plateful of salad for dinner. It’s a good thing I’m trying to lose weight.  Leftover was the pan the chicken was baked in, full of Maillard goodness and chickenfat. Maybe some olive oil as well. What’s an oataku to do?

Well, he could try dumping the oatmeal in right after dinner, and letting it sit overnight to absorb the fat and juices. In the fridge if you must. Then in the morning add a cup of broth and defondify it. I found that a two minute zot in the microwave warmed the broth enough to dissolve the crusty bits. I also threw in a couple of chicken thighbones someone left laying about. Sloshed everything around and poured it into my usual saucepan for the usual time.

Setup: 1/3 cup of stone ground rolled oats, dumped in the baking pan while the fat is still absorbable and left to absorb, two dinner teaspoons of potato flakes, one cup of chicken broth, salt.  Pour the broth into the baking pan, bring to a boil, and simmer for 10 minutes or so, depending on the exact style of oats. Stir frequently to absorb the fond that ‘s come along. Remove any spare thighbones and add the potato when you take it off the stove.

Results: Exceedingly good. The roast chicken flavor came through quite well. When you think about it, this is the equivalent of making chicken gravy with the pan drippings. And who doesn’t like chicken gravy?

Rating: ***** my first five star rating

Pork N Oats

Not lunchmeat. A while back, I stumbled across a recipe for carnitas, which as far as I can tell is Spanish for meat things. I’m not a primaltologist, but it looked interesting, so I made it while MJ was off on a trip. Most excellent. When she came back, I made it for her. Major fail. The first one was fork-tender in an hour. This one was still awash in water an hour and a half later, despite the fact that the interior temp of the meat was 180F.*

That’s not the point of the story. The point is, I had a cup of what was essentially pork broth left over, so the next morning, I used it in oatmeal.

Setup: 1/3 cup of stone ground rolled oats, two dinner teaspoons of potato flakes, one cup of pork broth from failed carnitas experiment, salt.  Cook for 10 minutes or so, depending on the exact style of oats.  Add the potato when you take it off the stove..

Results: Outstanding. Not overly porky, and the cumin gave it some nice spice. Not sure I want to ruin a two pound pork roast before breakfast, but I’ll be definitely on the lookout for a less Heath-Robinson way of preparing it.

Rating: *****

*So it wasn’t fork-tender. It was, however, food-processor-tender