Cross river, traverse woods

I’m outta here, tomorrow and Friday.

Pray for the terror victims in Mumbai.

Celebrity endorsement

When you have to kill a mother holding her baby, only the best will do. After Ruby Ridge and Waco, the FBI had to replace their aging sniper rifles, because the next time we have to kill patriot scum, it might be from twice as far away, and the government can’t afford to risk our asses, since it’s so hard to find skilled marksmen without a conscience. That’s why they bought the H-S Precision PS-2000 HTR for us. And that’s why I’m endorsing H-S Precision, because a consumer boycott means that fewer of these excellent rifles will be turned against us.

–Lon Horiuchi

That’s not actually what the endorsement says, of course. But it might as well be. As Beck said, “They might as well set fire to their whole establishment right now.”

UPDATE 12/5 H-S ain’t sayin nothin’, yet. But this is from Breda:

Kaveman: Good morning, I was wondering if your company supplied a sample target with the sale of your rifles to attest to their accuracy.

H-S: Yes, in fact we provide a sample target and the cartridge load data for every sale.

Kaveman: In light of your new spokesmen, Lon Horiuchi, I was wondering if you would send me a target of a dead woman holding a baby if I agree to buy one of your rifles?

“Goddamn piece of paper” to keep Hillary in Senate?

Via Ace, the claim is advanced that no senator may sit in Obama’s cabinet because the Senate just raised Cabinet pay. There’s a tradition of using “the Saxbe fix”: lowering the pay rate, a dodge pioneered by Tricky Dick Nixon. This may observe the spirit of the law, but not the letter. But when we don’t have to see proof of Obama’s native birth, and the 2nd Amendment is a personal right to be violated like all the others, what’s a little finagling among friends? It’s good to know that Obama’s Constitution is Bush’s Constitution; we wouldn’t want any kind of “change we can believe in”.

I haven’t found any rumblings from the PUMAs yet.

Moeck out of the early winds business

…except for recorders, of course. A casualty of a fragile economy and a fragile musical ecology: both the employees of that department are retiring, without having trained anyone to take their places. This was a misstep, somewhat like the one they did in the 1990s in taking recorder distribution out of the hands of recorder specialists and putting it in the hands of a music publisher.

Despite all our efforts, the number of customers and people interested in these unusual instruments has always remained small. Our idealism always weighed in favour of their production and keeping tradition alive as opposed to the dictates of economy.

However, both the employees entrusted with the making of these instruments are now taking their well-earned retirement. Thus the point in time has arrived where we are discontinuing the production of these instruments, which were always more admired rather than acquired.

Spare me the sob story. The windcap instruments were competitive in quality and price, and easily available. There are probably more people out there playing Moecks than anything else. Of those, the rauschpfeifen were handicapped because Moeck long ago ceased making an alto to serve as bass of an ATTB consort, forcing anyone wanting to use a consort instrument as a consort instrument to buy used or go to Moulder (and if you’re going to Moulder, why not Moulder all the way?). I suspect that if income were broken down, the buzzies paid for themselves. And losing those would be a loss indeed.

As for “admired but not acquired”…”ve make der gut Englisch yoke, ya?” but for their other instruments, “admired” was never in it. Name me one professional playing a Moeck shawm or cornetto, or any of the baroque woodwinds. I always thought the phrase “Moeck dreck” was unfair, but why buy a Deutsche shalmey or “ciaramella d’amore” when for similar money you could get a real shawm from Moulder, Hanchet or Cronin? Or a McCann or West cornetto? OK, we’re losing the world’s sole producer of the Baroque rankett. That’s an instrument of critical importance, to be sure. Maybe the German government can offer them a bailout. There’s a critical military need at Guantanamo Bay.

But this highlights a far deeper problem than Moeck’s failure to compete in the marketplace. Where are the young instrument makers? Moulder, Hanchet, Marvin, Cronin are all at or past retirement age. Prescott and Hailperin are close. I don’t know the ages of Praetorius or Wolf, but Beekhuizen and Breukink seem not to be too old. But where are the up-and-coming makers in their 30s or 40s? Is Renaissance wind making a hippie-generation thing, destined to die out with the Boomers?

Since I’ve been smart-assing about that civics quiz

…I took it.

I’m PISSED! I missed one! I knew at the time that there was something in the logic of it that was passing me by. Still 96.97% is nothing to sneeze at. (It was question 33, for the curious. I won’t be a spoiler, but do be careful.)

Ms. Perp cops a plea

Today was the pretrial for Ms. Perp. Rusty sprung out of bed at 6, saying “It’s Tuesday!” as if it were Christmas. she’s been pretty keyed up.

We were concerned because the assistant prosecutor Muldowney had screwed up royally. The charges as written involved Nelly driving under suspension, because her record said she was under suspension. But she was not driving under suspension at the time of the accident; her license was automatically suspended when she refused a breathalyzer test on the night of the accident. My wife tried to tell him this, but she’s just a poor unedumacated veteran while he’s part of the class that gets 44% on their civics exam. We were fearful that that would cause her to walk, or at least that it would send the whole matter back to the grand jury. But somehow, they amended the charges. I’m not sure how they can do that, but since it was amended down rather than up, I guess it’s OK. She pled guilty to 2 of the 7 charges: vehicular homicide 2 and vehicular assault 3. Sentencing is later: we’re hoping for Feb. 4, which would have been Ada Vanhorn’s 81st birthday.

Nelly looked terrible, and her family looked terrible. One cannot take joy in somebody throwing a good chunk of their life away. On the other hand, getting closure is something worth doing the Happy Dance about, insofar as you can jump up and down on a leg full of screws and metal. Nw we can talk about her apology, about forgiveness and prayer.

The sisters are off at Cracker Barrel. I told Rusty to eat some grits for me.

Jennifer Granholm on BO’s economics team

Oh loverly. The bimbo who sent Michigan down can help do the same for the rest of the country.

Granholm and Obama have much in common: They are both young Democratic party protégés, both are charismatic personalities, and both are left-wing, Harvard-educated lawyers with little experience running anything prior to assuming office.

Some people would add, “Neither was born in the US”, but we don’t have proof of that (one way or the other), so it’s not so, right?

Like Granholm, Obama appears to have little grasp of market economics, but prefers showy public-works programs and utopian visions of bridging a carbon-addicted America to a new green economy that will employ millions.

We’ve recently learned that politicians are even less qualified to run the country than the average Joe, so why should we expect any concept of market economics to come out of her pretty little head?

Thanks to Ace.

Cashing in on the Ordinary Form

Jeffrey Tucker has been holding feet to the fire about the decision of the U. S. Catholic bishops to make the Grail Psalter the official Psalm text, even though it is under copyright and those rights are managed by GIA (or, “The Publisher Formerly Known As ‘Gregorian Institute of America’”, back during the last time anyone cared about chant). He’s even using tough words like “simony”. I’ll go one harder: what do you think of when you think of religious groups copyrighting their sacred texts?I think of cults, particularly $cientology. (Yes, I’ve heard that King James is © The Church of England, but the Queen may give me the Infamous Kiss if she thinks I’ll honor a 400-year-old copyright.) As a composer, rights management is enough of a PITA that I don’t want to be begging GIA (let alone paying them money) to set Catholic English liturgy — not that I’ve ever done that, but cross my palm with silver and I’ll certainly consider it. My general reply to such a request (and one that I’m sure Tucker would be in sympathy with) is: copyright this!

Weather Channel fires propaganda arm

There’s a silver lining in the economic dark cloud:

NBC Universal made the first of potentially several rounds of staffing cuts at The Weather Channel (TWC) on Wednesday, axing the entire staff of the “Forecast Earth” environmental program during the middle of NBC’s “Green Week,” as well as several on-camera meteorologists…
Forecast Earth was hosted by former CNN anchor Natalie Allen, with contributions from climate expert Heidi Cullen. It was the sole program on TWC that focused on global climate change, which raises the question of whether the station will still report on the subject. Cullen’s future role at the network is not known.

Selling firewood

The text for our sermon rant today will be Farm and Dairy, November 20, p. C5 (this bit seems not to be online): “Ohio firewood laws…Non-packaged firewood must be sold by the cord or by fractions of a cord…if sold in bulk, firewood must be purchased by the weight in tons measurements. This must be weighed on a certified scale. It is illegal to sell firewood by any other unit of measurement such as a rick, rack, face cord or truckload. If a consumer believes that a seller did not comply with these rules and regulations, the person should immediately contact the seller. If non-packaged firewood is purchased, the seller must present the consumer with a delivery ticket or sales invoice that includes contact information and the terms and conditions of the sale.”

Suck me blue! My neighborhood is so full of criminals, I might as well live in Cleveland. Look at all the shootings over firewood deals gone bad!

Now, I realize those big city slickster politicians think that we carbon-emitting, bitter gun-and-religion-clinging hillbillies are in deathly danger of being screwed over by our equally BGARCH neighbors, (I believe the technical term for this is “projection”) and that we need protecting because we’re obviously too stupid to buy firewood without being taken to the cleaners or the woodshed or something. And that our BGARCH locally-underfunded schools full of BGARCH teachers didn’t teach us anything (possibly true for those under 40) and didn’t have the good sense to not teach anything really important on the first day of deer season.

But I do believe that most of us learned in elementary school about cubic measurements. And those of us who buy wood know what a cord is (It’s one of those esoteric measurements like on the famous Salina, Kansas 8th-grade graduation exam, from 1895, where if you don’t know how many pounds are in a bushel of wheat, you’ll flunk). Armed with those two facts, we can evaluate any wood deal, as I’m sure you know. But for the sake of any of our young’uns who were too strung out on meth that day to pick this up in school, let’s consider the facts.

A cord of wood is a stack 4′ by 4′ by 8′. To get cubic feet, you multiply length x width x height, and come up with 128 cubic feet. If the going rate for a cord is $150, the cost per cu.ft is$1.17.

The easiest measure to figure is a face cord. That’s a pile 8′ long and 4′high, but the depth dimension is unspecified. Usually it will be 16″, but the pieces could be cut 12″ or anywhere in between. Thus, at our $150 reference rate, it should cost no more than $50. If the pieces are all different sizes, you’ll want the cheapest price you can haggle, because it’s hard to tell just what’s in it, and because the guy was slovenly about cutting it up. This is easy enough to the seller to redefine as “1/3 cord”, “1/4 cord “or whatever, to keep the government off his back.

Ricks n’ racks are WYSIWYG. It’s ” a stack of wood”. If the stack is 6′ by 3.5′ by 10 inches, that’s 17.5 cubic feet and you should get it for $20.

Truckloads are harder, because the pieces aren’t nicely stacked and there’ll be a lot of dead space. But most people figure that if it’s mounded up nicely, that compensates, and they can figure truck bed surface (generally 4 x 8 ) times depth (what, 2.5 ft)?

No, here’s the part of this that cracks me up:”If a consumer believes that a seller did not comply with these rules and regulations, the person should immediately contact the seller.” This assumes that we actually care if the seller is complying. And weren’t we IN contact with the seller when we noticed he wasn’t compliant? I suspect this a roundabout way of saying, “If you didn’t like the deal, take it up with the seller, because if you drop a dime on him, your BGARCH neighbors will stop talking to you, but if you kick his ass, he probably had it coming.”