Quick Hitts

This article, How to Commit Armed Robbery in Six Easy Steps, is only moderately amusing.  Now, if someone were stupid enough to take it seriously, that would be funny. 

You can tell from their pictures that these three women are not exactly rocket surgeons.  They followed the article’s advice: “On a side note, you may want to bring this guide with you in case you get stuck.” The when the cops caught the brainiacs about a block away from the robbery the article was in their car.

(This post, with just a bit more embellishment, is now available as a podcast.)

Thursday night an ice storm hit the Northeast. Power flicked off and on a bit, but didn’t go off, and we went to bed.

Friday morning, about 5:30, we were awakened by a squeal from the cellar. All the power was off, and I recognized it as the alarm on the sump pump in the cellar, which is triggered by rising water levels. I grabbed a flashlight, went down cellar, waded through ankle deep water and turned off the battery powered alarm.

I came back up and called NYSIG, our power company, on my cell phone. “Press 1 to report a life threatening emergency, press 2 for all other questions.” I just wanted to know when the power was coming back on, so I pressed 2. “Please enter your ten digit account number.” I wasn’t about to dig through my bills with a flashlight, so I redialed and pressed 1.

A man answered and said that 100,000 people were without power, (we later learned it was about 240,000), lines were down all over the place and they had no estimate when the power would be back on. We waited an hour or so until my daughters got up, made a few phone calls, and determined that the places they worked were also powerless. Rather than stay in an increasingly colder house we piled into the car and headed north, to Saratoga, where they still had power. We went out for lunch, hung around the nice warm mall, and went to a movie.

We got out of the movies around six, and called the house. If the power was back on Vonnage would kick over to voice mail, if not it would forward the call to my cell phone. My cell phone rang.

We called NYSIG again, and the same guy answered the phone. There was still no estimate of when the power would be restored.

So we went out to supper and spent more than we should have, took as much time as we could at the restaurant, then headed home.

The house was down to 50 degrees. We bundled up and went to bed.

There was still no power when we woke up. The inside temperature was now 40. I called NYSIG, and was told they expected the power would be restored by Wednesday. Wednesday!

I needed coffee. I always make coffee with a French press, grinding the beans just before I brew it, but the grinder didn’t work without power and all I had was whole beans. I stepped on the back porch and put a pot of water on the grill, then went back inside, put a handful of beans in a plastic bag, and pulverized them with a meat hammer. Hot coffee tastes especially good in a freezing cold house.

I’d wanted to get a generator for a while, and now I needed one. Some of the water had drained out of the cellar on its own, but without power there was a risk that it could fill up at any time, ruining the heater and the gas water heater I’d had installed just a few months before. With nightly temperatures in the teens, burst water pipes were almost guaranteed. And a freezer full of food would be ruined. I needed a generator now.

I called every hardware store in the area. Nobody had any. I finally found one at a BJs in Utica, about 110 miles away. I told them to save me one.

I wasn’t looking forward to driving back down the Thruway with a generator half sticking out of my trunk, held in by bungee cords, but Stephen, a neighbor who my kids still babysit for said he wanted one too, and offered to drive us both there in his pickup truck if my kids would watch his kids. He has a fireplace, so it was an easy sell. I had, by then, contacted an electrician who said he could hook it up to the house wiring when we got back, and told us that we also needed to get a gen tran pack to hook it up to our existing breaker box.

We left around noon. The trip to Utica was uneventful, and we got two generators at BJs for six hundred bucks each. While we were waiting at the service desk to ring them up the woman in front of us was having trouble renewing her membership. I told Stephen how I had made coffee that morning, and she finished her transaction just as I said “That worked out pretty well.” The woman, thinking I was talking about her, turned around and gave me a funny look. “I wasn’t talking about you,” I explained, “I was just telling him how I made coffee with a hammer.” She gave me a funnier look.

BJs didn’t have gen tran packs or even know what they were, so we went to a nearby Lowes. They were sold out. Next stop, Home Depot. There I met someone who didn’t have any either, but told me he had been a master electrician for thirty years and wanted to have a conversation about how NYSIG were a bunch of assholes and shitheads and they sucked. Language doesn’t offend me, but I was surprised to hear that from a clerk on a sales floor. I was also awfully impressed that a master electrician was working for probably ten bucks an hour at a Home Depot.

Stephen made some calls from the truck and we located the Gen-Tran packs at a Home Depot in Amsterdam, which was on the way home and about 45 minutes from our neighborhood.

We hit the Thruway and headed home. About a half hour later the truck started bucking. Hard. (I’d like to tell you the truck was a Bronco, because that would be funnier, but it wasn’t.) We drove on the shoulder at 25 MPH for about a mile and it smoothed out again. Ten minutes later it started again. We drove on the shoulder, slowly, for five miles before we came to a rest stop. We were hoping it was just a case of bad gas or clogged fuel injectors. A full tank of gas, along with dry gas and some STP additive, and we hit the road again. It ran smoothly. For about a mile. Then the bucking started again. About ten minutes later it smoothed out, and stayed fairly smooth for the rest of the trip. We breathed a sigh of relief.

We pulled into the Amsterdam Home Depot. Several people were walking out pushing flatbed hand trucks…with generators on them. They had received a shipment while we were in transit.

We got our Gen-Tran packs ($300 each), some five gallon gas cans, and headed home. About twenty minutes from home we pulled into a gas station and filled the cans. We were delighted. We had been on the road for about six hours, but we had our generators, the electronics, gasoline and an electrician waiting to install everything.

As we pulled out of the gas station both our cell phones rang. Our kids were calling us to let us know the power just came back on.

No comentary neccssary. This is perfect as is.

Click Twice to Enlarge

Source

(This article is also available as an episode of the Quick Hitts Podcast, with a bit more commentary.)

It started with the Helena fraud.  The city of Helena, Colorado, instituted a smoking ban, and then rescinded it six months later.  Two “researchers” claimed that during while the ban was in place heart attack admissions dropped by 60%, and then rose again when the ban was lifted.

The study, published in the British Medical Journal, wasn’t just inaccurate, it was intentionally fraudulent.  There was a small dip in admissions for heart attacks, but only for the first three months of the ban, when it was being widely ignored by businesses and casinos.  The study’s authors manipulated the numbers, which were based on a laughably small sample size, to make it appear the effect lasted for six months.  You can read the details of the fraud here.  Although the study has been thoroughly debunked, anti-smoker groups still cite it as if it were valid.

This fraud has inspired similar frauds whenever a ban is put in place.  If a city, state or country bans smoking everywhere and the number of heart attacks stay the same or go up a bit, it’s ignored.  If they drop at all it is cited, not as normal statistical variation, but as proof that bans reduce heart attacks.

The nannies claim that Scotland’s ban resulted in a 17% decrease in heart attacks.  The study was limited to ten months before the ban and ten months after – with the time frame cherry picked to provide the most convincing numbers.  It was published in the New England Journal of Medicine where it was, of course, peer reviewed.
But now the truth has come out.

In the first year of the ban the drop was really 7.2%, not the 17% claimed.  The year before the ban it was 10%, so the ban caused a 3% decrease in the trend.  And the year after that the number of heart attacks rose to 7.8%, the first rise in a decade.  This not only completely erased the decease, it was a complete reversal of the trend.  Since the nicotine nannies always claim any decrease in heart attacks is the direct result of bans, using their logic we must also conclude that the 7.8% increase was also a direct result of the ban.  Therefore, we have proof that smoking bans cause heart attacks!

This is, of course, ridiculous.  All we’re seeing is the kind of normal variation that happens from year to year with any common ailment.  But why should we be held to a higher standard than the nicotine nannies with letters after their names, the anti-smoker organizations who quote their numbers, and the peer-reviewed journals are willing to publish nonsense as long as it’s politically correct nonsense?

Most of this information comes from Dr. Michael Siegel, who is a tobacco control advocate.  He likes smoking bans.  But he’s also disgusted with the junk science and dishonesty that pervades every anti-smoking organization.  He’s been calling them out on it for years, and as a result is now a pariah in the movement.

He has announced he’ll donate $200 to any anti-smoker organization that admits the mistake.  (He does a good breakdown of the original report’s inaccuracies here.  You’ll find more information, including a time line, on the site Velvet Glove Iorn Fist.)

I’d like to propose my own bet.  I’ll bet one fine cigar, or if you don’t smoke, the beverage of your choice, that not only will no organization apologize, but that one of them will refer to the fraudulent study as proof that bans are beneficial.

Rather than ship cigars or beer or coffee, let’s simplify things and just make it a ten dollar bet.  Here are the specifics:

• If any anti-smoker organization comes out and admits the error, and apologizes for it, you win.
• If, before that happens, any anti-smoker organization refers to the 17% decrease as if it were a fact, I win.

If you’re foolish enough to take the bet, leave a comment or send me an e-mail.   I don’t really expect any takers.

I visited the Discover site to see the outakes and extras for Mythbusters.  Most were only a few minutes long, but every one started with a 30 second commercial that couldn’t be bypassed.  I watched a couple of clips, and left, never to return.

I’m seeing this more and more on video sites.  First it was pop-up ads.  They’re annoying, but there’s usually a little X that lets you turn them off.  But now sites are insisting we watch commercials before they bless us with their video.  Screw that.

The one place I will put up with commercials is Hulu.com.  They play entire episodes of shows, and add one commercial where the show originally had commercial breaks.  (They also have entire movies, but I haven’t watched any, so don’t know how they do commercials on them.) Most are thirty seconds long and some are only ten or fifteen.  Occasionally they’ll offer the option of watching one sixty second commercial at the start of the show and then present the rest of it commercial free, which is pretty cool.  It’s worth it to watch Babylon 5 or Arrested Development.

But for every place else, forget it.  The internet is about choice, not force, and if you think you can force me to watch an annoying commercial before I can watch your short clip, you’re wrong.  I’m outta there.

I’ve been a fan of O’Rourke’s since back when the National Lampoon was funny.  His articles  on world politics have always been not only insightful, but funny as hell.  It’s not often you can get Smartenized while laughing. 

His article “We Blew It” is generating a fair amount of buzz, but I wanted to point it out for those of you who may have missed it.  Here are a few excerpts:

Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone–gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that’s headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.

There was no need to piss off the entire black population of America to get Dixie’s electoral votes. And despising cracker trash who have a laundry hamper full of bedsheets with eye-holes cut in them does not make a man a liberal.

No Child Left Behind? What if they deserve to be left behind? What if they deserve a smack on the behind? A nationwide program to test whether kids are what? Stupid? You’ve got kids. Kids are stupid.

Enough excerpts.  Go read the article.

And when you’re done, read this one.

I’ve been watching Heroes since the first episode, more or less enjoying it, but I don’t know how much longer I’ll bother. The most recent episode, a two-parter, really jumped the shark.

The show has been an interesting rip off of X-Men, but has had problems from the beginning. They introduced so many characters with so many powers there wasn’t much time to concentrate on any of them. They relied too much on time travel to solve their problems. And while everything was building up to killing Sylar, in the end he crawled away and got all better in time for the new season.

Now there are even more characters, and the good guys are the bad guys and the bad guys are the good guys and it’s getting more contrived and annoying with each episode. Sylar is still a bad guy. No wait! We travel to the future and see him as the good daddy, even wearing an apron while doing housework. Then back to the present, and he’s still a bad guy, but he really wants to be a good guy. Ok, now he’s working on being a good guy. But wait, he’s still a bad guy. No, now he’s a good guy. Ooops, not so fast, at the end of the last show he’s once again slicing skulls open again with his magic powers. A personal struggle between good and evil shouldn’t be this predictable and dull.

I’m perfectly willing to suspend belief for 44 minutes and pretend that people blessed with DNA changes can magically defy the laws of physics. But don’t insult my intelligence with a “world-wide eclipse.” Any fifth grader can tell you that an eclipse travels in a narrow band and only affects a small part of the planet at any one time, for about six minutes. It’s not physically possible for an eclipse to happen simultaneously in Kansas, New Jersey (the location of Pinehurst) and Haiti, or to last for an hour. Perhaps the show should contact Jeff Foxworthy and ask to borrow one of his fifth graders.

There are also major continuity errors. The first episode of the eclipse story ended with Noah Benet watching Sylar and Elle kissing through the scope of a sniper rifle. In the next episode we see them finishing up making love on the floor, and after a long conversation a laser dot appears on Sylar’s face, giving them enough warning to roll out of the way. Why didn’t Noah take the shot when he first had it? Is he just a dirty old man who would rather watch them bump uglies for a while before shooting? And what happened to the police when Clare came back to life? Did they just lose interest? Arthur Petrelli gains power by sucking other people’s powers away, leaving them powerless. But when he did it to Hiro, Hiro retained his powers and just lost his memory. Huh?

Sometimes good writers kill a major character part way into the story. It tells the reader (or viewer) that the dangers are real, and when the next character is in jeopardy the reader is much more engaged, knowing death is a real possibility. Bad writers take the easy, cheesy way out, killing their characters, but them magically bringing them back to life. ST:TNG killed off one of their annoying minor characters, Tasha Yar, in a rather pointless way, but couldn’t resist bringing her back (sort of) in a twisted time traveling tale. That, for me, was the official shark jumping moment, although the phrase didn’t exist back then. I used to watch Dallas with my wife, and was impressed when they killed off Bobby. At the end of the following season they appeared to kill of half the characters, but then Bobby appeared magically in the shower. We had to wait until the following season to learn that the previous season was all a dream. Arrrrgh! That trick worked once, in the Wizard of Oz, and should never, ever be used again. I felt ripped off and lied to and never watched another minute of the show.  That was more than twenty years ago, and I still remember it vividly.

None of the major characters in Heroes die and stay dead. Arthur Petrelli was supposedly dead, but then we find he’s really immobilized in a hospital somewhere. He steals Adams immortality, killing him, but we’ll probably see him resurrected later. In the last episode Noah kills a powerless Sylar, who is, of course, resurrected as soon as the eclipse is over. I’ve lost track of the number of times Clare has been killed. In this episode it looked like they finally killed her for real. Fat chance. She came back to life as soon as the eclipse was over. Of course. The result of these endless resurrections is that death has no dramatic impact in the series. Another character killed? Ho hum, what’s for dinner?

The show has been entertaining, but spotty, and I’d been hoping it would improve. Instead it’s gone the other way, and now has officially Jumped The Shark.