Electric car has a 56-mile range on a 30 degree day...until you turn on the heater. Turn on the heater and you can only go 37 miles.
Relying on the public charging station didn't help.
But I also said "windmills", and guess what? There is a reason they supply 1% of the world's energy. If windmills were in any way superior to coal/oil/nuclear we'd already be using them.
Okay? All you need to do is look at the history of power technology: As soon as we had any alternative to it we stopped using wind power.
* * *
This is why a basic cable subscription costs $60 per month. All the bullshit channels you don't give a rat's ass about, bundled together.
I only want access to a handful of channels; I don't care about the sports channels, the Spanish channels (I don't speak Spanish), the shopping channels, most of the news channels, the channels that run primarily celebrity/pop culture crap, the O network, the gay channels, the music video channels, the econut channels--almost all of them, in fact.
I'd be willing to pay $1 per month per non-premium channel. That would probably run me about $30 per month, total, including some nominal service fee, because there just isn't that much TV that I care about. I wouldn't mind being able to watch the car shows on SpikeTV or some stuff on the History Channel or such; but I find that--strangely enough!--my life is not a barren wasteland without television, and it's not worth $60-$70-$80 per month to be able to tune in to the occasional episode of Mythbusters...only to find that I've seen it before.
As things work now, TV services are full of junk and cost far too much for my taste.
* * *
"The mere presence of money, even a lot of it, does not constitute a crime." Tell that to DHS, which illegally confiscated $35,000 from innocent people solely because they had it. The agents of the DHS tricked these people into violating a law (which is, by the way, entrapment) and then stole their money, using the violation as a pretext. The people were not arrested and only their money was taken.
As Denninger points out, that is armed robbery, regardless of who is doing it. The penalties assessed on DHS (returning the money, paying legal and court costs) are insufficient.
If I were this family, I would use this case as a springboard to sue the fucking shit out of DHS.
* * *
New Orleans cops who violated peoples' civil rights are going to jail for it. Amazing.
* * *
Crazy right-wingers at the Washington Post actually oppose a high-speed rail project. I'll quote a bit of what Ace quotes: "...if this train is such a good idea, business-wise, how come private banks aren’t lining up to finance it?"
Hmm, the phrase NOT ECONOMICALLY NECESSARY comes to mind, the same way it always occurs to me whenever I see the words "high-speed rail".
* * *
I've seen this story in several places: the Teleprompter-reader-in-Chief is recycling his older material.
I got a bit more than halfway through the video before stopping. How much repetition do you need to see before you get it that it's the same f-ing speech?
The Obama administration would like to apologize for the constant repetition in this government.
The Obama administration would like to apologize for the constant repetition in this government.
...only you read that by looking to your left and saying three or four words, then looking to your right and saying three or four words, and repeat:
L: The Obama administration...And so on. Because that apparently is how a brilliant!!! orator delivers his speeches.
R: ...would like to apologize...
L: ...for the...
R: ...constant repetition...
L: ...in this government.
R: The Obama administration....
If it were George W. Bush this story would be all over the news channels: "Look at what Chimpy McBushitlercheneyhaliburtonpuppet did! He's so stupid he can't even tell he's giving an old speech!"
I'd like someone to explain to me how that criticism doesn't apply to the Obumbledroid in Chief.
* * *
Tonight I've got to be at church before 6:30. There's a special communion service which they call "stop and go communion", where the pastor holds several short communion services lasting about 15 minutes each.
...I know, I know, the hardcore Catholics out there are aghast at the notion: "Why don't you just put in a window and have drive-through communion? Why, I never!" Since we Protestants don't believe that the bread is the LITERAL FLESH OF CHRIST it doesn't require an hour-long Mass to celebrate communion. When Jesus did all that stuff at the Last Supper he wasn't hewing chunks of his arms and legs off and serving them to his disciples; he was giving them unleavened bread. Nor did he stick a tap in a vein and collect his literal blood in a cup; it was wine that he gave them.
It was allegory when Jesus said, "This is my body..." and "...this is my blood...." It's a symbol, meant simply to remind us that Jesus died for our sins.
Because of that, the actual material used is less important than the ceremony around it, consisting primarily of remembering what Jesus said and did. As long as you have bread (of whatever sort) and wine (of whatever sort--even grape juice) you are doing as Jesus commanded, which is to remember him, what he said, and what he did.
"As often as you do this, do it in remembrance of me."
...though I have to admit the idea of "drive-thru communion" would be stretching the point more than a bit. And while I wish I could say that's so ridiculous that of course no one would do that, I live in the United States, and I know someone's done it, planned it, or is thinking about doing it. Okay, they have drive-through margerita shops; nothing would surprise me at this point.
* * *
Which is not to say, of course, that the Catholics are somehow wrong. Their ways are their business. If you want to feast on the literal flesh of Christ--and follow it up with a literal blood chaser--who am I to stop you?
* * *
A few days ago I was riding the motorcycle, and I happened to drive past the theater that was playing Karigarushi Arrietty, and thought, "Hey! It's ten to five; I could go see the movie if I wanted to, assuming they're still showing it!" But I realized I didn't want to leave the motorcycle unattended and (relatively) unsecured for that long, so I decided against it.
Besides, I've got the DVD here, and can watch it unspoiled by Disney. Since I am apparently going to have nothing else going on this Sunday, I guess I can watch it then.
* * *
So I cracked open the libretto for King of the Jungle, that musical I'm gonna be in, and some of the songs are a bit on the "Christian-hokey" side, exactly as I'd expected them to be. There are some awful lines in it, but none of the true stinkers are mine, so all I have to do is listen for my cues and remember what I'm supposed to say.
My "solo" isn't even really singing--it's half-sung, half spoken. That'll be harder to learn but easier to perform since I really only have to get the cadence right.
I said "some", because a couple of them are actually kind of catchy. There was one that I think I actually like.
So I think this'll be kind of fun.
* * *
So I started editing that novel....
I really marked up the first page. When I started writing the story I had only the most vague idea of what I was doing with the thing; I had an extremely rough outline in mind and was concentrating mainly on getting the ideas out of my mind.
It was mid-August, 2000, when I started writing it; I was working at Rockwell-Collins and had quite literally nothing else to do. The department's budget was gone and there were two weeks left in the fiscal year. There was no work in the pipeline; I was on the Temporary Revisions team and we had a literal handful of jobs to last us until September, so we were advised (unofficially) to take our time with them.
When your project quite literally consists of two pages--one of which is almost entirely a cut-and-paste job--that you could do in fifteen minutes, making it last fifteen days takes some serious effort.
...so I let myself get distracted. A lot. It was during this time that I began writing this novel, and doing work on other creative projects, because I needed to fill my time with something and LOLcats hadn't been invented yet. At least if I was staring at the computer monitor and rattling my keyboard it looked like I was doing real work.
That was such a mess. *sigh*
I only wrote the first few pages there, though, because after I realized it was going to turn into a major project (and not something just done to pass the time) I had to stop working on it while using Rockwell's equipment. Company policy and all that--same reason I couldn't help a friend of mine with a for-profit campaign world idea he had, not while I was at work. I cuoldn't do any work on the thing while there; I couldn't even get proofreading copies of the work via the company's e-mail system, for that very reason.
I did other creative stuff instead; I drew a lot and even did some primitive photocompositing with the photocopier there. I turned out some of my best manga artwork in August of 2000, because I was drawing every day for hours.
Anyway--since the thing started out as a lark, the first couple of pages were an unmitigated mess, and I really marked them up; as I went on I began making fewer and fewer marks, as the story found its voice and pace and things settled down.
I have a rewrite of perhaps twenty or thirty pages, and I might just substitute some of that for the earliest pages of the book. It starts about the same, but there's more exposition tucked in here and there so the reader can get an understanding of who, what, where, and when a little more concretely and a bit sooner than otherwise.
But I'm going to heed Og's advice, and won't rewrite the whole thing right now.
...and speaking of "right now" I've got to get shaved and showered.