General Patton, Call Your Office. 

From IMDB, we are reminded that the script from the movie about Patton, ran something like this:

Patton: What’s the matter with you?
Soldier Who Gets Slapped: Well, I… I guess I… I can’t take it anymore.
Patton: What did you say?
Soldier Who Gets Slapped: It’s my nerves, sir. I… I just can’t stand the shelling anymore.
Patton: Your *nerves*? Well, hell, you’re nothing but a God-damned coward.
[Soldier start sniveling]
Patton: Shut up!
[Slaps him, once forehanded, then backhanded on the rebound]
Patton: I’m not going to have a man sitting here *crying*! In front of these brave men who have been wounded in battle!
[Soldier snivels some more, and Patton swings a vicious forehand slap, knocking his helmet away]
Patton: *Shut up!*
[to the doctors]
Patton: Don’t admit this yellow bastard. There’s nothing wrong with him. I won’t have a man who’s just afraid to fight *stinking up this place of honor!* You will get him back up to the front.
[to soldier]
Patton: You’re going back to the front, boy. You may get shot, and you may get killed, but you’re going back to the fighting. Either that, or I’ll stand you up before a firing squad. Why, I ought to shoot you right now, you…
[pulls his service automatic. At that, the doctors leap forward and hustle the soldier out of the tent. Patton keeps shouting at the soldier’s back]
Patton: God-damned bastard! Get him out of here! Take him back to the *front! You hear me? You God-damned coward!*
[Takes deep breath]
Patton: I won’t have cowards in my army.

Hmmmm. I guess we now have a working basis for a script in the forthcoming movie about Katie Couric and the failure of CBS news:

CBS EVENING NEWS anchor Katie Couric is being accused of slapping an editor — after he injected a word she detested into a script!

“The stress has caused her to blow up at her staff for small infractions on the set,” charges NEW YORK magazine reporter Joe Hagan, in a story set for publication on Monday.

“During the tuberculosis story in June, Couric got angry with news editor Jerry Cipriano for using a word she detested— ‘sputum’ —and the staff grew tense when she began slapping him ‘over and over and over again’ on the arm, according to a source familiar with the scene. It had seemed like a joke at first, but it quickly became clear that she wasn’t kidding.”

A top CBS executive tells the DRUDGE REPORT that no formal complaint has been filed against Couric over the incident.

So reports Drudge, tonight.

I’ve been on the other side of that microphone.  I know full well what operating under pressure means in those kind of circumstances.  Some people deal with such stress is very well indeed.  Others don’t.

However, there are a couple of things that can be gleaned from this;

1. There is apparently a good deal of stress within the newsroom as regards the lack of performance of CBS news, of late
2. Katie Couric is apparently feeling the stress very deeply
3. She’s not dealing with the stress well, at all

Now, if we can just get Cox and Forkum to draw the Perky one with a perky Swastika on her boot, we’d be all set.

An accident has been described as when a politician accidently speaks the truth.   Has Mrs. Sheehan accidentlly spoken the truth:

“Democrats and Americans feel betrayed by the Democratic leadership,”

A big tip of the hat to Jiim Lynch, Bright & Early, who made comments at both Blue Crab Universe and Sister Toldjah.  

?

To say the response to “Live Earth” was a bust, would be like saying Sir Laurence Olivier did a little acting, sometimes.  The London Times:

With the exception of the closing act Madonna – who played next door at Wembley Arena only last summer – there was nobody on the Stadium bill with the cross-generational appeal, and catalogue of monster hits, to supply the great unifying moments which event gigs need to make their message stick in the mind.

Yeah, well, about that: (The Telegraph)

She provided the finale to yesterday’s Live Earth concerts, even writing a special song to mark the worldwide musical event.

But instead of being lionised, Madonna found herself accused of hypocrisy last night after allegations that she has financial links to some of the world’s biggest polluters.

The Ray of Light Foundation, a charitable fund established by the star to support her favourite causes and named after one of her biggest selling hits, has $4.2 million (£2.1 million) of shares in a string of companies including Alcoa, the American aluminium giant, the Ford Motor Company and Weyerhaeuser, an international forest products company. All have been criticised by environmentalists.

In all, Hewitt quips…

Al Gore’s try at getting the feeling back went over worse than Shrek 3. Tim Blair provides some details, as does Mark Steyn at The Corner, Glenn Reynolds, and Michelle Malkin. Is anyone surprised?

no, not particularly.  In the end, this is simply Al Gore and his followers trying to regain some semblance of significance.  And, failing miserably…. Except insofar as the press willing to give them a hand…Indeed it rather left one wondering if they were watching the same concert.

American Thinker:

For example, an early Reuters report bluntly described the extremely poor turnout for the free Live Earth concert in Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beach (on a “perfect” winter night – when tropical Rio is merely comfortably warm) as les than 100,000. Since the hype had it that over a million would come, and since Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones managed at least twice as many concert goers a year ago in the same location, it does look like an embarrassment.

But in the hands of the Associated Press, the same concert was a huge success – the biggest crowds in the whole world for the triumphant effort. Suddenly less than one hundred thousand became “400,000” and they were “packed” onto the famous beach, which just recently was thought able to handle a million-plus concert-goers.

As to the commitment to environmentalism of the concert goers the nominally leftist Washington Post speaks to that point :

Certainly, on the way into the show, some of the 65,000 people who’d spent $110 on a ticket appeared unaware of the seven-point pledge that Al Gore, the event’s chief impresario, had asked all spectators to make. Asked about it, they offered blank looks and said they were there for Madonna (whose annual carbon footprint, according to Buckley, is 1,018 tons — about 92 times the 11 tons an average person uses per year).

“I’m not even sure who Gore is,” said Georgie Simpson, 35, from Ipswich, in eastern England.

The scary part is, the people who put this nonsense together,  are the ones who want to be in charge of your government.  They wanna make decisions about what you do in your life.  Ponder that for a moment the next time you see Gore hawking himself and his fellow Democrats.

I have often been asked, (as was again in this morning’s email), why I make conversational reference to the point being made on someone else’s blog, without making a full explanation of what it is the other writer is talking about. The resulting text takes on the appearence to some, like that of a closed circuited conversation, of which you are only hearing/reading one end.
One example, that nobody’s asked me about yet, but it’s handy, is the reference to a magic marker wielding twelve year old in the previous post.

My answer is this:

I am firmly convinced that I have some of the smartest readers on the web, visiting the site regularly. The e-mail conversations that I’ve gotten involved with, as a result of BitsBlog are testimony to that intelligence.

There are some people who will try to reinterpret what they see on the web, make their pronouncements and go their merry way. This seems a little high handed, to me.
Frankly, this amounts to a style difference.  There are, however, reasonings behind that style difference.  The reasons are rather simple; I prefer to link to what I’m talking about, and let the reader decide what it is he’s seeing, and whether or not my comments makes sense in that context.

When I link to something, I expect you, the reader, to go read the thing for yourself and digest it, for yourself. That’s the very purpose of cross linking. If I expect to carry the entire functional narrative of the conversation myself, I’m not going to bother taking the time, and trouble linking the anybody else’s site; it’s pointless. I get wordy enough, around here, without trying to do that.

Here it is; I am firmly convinced that I have some of the smartest readers on the web, visiting the site regularly.  The e-mail conversations that I’ve gotten involved with, as a result of BitsBlog are testimony to that intelligence. On that basis, then, I consider that the readers of this blog are smart enough to do their own investigations, and their own reading… and come to their own understanding of the material… Particularly the simple ones were all you have to do is click once and read the result. So, I refuse to spoon feed this stuff. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by attempting to reinterpret everything on the web that I make even a casual reference to, and I would hope that you’re not going to insult mine, by telling me you don’t know what the links I do put up, are for.
I assume that when you come here, you’re looking for something interesting to read.  That invokes a matter of trust in me and my ability, and those of my very capable co-writers.  If I link to something, it’s because I think it’s worth your time to look at. Frankly, if you can’t live with that, you’d better find someplace else to go.  If I do have to spoon feed this stuff to you, to get you to understand it, it’s a waste of both my bandwidth and my time, and a waste of your intelligence, in my view.

I simply won’t do it.

John Venlet over at Improved Clinch:

Schools’ zero tolerance rules have a tendency to relieve teachers and administrators from utilizing their reasoning skills, and their common sense.

While I understand your response, John, and I am sympathetic, I’m going to be a little less kind on the topic than are you.

After dealing with government school teachers for most of my life, I’ve become firmly convinced this is not a situation of administration teachers being relieved of their reasoning skills and their common sense.  Rather I suspect that such rules were set up in the first place, because such people possessed no reasoning skills, no common sense, to begin with.

The particularly reasonless, the particularly senseless, end up being college professors.  Usually , these end up in tenured positions.  Erb, as an example. But thereby hangs a whole ‘nother thread, huh?

And why he should our magic marker wielding twelve year old, be expected to possess any amounts of either reasoning skills or common sense, when the pablum she’s been force fed for the last six and a half years or so, has been absolutely devoid of it?  What we’re seeing here, is the result, not the cause.  GIGO. Follow?

As promised, here’s a series of photos of last night’s happening. For the fourth itself, we went west of here to a little berg called Lyndonville. Those pics are here.

For this trip, we went a bit east… a town called Far Haven, which is basically north of Syracuse, about 90 miles to our east. It’s a harbor/resort town, perhaps 20 miles west of Oswego.

We had some time to kill, on the way there, so we stopped about 15-20 miles the other side of Oswego and a little up I81, to a little town called Selkirk Shores. Here we found one of the few remaining old style like houses on the great lakes, The Selkirk Light. As it happens, this is the oldest Integral lighthouse, and was built by Jabez Meacham back in 1838.
The guy managed to make the whole thing out of fieldstone. The Birdcage style lighthouse cover is one of only a half dozen of this design to survive from that time… and it survives despite the fact that it was deactivated in 1859. in 1989, a new lens was installed, and after 130 years of being dark, the light was alive once more, where it is, today. The current owner rents the place out as a guest house. Last I heard, the owner was trying to sell the place, and retire… he had it listed at about $1.25m. (Ouch!) I never heard if he managed to sell it or not.  (Drill each pic for the full version)

While looking around, I was rather taken with a family of ducks… 8 little ones, who were spending their time feeding on the algae that grows on the dock pontoons.

It was getting dark, so some dinner in nearby Oswego, and then back to Fair Haven.
The place is typical northeastern small town.  Fairly tightly knit, with its own ways and traditions.  Fair Haven, makes a weeklong celebration of July 4 , usually culminating in the weekend.  They have the usual rides and carnivals and parades and such, but being Harbour town, they go one step further.  On the last night of the celebration, they do a traditional Lake of Fire, which is essentially accomplished by lighting a few thousand long burning red road flares on the shore of the harbor.  The effect is spectacular as all that fire reflects off the calm waters of the harbor, and into the fast-approaching night.

The center of the shot, is out into the lake, right over the sailboat, to the center right.  I’ve opened up the mid tones on this shot a bit, to bring up the flares a little.

I know, it’s a little off angle.  It’s a little difficult to shoot out the window of the truck.

At this point we went off in search of some place to park the truck so that we could see the fireworks display that had come to see.  Turns out, they drop quite a crowd, from all around.  I setup my tripod, and fired off a couple of shots of the crowd just to get an idea how many people were around.

Again, we’re talking typical small town, here.  Surprisingly ill equipped to handle that kind of crowds that that kind of event would draw, and yet there were no problems, everyone knows everybody, and nobody gets out of line.  Visitors, (such as myself and my camera and tripod ) are viewed tolerantly, and with some amusement.

Right on time, The first big bang announces the start of the show.  And of course, the first shot is very very bright, for two reasons…

First of all, what I’m shooting is very very bright, indeed… the people orchestrating the show apparently wanting to attract attention to themselves , and idiot me still has the settings enabled to shoot the lake of fire.

A few shots and a few adjustments later, and we’re pretty much dialed in.  One of the things I’m finding with his camera, the Cannon Sure Shot A95, is that the amount of time necessary to write whatever you’re shooting to the memory card that I have in it, (2GB) prohibits you from taking large numbers of shots in a hurry.  This is particularly true if you’re running high res.  It takes perhaps ten to fifteen seconds for a shot to be written to memory.  For most things, that works out fine.  But for fireworks.

Another problem, is that you really need to be fairly close to the show so that you don’t end up with a case of the jiggles.  You’ll see a little of that in some of these shots. (Particularly the first one… notice the non-linear motion of the projectiles) I was a little further away from the show then I would like to have been, mostly due to the idea that I had no stinking idea where the show was to be shot from, and thereby no way to know where to set up optimally.

Show done, back down 104 to I-81 and I-90 to home.

I do have some nightfall shots at the local ballpark I’m touching up for posting. This week, sometime.

Asked, a while ago, What are the real consequences of FDR? 

I pointed to an article by Amity Shales in the Wall Street Journal subtitled “Reconsidering our reverence for FDR.”

I suspect that that particular article in the Journal  started a small avalanche.  Because now we find by way of Captain Ed, George Will noting that the culture of entitlements started with the FBI are as well.  Says Ed:

George Will reminds us of when we began moving towards federal bankruptcy, and why, in today’s column about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Long admired as the man who saved America from economic disaster and potential revolution, FDR also begat the large-scale government spending programs that failed to reolve the economic crisis, but instead set us on the path for another:

In 1937, during the depression within the Depression, there occurred the steepest drop in industrial production ever recorded. By January 1938 the unemployment rate was back up to 17.4 percent. The war, not the New Deal, defeated the Depression. Franklin Roosevelt’s success was in altering the practice of American politics.This transformation was actually assisted by the misguided policies — including government-created uncertainties that paralyzed investors — that prolonged the Depression. This seemed to validate the notion that the crisis was permanent, so government must be forever hyperactive.

In his second inaugural address, Roosevelt sought “unimagined power” to enforce the “proper subordination” of private power to public power. He got it, and the fact that the federal government he created now seems utterly unexceptional suggests a need for what Amity Shlaes does in a new book. She takes thorough exception to the government he created.

Republicans had long practiced limited interest-group politics on behalf of business with tariffs, gifts of land to railroads and other corporate welfare. Roosevelt, however, made interest-group politics systematic and routine. New Deal policies were calculated to create many constituencies — labor, retirees, farmers, union members — to be dependent on government.

Will’s prinary point isn’t to discredit FDR, a president faced with an unprecedented catastrophe when elected to office, but to explore the failures of government imposition of scarcity. In the Depression, everything became scarce — goods, food, even work itself. Rather than attempt to bolster capital investment in the economy, FDR decided instead to assume federal control of the economy and ration on the basis of scarcity.

In taking that approach, FDR deliberately grew the federal government into a huge bureaucracy in order to control the economy down to the smallest level.

I must say, I have a great deal of difficulty with that assertion.  Certainly, if you are deliberately grew the Federal government into a huge bureaucracy, but to suggest that there was anything benevolent about it, in this case controlling the economy down to the smallest level, is not the purpose for which FDR did this.  Rather, it was the advance of socialism.  For its own sake.  That effort, socialism for its own sake, was successful at least in terms of establishing socialism here in the west:

Ever since, we have struggled with the legacy of the overmighty federal government. FDR’s radical approach to economic disaster, which ultimately failed, remains a millstone on our economy and our liberties. It’s time to rethink the FDR approach and return to a streamlined and properly scaled federal government.

What saved us?  Private sector initiatives, incidental to WWII.

Now, for an extra ten points,  who is the preeminent icon in the Democratic party of today?

Pinch Sulzberger, a.k.a. the New York Times, in reference to Fred Thompson, is asking, “Is America ready for a president with a trophy wife?” 

To which, Paul Mirengoff, Powerline, says:

I don’t see why not. In 2004, America came fairly close to electing a trophy husband.

?

Joyner at OTB:

The big news overnight is the claim by a pro abortion group that it hired Fred Thompson to lobby the first President Bush to soften his stance on a gag rule.
Michael Finnegan broke the story for the LAT (although not before being scooped by The American Spectator):

Fred D. Thompson, who is campaigning for president as an antiabortion Republican, accepted an assignment from a family-planning group to lobby the first Bush White House to ease a controversial abortion restriction, according to a 1991 document and several people familiar with the matter.

A spokesman for the former Tennessee senator denied that Thompson did the lobbying work. But the minutes of a 1991 board meeting of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Assn. say that the group hired Thompson that year.

His task was to urge the administration of President George H. W. Bush to withdraw or relax a rule that barred abortion counseling at clinics that received federal money, according to the records and to people who worked on the matter.

[…]

Judith DeSarno, who was president of the family planning association in 1991, said Thompson lobbied for the group for several months.

[…]

Former Rep. Michael D. Barnes (D-Md.), a colleague at the lobbying and law firm where Thompson worked, said that DeSarno had asked him to recommend someone for the lobbying work and that he had suggested Thompson. He said it was “absolutely bizarre” for Thompson to deny that he lobbied against the abortion counseling rule. I talked to him while he was doing it, and I talked to [DeSarno] about the fact that she was very pleased with the work that he was doing for her organization,” said Barnes. “I have strong, total recollection of that. This is not something I dreamed up or she dreamed up. This is fact.”

DeSarno said that Thompson, after being hired, reported to her that he had held multiple conversations about the abortion rule with Sununu, who was then the White House chief of staff and the president’s point man on the rule. Thompson kept her updated on his progress in telephone conversations and over meals at Washington restaurants, including dinner at Galileo and lunch at the Monocle, she said. At one of the meals, she recalled, Thompson told her that Sununu had just given him tickets for a VIP tour of the White House for a Thompson son and his wife. “It would be an odd thing for me to construct that thing out of whole cloth,” DeSarno said. “It happened, and I think it’s quite astonishing they’re denying it.”

Sununu said in a telephone interview: “I don’t recall him ever lobbying me on that at all. I don’t think that ever happened. In fact, I know that never happened.” He added that he had “absolutely no idea” whether Thompson had met with anybody else at the White House, but said it would have been a waste of time, given the president’s opposition to abortion rights.

In response to Sununu’s denial, DeSarno said Thompson “owes NFPRHA a bunch of money” if he never talked to Sununu as he said he had.

To which James adds a comment:

Thompson was a hired gun making a living lobbying Republicans. Trying to convince Sununu to get Bush to soften his stance on a gag rule would not seem to contradict his stated political philosophy and would only offend the most doctrinaire social conservative.

True.  And that they’ll drag this one out of the woodpile tells me that they are downright desperate to get something … anything on the man.  They are exerting efforts on Thomson that none of the declared candidates have gotten.  They’re worried. Anything that worries the democrats so is worth my support.

Addendum: (Bit)

Captain Ed, under a post entitled Someone Must Be Very Worried (Yeah, I know… Great minds really DO think alike…) notes that’s not all that’s going on from the ‘attack Fred” crowd…

Fresh on the heels of the Los Angeles Times attack on Fred Thompson’s lobbying, the New York Times lowers the bar by attacking Fred Thompson’s wife. Calling Fred “grandfatherly” and Jeri Kehn Thompson a “trophy wife”, the Gray Lady wonders whether America can deal with a May-December romance in the White House:

AS the election of 2008 approaches with its cast of contenders who bring unprecedented diversity to the quest for the White House, the voting public has been called on to ponder several questions: Is America ready for a woman to be president? What about a black man? A Mormon?Now, with the possible candidacy of Fred D. Thompson, the grandfatherly actor and former Republican senator from Tennessee, whose second wife is almost a quarter-century his junior, comes a less palatable inquiry that is spurring debate in Internet chat rooms, on cable television and on talk radio: Is America ready for a president with a trophy wife?

The question may seem sexist, even crass, but serious people — as well as Mr. Thompson’s supporters — have been wrestling with the public reaction to Jeri Kehn Thompson, whose youthfulness, permanent tan and bleached blond hair present a contrast to the 64-year-old man who hopes to win the hearts of the conservative core of the Republican party. Will the so-called values voters accept this union?

Mr. Thompson, who needs the support of early primary voters, is expected to formally announce his candidacy any day now. Meanwhile, much of the brouhaha around Mrs. Thompson, 40, is being stirred by photos of her in form-fitting gowns circulating on the Internet.

Ed Comments, in part:

Sexist?  Yes.  Crass?  Definitely.  Ridiculous?  You bet.

I’m touched, really, by the concern that Susan Saulny and the Paper of Record show for “values voters”, a group that normally received little but scorn and ridicule from Pinch’s crew. However, these people are not likely to have an issue with a man who spent seventeen years between marriages before marrying a woman in her mid-30s. Thompson’s ex-wife speaks well of him, his children seem very well-adjusted, and his current wife is an intelligent and well-spoken woman who will be an asset to his campaign.

Now let’s talk about the form-fitting gowns. Or let’s not. The clear implication is that Jeri Kehn is some sort of a trollop who married for power on the basis of her beauty, which is ridiculous. Saulny faults the Thompsons for not officially distributing her resume, but anyone with access to Google knows that Mrs. Thompson worked as an attorney and media consultant in DC, as well as a staffer at the RNC and on the Senate Republican Caucus. She’s no bubble-headed bleach blonde, but someone with her own record of accomplishment — even if the New York Times and Susan Saulny apparently can’t find it with both hands and a flashlight.

…

Is this the level to which the New York Times will stoop for the rest of the political campaign? All it indicates to me is that Pinch Sulzberger and his staff seem very worried about a Thompson campaign, so worried that they have already started attacking Fred’s family rather than discuss his policy stands, contained in essays that he has published for months at Townhall and ABC. The caliber of these attacks show the quality of the opposition to Fred, and also give Fred some indirect credibility, as his opponents don’t appear to have confidence that they can beat him on the issues.

Exactly so, Ed. It smacks to me of desperation of the first order. The left… and of course the Times, the House Organ of the left, has identified Fred Thompson as the most serious threat to their power since Reagan… and know he must be stopped. The desperation gets even worse in light of the 14% approval ratings the Democrats have in Congress just now. But as to your question, is this going to be the level the Times operates at, the answer is no.  It can only get worse as the desperation level increases.
Watch for it.

I know it is the question everybody, from Rush Limbaugh to Keith Olbermann, is asking, and given the size of our readship the obvious answer is no.   Yet revolutionary theories are often counter intuitive.

On the Fourth, in “Clinton crony charged with domestic spying” I urged:

Mrs. Clinton, here is your chance to be hero to the American People,  Fire Penn and fire him now.   Show your respect for the rule of law.

Well lo and behold, Bob Novak reports:

WASHINGTON — Sen. Hillary Clinton is facing increasing Democratic criticism for using Mark Penn as her presidential campaign’s chief strategist while he also serves as CEO of Burson-Marsteller, the public relations giant with corporate clients whose policies run opposite to Clinton’s.

Coincidence you say?

I believe in gun control, the ability to hit for what you aim.   A citizen demonstrates good control.

This “open society” madness is being used against us, as I predicted.  Little Green Footballs points out, this morning:

Here’s the jawdropper of the morning, as ThisIsLondon reveals that radical Muslims have infiltrated British police forces—but the police cannot legally fire them.

Up to eight police officers and civilian staff are suspected of links to extremist groups including Al Qaeda.

Some are even believed to have attended terror training camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Their names feature on a secret list of alleged radicals said to be working in the Metropolitan and other forces.

The dossier was drawn up with the help of MI5 amid fears that individuals linked to Islamic extremism are taking advantage of police attempts to increase the proportion of ethnic staff.

Astonishingly, many of the alleged jihadists have not been sacked because – it is claimed – police do not have the “legal power” to dismiss them.

We can also reveal that one suspected jihadist officer working in the South East has been allowed to keep his job despite being caught circulating Internet images of beheadings and roadside bombings in Iraq.

He is said to have argued that he was trying to “enhance” debate about the war.

It’s as I’ve been saying…. Our openness, and are strict adherence to “civil rights” is being used against us, my friends.  And if you think great Britain is alone in this, you are tragically mistaken .

We decided to do something little different this year, and instead of going all the way to the show at Niagara Falls, or partaking in any of the local shows, all of which we’ve been to dozens of times, we decided to stop over to a little burg just to the west of here called Lyndonville.

They had advertised a good show, and we decided to take a chance.  As it turned out, we were not disappointed.

We managed by way of some good “lay of the land ” pre investigation, to get an extraordinarily good spot for the show.  So, I set up the chairs in front of the truck and we sent back to watch.

As we settled in, we began to notice some of the families around this, one in particular that was parked right front of us, had a fairly young boy with them.

Both of mine, have grown beyond this stage, but I was taken with the image presented me, and snapped a few pictures.  This one here, is the best of a lot. Not bad, for a night shot, really, and I offered his dad copies of the pictures I took.  He was taken with the offer, and readily accepted.  I find that kind of thing to be a nice icebreaker.

To be honest, I think what captured my attention was how much what I saw in my viewfinder looked like what I’ve been seeing in my rearview mirror for 45 years or so, now. As Meatloaf sings: “if life is just a highway, and the soul is just a car, then objects in the review mirror may appear closer than they are.”

(Sigh)

As is usual with this kind of show, there’s always the amateurs that show up with their imported fireworks… by that I mean stuff brought up from shops in Pennsylvania and other places where fireworks are not controlled as they are in New York.  New York, in fact, has even outlawed the sparkler that the young subject is holding, here.  It interests me, and encourages me, actually, that te residents of the Nanny state take such a serious dump on such nonsense every year.  There are laws that have purpose.  Drug laws for example.  But taking sparklers away from the kids?  Beyond the pale. I tried to get some snaps of some of the smaller stuff, but couldn’t… Too fast, and to transient .  Setting up a shot with this camera and this tripod in the dark, is still proving to be a bit of a challenge for me.
Perhaps ten minutes after we arrived, the actual show began.  As it happens, the dew point was extraordinarily high, the winds low, which as you may know makes for perfect fireworks weather.  This is because the smoke from the first round of fireworks stands to hang in the year quite a while, giving a background to the second, and so on.  The result is a multilayered effect, that is really quite striking when it works right.  On this occasion, it did.  If you look closely and the following pictures, you will notice the smoke hanging in the shape of the fireworks that made it. you will notice it more in the movie link at the bottom of the page, then you will in the stills, I’m afraid.  Here’s the better stills, taken early in the show. You can drill on them to get the full res shot. These are 1600 by 1200 shots, which with JPG compression end up between 60k and 1 meg, depending. Night shots are like that, with compression.

I did manage to grab some low Res movies of the finale. one This file is about 10MB, and is in AVI format,

It should work in any browser. If not, right click it, and save the file to your hard drive, and then use Windows Media player to open it.

It’s a little boxy at full screen… sorry, I don’t have that kinda money to spend on bandwidth.

We’re going to another show tonight, over at Fair Haven, NY, which is up along the southeastern shore of Lake Ontario. With luck, I’ll have a few more shots to show you.

Reynolds has discovered the battery:

THIS SOUNDS COOL:

Batteries have long been vital to laptops and cellphones. They are increasingly supplying electricity to an unlikely recipient: the power grid itself.

Until recently, large amounts of electricity could not be efficiently stored. Thus, when you turn on the living-room light, power is instantly drawn from a generator.

A new type of a room-size battery, however, may be poised to store energy for the nation’s vast electric grid almost as easily as a reservoir stockpiles water, transforming the way power is delivered to homes and businesses. Compared with other utility-scale batteries plagued by limited life spans or unwieldy bulk, the sodium-sulfur battery is compact, long-lasting and efficient.

Using so-called NaS batteries, utilities could defer for years, and possibly even avoid, construction of new transmission lines, substations and power plants, says analyst Stow Walker of Cambridge Energy Research Associates. They make wind power â?? wildly popular but frustratingly intermittent â?? a more reliable resource. And they provide backup power in case of outages, such as the one that hit New York City last week.

Better batteries are very high on my list of important technologies for the 21st century.

I’ve got a news flash for ya, son… we’ve been doing things like that around here for quite some time.  For example, that pair of deep cycle storage batteries on the camper trailer in the driveway, that basically allows you to operate for many days without being hooked up to an AC line.  Or for that matter, the uninterruptible power supply sitting on the four deep cycle batteries in my garage, which keep things going in the House of Bit for at least 24 hours after a power failure.

There’s only one problem with this scenario that Glenn projects, of course.  That problem is perhaps best illustrated by the hybrid automobile.  Consider the hybrid driving around town.  It has periods of deceleration, and periods of idle, during which it is either a generating itself or not using any energy at all.  Now, consider the hybrid automobile on the freeway, engaged in long haul transportation.  It is constantly using energy, and never really has a chance to regenerate itself.  That is precisely why over the road mileage and a hybrid is never as good as it is around town.

So what happens in those situations where energy is being used on a continuous basis for long periods in your house, such as, for example, wintertime here in the land of the all-day snow?
Further, our electric old grid, as it now stands, is designed for the peaks and valleys of demand that we now have. Certainly, some reserve in individual buildings will solve some of the peaks and valleys, but that leaves us with a rather steady, high demand, then our electrical grid is simply not designed to provide .  The kind of reserve power that you’re talking about here, as a good idea for most homeowners, particularly those in flood plains where for example sump pumps are required.  Or where there are health issues and oxygen generators are required, or things along those lines.  But I think it’s overstating the case that this is going to help keep us from building additional power plants and electrical grid capacity, in anything but short term timeframes.

In terms of aiding our electrical grid, this is stopgap at best.  We are not going to be relieved of the task of adding capacity to our grid.  It’s that simple.

Of of all the stupid concept the leftards concoct none may be more inane that “awareness.”   From Michelle Malkin:

The Live Earth global concert series kicked off Saturday with an aboriginal group dancing and singing a traditional welcome at the first venue in Sydney.

Tribal leaders with white-painted bodies and shaking eucalyptus fronds were the first of more than 150 performers at the eight concert, 24-hour series to raise awareness about climate change.

The performance was immediately followed by a video greeting from former Vice President Al Gore, whose campaign to force global warming onto the international political agenda inspired the event.

Tell me how “shaking eucalyptus fronds” are supposed to counter act antropogenic global warming.  Me thinks Al Gore lieft his brain in the Sun too long.

Developing.