Caturday Update

I slept in. The cats, especially Jake and George, worked to get me up and moving. I finally did, just before 8AM. I put dry food in one bowl for Gracie and divided up a can of Friskie's for all three. George and Jake did not seem impressed, most of the wet food is still there.

So I put all fo the wet food into one bowl and left it. Jake was sitting by the food, giving me the "bring me another can, waitress" look.

I long ago developed an immunity to the plea for a different flavor of food. If they don't want to eat it, too bad for them.

Caturday

Gracie is lying on one of the cat beds.

I've been telling everyone that George has not been thrilled with the heated cat beds and hasn't used them. This week, he made a liar out of me.

Jake has had enough of George's shit.

Interloper alert!

Good Job, Barney!

An Officer Fife in Texas used pepper spray to try to subdue a baby squirrel.

That's not a joke. There were a bunch of middle-school kids watching and shrieking at the cop. Of course, the video is up on YouTube.

John Boehner Can Kiss My Ancient White Ass Cheeks

Seriously. Those asswipes in the GOP are going to force a shutdown of the Federal government. Not because of money, but because the "we don't want government telling us what to do" are willing to use the power of the purse in order to tell women what to do with their bodies.

These are the same people that required the Post Exchanges and Base Exchanges (the armed forces' on-base stores) to remove all soft porn because it offended their morals. Gawd forbid that some nineteen year old sojer could pick up a copy of Playboy or Penthouse, no, we don't want to corrupt his moral fiber as we teach him fifty ways to kill people, nosiree.

No, I don't think that the Democrats should buckle on this one. The Republicans are "negotiating" like a pack of spoiled children-- "If you don't do it my way, I'll take my ball and go home, so there!" Fuck them. They are so eager to shut down the government, fine, shut it down. It'll be on them.

It'll be on them when Medicaid reimbursements aren't paid, when Social Security checks don't go out, when the Department of Defense has to issue script so that military families can buy groceries at the commissary and gasoline at the base gas stations. It'll be on the Republicans when the servicemen's families or seniors can't pay their rent or make the next mortgage payment or pay the electric bill.

If you filed your taxes in the last week or two and if you haven't received your refund check, you aren't going to get it.

If you planned on traveling this summer and if you've sent a passport application in (or tried to renew it), too bad for you. That's not an essential service. On the other side of the border, if you need a visa to come here, you're shit out of luck.

Oh, and if you wanted to use your tax refund to buy a gun (always a good idea, in my opinion), forget it. The national instant records check is not an "essential service".

Personally, I haven't received my refund yet. Being laid off last summer dropped me down a tax bracket or two from what my withholding was based on so I have a decent amount coming back to me. Which I could use. Except for the fact that the social conservatives and the Tea partiers are more interested in adhering to their ideology than they are towards making the government function at governing.

They can all kiss my motherfucking ass.

The Real Problem With Satire

That is: You have to know something about the target of the satire.

The Daily Show spent two segments (across four segments online) satirizing the Glenn Beck Show.

I didn't get it, but then again, about the only way I'd watch the Glenn Beck Show was because I was immobilized with my eyelids forced open.

No Fraud Here, No Sirree!

Officials in Waukesha County on Thursday said a final review of paperwork and records from a closely watched Wisconsin Supreme Court election uncovered thousands of uncounted votes, a potentially stunning development that could upend the contest.

Unofficial returns on Wednesday gave the union-backed challenger, JoAnne Kloppenburg, a narrow 204 vote statewide lead over Republican David Prosser.

But late Thursday, the county clerk in Waukesha, a Republican stronghold, said that votes not included in earlier totals had resulted in a net gain of 7,582 votes for Prosser.

A Republican county clerk who has a track record of playing funny games with the voting tally computers just "happens" to "find" a "missing" spreadsheet that, miracle of miracles, has over 7,500 votes for the Republican candidate!

Yeah. There's no voter fraud in Waukesha County, folks. There is nothing to see here, just the expected sight of Republicans stealing elections. It's not as thought hat's anything new, right?

Move along, folks.

AARRGGGHHH! How Hard Is It to Get This Gun Shit Right?

I realize that there are a lot of authors out there that don't give a shit about guns. They don't know squat about them. They may have never fired a gun. I get that.

But you know, if you're writing in a genre for which the use of firearms is a common plot point and if a couple of your plot points involve guns, you ought to at least get try to get it right.

Cae in point: Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane. In this book, Lehane returns to the private investigative team of Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, which last made an appearance in 1999 in Prayers for Rain. Moonlight Mile is a follow-up to Gone, Baby, Gone, which was published in 1998.

Lehane brings the story forward in real time. All of the characters are a dozen years older and they are still dealing, to varying degrees, with the hard choices that Kenzie made in the earlier case. The writing is good, I enjoyed the story, but at the end of the book, the narrative makes two glaring errors with regard to guns.

First: In a scene where one professional killer is instructing his boss's wife on how to use a particular pistol to murder someone, he says "it pulls a bit to the left." Riight. In the "up close & personal" use of a handgun to murder a captive in a room, at a range of maybe six feet, that isn't going to matter jack point shit. Maybe you'd miss with one of those piece-of-shit derringers, but that's about it.

Second: A following scene has a character disassembling a variant of a 1911. You don't "detach the slide from the grip," which is what this character does. When you do remove the slide from the receiver, the "grip" and the frame (or the receiver) are not simply break down into individual pieces. You'd need a screwdriver (or an allen key) to remove the grip panels.

Maybe it shouldn't bug me. But it does. (And there is a glaring one that will also bother the foamers.)

But if you can overlook crap like that, Moonlight Mile is a good hard-boiled detective novel.

The N-1, Reborn?

SpaceX is proposing to build a heavy-lift version of its Falcon 9 rocket, called Falcon 9 Heavy.

When I saw the illustration of the proposed rocket, the first thing I thought of was that it would have almost as many engines as the N-1, 27 engines, versus 30 for the N-1. One might point out that the Falcon 9 has flown, but the counter to that is that the Russians have flown the R-7/Soyuz rocket design since the 1960s.

As best I can determine, the Soyuz rocket first ignites the sixteen engines of its four first-stage strap-on boosters and then, once they are all running, the four engines of the main/second stage are ignited, so that it flies with 20 engines burning. Yet the Soviets were never able to get the N-1, with its 30-engine first stage, to successfully fly. Yes, SpaceX has flown the Falcon 9 twice. The Russians have flown the R-7/Soyuz series close to two thousand times.

I'm not betting against SpaceX, mind you. But anyone at SpaceX who thinks that the Falcon 9 Heavy is a simple matter of just strapping three Falcon 9 main stages together is probably one of the brain-damaged fools who tend to spend their days cranking out press releases.

How to Tell If Your Neighbor Is Cooking Up Explosives

Stratfor has a guide.

There is an unfortunate aspect to such public information, though. It can also serve as "How to Reduce the Chances of Getting Caught While Making Explosives (or Meth)." While there are some pretty stupid terrorists out there, there also are a lot of smart ones. One of those could easily pick up a few tips on how to better cover one's tracks.

Moron With an Airplane

A 24-year-old pilot with an airsick passenger who landed his single-engine Piper Warrior on Rockaway Beach in Queens on Monday night could not be talked out of it, no matter how hard an air-traffic controller tried, according to a recording.

The pilot, Jason Maloney of Cornwall, N.Y., later told the police that he had gotten the idea from a television program called “Flying Wild Alaska” that depicted rough landings.

How that clown managed to be able to drink a glass of water without drowning is open to question. If he had a bona fide emergency, he could have landed at JFK or at Floyd Bennett Field.

Because of this clown's foolishness, that pathway by JFK may be closed off. And he wrecked a perfectly good airplane, because it got a saltwater bath once the tide came in.

What an imbecile. I guess they'll admit any clown to Georgetown University Medical School, nowadays.