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Yes, I still live, but in an older form at 75.
We had an inch or two of rare snow here a couple of weeks ago, and it provided a half-day or so of excitement. My grass is still
fairly green, but thankfully it has stopped growing. With the tree leaves having turned brown and fallen, it's winter-break time for the yard work. Good to see that you're still active and going strong.
Merry Christmas, Ksquared, and Happy Mowing in 2018 .... :)
k, Congratulations on your retirement. As a 21-year retirement survivor, I predict that by spring you'll be so busy you won't have time to do your yard work.
This post is for anyone who participated on the Silicon Investor site in the past 20 years and who remembers Uncle Frank, who died recently.
http://www.forevermissed.com/franklin-aka-uncle-frank-david-richardson/#about
I prefer to see Ellie Mae leave with Little Jimmy Dickens, a much better match.
Happy New Year, ksquared.
upset that she had to leave with Cuomo
I remember reading Southern humorist Lewis Grizzard's amusing stories about the scarcity and inadequacy of toilets in Russia. He wondered why we were wary of a country that hadn't mastered the flush toilet.
"The Broken Spoke is hanging tough...."
It was a 1999 Texas Highways article on CFS that I referred to, so it's interesting that the Broken Spoke is still in business after all the changes in the past 15 years. I was a UT student in the early '60s and remember Hank's Grill on Guadalupe having a pretty good CFS on a student's budget. Is Guadalupe still called "the Drag" in the UT area?
"What are chicken fried steaks?"
I remember submitting the following post when the CFS topic came up on SI awhile back ...
The July issue of Texas Highways magazine has an 8-page spread
on the Chicken-Fried Steak. It includes such eateries as the
Broken Spoke in Austin, the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo
and Clark's Outpost in Tioga. Also Rudy Lechner's Restaurant
in Houston which "serves an Austrian version of CFS that eschews
cream gravy in favor of cheese sauce."
One of the restaurant owners says that some out-of-state customers
aren't familiar with CFS -- "A few ask for it medium-rare, and
we have to explain that it just doesn't work that way."
Everly Brothers - Let It Be Me
[Demise of Incandescent Light Bulb] Reports were greatly exaggerated
By Sean Hollister on January 1, 2014 02:30 pm
theverge.com
Perhaps you’ve heard the news: the incandescent light bulb is dead. "When the ball drops on New Year’s Eve, the year ends — and so does the ordinary lightbulb," read Fox News' website. CNN even penned an obituary. That’s because, according to countless media reports, January 1st marks the "light bulb ban." Today’s the day when the US government finally phases out the dated technology by banning the manufacture or import of 60-watt and 40-watt incandescent bulbs, which are repeatedly cited as the most popular bulbs in the US. The reports typically suggest that consumers get used to buying pricier, more efficient compact fluorescent or LED bulbs, or else stock up on incandescents while supplies last.
INCANDESCENTS AREN'T BEING BANNED
Unfortunately, little of that is true. There is no such thing as an incandescent light bulb ban in the United States. In fact, on the very same day that the 60-watt incandescent light bulb disappears, you’ll be able to buy a 43-watt incandescent light bulb to take its place. Or a 72-watt incandescent bulb. Or a 150-watt incandescent bulb. Or a three-way incandescent light bulb. Or one with a more durable filament for "rough service" applications. There are literally dozens of loopholes. "It's not like tomorrow people won't be able to buy an incandescent light bulb," says GE’s John Strainic.
So what is actually happening on January 1st? The cost of an ordinary light bulb will drastically rise— and hopefully your electricity bill will fall. The so-called bulb ban is simply a government-mandated energy efficiency standard at work. Seven years ago, President Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (PDF) into law, and its final light bulb provisions take effect today. They simply require that the most popular light bulbs are roughly 25 percent more efficient — that you only need 43 watts to generate the same amount of light as a 60-watt incandescent.
THE NEW NORMAL: HALOGEN
And it just so happens that such 43-watt incandescent bulbs already exist — they’re known as halogen. Halogen incandescent bulbs complement the tungsten filament of a traditional incandescent bulb with halogen gas, which helps them burn more efficiently. Now, manufacturers claim halogen incandescents look and work nearly identically to the original. GE says they can have the same shape, size, brightness, color temperature, color rendering index (CRI), and dim the same too. Unfortunately, they cost a lot more. While you could buy incandescent bulbs for as little as 25 cents each last year, you can expect to pay upwards of $1.50 for each halogen incandescent. "Halogen technology is a little more expensive to use and manufacture," admits Strainic, who says he doesn’t expect those prices to change drastically even if halogen bulbs really take off.
But theoretically, these new bulbs pay for themselves. Where a traditional 60W bulb costs roughly $8 per year for three hours of light each day, a 43W bulb can put out the same amount of light for only $6 worth of electricity, according to manufacturer estimates. That would more than cover the cost of the bulb.
Of course, that same math could indeed kill the incandescent light bulb one day. While a compact fluorescent might cost you $2 each, or $13 for a 60-watt equivalent LED, they use closer to $1 a year in electricity, and since they last much longer that yearly savings can stack. The expected life of a halogen bulb is just one or two years, but compact fluorescents can sometimes make it to ten. According to manufacturer estimates, an LED bulb can last 15-20 years before it even starts to dim by a perceptible measure. That’s why savings-conscious consumers already stocked up on fluorescents years ago, and why they might pick LEDs now.
Left: traditional incandescent. Right: compact fluorescent.
Mike Watson, the VP of product strategy for Cree LED, says the LED bulb business is booming, and he certainly sees the phase-out of 60W and 40W incandescents as potential for greater LED sales as well. "It’s a moment in time when you can get a mass amount of customers to contemplate lighting for the first time ever," says Watson, noting that pricy halogen bulb could make his company’s LEDs seem like a better deal. But Watson isn’t ready to call January 1st a victory for LED quite yet. The sticker shock of LED means that many could still choose compact fluorescent bulbs if they want an efficient incandescent alternative.
"YOU CAN GET A MASS AMOUNT OF CUSTOMERS TO CONTEMPLATE LIGHTING FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER."
Neither GE nor Cree believe that the incandescent light bulb will die anytime soon. Intriguingly, both Strainic and Watson independently told us that the compact fluorescent is the one in jeopardy right now. Both men say that consumers aren’t satisfied with the poor quality of light and non-dimmable nature of many compact fluorescents, and the falling price of LED bulbs could mean those fluorescents get squeezed out of the market. When so many are sounding the death knell for incandescent, wouldn’t it be something if the filament bulb outlasts its competitor?
As of today, January 1st, you still have plenty of choices for how to light your home. There’s the halogen incandescent, the compact fluorescent, and the LED, not to mention a host of traditional incandescent options — like three-way bulbs — thanks to over a dozen loopholes. Now, consumers will vote with their dollars to decide which technologies stay and which will truly disappear.
May the best bulbs win.
Thanks, ksquared. I read nearly all your posts, and it's good to see you're still here consistently. I was trying to remember if you started here on IHub or spent some time earlier on Silicon Investor.
It's a chilly day here in Houston as it must be as well in the hills of NJ. Lots of cold days in December but we haven't hit 32 yet, meaning the grass is still green but covered with fall leaves.
With my stash of incandescent bulbs and with having all my lights on dimmer switches, I hope to have a lifetime supply of incandescents as well.
I may never have to buy another bulb again as long as I live.
Pat Hingle and I attended the same high school, albeit 20 years apart. Unfortunately my only link to Natalie Wood, via Hingle and Splendor in the Grass, is a highly tenuous one. :(
This wonderful man cares for your health and sanity, and he started your generator and fixed your mower. What more could you ask for in a man? :)
My beloved mechanic pronounced me "insane" when he showed up out of the blue ....
I'm still doing the yard work and washing my car. My car dealer washes the car when I take in in for service, which cuts down on the frequency of doing that chore. Hiring someone to do the yard is tempting.
I'm doing well here in the Southern Hemisphere of Texas. Glad to have helped a maiden with her mowing. Another helpful hint is to hire an illegal immigrant to push the mower. On my street they work in teams and knock out a yard in 12 minutes max. :)
"Fun is over-rated" ... You're of course referring to your lawn-mowing? :)
A lesson on taxes ....
http://moonbattery.com/taxes_ice-cream.jpg
Charlie Daniels unloads on Obama's 'cowardice'
'You're not leading the country, you're misleading the country'
Drew Zahn
Monday, May 27, 2013
wnd.com
Country-music legend Charlie Daniels isn’t buying the White House line that President Obama simply “didn’t know” about the scandalous actions plaguing his administration.
From the gun-running “Fast & Furious” debacle of 2011 to recent revelations the Internal Revenue Service has been targeting tea-party groups, Obama has denied knowledge of his underlings’ actions, even stating he only discovered the improprieties after the evening news reported them.
But in an exclusive interview with WND, the ever-outspoken Daniels blasted the president’s “excuses.”
“If I had a drunk bus driver, for instance, and I told everybody, ‘Don’t tell me about that, I don’t want to know about it,’ and that way if we get sued I can say, ‘I didn’t know it,’ basically that’s got to be what’s happened,” Daniels said. “[But] when you hide behind plausible deniability, that is not leadership. That is cowardice. You’re not leading the country, you’re misleading the country.”
Daniels further charged the blame-shifting is “pervasive” throughout the Obama administration.
“Look at the so-called attorney general, who should have been held to task a long time ago, for one thing, not prosecuting the Black Panthers standing in front of the polling place,” Daniels said. “Then we have Fast & Furious, then we have this thing in Benghazi, then we have the IRS thing – it’s one thing after another. This administration is out of control!
“People have, with reason – regardless of whether they support the presidential administration or not – lost any kind of trust,” Daniels said. “If someone says something, you don’t know if it’s true, if they mean it, if they don’t mean it. As far as what’s going on right now, we don’t have a leader.”
And don’t even think about defending Obama by pointing back to George W. Bush.
“Going back and saying what Bush or Reagan – or for that matter George Washington – did is a total and complete waste of time,” Daniels told WND. “It makes no difference what they did. This guy was supposed to be in to fix the mistakes any president in front of him made, and he’s not doing it. Making excuses for him is not going to help him. He needs to be held to account, he needs to come clean. He needs to get that IRS woman to go back in front of Congress and tell the truth.”
The IRS scandal in particular, appears to have piqued Daniels’ ire.
“Somebody deserves some jail time out of this thing with the IRS,” Daniels told WND. “It’s like the Gestapo. It’s like having your own, private, secret police force to sick on people. It’s dirty.
“I am not comparing Obama to Hitler; I’m comparing politics to politics,” the singer explained. “In the 1920s and ’30s Germany erred in that direction, giving a little bit here, a little bit there, giving the government more and more until they had it all, then all of a sudden the government turns around and says you can’t have guns and you can’t do this, you can’t do that. … This is a dangerous, terrible situation we have going on in this country right now.”
Watch Charlie Daniels’ message to America about the loss of U.S. sovereignty and the rise of a New World Order in the riveting new video “Behold a Pale Horse” on DVD!
Since the 1950s Daniels has been a country singer and famed fiddler, perhaps best known for his hit song “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” He was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry in 2008.
But he also writes frequently on culture and politics, no stranger to bold statements in defense of God and country, and maintains a “soapbox” blog on his website, CharlieDaniels.com.
“I have never in my life seen the United States of America in the kind of shape it’s in right now,” Daniels told WND. “It’s time for somebody to do something to bring this country back together.”
But who’s that somebody, and what can they do?
Daniels decried that so many people in our country are unaware of the severity of the scandals rocking Washington and unwilling to be educated about their own government or the freedoms being slowly sapped from them by the very people they voted into office. Far too many, Daniels lamented, “don’t even know who the speaker of the House is” and “couldn’t find New Jersey on a map.”
“How much more are we going to let stupid get away with?” Daniels asked. “The Bible says, ‘My people perish for lack of knowledge’ – it’s what’s going on in this country. If people knew what was happening, it would scare them to death. But they don’t know. They’ve got their head in the sand; they don’t want to know. It’s just like, ‘Send me my check every month and the h— with everything else.’
“Who are they going to vote for?” he asked rhetorically. “They’re going to vote for the guy that gives them the most.
So can anyone make a difference in Washington?
“The true power in this country is the House of Representatives. That’s our people,” Daniels said. “That’s the people that the people put in every two years. We need to put people there that hold people accountable. The Senate’s a d— lost cause. In my opinion the House of Representatives needs to hold everyone’s feet to the fire. … We need to get to the bottom of this thing.
“If the IRS gets off scot free, the Benghazi thing is let go and the Justice Department getting into these reporters’ lives is let go, we’re finished,” Daniels concluded. “I mean, it’s just gone: nothing going to be done about nothing, and they can do anything they want to and we’re just at their mercy.”
“I hope that this time he’s dug in deep enough that they’re not going to let it go,” Daniels said of Obama. “If people had any idea what they’re losing in this country, they would be doing something about it.”
What is the "R/S"? ... TIA
Its not going anywhere until after the R/S.
I see "RS" frequently here, so I assume it's significant. Curious what RS stands for.
TIA (Thanks In Advance)
During Hurricane Ike in '08, I had 48 ft. of fence break apart and land in the yard. I did the cleanup and decided to rebuild it myself. At 66, it wasn't particularly entertaining.
A section of my fence just broke apart and landed in the back yard ... Clean up is going to be really entertaining. Sigh
frasier? niles? :)
There's a crane dangling over 57th St.
NTSB Recommends All States Ban Use Of Cell Phones By Drivers ...
http://www.kake.com/news/headlines/NTSB_Recommends_All_States_Ban_Use_Of_Cell_Phones_By_Drivers_135516903.html
Ksquared, you'll never walk alone, so to speak. I'm tweetless as well and anticipate remaining that way.
I've never done a tweet.
The Houston Chronicle sports page had this headline for the final game of the long UT-A&M rivalry ...
UT inflicts exit wound
what a great finish
The left wakes up: Obama is not ‘sort of God’
By Jennifer Rubin
Poor Evan Thomas will never live down his ludicrous comment that President Obama was “sort of God.” What seemed like slobbering now seems outright dumb, given the president’s performance. And don’t take my word for it.
Left-wing pundits have discovered he’s sort of like Jimmy Carter. Others now comprehend he’s remote and cold. Still others recognize he is weak and ineffectual (“strangely powerless, and irresolute, as larger forces bring down the country and his presidency”).
It’s not strange at all. Conservatives have been saying the same thing for several years (ever since the 2008 campaign got underway). We noticed his contempt for his fellow citizens who “ cling to guns and religion.” We noticed when his response to the Fort Hood massacre was oddly disengaged. Even the death of his political patron didn’t evoke any real emotion.
And what is more, conservatives have noticed that despite his Ivy League degrees he’s not truly an intellectual and lacks smarts in some key areas. And his understanding of history is, well, Bachmann-esque. In other words, “the perhaps somewhat exaggerated acclamation he received during his Harvard and Chicago years taught him to harbor a peevish faith in the superiority of his own intelligence.” Conservatives weren’t even taken in by the neatly pressed pants or his prowess in philosophy.
The idea of Obama is proving much more satisfying to the left than the reality of Obama, in part because he lacks the competency and strength to advance the left’s agenda. What good is he if he’s going to wimp out and deliver embarrassing denials of responsibility?
The criticism running through much of the liberals’ complaints never acknowledges, of course, that the problem is not simply Obama but the ideas he advances. That, of course, would be much more problematic than one failed president. Given a choice between blaming Obama and blaming Keynes, Obama is going to lose every time.
You have to wonder: If and when Obama ever gets around to proposing real entitlement reform, will his base desert him? After all, he’s already betrayed the left’s dogma by keeping the Bush tax cuts in place in 2010, agreeing to additional spending cuts in the continuing resolution and signing on to a debt-ceiling deal with no tax hikes.
In 2008, many conservatives figured (wrongly, I would argue) it was better to risk an Obama presidency than to go all out for an inconsistent Republican who would very likely promote things with which they disagreed. They’d come back in 2012, they reasoned. I can imagine there are some Democrats (Clinton fans, especially!) who are mulling over a similar notion now.
By Jennifer Rubin | 09:32 AM ET, 08/09/2011
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/the-left-wakes-up-obama-is-not-sort-of-god/2011/03/29/gIQAoSqR4I_blog.html
A photo display of Betty Ford's life ...
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/photogalleries/nationworld2015552978/28.html
More like 'The Great Mind Starring ksquared' with a few wannabes tagging along. <g>
Zounds. 25 seconds is pretty close to simultaneous. Glad you liked the musical piece .. quite an amazing performance by the young lady.
Taps, played in its entirety ...
ksquared, by my calculations, your rough uphill dig and extra plow detritus give you an adjusted snow depth of 18 inches.
I hope this helps. :)
J.
George Jones - Funny How Time Slips Away
And Happy Winter Solstice to you, ksquared. It makes me happy that daylight will begin to get longer every day after today.
Here on the equator of Texas, we're celebrating with a high of 82 forecast for this afternoon.
I once was in line with several people in front of me at a major pharmacy. At the front of the line was a man of about 40, and the pharmacist was at her computer screen when she turned to the man and said rather loudly, "Sir, your insurance doesn't cover Viagra." The man quietly left, but I would imagine the pharmacy later heard from him about the incident.
Takes me back a few decades ...
http://home.comcast.net/~twirlrecords/JackWebb.jpg
http://images.quickblogcast.com/94060-86797/Jack_Webb_3.jpg
Do you like him any better now?
Gooood cracker ...
Was, burp, alchool involved? Or does it simply manifest the quality of public education in Florida?
a road crew painted "SCOHOL" on a road near Miami
Beatles - In My Life
No, I don't know what part of the hour Daniels will be on. The show itself, which airs Sunday morning on the Fox network, is repeated on the Fox News Channel at 6:00pm ET on Sunday.