Daily Theme Song: June 30, 2008

Tis another day.

Today’s Theme Song is: “Money” by The Flying Lizards

Chakra: Solar
Color: Yellow
Energy: Power

It’s What I Want. It’s quarter end. Time for Sales to close some Big Deals.

Review: Weber 2820 Smokey Mountain Cooker/Smoker

We inaugurated the Weber 2820 Smokey Mountain Cooker/Smoker in style yesterday. In summary, this is a great product and I would buy it again.

Assembly: Incredibly easy to set up, especially as I was the assistant handing the bits and pieces to FanBoy.

Weber Customer Service: We did discover that the lower bowl section had a big scratch on it. I called Weber’s 24 hour support line. The Customer Service Professional registered the smoker, and then took the information for the free replacement parts. He said the parts would be sent out by Fedex today and that we could keep the defective ones. This enabled us to still use the smoker until the non-scratched bowl arrives. Excellent customer service is a hallmark of Weber. They did not disappoint.

The Fuel: We used the housebrand “365″ charcoal from Whole Foods and Weber’s fire spice mesquite chips. The combination resulted in a bit too intense wood flavor to both of our tastes. Given that the charcoal was a hard wood version, we could have skipped the additional wood chips. We also decided that we should have followed the Weber recommendation that just a few food chips be put in foil with holes to allow steam/smoke to escape.

The Temperature: We were able to easily maintain a 220 degree temperature. Once the vents were set, the rest was a breeze – just the addition of a few bits of charcoal from time to time.

The Time: It took 5 hours to cook one perfect slab of ribs. (With racks, we could have done 6-8 times this amount given the double levels in the smoker. ) The time was consistent with the directions included with the Weber.

The Ribs: Despite the tad-too-intense mesquite flavor, the ribs were delicious! The exterior was perfectly bronzed and the interior was juicy, pink, and tender. My only complaint is how fast we ate them after hours of preparation, but isn’t that always the case with slow food?

The Sauces: We tried Stubbs BBQ and Everett & Jones Super Q. FanBoy preferred the Stubbs (less sweet, more pepper), whereas I adore the Super Q (classic Oaklandtown BBQ sauce). We’re going to try making our own sauce next time. The Complete Meat Cookbook has a very promising set of recipes, including an Oakland style.

Stay tuned!

How To Tell When Something Is Not Shakespearean

It’s pretty safe to conclude that any artist who describes his work as “Shakespearean” has delusions of grandeur. Such evaluations are best left to the audience and over the arc of time. A work must endure to be considered a classic, much less “Shakespearean”.

At least we can rest assured that Oliver Stone does not suffer from self-esteem issues.

“I love Michael Moore, but I didn’t want to make that kind of movie,” Stone said of “Fahrenheit 9/11.” “W.,” he said, “isn’t an overly serious movie, but it is a serious subject. It’s a Shakespearean story. . . . I see it as the strange unfolding of American democracy as I have lived it.”

This goes on the Not To See list along with Get Smart and Wall-E.

Global Cooling Alert!

Australian columnist Andrew Bolt made a good catch regarding Yet More Scientists refuting the Debate Is Over crowd:

A new paper published by the Astronomical Society of Australia has a warning to global warming believers not immediately obvious from the summary:

Based on our claim that changes in the Sun’s equatorial rotation rate are synchronized with changes in the Sun’s orbital motion about the barycentre, we propose that the mean period for the Sun’s meridional flow is set by a Synodic resonance between the flow period (~22.3 yr), the overall 178.7-yr repetition period for the solar orbital motion, and the 19.86-yr synodic period of Jupiter and Saturn.

Or as one of the authors, Ian Wilson, kindly explained to me:

It supports the contention that the level of activity on the Sun will significantly diminish sometime in the next decade and remain low for about 20 – 30 years. On each occasion that the Sun has done this in the past the World’s mean temperature has dropped by ~ 1 – 2 C.

Oh. Global cooling coming, then. Obvious, really.

Perhaps James Hansen will add Ian Wilson and team to the list of people who should be prosecuted for daring to object to his climate change thesis.

Tales of a Swinging Cook #4

The Weber Smoker arrived on Friday – so today is the inaugural slab of pork ribs BBQ adventure. After consulting Aidells and Kelly’s The Complete Meat Cookbook (I have a signed first edition), I rubbed the slab down with some Stubbs’ dry rub and stowed it in the fridge. Next time, I’ll make my own dry rub, but for the sake of time, the commercial version will have to suffice. At noon, I’ll take the slab ouf of the fridge and allow it to sit for one hour while we get the coals ready.

Progress report to follow.

Bubba Says Obama Can Kiss His Ass

Bubba is bitter.

The Telegraph has learned that the former president’s rage is still so great that even loyal allies are shocked by his patronising attitude to Mr Obama, and believe that he risks damaging his own reputation by his intransigence.

A senior Democrat who worked for Mr Clinton has revealed that he recently told friends Mr Obama could “kiss my ass” in return for his support.

I wonder if “lily white” was censored from the quote. It appears that Obama’s most difficult diplomatic challenge will be to appease Bubba.

Smokin’!

After 8,000 plus lightening strikes and over 1,000 fires up north, the air quality in the Bay Are is just plain vile, although the bureaucratEEZ is officially “unhealthy for sensitive groups”.

I beg to differ, it’s unhealthy for everyone. The sky has a sickly yellow cast. Eyes, throats, and lungs are itchy or congested. Everyone I know is feeling slightly ill.

It must be George Bush’s fault. He should have made it rain more during the winter.

The air in parts of the North Bay and East Bay will officially be unhealthy and “unhealthy for sensitive groups” today, according to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. On Wednesday, air pollution was only moderate.

“We’ve gone up a step,” said district spokeswoman Kristine Roselius. “It’s terrible. There are just so many fires out there, and the smoke is coming down and impacting the Bay Area.”

Seniors and children should stay inside with the windows closed if possible, a tough thing to do on a sunny summer day.

The primary source of the smoke locally remains the out-of-control Walker Fire in Lake County, which has burned 14,000 acres and is only 5 percent contained. Fire officials expect the amount of blackened acreage to grow substantially as firefighters conduct deliberate burns to curtail the fire’s spread.

A Second Amendment Victory

Good news:

The Supreme Court says Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices’ first definitive pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.

I’m looking forward to reading Justice Scalia’s majority opinion.

Preview quotes from SCOTUSblog:

“Logic demands that there be a link between the stated purpose and the command.”

“We start therefore with a strong presumption that the Second Amendment right is exercised individually and belongs to all Americans.”

“the most natural reading of ‘keep Arms’ in the Second Amendment is to “have weapons.”

“The term was applied, then as now, to weapons that were not specifically designed for military use and were not employed in a military capacity.”

“Putting all of these textual elements together, we find that they guarantee the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation.”

“Thus, we do not read the Second Amendment to protect the right of citizens to carry arms for any sort of confrontation, just as we do not read the First Amendment to protect the right of citizens to speak for any purpose.”

“The prefatory clause does not suggest that preserving the militia was the only reason Americans valued the ancient right; most undoubtedly thought it even more important for self-defense and hunting.”

“It was plainly the understanding in the post-Civil War Congress that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to use arms for self-defense.”

“Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.”

“Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

“We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those ‘in common use at the time.’ 307 U. S., at 179.”

“Whatever the reason, handguns are the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home, and a complete prohibition of their use is invalid.”

“In sum, we hold that the District’s ban on handgun possession in the home violates the Second Amendment, as does its prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense. Assuming that Heller is not disqualified from the exercise of Second Amendment rights, the District must permit him to register his handgun and must issue him a license to carry it in the home.”

Green Spleen

One source of continual amusement is the cognitive dissonance of the parade of Bay Area Lefties. SFGate is often a good source for the mainstream wimpy variety of Lefties – but today I mined a few nuggets from a particularly steaming pile of angst-filled too cool for school blasé urban green hipsterdom excrement. IOW, extremely chuckle-worthy for reasons the “author” did not intend.

It would be nice to think much of the ugliness is coming to an end.

It would be lovely to imagine the era of brutal Earth-mauling technologies, coal extraction and petroleum and industrial agriculture and strip mining and clear cutting and industrial fishing and all rest, all the more rapacious and unforgiving notions of how we exist on this planet are, after an era of unchecked capitalistic greed and waste and over-consumption right along with almost zero concern for consequences and the ethics of sustainability, finally moving toward obsolescence — or rather, are quickly being shoved there by sheer necessity, brutal market forces, as supply runs dry and oil production slows and the Earth groans and spits and says, “enough already.”

It is a pivotal time, and now more than ever, you get to choose the lens through which you want to watch it all unfold. Or implode.

Are we headed toward a brighter future packed like a Hooters Energy Drink with a renewed sense of hope and global cooperation? Or is our species plainly doomed to be crushed under the corn syrupy weight of our own gluttony and ego and entitlement? Are we waking up just in time to save ourselves from ourselves, or is that fistful of sociocultural Ambien we downed all those years ago merely causing us to sleep-drive into a wall of nuclear asbestos?

Delicious irony: the condescending ridicule of the advantages of modern civilization which enable him to have a writing career instead of being a dirt farmer.

If you haven’t had enough, here’s the rest.

The Real Issues Regarding Obama

Too much attention is being paid to Obama’s race and religion, which only serves his campaign agenda to keep attention away from his Real Agenda. Dick Morris has a good summary of Obama’s policies:

• In effect, he would legislate a 60 percent tax bracket for upper-income Americans, killing all initiative and innovation. He’d raise the top bracket to 40 percent. He’d apply FICA taxes to all income, not just that under $100,000 as at present. So add 40 percent plus FICA’s 12.5 percent plus Medicare’s 2 percent plus state and local taxes averaging, after deduction, at 5-6 percent, and you have a 60 percent bracket.
• He would double the capital gains tax, saddling the 50 percent of Americans who own stock with dramatically higher taxes.
• He’d double the dividend tax, hitting elderly coupon-clippers now retired and depending on fixed incomes.
• He wants to cover 12 million illegal immigrants with federally subsidized health insurance, dramatically driving up costs and forcing federal rationing of healthcare. As in the U.K. and Canada, you will not be permitted certain medical procedures if the bureaucrats decide you are not worth it.
• He proposes requiring Homeland Security operatives to notify terror suspects that they are under investigation within seven days of starting the investigation
• He says that unless they can establish that there is “probable cause to believe that a certain individual is linked to a specific terrorist group,” Homeland Security cannot seize his documents and search his business. The current standard is only that the search be “relevant” to a terror investigation.

I’m hoping that the GOP starts putting the focus on these, as well as his “sit at home in the dark wearing sweaters” version of an energy policy (while prices are slowly turned up so we won’t notice). Oy.