Defaulting Epidemic

Now this is a bit unnerving... You can look up current foreclosure procedures (for free) via RealtyTrac. This is intended as a tool for people who make money flipping foreclosed property. There are 818 houses listed as under a Notice of Default in my zip alone. I think that exceeds the annual housing turnover in my village through normal sales! If someone had asked me yesterday, I would have guessed that in most neighborhoods under 1% of property owners were involved in some sort of mortgage debt-related legal proceeding. And I would have been so, so wrong.

Bedtime (Pets)

It is bedtime for me, so I thought I'd slap up some leftover bedtime pictures of the kitties.
Our kitties, who hate each other, still manage to imitate each other's behaviors all the time. Here they are echo-sleeping, providing an extra dimension of kittiness.

The Liberal Media (Reblog)

Keith Olbermann's Countdown on MSNBC has become my second favorite source of television news -- after Jon Stewart's more newsy bits on the inimitable Daily Show. With over half a million viewers, that means over one tenth of one percent of Americans will occasionally be exposed to actual news about our government's criminal malfeasance as we continue to discard our checks and balances on our route to formal oligarchy.

He recently spoke with Jonathan Turley, a woefully naive professor of law. Turley thinks that there may be a chance of a criminal investigation into the wiretapping issue to sidestep the White House's use of executive privilege to avoid any congressional review. It'll never happen. Our elected officials are either complicit or cowards, and our media can generally only aspire to that abominable level of integrity and courage. The Raw Story has a brief discussion (in which they unfortunately misspell Turley's name).

Keith has an interesting blog as well.

Last Night's Leftovers (Chow)

NDM always makes such pretty presentations that even our leftovers seem très élégante. Here we have some portabello stroganoff from the deep-freeze. We've grated some pecorino romano over it and have a side of light sour cream. The greens are from our garden, with red bell pepper, grapes, yummy radishes, and a little bleu cheese vinaigrette. Some mandatory bread (garlicked despite Italy's contrariwise pleas) rounds out the meal. Everything is classed-up on a cool square plate and ready to accompany an episode of Iron Chef. Morimoto, ganbatte!

Quenchless Thirst (Pets)

This is 'Dolon's antisocial behavior at the Mayslake dog park. He's using his own water dish here, but is of course quite happy to monopolize and perhaps upend anyone's water.
It is, of course, more important that the other dog not get any water than the water be preserved for his own personal use. Here he is shown battling with and then victorious over a sweet German Shepherd-mix puppy.
We're not sure where he picked up this behavior. Now, whenever any other dogs are around, he always drinks with the bowl braced between his front legs, poised to fend off any tricky water thieves. Of course, to the best of our knowledge, the only such thief he regularly encounters is himself.

The Truth About Garlic (Reblog)

Finally, after all these years, when I have been forced to break down and incorporate garlic into my cooking to keep the better half happy, I am vindicated by the skilled and erudite chefs of Italy! No more fine cooking with garlic, they cry! Garlic destroys delicates flavors and reduces everything to a numb garlicy miasma. Read all about it.

Of course, it is too late for me. But maybe some future palate can be saved.

No More Endangered Species (Reblog)

These days our Supreme Court is supremely uninterested in precedent -- so much for stare decisis et non quieta movere. One among many recent 5-4 decisions (Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Kennedy vs. the interests of the people of the United States of America), the Court has ruled in favor of the National Association of Home Builders (PDF) to permit the federal government to ignore the Endangered Species Act. Why, you might ask? Why, when such a decision overrules all established case precedent and past judgments?

The time to ask why was, of course, before we were left with just four unbought justices -- ages 67, 68, 74, and 87. That means that the right-wing Court is on average more than 12 years younger than the ethical Court.

Know Your Dog (Reblog)

There is apparently now an at-home breed test for dogs, the Canine Heritage™ Breed Test. You get a cheek swab kit in the mail, post it back, and in 4 to 6 weeks you have an ancestry breakdown. Unfortunately, it only traces 38 American-standard breeds, which means if other bloodlines are present you can get weird results from more distant recognized ancestors.

Why would people do this? There is already parentage testing for anal pure-breed owners. Something like this might be useful in trying to figure out how colossal your little puppy is going to end up being, but since it takes so long to get results you can't really use it to figure out if you've found the right shelter puppy.
Why am I talking about this? Slightly related to her, a potential 'Dolon mitigation unit.

IBKC Absorbed By Household Domain

This blog is now available at its new permanent home of http://ibkc.krndm.org/ as well as its original location. I'll eventually be aggregating all of our household's web cruft at the krndm.org site.

Mastery

Congratulations to my baby cousin on receiving her Masters in Education!

My Naked Mole Gargoyle (Pets)

Do you ever feel like you're being watched?

Death To Gerber (Reblog)

It is only a matter of time before a hit is taken out on Gill Rapley by the US $1.25 billion a year baby food industry. She has declared that pureed foods are completely unnecessary, and that it is healthiest for babies to move directly from mother's milk or formula to solid foods at 6 months with no pureed transition. One interesting thing she posits is that a baby's natural abilities to reach and put things in their mouth, which develop at about 6 months, are the signs that the baby is ready to move on from milk.

Cooperative Cooking (Chow)

Local hotshot epidemiologist DAT joined us for dinner tonight. We had an unusually proper division of labor for the meal, with NDM working on the pasta and dessert while I handled the sauce and bread. We split appetizers down the middle. Often one or the other of us will make a meal; it is always especially fun when we actually get to collaborate a bit.
I've blogged about my artisan bread before. Making a bread like this fits very well into the nooks and crannies of other meal preparation activities.
Fresh pasta is a little more labor-intensive, which is why NDM handles it. I clean up all the flour and pasta scraps that end up on the floor -- assuming 'Dolon doesn't get there first.
I made a goat cheese variant of my generic red sauce to go with the fresh pasta.
We started off in the kitchen with wine, the bread, some soft Camembert, NDM's roasted garlic, and my red pearl onions in a caramelized wine glaze. It is very out of character for me to cook with onions once a month, let alone twice in one week, but I had half a bag of the things left from my earlier provençal vegetables.
The dinner was delicious, as was the dessert.
Our slight lentil error with the dessert was buried under whipped cream and chocolate. I had to pick the lentils out of the refrigerator-hardened crusts; clearly, even for such a small shell, we should have used parchment between the crust and the lentils.
And the best part is at the end of the night I get to freeze several bags of leftover sauce. I almost always try to make a lot of extra sauce for this purpose; whether it is a goat cheese sauce, or something with artichokes in it, or a puttanesca, it is always nice to be able to defrost some delicious homemade sauce for use on a pizza, a box of pasta, a nice crispy French bread, or even a mess of steamed vegetables.

Rule Of Law (Reblog)

Courtesy of Tony Auth.

Abstinence Works (Reblog)

...to make more "conservative" voters, anyway.

It is wonderful how much political choice we have in this country. Just look at how well our Democrat-controlled legislature is serving this country's women.

By the way, isn't it great that "conservative" is the label we now use for imperialist expansionist oligarchophile religio-fascist plutocrats? In another world, I'd consider myself conservative, since I'd like to hear reasoned debate and see all applicable historical and scientific evidence before rendering an important political decision, and when in doubt I'd prefer proceeding with caution where millions of lives, billions of dollars, and the very world we live on are concerned. In this world I'm a flaming liberal because I don't believe in thought police, religious oppression in either direction, grossly excessive economic exploitation, or that political control is better off in the hands of corporate entities than people.

Kitchenarium Updates (Chow)

Updated the Kitchenarium with a provençal vegetables dish I made up the other night. This is a great departure for me, since you may have noticed that I really never cook with onions. As a treat for NDM I got a bag of red pearl onions and this is what I came up with to use them.

It turned out quite well, with the onion sweet and not overpowering. I even ate one or two of them.

Cooling Jowls (Pets)

'Dolon has started cooling off in the evenings on our leather couch. Recently he's discovered the best heat transfer mechanism he has available: the velvety insides of his capacious jowls.
Ah, that's the stuff!

Name That Drink

Since we've been in the new house, we've discovered a simple non-alcoholic mixed drink that NDM is in love with. This beverage accounts for probably 25% of unfinished drinks left lying around our house (also 60% various teas and 15% suisse mocha -- 100% NDM leftovers)...
It consists of a splash of grenadine (enough to just cover the bottom of a pint glass) covered with a can of Diet Pepsi. Yeah, I know, I wouldn't drink it either, but it makes NDM very happy. After over a year, despite our increasing sophistication leading to use of a bartender spout for the grenadine, we still don't have a name for this drink! Any suggestions?

Serviceberry Harvest

When EJB visited this last weekend, he pointed out that we weren't harvesting our serviceberries. This is one of the more edible of the antique, rarely-eaten fruits that he lives and dies for; they are actually quite good. I cleaned out our bush and froze a quart or so which will one day become preserves.

Beat The Heat (Pets)

Nothing like a nice crunchy bowl of ice on a hot day!

Besides hoovering ice, 'Dolon has also evolved some strange drinking habits at the dog park. He now lies down with a water bowl between his front paws and will frequently submerge his entire muzzle in the water. Sometimes he blows bubbles. If another dog comes near, he'll hook one of his paws around the bowl and drag it closer in to his belly. This is the kind of dog you get if you raise him without regular doses of Sesame Street...

Rotating Poles

So we saw these really nifty wind sculptures by Lyman Whitaker while visiting the Missouri Botanical Garden. Unfortunately, I did not get a very close look at them because of how they were installed, but I've been thinking about how to make some sort of less attractive approximation.

The only critical engineering element is the bearing. The Whitaker sculptures apparently use a sealed ball bearing "at the top of a vertical rod", which I suppose is to reduce the thrust load on the bearing. I'm unclear of their definition of top, however... It does make sense to place the bearing as high as you can, reducing the amount of the sculpture that will spin and produce drag.

There are lots of types of bearings. Generally I would expect a spinning pole to need to support a moderate thrust load with very little radial load, but at fairly high speeds. The speed probably mean that a ball thrust bearing would not work all that well, so I'm guessing a roller thrust bearing might be the way to go if a ball bearing doesn't cut it.

Wouldn't you think that there would be readily available plans on the Internet for making some kind of rotating pole thing? As far as I can tell, two kinds of rotating pole assemblies exist electronically: rotating flag poles, and trick stripper poles. Both of these use bottom-mounted bearings, which spin the full weight of the pole and anything hanging off of it -- which I guess means it is silly for me to worry about whether I need roller thrust bearings instead.

I guess what I need is a nice 12' galvanized steel pole to fit a sealed ball bearing's inner dimension, and a shorter length that fits the bearing's outer dimension which can depend from it and will have my windsocks fastened to it. Or I guess I could even use a separate bearing for each propeller element.
Something I don't fully understand -- remember, I'm a software guy -- is how to fasten the bearings. Do you ever have any choices besides pressure fits and straight welds? Larger bearings often come with cast mounting accessories on the outer piece, but the inner piece is often featureless. Flanged ball bearings provide another option, but don't really relieve my consternation about how best to connect one piece to another.

Maybe I'll email Lyman.

Adam Blacklisted For Indecency (Reblog)

An actor who played Adam in a vignette at the Creation Museum has had his clip pulled because of his real life activities. He gives a particularly pertinent quote at the end of the AP article:

"It's make-believe."

Missouri Botanical Garden (Recommendation)

We visited the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis this weekend with EJB, his mother, and his daughter. It was a nice change of pace from the excellent Chicago Botanic Garden, and even held up acceptably to EJB's mother's marvelous private garden that I just posted about.
A non-vegetal highlight was a beautiful hanging Chihuly in the visitor's center at the garden's entrance.
In the line of plants, I really liked the asparagus fern (Asparagus densiflorus 'Myersii')...
The Peruvian golden shrimp plant (Pachystachys lutea), which I'd never seen before...
The king's spear asphodel (Asphodeline lutea), which had neat little fruits that yield a yellow dye...
This dramatic Amazonian elephant's ear (Alocasia x amazonica)...
A wonderful dense stand of bamboo... I really need to get some bamboo for our yard, but it is so expensive!
There were also many wonderful stones in the Chinese garden. The most dramatic were the Taihu stones. I'm not sure if these limestones always come from Lake Taihu, or just get that name because of their prevalence in that area. Maybe one day we'll get one of our own -- after we've got a nice thicket of bamboo going, of course...
I'm not sure what kind of stone this aggregate is. Maybe CRB will chime in with an answer? It is natural, but does share a lot of characteristics with concrete.
There was a really nice bridge in the Chinese garden...
The bridge to an island in the Japanese garden was also very picturesque, but closed to the public.
The waters around these gardens were full of koi and other carp. These were some of the largest such fish I have seen anywhere, and must be very old.

Failed Fence Kludge

Our garden will never look as nice as EJB's mother's because we have a wonderful dog. I have a more permanent solution in place now to keep him from destroying everything in our back yard in his frenzied search for cicadas to eat -- this initial pass at a dog barrier was a failure.

One Garden To Rule Them All

On the way back from our weekend trip, we stopped at EJB's mother's house. His mom has the most extraordinary private garden I have ever seen; these few pictures totally fail to do it justice.
There are lots of smaller plantings from the street front up to her house. Then her huge back yard is so riotous with interesting colors, textures, elevations, and smells that you just don't know which way to go to further appreciate its beauty.
One of the plants I enjoyed the most in her yard was this excellent ornamental asparagus, leaning a little more than usual due to our recent high winds.
She even has a few smaller accent gardens with various succulents. Many of those pictured here are in home-cast cement troughs.
There is even an old mulberry tree. Here we witness EJB's inevitable tree climbing ritual (although I shrunk the picture down so much that he just looks like some particularly strange branches). Unwilling to play the chump and pick fruit by hand, he's placed a tarp from his trunk under the tree and is jumping up and down to dislodge the mulberries. A quick spritz and it is time to eat!