RE: MH370 and US Lawmakers

SHUT UP.

Regardless of whether the Malaysian government is actually "bungling" the search, it is not the place of US personnel to comment on practice, policy or execution.  Shut up.

The citizens of Malaysia are embarrassed enough without ugly Americans wading into the already-roiled waters.  They have enough angry people shouting at them, why add to that?  This is yet another example of the hand being offered is a clenched fist instead of a helping grip.

When Steve Fossett's plane crashed in 2007, a gigantic array of seachers were fielded, including satellite coverage from Google, and they even had a good idea where to look.  Fossett's plane wasn't found for over a year.  Not only that but they were searching on land - none of the bits were likely to have sunk under the surface of the ground.  Searching the ocean is a whole different kettle of wide-open featureless space.

American deputy national security advisor Tony Blinken, however, went on record stating that the various countries working together for the search was praiseworthy.  Good!  At least somebody is finding something positive to say.

Can't we all do that?  How hard would it be for American Congressmen to say, "Hard luck, gents.  It happens to all of us!  How can we help?"  That's all that needs to be said.  I'm quite certain Malaysia in general and Malaysian air traffic officials in particular are feeling a bit under the gun right now, let's not be jerks and pile on in their time of crisis, okay?

I'm going to sound awfully cold and calculating in the next few lines, so just roll with it: The US could come out of this, an air disaster in which we have virtually no stake at all (three Americans out of over 230 people aboard) smelling like a rose with just a little careful management.  It goes like this:

1) No critical commentary from US at all unless specifically asked for by Malaysian authorities, and then only in private.  Malaysia discloses criticism at their own discretion.

2) Bend over backward, sideways and inside out with assistance.  Rally every vessel we have to search and recovery efforts, everything within a week's sailing.

3) Commit search submersibles now.  Send their support fleets steaming to the nearest port for immediate dispatch once the crash site has been determined.

4) Shut up about all of it.  Be humble, be gracious, be self-deprecating.  The very best marketing is the marketing that is believed, and shouting your own merits tends to sound hollow.  When some other nation, however, has nice things to say, words like that have a lot more merit.  It sounds expensive to send half the Pacific fleet churning toward the Indian Ocean, but we wouldn't be firing any guns.  This is how a nation wins hearts and minds, and we're missing the opportunity.

Death of a Hatemonger

When I heard that Fred Phelps, pastor of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, had died a small, uncharitable part of me said, "Good.  It's about time."

I'm not proud of that.  I like to think that I don't actively hate anyone.  I don't preach hate, certainly not the way Phelps and his church did.  But I've thought more than once that Phelps is was one of those people the world would probably be better off without.  I didn't necessarily wish him dead, I just wished him gone.

I'm aware of how immature that is, how fantastical.  If the person is there, for him to be gone he has to die.  But can you believe me when I say there was no malice in that?

So now we have a world that is short one Fred Phelps, Sr.  Is the world a better place with Phelps gone?  I suspect it probably is.  It is only incrementally better, a very small increment.  But sometimes you have an incremental hurt like an ingrown hair or an infected eyelash.  Minor things, tiny things.  And yet they can be highly irritating and the instant they are gone you feel so much better.

Phelps' history is checkered.  As a Kansas lawyer he successfully fought for civil rights in many cases, but he also took on a personal vendetta against a court reporter, haranguing and defaming for his own reasons.  He was ultimately banned from practicing in Kansas courts but continued to represent cases in Federal courts, until another vendetta - against judges this time - got him disbarred from any kind of court.  That pretty much put an end to his legal career.

It's not really clear exactly what led him down this path of vitriol.  Several members of his family have quit both the church and the family.  Most of them cite both physical and emotional abuse.  Well, can't blame them for leaving.  The church's history of protesting military funerals and political activities in order to draw attention to "God's hatred of America" is pretty well known, unfortunately not just here in the US.  The church's reputation got Phelps and his wife placed on a permanent persona non grata list in the UK.

Ironically, in the last year or so Fred backed off his extremist views.  That put him on the outs with the WBC which, believe it or not, got him excommunicated from the church where he was the founding pastor.  Wow.  If you thought Phelps was intolerant, look at the intolerance he's inspired.

And now he's dead.  Ostensibly because members of the WBC do not "worship the dead" but possibly because they'd rather avoid any loud and unpleasant protests, there will be no funeral for Fred Phelps, Sr.

Rest in peace, Fred.  It isn't up to you to tell us who God hates, but for your own sake you'd better hope He forgives.

The View From Above...

...my shoes, that is.

Here they are:

Sexy, not really.  Just tall.

My few regular readers will probably remember that I do a little acting in community theater from time to time.  I have been fortunate enough to win the part of Aunt Augusta in "The Importance of Being Earnest," it was really the only part I was auditioning for.  I wanted it.

I'm a guy.  I'm about 5' 10", which isn't especially big for a guy.  For a woman however it's pretty large, and when set atop 3" heels (and under a foot-high hat) Aunt Augusta is downright imposing.  That was the plan.  She's an imposing character.  I have dreamed of taking Aunt Augusta right over the officious, blustering top in high style ever since I first saw the play.

It's a peculiar quest to find heels of any height for a guy - any guy - let alone one my size.  Get online and Google "women's shoes for men" and your popup banner ads start to get a little weird.  I won't get too graphic, but let's just say it wandered into alternate lifestyles of which I do not take part.

I found shoes that fit.  I normally wear a men's 12 to 13, which we guessed would translate to a women's 15W.  They're a little big but that's good, I think men's feet tend to be a bit wider than women's, certainly men's shoes tend to be wider than women's.  So I have nearly sufficient width for my feet and a bit more length than is strictly necessary.  Padding takes care of that.

But my toes are under terrific pressure from my own body weight.  They are bent into an odd angle that hurts after a while.  The heel of the shoe begins to bear up against my own heel in a way that my usual everyday shoes never, ever do.

So now we come to the point of this post: high heels hurt.  I have always told my wife that she is never prettier than when she is comfortable; if she is wearing something that doesn't feel good then by all means she should take it off and throw it away.  Life is too short.

Heels hurt.  They hurt all the time and then when I take them off my feet continue to hurt for hours afterward.  I understand that my limited experience means that my feet haven't become accustomed to them and they would probably get better if I had both better-fitting shoes and gave them more time to acclimatize.

But they hurt.  Why in the world would I want to acclimatize to that?

Take your high heels off and throw them away.  It may sound terribly hypocritical to say that, after 4 decades of having never said anything about women's shoes, but that was because I had no experience.  I have that experience and now can say, from a much more sympathetic viewpoint, that high heels have no saving grace at all.  Besides being flimsy and subject to structural failure, they can and do cause permanent injury over time besides being highly uncomfortable in the moment.

And don't start me on bras.  Holy cow.  Between the shoes and the bra my back feels like I've been splitting wood and raking leaves since September.  The ache won't go away.

As part of the gender that has somehow encouraged or even required all you ladies to put yourselves into this state, I apologize.  I assure you, I did not actively take part.  And for my part, I say set it all aside as soon as you can.  Like I said, life is too short.

Helpful Household Hints: Avoiding Frozen Pipes

We're coming up on another deep freeze over the next few days.  If you were one of the many unfortunates that had to contend with a burst pipe due to freezing, you may remember that in my last post I made some suggestions on how to deal with it, and maybe what to do to avoid it in the future.

The future is bearing down.  Your time to act is now.  You cannot wait until warmer weather arrives, if you'd prefer to avoid slithering around in freezing mud under your house to deal with a burst pipe, then you'd better get slithering around under there right now while it's still dry.

If you cannot afford a bunch of heat tapes or are feeling the financial bite of having hired a plumber to do the job last time, then there is a simple expedient: crack open some faucets.

It's really that simple.  Reducing water to freezing temperature doesn't require pulling that much energy out of it, but making it make the change from water to ice takes much, much more energy removal.  If you simply have some water moving through the pipe, always bringing in fresh water from the main, you may be able to dodge the problem.  Before sufficient heat energy has leaked out of the water through the pipe walls, that water has already gone all the way through the pipe and been replaced by new, not-freezing water.

Yes, that means having a faucet run all night.  You might do well to get up in the middle of the night to flush the toilets a couple of times, too.  It's a lot less inconvenient than having to dry out your house again.

You don't have to have the faucet going wide-open.  Just a thin stream will do.  If you're one of those people who can't stop hearing the drip-drip-drip and it keeps you awake, tie a length of string to the faucet that the drip will hit.  The drop will then slide down the string and reach the sink that way instead of having the loud impact that you can hear.

I generally recommend opening all the faucets for just a trickle.  Don't forget the tub.  Water is fortunately one of the least-expensive commodities Americans consume, so you won't break the bank doing this.

Good luck with it.

Helpful Household Hints: Frozen Pipes

Now that the "Polar Vortex" has pretty much rolled out to sea and the only folks still frozen over are the ones used to it at this time of year, let's take a look at one of the main headaches of extremely cold weather: frozen pipes.

It's bad enough that a pipe is frozen.  That means you can't get water out of some fixture where you would normally expect to get all you want.  It's even worse when the freeze happens in the main pipe that supplies your house or office.  But sometimes that ice can even damage the pipes.

People sometimes have the mistaken notion that the water pressure inside the pipe is what causes an ice plug to burst a pipe.  Not so: that pressure is always there.  Turn the faucet off and the pressure is still there.  That the water isn't moving doesn't change the fact that the water pressure continues to press on the pipe.  And really, most houses run at less than 100 pounds of pressure, considerably less.  My own home's pressure regulator is set for 40 pounds, which is more than sufficient for every need.

Think about ice in your freezer, and icebergs.  What do we know about ice?  It floats.  Why does it float if it's just made of water?  It floats because it occupies more volume than an equivalent mass of water would.  And yet it already is water, so it is an equivalent mass to itself.  That must mean that in becoming ice, water expands as it freezes.  And indeed, so it does.

Many of us are already aware of the magical 1/7 ratio, that about 1/7 of an iceberg is all you see above the water, and the rest is below the surface.  I've never researched that too carefully so for now let's assume it's the gospel truth and move on.  But here's a tidbit you might not know: water ice that is restrained as it freezes can exert tremendous pressure on its container.  How much pressure?

Thirty thousand pounds.  30,000 psi.  That's a huge amount.

If you ever experimented by placing a bottle full of water into the freezer to see what would happen to it, perhaps you saw either a lot of ice dribbled down the side of the bottle, or perhaps you saw the bottle split, the top from the bottom.

Household plumbing is pretty sturdy stuff.  Even cheap plastic PEX water supply lines will easily resist 100 psi of pressure with no difficulty.  But 25,000 psi blows through household piping like it wasn't even there.  Don't be misled, you can have plumbing that can sustain such pressures.  A 1/2" inside diameter steel pipe can sustain nearly that kind of pressure, but it won't be the pipe you find at Home Depot, no way.  It's a piece of pipe with an inside diameter of 1/2 inch, but an outside diameter closer to 13/16".  That is not typical plumbing pipe.  And your typical copper plumbing is nothing in the face of such pressures.

So an ice plug formed somewhere in your piping.  If you're very lucky it expanded back in the direction of the water supply.  That means it only experienced the pressures generated by the city water.  The piping walls might take some strain but it's not too uncommon that an ice plug just grows along the pipe and is an inconvenience, nothing more.

But if you have an ice plug that grows toward the fixtures, which are often turned off, then there's nowhere for the pressure of the growing ice to go but out.  And that's when you get pipes bursting.

Obviously the first step is to turn off the water.  Find your control valve if you have one, or the main shutoff if you don't, and get things to a standstill.  Place buckets under the leaks if they're coming from overhead.  If they're in your crawlspace you got lucky for the moment.  More on that shortly.  If the leak is in your wall, you have some cutting to do to find the source.

Now you need to go shopping.  You have some options:

You can make your repair using a repair coupling:

or if your break is small, you can use one like is intended for regular plumbing joints:

and if you shop in the right places you can even find a longer length of the coupling-diameter pipe:

That last one is very useful: you can cut out the damaged section, flex the existing pipe just a bit to slide this repair piece over the existing pipe, and solder it on.  No measuring, just a quick slide-and-torch job.  Very convenient.  And the last time I bought a piece it was about $8.00 for a 12" length.  I like to use the entire length on the repair because it provides plenty of support to the pipe, which is important since you have to cut the pipe to install the piece.  That top piece with the compression fittings works in a similar fashion, you don't have to measure carefully to get the lengths right, the entire length of the piece will slide right over the existing pipe.

Be advised that these are easy to find in 1/2" sizes, typical household size.  If you have a different size go wrong, you may be in some difficulty.  One house where I lived had a lot of 3/4" copper supply pipe, just ridiculously sized plumbing.  And it sprang a leak.  That's when I had to get one of these:

It's called a pipe repair clamp and it's a lot more forgiving on the pipe diameter.  They're intended as a temporary measure so you can keep the water running while you set up for a proper repair, but when I moved away from that old house the clamp had been in place for three years.

To fix the leak you have to find it.  You have to find it.  This will necessitate cutting open a wall if it isn't someplace convenient like a basement or crawlspace.  I like exposed plumbing for this reason.  I don't mind plumbing, but I dislike all the concomitant finish work that follows a burst pipe, trying to make the place look nice afterward.  So screw up your courage and cut open the wall, ceiling, whatever.  Find it.  Cut out the damage and solder in the repair.  

Remember the crawlspace?  Yeah, about that: if your pipe is leaking down there, then it is conveniently not soaking your house...but now you have to go slithering around under the house in a lake of freezing mud and do your repair there.  Win some, lose some.

Compression fittings just wrench on.  Slide the nut onto the pipe, followed by the compression sleeve, and then the repair fitting.  Torque it up.  Use two wrenches, one for torquing and the other to keep things from getting twisted up.  Don't go too crazy, you'll be able to feel when things have started to bottom out.  NOTE: be damned sure about where you want that compression sleeve.  They aren't reusable.  If you get things wrong you have to cut off the bit of pipe with the sleeve and start over.

Solder fittings are a little more involved.  You have to sand the pipe surfaces to remove gunk, then add some flux.  You need a clean, pure surface for a good solder joint.  Sanding gets you close, but the flux is crucial for finishing the job, reacting with and carrying away contaminants so the solder can do its thing. The upside is that the solder joint is a lot stronger than a compression joint, and the material costs are fewer once you've bought the torch, flux and solder.  $20 worth of flux and solder will plumb an entire house, $20 worth of compression fittings will do one bathroom.  And with solder if you get things wrong, you can heat things up until the solder melts and knock it apart, and start over.  The only downside of soldering is the possibility of lighting yourself or your home on fire.  So be careful.  The cool thing about soldering, though, is that once you've got the hang of it it's actually a lot of fun.

Now let's think a moment about prevention:

Pipe insulation

is for more than just hot water pipes.  It helps slow down heat loss from the cold water pipes too, and that's the name of the game here: heat loss.  After enough energy has left the water in your pipe, it changes state and becomes ice.  If you can prevent the heat leaving too quickly, perhaps then enough heat leaks into the pipes from elsewhere or the temperature rises sufficiently to prevent freezing.  There are several different ways to do it: a slit tube that slides on, a tape roll that you wrap around...actually that's about all the ways there are.  Whatever you do, do it.  Thicker is better.  If you can, add two layers.

You can also fight the cold by adding heat

with a heat tape.  So far every installation I've ever seen had the tape wrapped in a spiral around the pipe.  That's overdoing things.  Simply having the tape run alongside the pipe, and perhaps fastened directly to the pipe with a spiral of electrical tape, will suffice admirably and provide a lot more distance on the pipe.  Follow it up by wrapping the whole mess with pipe insulation and your pipes should be proof against anything but the next ice age.

Unless your power goes out.  

Good luck, stay warm and dry, and be careful.

A New Calendar

Happy New Year!

This morning I took down the Christmas tree.  It came down in several stages over the course of a couple hours.  First the ornaments were extricated and packed away - this year's tree was not heavily decorated so that didn't take long - along with a dedicated extension cord and one modest string of lights.  Having all that stuff together will make the next decorating much easier.

Then the tree was dismantled.  Since it was a live tree, this required a rose pruner and the wood stove.  I am forever amazed to see Christmas trees at the curb waiting for disposal by the city.  If you have anything resembling a woodburning fireplace - and I would guess a majority of the homes around me do - break the tree up and burn it.  You spent money for that tree, wring every penny of value out of it.  Let it heat your home.

At this moment the trunk sections are finally in the firebox.  Burning up the branches is a tricky business, the needles flare up so bright and hot that you have to stuff in a load, light them and slap the door shut.  Then wait until the inferno dies down so you can safely stuff in another load.  You can't push more branches full of needles in atop a going fire, the resulting flareup will singe all the hair off your arms.  And maybe your eyebrows.

This process started at about 9:00 this morning, and only just now have I finally put the last piece of tree into the firebox at 11:30.  The house is pleasantly warm as a direct result and nothing is going to the landfill.  Christmas cardboard goes in, a fair amount of other household litter, all manner of stuff that isn't high in chemical additives goes in.

One thing that doesn't go in is the old calendar.  I sometimes save them with some starry-eyed notion that I'll use those pretty pictures for something.  That never happens but the idea was there.  The paper wouldn't be good for burning in any case; clay coated shiny papers don't burn well at all.

This year is unique.  I'm not especially keen to ditch the old calendar because I don't have a new one to replace it.  I usually put up something with vintage tractors and there has been precious little to be found along those lines this year.  None of the old tractor calendars I've seen really grabbed me.

I'll just have to keep looking.  I'm not married to the tractor calendar, I can branch out.  We've had castles, Victorian houses, Kliban cats, but generally I keep coming back to the rough-and-ready, function-is-form directness of old tractors.

Well.  Of this much I can be pretty sure: now that the new year is actually underway, calendars should be on sale.

Mouth, Meet Foot. Foot, Mouth.

"I can't be fired for things I say while intoxicated, can I?"

Of course you can.  It all depends on how you say them, to whom you say them, or in what venue.  Sometimes, what really matters is all of the above.

Justine Sacco is was a public relations professional with the large media company IAC, which includes such presences on the web as Ask.com, Vimeo, and news sources like The Daily Beast.  Apparently Sacco is now trying to blame at least part of her amazingly bad judgment on "unfamiliarity with Twitter," but according to other sources she has had been using Twitter for years and simply hadn't completely grasped some of its "nuances."

Being boorish, racist and paralytically obtuse vis-a-vis likely public reaction to such things, while being a supposed expert on exactly such things, is a paradigm almost beyond belief.  Were it played before me on a stage I would deny it as an unlikely fiction.

Justine fired off this tweet right before she got on a plane to her native South Africa:

Take note of that destination: South Africa.  Clearly Mandela didn't get through to everyone.  Clearly some prejudices remain.  And since she was on a plane from New York City, she was in the air for 12 hours, incommunicado, while easily- (and in this case very rightly) offended and even thicker skinned individuals read it, gasped in disgust, and raised their arms in uproar.

Uproar indeed.  Take note how I've carefully edited out the tenses that describe Sacco's state of employment.  She was.  Now she is not.

If you take this tweet at its face value, that of a tasteless joke, it is merely inflammatory.  You can easily find worse than this on the twitterverse and if you went looking, you probably wouldn't have to look far to find it.  But the real rub here is who Sacco is.

Sorry, my bad: was.

Public relations director for IAC.  Holy catfish.  Even if you have made something of a reputation for yourself as a loose cannon on Twitter, you still can't go around making fun of an entire population suffering the slings and arrows of runaway HIV, and then toss off the even more insulting statement that you'll be safe because you're white.  You just can't.  The only kind of people who can get away with saying things like that are Adolf Hitler and David Dukes, and the only reason they get away with it at all is because it's expected of them, because they are Towering Monstrous Assholes.

And when you align yourself with people like that, suddenly you become the kind of person no one wants around: not as an employee, not as a representative, not at all.  Even if your statements are strictly your own and do not reflect philosophies or views of your employer, so what?  You are associated with your employer.  You can be fired any day for any legitimate reason, and in at-will states for no reason at all.  Every day is another performance review.  Just because you're on private time doesn't mean what you do, how you behave, is also private.  If you take your thoughts and actions public - like I'm doing right now - you can and will be judged.  Sometimes that judgment comes from the boss.

In Related News:

Phil Robertson's suspension from his own show has already been reversed.  I was surprised they dared to do it in the first place.  He went over the line into topics on which he isn't supposed to speak, which he has done before...and not been punished for it before.  Well, I guess they had to step up and be serious about their restrictions eventually.  But like a parent disciplining a child, consistency is key.  Don't waffle back and forth.  Either you mean it or you don't.

In More Related News:

Jesse Jackson, who was once respectable but has since descended to the level of "race hustler," has jumped onto the lurid coattails of Robertson's loose lips to build himself a little podium.  Read his diatribe if you like, but it'll sound like a lot of other stuff Jackson has said in the past.  The bit about "without cover of the law" is a little weird.