I should hope by now I don’t have to explain why I’m a total cheesehead since the accident of my troll birth and political sentimentality is fully exposed so instead I’ll share a story from my past life as capo di tutti.

It was about playoff time and we had one of our quarterly meetings at a “hotel” in Hartford that was really a training dormitory for one of the big insurance companies with end of the corridor common rooms of the campus style suitable for “hospitality”, also of the keg chugging beer pong college type (it was a ‘fun’ club).

We were favored by a comely visitor from an isolationist local and since everybody appeared to be shunning her I did my little leadership thing and spent a lot of time making sure she felt welcome in our midst.

Now normally I was the diest of =hards but on this particular occasion I heeded the entreaties of my new handlers and staged a gracious exit before the festivities had hardly begun.

Hardly?!  After I left comely visitor was assaulted by the harridan wannabe spouse of one of my sponsors (the one who could get us thrown out of an airport bar, who else?) and accused of adultery which would have been true if my Irish friend (?) had been married to the Xanthippe instead of merely co-habitating (which is a sin in the eyes of the Church guys, just saying).

Words were said, people grappled, and eventually car keys were siezed and tossed out of an open window into the night.

So at about 4 am, when I was about my groggiest, there came a knock on the door.  Do something about this… now.

Umm… sure, yeah, could you repeat that while I wipe out the sleep?

I parked adultery gal on my bed (I was using the chair to make phone calls for you filthy minded) and listened to her tale of woe and called the front desk where they very politely (I would have told me to piss up a rope and that my crew of social outcasts was responsible for every scratch) told me that the janitor would be in about 7 and that searching for the missing keys on the 4th story roof would be much more effective in the daylight.

Keys found floozy vanished which I suppose was the best for me since I’d already spent an enormous amount of political capital keeping her hidden and quiet, but on the other hand WTF since I’d already fired and replaced my exec (from which she never recovered) and her boyfriend (who also never recovered and speaking of adultery she was sleeping with him and not my brother her public ‘boyfriend’) and suffered the resignations of all that had been associated with their faction which I soon enough found out had been stealing 10s of thousands I had personally donated to keep the organization afloat…

Not that I’m bitter.

But more to the point it was clear I’d need a nap so I called to the front desk and told them I was not moving that Sunday and they would just have to clean up around my prostrate form which they were surprisingly ok with.  I like those guys.

Mid afternoon I roused myself to tune in a playoff game and considered how lucky and privileged I was to enjoy that moment.

So I took another nap.

Oh, ‘Boys @ Cheeseheads.  Did I mention that Airport Drunk was a total and vociferous ‘Boy toy?  Makes me proud to be a Packer fan.

I don’t mind admitting I kind of want the Panthers to win so that the Packers have another home game but I don’t expect the Seahawks to co-operate.  The Seahawks are, after all, the defending Champions and they’re really a much better team than the Panthers.

The Panthers have also lost their inside rushing defense in the person of 311 pound Star Lotulelei, one of those Pacific Island monsters who broke a foot this week in practice.

And then there is Century Link Field, one of the loudest Domes in the league.  The Pack will not be daunted by that, but the Panthers are younger and rawer and less used to distractions.

So here’s hoping for an upset, not that I dislike the Seahawks, but that I actively support the Pack and am a total cheesehead.

The game is on Faux starting at 8 pm.

Look, I have my reasons to hate the Patsies and like the Ravens the primary one being that the Ravens, since they are new, haven’t dinked around cities the way the Patsies have.

Oh, and Bill Belichick and Pat Brady are steroid addled assholes, but that’s so common in Throwball it’s hardly worth mentioning.

The truth is that I’d be very surprised to see the Ravens walk off the Foxborough turf victors.  Belichick has used Brady to build himself a buffer of talented role players without wasting time and money on a Quarterback hunt and it shows in the system which should last (given good luck and Robert Kraft staying out of the way which he seems inclined to do) beyond both their careers.

I still think they’re all thoroughly horrible people and brain damage only accounts for some of it although it helps.

The game is on NBC starting at 4:30 pm.

And Now For Something Completely Different-

You see, a good writer can write about anything and make it mostly painless and accessible to the non-expert reader.  You need some style and a fair vocabulary, but no special expertise in the subject.  In fact expertise is kind of a handicap because what you are chronicling is a joint voyage of discovery with your partner, the reader, and if you know a lot more about things than they do and suppose some common connection you mostly limit your audience.

Which is why I’m proud of my ignorance.

I can read music, but not sight read it (i.e. hear the tune from the notation, I have to listen to it first and then I can say- Aha!  I know what this means).  I can make fart noises into tubes and, provided there are not too many buttons and I don’t have to push them very fast, produce sounds that are arguably recognizable as tunes.

By the time I was in 6th grade I had already advanced to the important position of first seat, third Trumpet where my duties were primarily to ensure that in those parts of pieces where we were actually supposed to be playing I and the rest of my section held our instruments in a fashion that could easily be mistaken by people with bad distance vision as contributing to the group effort without actually audibly detracting from it.

In my Junior High years it was gently suggested I take up the euphonium because, as hopeless as Leonard Falcone pronounced me, I was better at that than Trumpet and in due course I rose to section lead and finally switched to French Horn as a Senior since we were one short in the Mellophone line (Weird French Horn trivia- I no longer remember what exactly that 4th key does and playing French Horn can mess with your heart rhythm, seriously, French Horn players are about 4x more likely than average people to die of heart attacks).

Oh, and we marched.  Field shows in the fall and parades in the spring.  Our great and bitter rivals for state supremacy were the hated and despised East Slime.  Screw the Runball (our Coach didn’t believe in the Pass very much so our offense was run left, run right, run up the middle, and punt) team, those people were in the stands to see us.

This experience (13 years of it) warped me profoundly to the point where I enjoy and am impressed by groups like the Mummers and DCI Bands, and one of my favorite pranks is to take a police whistle and induce a roll off so the band plays in front of my house.

So, fun games you can play with a marching band.  Here’s how you do it with the “Commandant’s Own”.  Remember, these folks are trained combat infantrymen for whom this is only a hobby.

Did you catch that last tune?  It was Stars and Stripes Forever, the National March of the United States composed by the “March King”, John Philip Sousa who was director of the band from 1880 to 1892.  He wrote over 136 marches, most of them entirely forgettable except you hear them all the time, and some Operettas that sound like marches.

In his day he was about the most famous native composer from the U.S. among a European audience that regarded our Art Music as crude and simplistic, even compared to the Russians.  He wrote novels including The Transit of Venus (which was also a march) that is entirely less erotic than the title might suggest. “It was about a group of misogynists called the Alimony Club who, as a way of temporarily escaping the society of women, embark on a sea voyage to observe the transit of Venus. The captain’s niece, however, had stowed away on board and soon won over the men.”  His other best known works are The Fifth String and Pipetown Sandy.

(A) young violinist made a deal with the Devil for a magic violin with five strings. The strings can excite the emotions of Pity, Hope, Love and Joy – the fifth string was of Death and can be played only once before causing the player’s own death. He was unable to win the love of the woman he desired. At a final concert, he played upon the death string.

…

Pipetown Sandy… included a satirical poem titled “The Feast of the Monkeys”. The poem described “a lavish party attended by variety of animals, however, overshadowed by the King of Beasts, the lion…who allows the muttering guests the privilege of watching him eat the entire feast”. At the end of his gluttony, the lion explained, “Come all rejoice, You’ve seen your monarch dine.”

He was famous and avid trap shooter who helped found the Amateur Trapshooting Association– “Let me say that just about the sweetest music to me is when I call, ‘pull,’ the old gun barks, and the referee in perfect key announces, ‘dead’.”

He (as you might imagine) invented the Sousaphone as a Tuba replacement and you need a very special kind of cheek vibrating fart noise to make it work at all.  The fact that the fiberglass ones sound exactly the same as the much heavier brass ones really says all you need to say about the instrument

What makes a March a March?

Well, first of all is the strict enforcement of the 1 and 3 accents in a bar of common time.  Then you play it twice as fast (cut time) and loud.

I am a member of a community Marching Band that mostly does Fireman’s Parades, but I haven’t played or practiced in years.  My activist brother, the Music Major, is a pretty regular attender and he keeps trying to tempt me into a comeback-

“All you have to do is play fast and loud”, he says.

There are free beers and hotdogs at the end too.

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Heck Cattle

Homeless in Salt Lake City

The real news and next week’s guests below.

When we talk about Entropy and its increase, it pays to keep in mind that we are talking about a a theoretically ‘closed’ system.

Like, oh say, The Universe.  All that was or ever will be.

Locally it is not only entirely possible that new inputs (opening the system) will result in the spontaneous rise of complexity, it may even be likely!

God is on the ropes: The brilliant new science that has creationists and the Christian right terrified

Paul Rosenberg, Salon

Saturday, Jan 3, 2015 09:00 AM EST

Darwin didn’t exclude God, of course, though many creationists seem incapable of grasping this point. But he didn’t require God, either, and that was enough to drive some people mad.

Darwin also didn’t have anything to say about how life got started in the first place – which still leaves a mighty big role for God to play, for those who are so inclined. But that could be about to change, and things could get a whole lot worse for creationists because of Jeremy England, a young MIT professor who’s proposed a theory, based in thermodynamics, showing that the emergence of life was not accidental, but necessary. “[U]nder certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life,” he was quoted as saying in an article in Quanta magazine early in 2014, that’s since been republished by Scientific American and, more recently, by Business Insider. In essence, he’s saying, life itself evolved out of simpler non-living systems.

…

If England’s theory works out, it will obviously be an epochal scientific advance. But on a lighter note, it will also be a fitting rebuke to pseudo-scientific creationists, who have long mistakenly claimed that thermodynamics disproves evolution (here, for example), the exact opposite of what England’s work is designed to show – that thermodynamics drives evolution, starting even before life itself first appears, with a physics-based logic that applies equally to living and non-living matter.

Most important in this regard is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that in any closed process, there is an increase in the total entropy (roughly speaking, a measure of disorder). The increase in disorder is the opposite of increasing order due to evolution, the creationists reason, ergo – a contradiction! Overlooking the crucial word “closed,” of course.

…

Evolution is no more a violation of the Second Law than life itself is. A more extensive, lighthearted, non-technical treatment of the creationist’s misunderstanding and what’s really going on can be found here.

The driving flow of energy – whether from the sun or some other source – can give rise to what are known as dissipative structures, which are self-organized by the process of dissipating the energy that flows through them. Russian-born Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine won the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work developing the concept. All living things are dissipative structures, as are many non-living things as well – cyclones, hurricanes and tornados, for example.

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Just Science

New Research Links Scores of Earthquakes to Fracking Wells Near a Fault in Ohio

By MICHAEL WINES, The New York Times

JAN. 7, 2015

Not long after two mild earthquakes jolted the normally steady terrain outside Youngstown, Ohio, last March, geologists quickly decided that hydraulic fracturing operations at new oil-and-gas wells in the area had set off the tremors.

Now a detailed study has concluded that the earthquakes were not isolated events, but merely the largest of scores of quakes that rattled the area around the wells for more than a week.

…

The number and intensity of fracking-related quakes have risen as the practice has boomed. In Oklahoma, for example, quakes have increased sharply in recent years, including the state’s largest ever, a magnitude 5.7 tremor, in 2011. Both state and federal experts have said fracking is contributing to the increase there, not only because of the fracking itself, but also because of the proliferation of related wells into which fracking waste is injected. Those injection wells receive much more waste, and are filled under high pressure more often, than oil or gas wells, and the sheer volume of pressurized liquids has been shown to widen cracks in faults, raising the chances of slippage and earthquakes.

…

In Poland Township, an analysis of seismological data found 77 well-related earthquakes from March 4 to March 12, the four largest of them on March 10. All occurred about 1.9 miles underground, along a horizontal fault that at times ran less than a half-mile under wells where fracking was underway.

For States That Don’t File Carbon-Cutting Plans, E.P.A. Will Impose ‘Model Rule’

By CORAL DAVENPORT, The New York Times

JAN. 7, 2015

The regulations, the heart of President Obama’s climate change agenda, are based on the Clean Air Act and require states to cut planet-warming carbon dioxide from power plants. Each state may create its own plan for how to do so, but the requirements have the potential for shutting hundreds of coal-fired power plants.

…

“We certainly hope that every state feels like it’s in their best interest to create a plan,” Ms. McCabe said. “But we have an obligation under the Clean Air Act, should there be states that don’t submit plans, to be sure we’re ready.”

…

Ms. McCabe said she expected the E.P.A. to release final versions of the climate change regulations by midsummer, when it would also issue the proposed model rule for states.

So Many Earth-Like Planets, So Few Telescopes

By DENNIS OVERBYE, The New York Times

JAN. 6, 2015

Astronomers announced on Tuesday that they had found eight new planets orbiting their stars at distances compatible with liquid water, bringing the total number of potentially habitable planets in the just-right “Goldilocks” zone to a dozen or two, depending on how the habitable zone of a star is defined.

…

So far, Kepler has discovered 4,175 potential planets, and 1,004 of them have been confirmed as real, according to Michele Johnson, a spokeswoman for NASA’s Ames Research Center, which operates Kepler.

Most of them, however, including those announced Tuesday, are hundreds of light-years away, too far for detailed study. We will probably never know any more about these particular planets than we do now.

“We can count as many as we like,” said Sara Seager, a planet theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the new work, “but until we can observe the atmospheres and assess their greenhouse gas power, we don’t really know what the surface temperatures are like.”

Climatologists Balk as Brazil Picks Skeptic for Key Post

By SIMON ROMERO, The New York Times

JAN. 6, 2015

Calling Aldo Rebelo a climate-change skeptic would be putting it mildly. In his days as a fiery legislator in the Communist Party of Brazil, he [railed against ] those who say human activity is warming the globe and called the international environmental movement “nothing less, in its geopolitical essence, than the bridgehead of imperialism.”

Though many Brazilians have grown used to such pronouncements from Mr. Rebelo, 58, his appointment this month as minister of science by President Dilma Rousseff is causing alarm among climate scientists and environmentalists here, a country that has been seeking to assert leadership in global climate talks.

“At first I thought this was some sort of mistake, that he was playing musical chairs and landed in the wrong chair,” said Márcio Santilli, a founder of Instituto Socioambiental, one of Brazil’s leading environmental groups. “Unfortunately, there he is, overseeing Brazilian science at a very delicate juncture when Brazil’s carbon emissions are on the rise again.”

With Veto Threat, Obama and Congress Head for Collision Over Keystone Pipeline

By CORAL DAVENPORT, The New York Times

JAN. 6, 2015

The White House on Tuesday made it clear that President Obama would veto a bill authorizing construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, setting up an immediate clash with Republicans just as they assume control of Congress.

“The president threatening to veto the first bipartisan infrastructure bill of the new Congress must come as a shock to the American people who spoke loudly in November in favor of bipartisan accomplishments,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the new majority leader, said on Tuesday.

…

A State Department analysis of the project, released last January, concluded that it would not significantly increase the rate of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions, noting that producers would extract oil sands petroleum and move it to market with or without construction of the pipeline. The review estimated that Keystone would support 42,000 temporary jobs over its two-year construction period – about 3,900 of them in construction, the rest in indirect support jobs, such as food service. It estimated that it would create 35 permanent jobs.

The Bloom Is On for Maple Syrup

By JOSHUA A. KRISCH, The New York Times

JAN. 5, 2015

Pancake lovers, take heart. In the coming weeks, maple farmers throughout Quebec, Vermont and elsewhere in the syrup belt will dust off their metal spiles for another harvest season, and some scientists are predicting that the sugary sap will flow even more freely than usual.

That’s because this year, the region is likely to have what is known in botany as a mast year – a time every few years when perennial trees like sugar maples synchronize their seed cycles, and flower as one. Low-seed years usually lead to mass blooms, and may bode particularly well for the maple syrup industry.

In a paper published recently in the journal Forest Ecology and Management, ecologists at Tufts University near Boston suggest that syrup and seed production are linked. Because 2014 was a low seed year for maples, the scientists reason, maple trees invested spare energy into producing more carbohydrates. This year, the trees will use those carbs to flower – and fill sugar makers’ pails with rich, sweet sap.

Scrutiny for Laxatives as a Childhood Remedy

By CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS, The New York Times

JAN. 5, 2015

The agency has asked a team of scientists in Philadelphia to look more closely at the active ingredient in Miralax and similar generic products, called polyethylene glycol 3350, or PEG 3350. While outlining the scope of the research, the agency also disclosed that its scientists had discovered trace amounts of two potential toxins in batches of Miralax tested six years ago.

…

Buried in the agency’s brief to researchers, issued last year, was some disquieting news. The F.D.A. said that it had tested eight batches of Miralax and found tiny amounts of ethylene glycol (EG) and diethylene glycol (DEG), ingredients in antifreeze, in all of them. The agency said the toxins were impurities resulting from the manufacturing process.

…

As it turns out, extremely small amounts of DEG and EG are permitted in finished drug products, and the F.D.A. considers the laxatives “safe to use in accordance with approved labeling” – that is, only by adults for not longer than seven days.

Goodbye smart gadgets. Hello dumb tech

Stuart Heritage, The Guardian

Tuesday 6 January 2015 13.52 EST

This is going to be the year of the smartwatch. Thanks to several incredible boundary-smashing technological vaults, Apple will soon release a product that looks like a wristwatch but is really So Much More Than That. The Apple Watch will display your Facebook updates. It will tell you who is calling your phone. It will let you show photos to people, even if each photo is the size of a postage stamp and the only way to let anyone actually see it is to awkwardly hold your arm out in a berserk mockery of a CIA stress position while they grab it and squint.

The Apple Watch apparently solves a problem. The problem? Sometimes people have to take their telephones out of their pockets. Why would you want to do that, when all the information in the world could be permanently located at the bottom of your arm, on a tiny screen that you have to navigate by twisting a crown so hopelessly minuscule that it makes you look like a drunk bear in boxing gloves trying to pick a needle off the deck of a listing ship?

If the rise of the smartwatch has taught me anything, it is that I am perfectly happy with my dumbwatch. The one I can strap to my wrist and look at sometimes if I am not in the immediate vicinity of a clock. My watch can do one thing really well. The Apple Watch, meanwhile, will let you do a million things that you can already do elsewhere, but in a slightly more difficult way. Unless it’s run out of battery, that is, which it probably has because it’s an Apple product.

…

Technology is still brilliant, and completely necessary. If I didn’t have a map of the entire world inside my phone all the time, there’s a fairly reasonable chance that I would still be fruitlessly wandering around continental Europe, starved and frothing because I couldn’t find my way back to the hotel that I had checked into somewhere in the middle of 2012. If I couldn’t look up recipes from my phone, I guarantee that I would be dead from excessive oven-chip consumption by now. Try to part me from my phone, and I would probably have quite an ugly tantrum in front of you.

But when you get to the point, as I did recently, where you are buying lightbulbs that can only be switched on and off from your phone, it is time for an intervention. Things like that – and smartwatches, and everything else – sound cool, but they just end up making things more complicated than they need to be. You can do without them. Your smartphone isn’t your entire life.

That Crazy Story About Making ‘Hate Speech’ A Crime? Yeah, That’s Satire

by Mike Masnick, Tech Dirt

Wed, Jan 7th 2015 10:25a

art guerrilla–

daily kos, snort

AS IF they have ANY brief to actually be for real free speech, they censor for simply voicing valid plaints in opposition to their agenda…

obama and obamacare, for instance…

they are odious dem’rat authoritarians who care not ONE WHIT for free expression…

blaaaap

i fart in their general direction…

Monarch Butterflies Considered for Endangered Species Status

By Laura Geggel, Live Science

January 5, 2015 10:43 AM

Over the next year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will determine whether the iconic black-and-orange butterflies deserve the federal protections that come with being listed an endangered or threatened species.

By some estimates, the monarch butterfly population has declined by 90 percent over the past two decades, from about 1 billion butterflies in the mid-1990s to just 35 million individuals last winter.

That loss is “so staggering that in human-population terms it would be like losing every living person in the United States except those in Florida and Ohio,” Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement.

Florida and Ohio.

Only the the Yahoos survive.

Science Oriented Video!

This Day In History

Nothing to be done.

I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I’ve tried to put it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle.

So there you are again.

Am I?

I’m glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever.

Me too.

Together again at last! We’ll have to celebrate this. But how? Get up till I embrace you.

Not now, not now.

May one inquire where His Highness spent the night?

In a ditch.

A ditch! Where?

Over there.

And they didn’t beat you?

Beat me? Certainly they beat me.

The same lot as usual?

The same? I don’t know.

When I think of it all these years but for me… where would you be? You’d be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the present minute, no doubt about it.

And what of it?

It’s too much for one man.

The problem with transitions like this is that one is never sure when they’ll pick up the pen again, or even if they should.  The blank page looms intimidating in it’s nakedness and covers call and naps don’t take themselves you know, you have to sieze them like Roman Herman’s Berries.

I don’t expect your praise.

And not that I’ve really napping, I’ve been erecting pyramids in honor of my escaping.  This is the land where the Pharoh died.

I tell you this- No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.

When all else fails we can whip the horse’s eyes and make them sleep.

And cry.

Now normally I’d have no trouble at all rooting against the ‘Boys since their fans are the biggest assholes in professional sports- ignorant, loud, and irrational.

On the other hand I haven’t much forgotten the Lions’ Ndamukong Suh stepping on Aaron Rogers.

We won’t get a rematch of that if the Lions advance.  As the lower seed they’ll face the Seahawks and the Packers will get the Panthers.  If the ‘Boys advance they’ll face the Pack at Lambeau where General Winter will crush them as they deserve to be crushed.

Game time 4:30 on Faux.  Consider this an open thread too.

I think we’re all pretty clear by now that I don’t like franchise shopping and extorting communities for stadiums that teams ought to be buying with their own money because, except on rare occasions, they sit like great white elephants on acres of parking that could and should be parks except for 8 days a year when they suck all the money out of the municipalities they’re supposed to be such an engine of prosperity for and deposit it all in the off the books coffers of the team owner’s concession stands.

And of course if I ever needed a team to illustrate that story it would be the Bolts.

Other than that there are only 2 teams I actually like, one because of geography who are not in the playoffs and likely never will be again as long as Tom Coughlin is coach, and the other is the Packers who get right what every other professional franchise in any sport get wrong.

So it’s not that I don’t like the Bengals, it’s that I don’t much care about them one way or another unless they’re playing a team I really hate.

Like the Bolts.

The Bengals could win.  The Bolts defense is nothing special, but the Bengals Quarterback is a choke king who has 1 Wild Card win for 4 appearances in the last 4 years.  In today’s game he has a $1 Million bonus riding on the outcome.  It will be interesting to see if that motivates him.

The game starts on CBS @ 1.  As yesterday there is no guarantee I’ll be around to live blog, so it’s open thread.

Probably not around for this one either.  Forget the hype about Le’Veon Bell, he wasn’t going to be much of a factor anyway.  The Ravens suck on the road, but they have great run defense.  Fortunately for the Steelers they have Ben Roethlisberger and Antonio Brown.

The Ravens may be a contender next year, now they are a tune up for the Steelers and a rest day for Bell.

Game @ 8 pm on NBC.  This is an open thread.