It worked

Well I don't know if the red wine I got was dry or not but the recipe worked better this time. It was for taco filling but because of the wine it tasted different. And there didn't seem to be enough chili powder (and no cumin) to taste like tacos to me. It was good, mind you, but not taco-like enough.

This time I put more chili powder in and put it some cumin as well. Plus I started cooking too early and so it simmered for longer and I think more of the wine cooked off so it tasted less wine-like. Plus I used a shiraz instead of a merlot but I have no idea of their relative dryness.

Everyone liked it however so it worked out well. And the two styles of salsa I made went over pretty well too. We finished this episode in the Star Trek game (it was called "Gypsies in the Woods") and next week Marlin and Yvonne should be able to rejoin us for one episode (about three or four weeks). I got stuff to make brownies again but we'll prolly play at there house.

And I made Matt do his English Warm-ups at home if he didn't do them in class. He bemoaned that but I was busy making salsa so I only came back to focus on him when he was ready to work, thus avoiding some of the drama. His teacher had emailed me that the rough draft for a paper was due Tuesday and he had thought it was Wednesday so we had some more drama. I had just put some rice in to cook in the microwave (14 minutes). He actually finished his work before the microwave dinged so it took a trivial amount of time. His drama probably took twice the time than the actual work did! ;-P

Dry red?

I'm trying some new taco recipes and the one I've been experimenting with requires "1 cup, dry red wine". This is a bit confusing since most of the stuff I've seen has used the "dry/sweet" meter in reference to white wines. Reds have the word "tannic" in place of dry.

Hmmm. Well whatever else it needs it definately needed more chili powder and some cumin to taste appropriately taco-like. It was good and different but not particularily taco-like.

Done finally

Well after much ... delay the loan stuff is finished (I hope!). I sent a note to the supervisor of the fellow I'd been working with and he put sufficient heat on the process to produce spirits. The "processor" of my loan called and I made an appointment for the notary to come by Saturday at 1. He called me nice and early Saturday morning and startled me awake. I broke my CPAP mask (again ) getting up and to the phone. He asked me for directions and asked if we could put it off until 6 (pm). I said okay and then he called around 2:30 asking if we could postpone again until 12 on Sunday.

So he came over then and man, do you have to sign your name a lot when you do this. Apparently the shock of buying a house insulated me from this last time and I don't recall writing my name that much. Or initialling. Every damn page it seemed like. Then he left and had to come back a bit later because I'd initialled where I should have signed. We got it done and then went to karate.

Attendance was lower than Thursday but I found out one of the new guys was a minister so he had to preach on Sundays. So we may move it to Saturday. But we can apparently use his church and Yvonne is working on a t-shirt for the class. Something about Sho-go-ryu refugees. (I hope it gets finished in a bit since anything about refugees lately is kind of in bad taste - but since most of it is in Japanese it might not matter)

Matt got a "do-over" for his poor performance on Thursday and earned back his game time (he'd lost two weeks of it). All I can say is that I've nearly got down the first kata and I'm glad I'm not evaluating his effort because it looks to me like he's not trying very hard. But then I'm only a student ... ;-P

And this morning he got up in a timely manner and got his stuff going. He seemed okay but as I got dressed to go to work his English teacher/case manager called me. It seemed he refused to try to do the warm-up exercise again. Every morning she writes a quote on the board and the students are supposed to write down what it means to them. Being an opinion, there is no wrong answer. However he maintains that he understands what the quotes mean (at least the verbage) but refuses to write anything down.

I talked to him and asked him what went wrong between when he left and now. He went with his typical answer "I don't know" even though we've talked about how that is mostly an unacceptable answer.

I don't know what I'm going to do with him but now that I've got the loan stuff finished it's definately time to get an appointment with the Child Psychologist and get a longer term perscription to his meds. And that counselor Yvonne recommended. If he won't talk to me I need to find *someone* he will talk to, at least a little. His grades are plummetting and I'll be left with no choise but to take away privilidges.

Funny as fsck!

"Earl, I think you're trying to sell a cat to a man who prefers dogs ..."

Next week, go watch "My Name Is Earl". I caught it last night and it was hilarious. I loved it.

D'oh

Sometimes I hear things when I'm getting ready for work on the radio that inspire funny comebacks or amusing questions. Then when I finally get here I can't remember what they are to post here. D'oh. And lately I've been told that while my political rants may be cathartic for me, they aren't as entertaining as this place used to be. Ah well, maybe I'll remember later on.

And even I have recognized how whiney I've gotten in the last few months. I don't want to post my complaints about being a parent here since lots of folks can say "been there, done that, got the t-shirt".

Got the Home Equity paperwork finally. Get the credit cards paid off and get a few new appliances for the house, a stand mixer, maybe a bread machine (anyone have any experiences with those things?), a new refrigerator. And of course a new computer (well wasn't that a given?). Now I have to figure out which video card is the one I want/need. Always a challenge since I don't keep up with the stuff when it comes out so I have to catch up every 18-24 months.

Isn't

Freedom of Information a bitch guys?

I saw this because we find out now that there's a guy at FEMA who's sole job is to tell the bigwigs when something terrible is going to happen. And his report on what Katrina might do (or more accurately what a cat 4 hurricane might do) is going to be out there where media types can distort the hell out of it. So it would seem that the managers (Brown, Chertoff and Mr. president) had warning but ... didn't do enough?

But the most interesting thing I haven't found yet is how accurate this guy's forecasts were. If he was dead on most of the time and they ignored him that's pretty damning. Brown is gone now (Andy or John predicted he's going to get some sort of Presidential medal like Tenet did after he quit) but should Chertoff quit? Or be fired?

If, on the other hand, he's like Chicken Little then I suppose I can understand why they didn't appear to listen to him. But there's still the nagging little detail about the poor communication aspect of all those plans ...

"Can you hear me now?"
Apparently not!

---

http://www.fema.gov/emanagers/2005/augarch05.shtm

The list of emails this guy sent the heads of FEMA and Homeland Security. Interesting.

Whoa, dude!

Last Friday (in the Op Center) we had a woman come in with what she thought was a compromised bengal account. In the course of helping her I copied all the files in her account to that machine and burned them onto a CD. After she left I started to hear strange sounds coming from my machine. Listening more closely it seemed to be fart noises.

Erik and I spent the next hour trying to isolate the process which what we presumed was a virus used which was making this fart noise. Eventually Brand went down to examine the cabling and found a fart machine (a remote control speaker which made the fart noise). I thought it was pretty funny but Erik had gotten mad by then since we'd gone to so much trouble to try to find what we thought was a virus and since I have root access to so much stuff he'd taken it serious as a security threat.

Bogus, way bogus

http://www.cnn.com/

Pretty bogus that he mishandled "highly classified" documents and all he gets is community service. He even destroyed documents and just gets slapped on the wrist.

Jail time I say, jail time!

---

Okay it was a plea bargin. It still seems pretty bogus.

Have the rats ...

found the cheese?

Not long ago the road home was repaved (Nifong west of Providence). Now it's all shiny and black and smooth. I was great. At least until people started driving on it. And it's not that driving on it ruined it or anything. But rather than there were yet no lines painted on it, only those little post-it looking tabs sticking up from the road surface. Yellow ones for where the yellow lines would go and white ones where the sides of the road where and the shoulder began.

But that wasn't sufficient. Most people either didn't see them, ignored them, or didn't understand what they meant. And so they had this whole wide new black road to drive on and they took advantage of it. So if they were turning and wouldn't pull through traffic to finish their turn they could now block the entire road rather than just their lane. D'oh

And it continued and continued. When I first drove down it after the paving was finished I was mildly confused until I saw the post-its and realized what they signified. Then I knew where the lanes were going to be and I drove accordingly. I realized one night driving home that this was just like a big rat maze that the psychology people use in their experiments, except the walls had been removed (well mostly removed). The rats had no idea where to go now that there was no clearly defined path for them to trudge along.

However it seems that yet again, I'm in the minority. Many people were close but there were (and always will be as far as I can tell) those for whom we can say (and I love this quote)

"You couldn't get a clue during the clue mating season in a field full of
horny clues if you smeared your body with clue musk and did the clue mating
dance."

---

I've continued to read things about the recovery and aid efforts following Katrina. I'll have to admit that other than delaying going down to the worst hit parts of LA/NO, the only thing the president did wrong was appointing an unqualified (as far as I can tell) lawyer crony as the FEMA director.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/

Seems to be pretty free of finger-pointing, blamestorming and liberal bias. And it asks several interesting questions. It seems there were plans in place both for evacuation and response in the event of major storms. So my previous question "why wasn't there a plan" is moot, there was, but no one seemed to follow it (them).

However it doesn't appear that Governor Blanco or Mayor Nagin acted soon enough with enough decisiveness to deal with the situation. The president asked for an evacuation before the storm and the governor refused. The mayor called for an evacuation but was overriden by the governor. He didn't make use of the school bus fleet which the evacuation plan called for. None of them (Blanco/governor, Nagin/mayor, Brown/FEMA) paid enough attention (it seems) to the Hurricane Warning center or events as they unfolded.

But it's easy to sit up here cool, dry and well-fed in Missouri and say these things, isn't it? (and for the record I have donated money and have been wrestling with the idea of putting my name on http://www.hurricanehousing.org but with Matt here I don't know if it would work)

The voice of the red states?

Phil sent me this

http://www.ejectejecteject.com/

I read his Tribes piece and it's well thought out and very well written. I don't hold with his implied comparison of Bush to Lincoln, Roosevelt and Kennedy, but there are (obviously) lots of folks who don't see Bush as I do or aren't bothered by the things that bother me.

However when I read his Sanctuary piece I very nearly stopped reading. He was much more insistant in his bashing of uberLiberals. Now I can't disagree, Micheal Moore strikes me as a moron, perhaps as much as I have said the president is. I think folks on either end of the extreme often are. Once you close your mind you stop learning and stagnate. Okay the uberLiberals are as moronic as the neoCons, I get that, good story about LAX but please move on. Compairing Ancient Egypt to a modern 7-11 seems a bit melodramatic.

But Phil and I got into an interesting discussion about what each of us likes or doesn't about Bush and intelligent, well reasoned, well presented discussions are much more likely to change peoples minds than all the ranting in the blogsphere.

Taken to task

A lot of people have been pointing the finger (the one labelled "Fucked Up Katrina Response") at the president.

I haven't, per se, but he did appoint some of the federal folks who it appears may not have had their "A" game on. And sometimes competence doesn't seem to rank high on the list of qualifications he considers for his appointees.

Posters have taken me to task for blaming him while seemingly ignoring the state and local folks who also seem to have fscked up. Someone pointed out that following Hurrican Ivan in Florida the president had all kinds of help waiting on the highways for the storm to pass. But it was an election year and his brother was the govenor.

It's scary to think that the place where they can't count (votes) is better prepared for disaster than ... well than anyplace else. Nothing I'd ever seen in the news led me to believe the Florida guys were anything approaching competence. Maybe the LA people were just worse.

Did we elect the wrong Bush president? hmmmm

That round white thing on the floor

That's called a toilet and that's where you put your urine. Really, trust me on this.

And if you don't have enough concern for hygene or sufficient dexterity (of one sort or the other) to hit the bowl, at least have the decency to clean up after yourself after you pee all over the floor. Or what's worse, all over the toilet.

The term "barbarian" is too mild I think. Hell, at least we have a restroom with running water and lights.

I don't understand

"There are dead babies tied to poles and they're dragging us out and leaving the dead babies. That ain't right!" she screamed, according to the AP."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

I don't understand how these two facts corollate? The fact that there are dead babies (a tragic occurance) means that you shouldn't leave a dangerous area which threatens your life?

I agree that they should do something about the dead but the dead are beyond our assistance and the living aren't.

Blunt Trauma

That's a bumper sticker I see on a car in our parking lot. I didn't think too much of it (besides the medicare cuts the governor is trying to pass) until I heard the other day of the special session of the legislature.

It seems there was an abortion bill on the slate last session and it was defeated. Now I don't necessarily disagree with the ideas in the bill since it covered minors getting them but it allows the parents to sue any adult who helps a minor get an abortion. It doesn't strike me as the best way to deal with the situation, kind of dumping the responsibility of the situation back on the government rather than on the girl or her parents. Encouraging blamestorming as it were.

But what really bothers me (besides the attempt to remove even more freedom of choice - no, minors don't get that yet but it could serve as a precident) is that the governor is spending some of our tax money to do what appears to me to be bypassing the system. Or perhaps preempt it since it's likely it would have passed next session.

I didn't vote for the guy and I don't much like the way he's running the state. Even more I find myself saying "No, I'm not from Missouri, I just happen to live there right now."

Happy?

Okay now, I'm not married and I'm not gay so you can take the following for what it's worth.

But I don't understand how a gay couple getting married is going to totally destroy marriage as an institution. I just don't get it. I mean if it's legal for some pair of guys to get married to each other is that suddenly going to make you gay? I didn't think it worked like that (but not being gay I can't confirm it). Is the fact that gay couples (male and female) can legally be married going to prevent that girl from marrying you? Are you afraid it's going to make her gay (and thus she won't want to marry you)? What's the deal?

Okay, I'm willing to admit that I haven't found anyplace in the bible where it says that gay coulples can get married but then I haven't found anything preventing it either (however I haven't read the whole thing yet). And I'm sure since I seem to have attracted a few conservative readers that someone will point out the appropriate chapter and verse.

As far as I know being gay doesn't "rub off" or anything. Sheesh, you'd think it was "cooties" and we were in middle school again!

What was the Plan man?

I was talking with Erik in the Op Center on Friday and we were discussing the response to the disaster in New Orleans. I opined that things could have been handled better but he didn't see how. He didn't understand what I meant.

Sure, we can't know before hand where the nasty devil storm is going to hit. And even days before we couldn't predict it's ferocity when it came ashore or where exactly that would be.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

But a plan could still have been put together. I know because I wrote all kinds of plans for the Army. OpPlans, Contingency Plans ... well there may be other names but these are the main two types. One to lay out how things are going to happen for X operation and one to lay out how things should go down if Y happens and Z operation needs to start. Let me give you an example. (this is the five paragraph field order format which ends up being how most [good] military officers think)

---

1. Situation: A big natural disaster hits on or near New Orleans. The levees may break, there may be lots of collateral damage as buildings are blown down or flooded. Power will likely go out along with other services (sewage, fresh water, police, ambulance, medical) stopping.

2. Mission: Save as many people as possible. Make them as comfortable as conditions permit. Feed, house, clothe them and ensure they have adequate medical services.

3. Execution:
Concept of the Operation: Lots of people will need to be moved from a dangerous place to a safe one. This will take vehicles capable of covering the terrain and carrying people. There will need to be a place to take them too. Fuel, oil, relief drivers, maintenance, etc will all be needed for the vehicles. Once the people are there they need a place to sleep, shower, go to the bathroom, food to eat, water to drink, etc.
Specific Assignments: Who will do what, who will be responsible for what. Find the organizations or people who can do it and put them in charge of it. Find someone who is good at organizing and put them in overall charge.
Coordinating Instructions: Who, what, where, when, why.

4. Service and Support:
This is the meaty details about where supplies come from, go to and who gets them there. Who gets them from there out to the folks who need them, be they evacuees or rescue types doing the getting.

5. Command and Signal:
Talking about things, giving orders, responsibility, authority, all of these "being in charge" type of things.

---

You can put, even without knowing the details of where or when, a lot of stuff into this sort of Contingency Plan. Most military officers know this and have done it hundreds (if not thousands) of times for smaller operations. Bigger plans take a few more people a bit more time and are even more short on details but can still be drafted. The key is to have a framework that you can hang the details on when you get them.

And I've done this thing in about 20 minutes. Six months ago they (civil defense types in Louisana) had an exercise which it turns out had nearly identical conditions as this. Why wasn't the plan done then? I won't point my finger at the president like Mr. Robinson of the Washington Post does but I can't help but ask that question. Which leads to 'how many people didn't need to die if you had a plan ready?'.

The answer can only be saddening.

And Andy was right ...

But the two have absolutely nothing to do with each other. When I finally got fed up with the ads on the morning radio station I listen to I wanted to change to the local NPR station, figuring that I could get all kinds of good news.

That turned out to be true (well Renee Montagne doesn't do well in some interviews, she sometimes asks blindingly stupid questions) mostly. But he told me that he hated the morning guy they have, Darren Helli-wedgie (name purposely misspelled to protect the idiotic, ... well okay, his name is misspelled because I don't like him either and he's got a funny name).

To Darren let me say "I don't care what you did with your kids this weekend and I don't care what you think about things. Just read your advertiser list and introduce the real news".

Okay I was wrong

It's not so amazing that there are 80,000 folks who didn't evacuate.

It seems that most of these people are too poor to have a car and have to use public transportation. So when the transit shut down they couldn't evacuate. Or they had a car and couldn't afford the gas to get out of town. Or perhaps they had no where to go or didn't have the money to stay anyplace once they did get out.

And leaving New Orleans on foot couldn't have been an attractive option.

But the city was only prepared to deal with a category 3 storm (I may be misremembering and it was cat 4) and Katrina was a category 5. And having lived through the Great Missouri Flood of 93 I can sort of understand why they wouldn't prepare the town for an event that is so unlikely to happen. That flood was what they call a 500 year event (there is only one event of that magnitude every 500 years). I haven't heard how infrequent a hurricane this severe is but the media is saying that only the 1906 San Francisco fire was worse. So it's nearly a 100 year event even if not the same type.

Amazing

Absolutely amazing.

According to that article, approximately 80,000 people ignored the warnings to evacuate the are as the hurricane came ashore.

And now there are armed bands looting, carjacking and stealing vital supplies going to refugee centers and hospitals.

Redneck Rampage

No, it was a first person shooter video game.

These days it's some bozo(s?) currently a refugee in the Super Dome who's been shooting at the National Guard helicopters that are trying to help them.

Don't they know that those guys are

a) only trying to help, and
2) the Army, which means that they've got waaayyyy bigger guns than you guys do.

(we don't use 'b' since that Sonic commercial about their new slushie
"I've learned to speak 'bee'!"
"Bee? What possible scientific purpose could that serve?")

See



And while I haven't heard/seen the minigun from this one fire, it's (IIRC) a bit bigger than the GAU-8 that the A-10 carries and I have heard/seen that one. It'll make your pickup into about a coffee can's worth of steel in about 1.7 seconds, Bubba. So you might want to reconsider.