From that point on it will be just weekends at which time he'll be working on splitting firewood, some for this year (ash can burn whether green or dry) and for the year after next (red oak, white oak, and maple take 2 years to dry). I expect Farmer Andy will also have him delivering firewood as well as hay over the fall and winter months.
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Speaking of firewood, Farmer Andy delivered our final cord dry hardwood to The Manse this morning. We now have 31/2 cords stored in the garage and another cord and a fraction outside.In order to make things easier for us over the winter we'll probably start burning the cord stored outside first. That way we won't need to haul it inside in the dead of winter or try to shovel or snowblow around it after any snowfall.
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I like this idea a lot: Allow motorists to pay for the privilege to speed on highways.While it might not work in some areas (too congested), it would in others. It would also raise revenue for the state, probably far more than it would collect in speeding fines.
Maybe it's an idea whose time has come.
(H/T Instapundit)
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Laser pointers: They're not just for using with PowerPoint presentations!In the case reported in the link above, a 15-year old boy bought a green laser “pointer” and, in the midst of fooling around with it, managed to damage the retinas in both eyes. Most laser pointers have an optical output of 5 milliwatts (or 5 thousandths of a watt). The one the boy purchased over the Internet had an optical output of 150 milliwatts, a level where the normal human aversion response to bright light won't protect the eye.
Though most of the lasers I deal with at work emit in the infrared part of the spectrum, care must still be taken to prevent damage to eyes. Some of our stuff is far more powerful than the laser the boy was using when he damaged his eyes.
(H/T Instapundit...again)
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There's nothing I can add to this that would make it any more profound or provocative than it already is.(H/T GraniteGrok)
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Ron brings us a history of the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Telethon, which got its start in 1952 on a local New York TV station.**********
What's not to like about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie? He tells it like it is and he doesn't mince words. He also makes sure he knows exactly what he's talking about, making his opponents look uninformed an ignorant of the realities the state of New Jersey faces. Here's an example:**********
Sarah Palin isn't running for office, yet she sets the Left into full-on panic mode. The claims made by them are ludicrous in the extreme. Why are they so afraid of her? Maybe it's because she isn't them and they find she appeals to everyone who isn't them, including a number of people in other countries, like out neighbors to the north. An example from one of the commenters:Is it any wonder the Left is panicking? Who do they have that appeals to the non-elite like Palin? No one. Not even Obama has that kind of foreign fan base.
I was in Windsor, Ontario in 2008 doing some work at a power station and I was talking to the lead operator in the control room. He was English and had emigrated to Canada a few years before. The Canadians were having an election at the time, but all he wanted to talk about was Sarah Palin. The operators and mechanics loved her. They said they needed someone like that in Canada to represent THEM. What they meant was someone from a non-elite background who was one of them. Sarah fits the bill. This is what the left fears. The idea that their pseudo hereditary claim to power and influence can be simply ignored knocks the legs out from under them.
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Professor Jacobson of Cornell Law School delves into anti-Americanism in Europe and how much of it can be attributed to their failure to understand the nature of our nation, our people, and our form of government. From the Telegraph piece Jacobson links:Or to quote Bill Murray's character John in the movie Stripes: “We're Americans, with a capital 'A', huh? You know what that means? Do ya? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We're the underdog. We're mutts!”
What is unique about the US – and indispensable to the understanding of it – is that it is a country of the displaced and dispossessed: a nation which invented itself for the very purpose of permitting people to reinvent themselves, to take their fate into their own hands, to be liberated from the persecution and the paternalism of the old cultures they had left behind.
But we have a bigger problem with anti-Americanism, where members of our own Democratic Party have started to resemble and sound just like many of the European anti-Americans.
It's sad that they have less understanding of America and the American people because they were born and raised here.
The modern Democratic Party, beholden as it is to unions and welfare-state sycophants in the European style, embodies attitudes which are alien to this nation. Three generations of leftist education have resulted in a substantial minority of the population who accept that we should be like Europe, but still a minority.
The notion that everything we have and are devolves from the state is not natural to this country, but the modern Democratic Party can't comprehend why that is so. It is inconceivable to them that people would not want their form of health care system; it must be that we don't understand how good it will be for us.
One last quote from the Telegraph piece:
Indeed.
I wonder if the Obama liberals – in their eagerness to turn the US into a European country, complete with paternalistic interventionism and bourgeois guilt – realise what is in the rest of that package: passivity, resignation and the corrosive cynicism that makes it impossible for Europeans to believe that ordinary people can use words like “freedom” and “justice” without smirking, and are not prepared to give up on the attempt to reconcile their ideals with the difficult realities of human behaviour.