Month: August 2012

Your future: 54.5 miles per gallon

Yesterday, the Obama administration made it official. The new target for gasoline mileage for 2025 is 54.5 miles per gallon. Though the usual stark-raving-mad lunatics in Congress are deeply offended by something so sensible and call the new rules “burdensome” (among other things), the auto industry stopped fighting and cooperated. They’re on board. Why?

Partly, no doubt, it’s because anyone who has two clues to rub together (that would exclude most of the U.S. Congress) knows that the era of cheap gasoline is ending. People probably will be delighted, come 2025, to be able to buy cars that get that kind of mileage.

Does that mean that everyone will be driving tiny cars? Not necessarily. Automobile engineers have lots of tricks up their sleeves that they haven’t used yet, including better fuel injection systems, better turbochargers, and more efficient transmissions. They also have more than 10 years to develop new technologies. They’ll find ways to make vehicles lighter, including greater use of aluminum and technologies borrowed from aircraft design that make components light but strong. You can be sure that engineers also will continue to build safer cars, because automakers already compete on safety. The automobile industry is a truly competitive industry, so automakers will compete to design cars that are safer, more fuel-frugal, and not tiny. Yes, the cars will cost more. But the savings in gasoline will more than offset the increased cost.

The reason the Obama administration gives for the new rules is very sensible: to reduce dependence on foreign oil, and to cut vehicle emissions in half. But they (and the automobile industry as well) know more than they tell us, and I believe they know that gasoline will be much more expensive in 2025. Car manufacturers are nowhere near stupid enough to be caught with nothing but gas-guzzlers to sell if people can’t afford the gas for them. Only right-wing shills for the oil and fracking industry are that stupid.

Would the oil companies like to catch us with a fleet of gas-guzzlers in an era of $8 gas? You bet they would. By agreeing to the new standards, automakers are protecting their industry and their future profits, at the expense (heehee) of the oil companies. Because I love cars and hate oil companies, I say that’s a darned good lick. Anyone who sees it otherwise is getting money from the Koch brothers or someone similar.

By the way, on a recent fill-up, the Smart car hit 53.6 miles per gallon — not quite enough to meet the 2025 standard, but I’m not complaining. The weather has been cooler, and I’ve used the air conditioner less. That has increased the mileage. I’m also finding that the brand of gasoline makes a difference. I’ll have more on that after I’ve collected more data.

Rowdy chickens


Can you espy the chicken in this photo?

The new generation of chickens seem to be rowdier and more inquisitive than the previous generation. Sister Josephine, who I thought was rather mousy when she was young, has taken to escaping, daily, from inside the fence. I still have not caught her in the act to see how she does it, but I suspect she’s flying up onto the horizontal members of the fence structure, then hopping up onto the wire, then flying down to the other side.

She strolls some in the yard, but mostly she peeks in the windows, and waits by the door for me to come out with treats. And she seems to enjoy being caught and lectured. I blame this on Ken. He raised them to be willful and rebellious.

La bonne cuisine

If you buy something at the mall, it’s only half a thrill — the thrill of acquisition. If you buy something at a second-hand shop, it’s the full thrill — the thrill of acquisition plus the thrill of the hunt. Because you never know what you’re going to find at a second-hand shop. This week, for $5, I found a classic French cookbook.

I have very few cookbooks anymore. Specialized cookbooks (for example, Beard on Bread), sat on the shelf and were never consulted. There’s only one kind of cookbook that I find truly useful — a complete, encyclopedic cookbook. That’s why the 1943 wartime edition of The Joy of Cooking is my favorite cookbook, used regularly. I may page through it looking for inspiration. Or maybe I have too many eggs on my hands, and I’m trying to think of something new to do with them. Or maybe I want something chocolate, but I’m not sure what.

Though for years I subscribed to Gourmet magazine, I’ve never really been a student of French cooking. I have, however, been a student of the French language, and I read French fluently, though I never claim to speak it. So I was thrilled to come across this copy of Le Livre de la Bonne Cuisine. It’s a classic in France, in many ways analogous to America’s The Joy of Cooking. It’s encyclopedic — 770 recipes, 668 pages, 1,200 photographs. Like The Joy of Cooking, it was largely aimed at diligent new housekeepers who wanted to upgrade their cooking. This is the 1989 edition. It assumes that you don’t know a great deal, so it covers lots of basics, things such as how to clean a chicken, how to slice uncommon vegetables, pastry techniques, what to do with a lobster, or how to filet a fish.

I don’t do a lot of cooking in the summer — just enough to survive. But as soon as the air is cool, so that the heat of the kitchen is comforting rather than oppressive, I cook. This fall and winter, I plan to work on my French cooking skills.

I need to get a kitchen scale, though, and metric measuring vessels. Though French recipes use tablespoons and teaspoons as a measure, liquid ingredients are given in metric measures, and many ingredients, including butter, sugar, and flour, must be weighed. Williams-Sonoma, here I come, for a little mall shopping.

An Amish well bucket


It looks like a rocket, but it’s a well bucket.

If a big storm or other crisis kept the power off for a long time, how would you get water? Everyone should have some containers of water tucked away for relatively short outages, but storage is not a good solution if for some reason the tap stopped working for days as opposed to hours. Those of us with wells are lucky. We have our own water. But we have to get it out of the well.

Some people with water wells solve the problem with electric generators. That will work. They’re expensive, though, and in a seriously long crisis in which the electric grid went down and stayed down, one might also run out of fuel to power a generator.

A cheaper form of insurance is a well bucket. Until a few decades ago, wells were fairly wide, and well buckets were six or eight inches, or more, in diameter. These days, though, modern wells are much smaller in diameter. Lehman’s sells a well bucket that is only 3.5 inches in diameter. It’s 52 inches long and holds 2 gallons of water. They are usually on back-order. They’re made by an Amish gentleman who has a hard time keeping up with the demand.

They’re made from galvanized stove pipe. The design is simple. The only tricky part of making a well bucket is the valve at the bottom. The valve must open and allow water to enter the bucket when the bucket hits the water, but the valve must close when the bucket is lifted. The valve in this bucket appears to be a piece of rubber which is fastened to a shaft that runs the full length of the bucket. The long shaft is a nice touch, because it should keep the valve moving smoothly. Some people also make narrow well buckets out of PVC pipe. Again, the foot valve is the challenge.

I’m stashing a bucket as cheap insurance, along with some rope, a pulley, and other hardware needed to mount a windlass over my well.


The top of the bucket


The bottom of the bucket

An Irishman speaks up for America


Michael D. Higgins, president of Ireland

Last year, when Michael D. Higgins was elected president of Ireland, I wrote a post about how delightful it is that there are countries in the world capable of electing poets for president. Higgins promised to govern Ireland from principles other than wealth.

Higgins used to live in the United States. He knows this country, and he follows our politics. Here is a link to a stunning radio interview (“A tea partier decided to pick a fight with a foreign president; it didn’t go so well”) in which Higgins gives T-total hell to some Tea Partiers. It is not to be missed.

This pairs nicely with yesterday’s post about Julian Assange. Russians — Russians! — can try to get the truth to the American people, while the American media are nothing but a pig circus. In this interview, Higgins, an Irishmen, stands up for the principles of social justice in a way that never happens in the United States, because our media are corrupt and the Democratic party is feckless and cowardly.

If people in this country who care about social justice dared to speak with passion, then perverted projects like the Tea Party would soon fade away. When did it become impossible for justice-loving people to talk like this in the United States? When did our churches start to glorify war, exploitation, and greed? Why are we such cowards in standing up to people like the Tea Partiers, or the people on hate radio?

Cultural continuity

When I was a young’un in the 1950s, growing up in the farmland of the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina, one of my uncles operated a country store. Every day, local menfolk, especially farmers, would congregate there. If it was winter, they’d sit around the stove. If it was summer, they’d sit around the fan. Of an evening, they might move outside onto the benches under the store’s front awning.

It was called “loafing,” and by some people it was frowned upon. I call it important cultural glue. Today, there are far fewer places where neighbors can congregate than there were in the 1950s.

But this tradition persists in Stokes County today, and no doubt in rural areas all over America as well. Most of the country stores are gone now. Today the loafers hang out at fast-food places at the nearest town or highway stop. In this area, Hardee’s rules, but I’ve also seen congregations of elderly people hanging out at McDonald’s. In Madison-Mayodan, one of the Hardee’s actually has live music and square-dancing once a week (for old people). Or at least they did a couple of years ago.

Even in the 1950s, though, loafing was nothing new. Its roots, I’m sure, are in the old countries.

Most of the people in this area are descended from people who migrated here in the 18th and 19th centuries. Most of them came from the British Isles. Even today, rural pubs are common in the British Isles and Ireland. A couple of times I have visited a Welsh family I’d befriended. Of an evening the menfolk would go down to the pub for a couple of hours in the evening, while the womenfolk cooked dinner.

In this country, Puritan, anti-alcohol values were strongly enforced, so country stores took the place of pubs. The same Puritan culture that demonizes alcohol used the pejorative term “loafing” for it. Now fast-food restaurants have taken the place of country stores. At least it’s cultural continuity, but it looks like thirsty work to me.

Julian Assange

“Facebook is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented.” — Julian Assange

Regular readers of this blog know that one of my constant refrains is that Americans are now the most propagandized people in the world. Whenever I say this, I also say that I’m not just throwing a rhetorical grenade. I am being completely serious. My constant concern is that, because of the failure of our media, we know very little about what is actually going on in the world. Instead, we get a constant blare of distraction, drivel, and misinformation. They tell us what they want us to know, and anything else is difficult or impossible to get. Assange expresses my precise concern: that without accurate information, we cannot understand the true state of the world or plan for our own future.

Julian Assange and Wikileaks are probably the most powerful forces in the world today, damaged though they are, that are operating to break through the lies and secrecy and get real information to people. Because of that, Assange is criminalized and hounded.

I’m posting links to a 40-minute interview with Assange last year, by Russia Today. This interview is by no means out of date, and it provides important background on the drama now playing out in London, with Assange holed up at the Ecuadorean embassy.

The ironies are incredible:

— That in our times, only a Russian organization is independent enough of U.S. and Western interests to bring us this interview. Please note that I do not allege that the Russian media tell the truth about Russia; far from it. But they can tell the truth about the United States, because they are not in our orbit or under our thumb. Nor do they need to propagandize, because the unadorned, unspun truth is so powerful on its own.

— Note how civil and intelligent this interview is — quite unlike anything on American television. No one shouts, no one interrupts. The interviewer asks excellent questions in an intelligent sequence, then listens silently, giving Assange plenty of time to respond.

— Note that no one is spinning — neither the interviewer for Russia Today, nor Assange.

I defy anyone to disprove any of the hundreds of facts that Assange covers in this interview. He is no idealogue. He is simply a truth teller. I have often said that the best journalists, the real journalists, are people who find it pretty much impossible to lie because of an honor for the truth that is almost religious. There are very few journalists like that anymore. Most journalists today are simply too weak to resist the forces that have degraded and corrupted the media. They are all equally cowed, they all sing the same song, and they all think they’re doing a great job. For those who don’t know me, I should mention that I spent my entire career in the newspaper business, that I know more than my share of (and am ashamed of) the journalists you see on television today, and that I have for decades been an amateur scholar of propaganda.

The first part of the interview deals largely with important events in the Arab world last year. The last half of the interview will be of more interest to Americans, including Assange’s statements about the threat to privacy from Facebook, Google, and Yahoo. It’s worth taking the 40 minutes to listen to the entire interview, just to get a feel for the inferiority of the American media and how it deceives us, and to size up Julian Assange as a person.

Here are links to the two-part interview: Part1 — Part 2.

Brother Evangeline

From early on, we had our suspicions about Sister Evangeline. She had large feet, and she grew unusually fast. Still, she was gentle enough, though she didn’t like to be petted like the other hens. And she did not have the flashy comb that roosters (or so I thought) are supposed to have.

The first convincing sign came about three weeks ago, when there was a strange noise from inside the fence that scared the cat and me both. It sounded vaguely like a fox barking. But when I dashed to the door and looked, I saw an adolescent rooster practicing his crowing.

The second convincing sign started about two weeks ago. Watching chickens do it is not a pretty sight. It looks like rape to me, and now it happens first thing every morning, as soon as I let the chickens out, and again at random times during the day. He pinches the hens on the back, or on the back of the neck, to hold them still while he does his ugly little thing. The hens squawk. But so far no one seems to have been hurt.

I’ve been opposed to having a rooster, for several reasons. For one, they don’t lay eggs. For two, they make a lot of noise. For three, they can be mean. I have very clear memories of a rooster who used to flog me when I was a child and was sent to the barn to feed the chickens. I came home from school one day, and he was in the oven.

However, Brother Evangeline doesn’t spend a lot of time crowing. And, so far, he has never been aggressive with me. He continues to spat with Patience, the oldest and largest hen, but she hasn’t backed down yet and given up her place at the top of the pecking order, and they have not hurt each other.

So I guess the abbey’s nunnery is stuck with a rooster.

Persimmons, volunteering

I have carefully protected the four native persimmon trees that volunteered around the edges of the yard. They’re about eight feet tall now. This year, two of them are bearing. There are lots of wild persimmons along the edges of local woods, but they’re usually so surrounded by undergrowth and tangle that it’s hard to retrieve the fruit. I can mow around these four trees. They’ll be easy to get at.

Something else to fight the raccoons for.

Automobile safety


NASA Multimedia Gallery, released for public use

When I was a child in the 1950s, cars were incredibly unsafe. No one had ever seen a safe car, and people were only just beginning to imagine safe cars. It was very common in those days to hear of fatal wrecks, and all too often those wrecks involved someone you knew. It was during the 1950s that some people began to imagine safer cars. For example, take a look at this article from Popular Science from 1955.

The steady improvement of automobile safety over the decades is a great example of a cooperative effort by government and corporations. Some corporations at first resisted building safer cars. They didn’t think there was a market for it. They were wrong, of course, and eventually automobile manufacturers started to engineer for greater safety. In 1968, government regulators started requiring shoulder belts and collapsible steering columns. In 1969, head restraints were required. Whiplash injuries were very common before head restraints.

The integration of computers into automobile control systems opened up new possibilites. Anti-lock brake systems are a good example. Though much of the anti-lock brake system is hydraulic, it relies on a digital controller. The most amazing system yet, though, is the electronic stability control system. This system monitors the wheel speed, the direction in which the steering wheel is pointed (to understand the driver’s intentions), and a “yaw” sensor, which determines the direction the car is actually headed. If the car is sliding sideways, for example, the yaw sensor would allow the control computer to know it. By comparing the actual trajectory of the car with what the driver says he wants (as revealed by the steering wheel), then the system can use the brakes (each wheel independently) and the throttle to make the car go where the driver wants it to go.

Last night, driving home from Winston-Salem, I experienced one of these systems for the first time. It felt like a miracle. I was traveling at about 45 miles per hour on a dark country road. Suddenly a deer jumped out in front me from some heavy vegetation on the right side of the road. I hit the brakes, hard. Without anti-lock brakes, I’d have heard squalling tires, and, depending on the conditions, I might or might not have been able to steer the car. Instead, I heard a rapid “clicking” sound from all the brakes, and I felt a pulsing in the brake pedal. There were no squealing tires. The car just … stopped, and it continued in a straight line until it stopped. I figure that I missed the deer by about 10 feet. Without anti-lock brakes, I’m sure I would have hit it.

That quick stop did not engage the electronic stability system. If I’d had to swerve to miss the deer, the stability system might have been activated. The worst case scenario is when some sort of obstacle in front of you requires that you brake, steer sharply in one direction, then sharply back in the other direction. It causes a kind of inertial whiplash, and this is exactly what causes an SUV to flip and roll over. If you’ve ever been in this situation, the feeling is sickening. I had it happen once, 10 or so years ago on a freeway in California. I strongly felt my Jeep Wrangler wanting to roll over. It didn’t happen, either because I deftly used the steering to reduce the inertial force that was sending me up onto two wheels (try steering then!), or I wasn’t going quite fast enough to roll.

I consider myself a good driver. My reaction to the deer last night was so fast that I wasn’t even conscious of why I’d hit the brakes until the deer was almost across the road. I’ve never had an accident in more than 45 years of driving. But in a close call, one wants all the help one can get.

My 2001 Jeep Wrangler has air bags, but 2001 was a little early for digital systems, at least in the Jeep Wrangler. I have greatly desired a car with the new digital systems, and that was part of my decision to get a Smart car. The Smart car is the least expensive car you can get that has those systems … not to mention eight air bags.

It took only six weeks of driving the new car for the anti-lock brakes to pay off. With luck, I’ll never get into a situation in which I need electronic stability control. But it’s good to know it’s there.

Let’s hear it for those automotive safety engineers.