November 2014 archive

Softs and Super Softs ok?

First of all you have to recognize that very little of what matters in Formula One right now is happening on the track.  While I’d be gratified by a Hamilton win if only because I think he’s the best passer in the sport currently and Rosberg is basically a cut throat asshole who has no respect for his team or his team mates, I don’t really care if he finishes 2nd (clinching a win for his 2nd Drivers’ Championship) or not.

Nope, as always the big story is the money.

CVC, the private equity group (think Bain Capital) that along with Bernie Ecclestone (who’d be the biggest sleazebag in sports except the competition is so fierce) who organized them, own a controlling interest in Formula One and have been looking to cash out by either floating an IPO or finding a bigger sucker for at least 2 years now.  What’s been holding them back is the barely disguised corruption that permeates it, from the sweetheart deals with some tracks and the extortion of others, to the flagrant bribery of the Big 5 (Red Bull, Mercedes, Ferrari, McLaren, and Williams) 3 of whom (Ferrari, Red Bull, and McLaren) get the majority with Mercedes and Williams coasting on their “historic contributions” despite Ferrari, McLaren, and Williams having fielded inferior cars for nearly a decade, also conveniently packing the “Strategy Group” that is supposed to represent all the teams, to the ‘no bid’ contracts for well known companies like Pirelli (tires) and lesser known ones like McLaren (who provide all the engine control electronics), to the sponsorships bribes and kickbacks Drivers are routinely expected to provide their teams, to the fact that Ecclestone bribed a Banker to undervalue the shares held by a media company so that CVC could pick them up at a discount when the Banker’s Bank conveniently called the note they were collateral for.

Formula One is a House of Cards floating in a cesspit and the smart money is looking to get out while the getting is good.

So what’s really interesting is seeing which way they fall.

Take engines for instance- there are only 3 suppliers at the moment.  Mercedes rule, Renault drools, and Ferrari is an underpowered joke and has been for years.  The only reason for the Williams resurgence is that they inked a deal to use the tri-star.  McLaren will be debuting the new Honda which may or may not be a gamble, they hired away Alonso who made even the Scuderia’s bricks seem racy as insurance and they’d be fools to dump Button (who’s not quite as good at what Alonso does as Alonso is, but is better than most) in favor of Magnussen who has shown their hardware as the crap it inherently is.  Even Renault doesn’t think that new rules (which Bernie likes because… underpants) will be beneficial.  Ferrari of course longs to dust off a few of their old, good designs but the bottom line is that engines have gone from £5m to £25m and  changing the rules will simply result in another round of development costs that the Littles (Lotus, Force India, Sauber) can’t afford.

Here’s what they spend now- Ferrari and Red Bull around £250m (Red Bull also kicks in about £120m for Toro Rossa); Mercedes and McLaren around £200m; Lotus, Williams, Sauber, and Force India between £100m-£140m.  Marussia struggled along on £70m while Caterham (which will race this weekend because of a crowd-sourcing campaign Bernie likened to begging) has just fired everybody after 7 weeks with no pay so they can at least collect unemployment.

If the Littles leave, which they’re likely to do if all they can afford is “Customer Cars” built by the Big 5, Bernie is left with a field of a dozen.  Red Bull and Ferrari have indicated they’re willing to add a car which would make it 14.  Add Haas Racing (likely in a purchased chassis) and you have 16, but not until ’16 and while the threshold at Yas Marina is exactly that before contract default most tracks have a 14 car minimum so Bernie is just scraping by.

Hardly conductive to that big cash buyout he and CVC are anticipating.

So Bernie has back-tracked on the rhetoric a bit and in negotiations that have been happening this week the Littles have seen at least some encouraging signs.

Me?  I think he’s stringing them along.

Michael Schumacher is paralysed with memory and speech problems, Jules Bianchi is off a respirator and breathing on his own.  Romain Grosjean has signed again with Lotus, Perez will be staying with Force India.

Red Bull is starting from the back of the grid once again because of a non-compliant front wing.  Grosjean has a 20 grid penalty for engine replacement but will start 18 with a stop & go to serve.

If you’re totally into the horse race the groupings are these-

• 1 & 2, Hamilton and Rosberg
• 4 – 6 Vettel, Alonso, and Bottas
• 7 – 9 Button, Massa, and Hulkenberg with an outside shot.

In Constructors 3 & 4 potentially Williams and Ferrari could change.

We start racing again March 15th, just in time to totally deprive me of sleep during the NCAA Basketball Tournament, in Australia.  Mercedes will have 4 engines, Renault 3 (if Caterham survives), Ferrari 2, and Honda 1.

• Yas Marina
• Yas Marina Interactive

Pretty tables below.

I can’t believe it’s that time already.

Revised from November 20, 2010 for obvious timely reasons.

I never went to cooking school or took home economics in high school, I was too busy blowing up the attic with my chemistry set. I did like to eat and eat stuff that tasted good and looked pretty, plus my mother couldn’t cook to save her life let alone mine and Pop’s, that was her mother’s venue. So I watched learned and innovated. I also read cook books and found that cooking and baking were like chemistry and physics. I know, that was Translator’s territory, but I do have a degree in biochemistry.

For you really geekie cooks here is a great article about the “Turkey Physics” involved in getting it all done to a juicy turn.

Cooking a turkey is not as easy as the directions on the Butterball wrapping looks. My daughter, who is the other cook in the house (makes the greatest breads, soups and stews) is in charge of the Turkey for the big day. Since we are again having a house full of family and friends, one the two 13 to 15 pound gobblers will get cooked outside on the gas grill that doubles as an oven on these occasions. Her guru is Alton Brown, he of Good Eats on the Food Network. This is the method she has used with rave reviews. Alton’s Roast Turkey recipe follows below the fold. You don’t have to brine, the daughter doesn’t and you can vary the herbs, the results are the same, perfection. My daughter rubs very soft butter under the skin and places whole sage leaves under the skin in a decorative pattern, wraps the other herbs in cheese cloth and tucks it in the cavity. If you prefer, or are kosher, canola oil works, too.

Bon Appetite and Happy Thanksgiving

Iran nuclear talks: Doubts over deal as deadline looms

23 November 2014 Last updated at 05:00

BBC

Doubts are growing that Monday’s deadline for a deal on Iran’s controversial nuclear programme will be met at talks in Vienna in Austria.

Both the US and Germany said the sides were working to close “big gaps”, with some suggestions that the deadline could be extended.

Six world powers want Iran to curb its nuclear programme in return for the lifting of United Nations sanctions.

Iran rejects claims that it is seeking to build nuclear weapons.

It says its programme is purely peaceful for energy purposes.

Representatives of the so-called P5+1 group – Britain, China, France, Russia, the US plus Germany – are taking part in the negotiations with Iran in the Austrian capital.

I barely understand this stuff, but it appears that Google has gotten rid of the You Tube “use old embed code” share option again. So if your web site doesn’t use iframes you’re just going to be SOL. Ebay users are going to be pissed. Guess I’ll have to study up. I only know how to post You Tubes the old way. Anyhow I found this workaround that appears to work for now. My understanding is that Google doesn’t want anyone to use the old embed codes anymore because … mobile devices. Yay! ScrOOGLElicious.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Today in History

Breakfast Tune: ‘Viola Lee Blues’ GUS CANNON (1928) Banjo Blues Legend

Breakfast News & Blogs Below

Nissin Cup Noodle is offering a promotional life-size water-dispensing cow



evie lund

Yes, you read that title correctly! As part of their promotional campaign for the “Milk Seafood” flavor of cup noodle, Nissin is giving away a life-size plastic cow water dispenser to one lucky instant ramen fan. Simply fill up your cow with water, wait for the cow to heat up, and then “milk” out as much hot water as you need to fill up your Cup Noodle. Join us after the jump for a look at the amusing commercial behind this wacky promotion!

The commercial is actually quite sweet and touching, and features a doting dad reading a story to his child.

Welcome to the Stars Hollow Gazette‘s Health and Fitness News weekly diary. It will publish on Saturday afternoon and be open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.

Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.

You can now find past Health and Fitness News diaries here and on the right hand side of the Front Page.

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Apples will see their way from the beginning to the end of my Thanksgiving meal, starting with a chopped salad that pairs apples with walnuts and bitter lettuces (endive and chicory or radicchio). I made whole wheat apple-pecan scones that you can serve with the meal or eat for breakfast, and sautéed apple rings that make a very nice side dish with turkey (or serve them for dessert with ice cream). Apples and cranberries also add a new sweet dimension to my whole wheat bread stuffing. All this is not to discourage you from making apple pie; but if you want to make a dessert that is a little less demanding, try my now-favorite gluten-free apple-cranberry crumble.

~Martha Rose Shulman~

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

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New York Times Editorial Board: Mr. Obama’s Wise Immigration Plan

President Obama’s speech Thursday night on immigration ended on a high, hopeful note. Mr. Obama, quoting Scripture’s admonition to welcome and protect the stranger, told millions who have lived and worked here for years, many of them Americans in all but name: We cannot fix your situation yet, but for now we will not expel you, because we have better hopes for you here.

A speech is not a solution, of course, and now that it is over, the hard work begins. Efforts over the last decade to repair immigration have repeatedly ended in failure, leaving the meanness of the broken status quo. [..]

The reality of the status quo is paralysis, in which nobody is ever legalized and most people are never deported. That is another form of amnesty – the amnesty of inaction – though none on the right who oppose reform would ever admit it. The White House is beginning a campaign to defend its action by stressing the economic and law enforcement benefits of bringing millions in from outside the law. The most immediate and profound benefit is the lifting of fear in immigrant communities, even though perhaps half of the undocumented population will still be left out. Many parents will be excluded, and many families will be broken. Their struggle will continue.

Alan Grayson: The Womb Lottery

I’m happy that President Obama finally has moved forward with immigration reform. But the six-year-long White House Bad Messaging Plague (WHBMP) continues unabated. We’re in danger of losing the public on this issue even before the first work permit is issued.

President Obama’s executive order removes the loaded guns pointed at the temples of five million human beings, who also happen to be undocumented U.S. immigrants. It is an act of compassion and mercy that has eluded House Speaker John Boehner for years, his utterly hypocritical nattering about the urgent need for immigration reform notwithstanding. If Boehner had ever looked up from his shot glass, he might have seen their sad eyes and felt some urge to confer simple dignity on them.  [..]

Think of it this way: for whatever reason — lax enforcement of immigration laws, oppression in other countries, the need to survive, whatever — these five million people are our new sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law. polite thing to do is to welcome them. Repeat after me: “Welcome to the American Family, and thank you for contributing to the American Experience.”

Last week we discussed the British composer Gustav Holst and the week before that Mendelssohn (boffo in Britain, I’m telling yah), and this week we’ve had a really excellent parody of I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General (which is of course nothing new, patter songs, particularly the very popular ones lyricized by W.S. Gilbert, are often laced with satiric contemporary references that performers update to reflect their own environment).

All of which means that it must be time to mention Arthur Sullivan.

Ok, I can see you shaking your heads out there, muttering WTF?  It’s perfectly obvious to me.  Major General is from the famous light Opera (sometimes called Operetta or Musical Theater), The Pirates of Penzance composed by Sullivan in collaboration with Gilbert.  Holst idolized Sullivan until he changed his allegiance to (shudder) Wagner.  Sullivan was the first recipient of the Mendelssohn Scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music when he was 14 years old.

See, clear as mud (and remember, mud spelled backwards is dum).  The important thing about my jokes is that they amuse me.

I’ll spare you a recapitulation of my career as Ralph Rackstraw, let’s just say I’m big with captive audiences in school assemblies and relatives who are supportive of macaroni and glue pictures.

But let’s talk about Artie for a while.  In the first place, he would have hated that nickname because he always considered himself a serious and dignified member of the conventional “Art” Music establishment and certainly not a mere tunesmith writing ephemeral crap for beer soaked groundlings in a Music Hall (which everyone knows is the next thing to a brothel anyway).  He composed 23 Operas, only 14 in collaboration with Gilbert, 13 oratorios and other major orchestral works, and 2 Ballets.  This in addition to many pieces of chamber music, piano sonatas, and hymns of which probably the best known is Onward Christian Soldiers.

But he fell into the company of Richard D’Oyly Carte, this kind of sinister Brian Epstein/Tom Parker character who made him fabulously wealthy by forcing him to write wildy popular ditties hardly worthy of his talent.

Though that was not the cause of his split with Gilbert, nope, they broke up over a carpet.

Throughout most of his association with Gilbert they had quarreled over the plots and themes of their work.  Gilbert was a decided populist and Sullivan entirely bourgeoisie.  They both considered themselves better than their commercially successful Operettas.  It was most often Sullivan who would threaten to quit and eventually Gilbert would respond with a libretto that was at least not totally unacceptable to Sullivan’s refined sensibilities and aristocratic asprations, but in the end it was Gilbert who walked away.

D’Oyly Carte used a lot of the money generated by their partnership to build a theater dedicated to staging their productions, the Savoy.  At best he wasted a lot of it on maintenance, at worst-

In April 1890, during the run of The Gondoliers, however, Gilbert challenged Carte over the expenses of the production. Among other items to which Gilbert objected, Carte had charged the cost of a new carpet for the Savoy Theatre lobby to the partnership. Gilbert believed that this was a maintenance expense that should be charged to Carte alone. Gilbert confronted Carte, who refused to reconsider the accounts.

After all, the carpet was only one of a number of disputed items, and the real issue lay not in the mere money value of these things, but in whether Carte could be trusted with the financial affairs of Gilbert and Sullivan. Gilbert contended that Carte had at best made a series of serious blunders in the accounts, and at worst deliberately attempted to swindle the others. It is not easy to settle the rights and wrongs of the issue at this distance, but it does seem fairly clear that there was something very wrong with the accounts at this time. Gilbert wrote to Sullivan on 28 May 1891, a year after the end of the “Quarrel”, that Carte had admitted “an unintentional overcharge of nearly £1,000 in the electric lighting accounts alone.”

So Gilbert sued Carte and won.  Sullivan supported Carte during this dispute and for a while the former collaborators barely spoke and created solo works that were resounding flops.  They were eventually reunited by their music publisher Tom Chappell, but their new productions (Utopia, Limited and The Grand Duke) were not nearly as well received as their previous work.

Sullivan died in 1900, Gilbert in 1911.  Sullivan was considered by almost all his “serious” contemporaries a wasted genius.  Of course they all languish in deserved obscurity but you’ll find people like me performing H.M.S. Pinafore to this very day, partly because they are public domain (next time we chat about Sullivan I’ll try and concentrate on their copyright litigation).

The piece I have selected is not a collaboration with Gilbert but does have a connection.  It is a traditional “Grand” Opera, Ivanhoe.  It was originally staged at the Royal English Opera House which was built by Carte expressly for the purpose.  While moderately successful itself, Carte was unable to find enough suitable productions to make the Hall profitable and the Opera House was a commercial failure.

Unfortunately it’s in 13 parts so I’ll embed the playlist and hope that works-

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

November 22 is the 326th day of the year (327th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 39 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1990, Margaret Thatcher, the first woman prime minister in British history, announces her resignation after 11 years in Britain’s top office.

Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, LG, OM, PC, FRS (born 13 October 1925) served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. Thatcher is the only woman to have held either post.

Born in Grantham in Lincolnshire, United Kingdom, Thatcher went to school at Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School in Grantham, where she was head girl in 1942-43. She read chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford and later trained as a barrister. She won a seat in the 1959 general election, becoming the MP for Finchley as a Conservative. When Edward Heath formed a government in 1970, he appointed Thatcher Secretary of State for Education and Science. Four years later, she backed Keith Joseph in his bid to become Conservative Party leader but he was forced to drop out of the election. In 1975 Thatcher entered the contest herself and became leader of the Conservative Party. At the 1979 general election she became Britain’s first female Prime Minister.

In her foreword to the 1979 Conservative manifesto, Thatcher wrote of “a feeling of helplessness, that a once great nation has somehow fallen behind.” She entered 10 Downing Street determined to reverse what she perceived as a precipitate national decline. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised deregulation, particularly of the financial sector, flexible labour markets, and the selling off and closing down of state owned companies and withdrawing subsidy to others. Amid a recession and high unemployment, Thatcher’s popularity declined, though economic recovery and the 1982 Falklands War brought a resurgence of support and she was re-elected in 1983. She took a hard line against trade unions, survived the Brighton hotel bombing assassination attempt and opposed the Soviet Union (her tough-talking rhetoric gained her the nickname the “Iron Lady”); she was re-elected for an unprecedented third term in 1987. The following years would prove difficult, as her Poll tax plan was largely unpopular, and her views regarding the European Community were not shared by others in her Cabinet. She resigned as Prime Minister in November 1990 after Michael Heseltine’s challenge to her leadership of the Conservative Party.

Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister was the longest since that of Lord Salisbury and the longest continuous period in office since Lord Liverpool in the early 19th century. She was the first woman to lead a major political party in the United Kingdom, and the first of only four women to hold any of the four great offices of state. She holds a life peerage as Baroness Thatcher, of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire, which entitles her to sit in the House of Lords.

There are no words.

President Obama decided in recent weeks to authorize a more expansive mission for the military in Afghanistan in 2015 than originally planned, a move that ensures American troops will have a direct role in fighting in the war-ravaged country for at least another year.

Mr. Obama’s order allows American forces to carry out missions against the Taliban and other militant groups threatening American troops or the Afghan government, a broader mission than the president described to the public earlier this year, according to several administration, military and congressional officials with knowledge of the decision. The new authorization also allows American jets, bombers and drones to support Afghan troops on combat missions. [..]

The decision to change that mission was the result of a lengthy and heated debate that laid bare the tension inside the Obama administration between two often-competing imperatives: the promise Mr. Obama made to end the war in Afghanistan, versus the demands of the Pentagon that American troops be able to successfully fulfill their remaining missions in the country.