TSA: Thinking Shouldn’t Apply

So I was going through my umpteenth security screening at the airport when I realized yet another thing very stupid about the “liquid limit” busywork …er, screening the TSA is performing.

Each traveler is limited to 3.4 oz containers which fit in a 1 quart bag. Screeners will pitch an absolute hissy fit if any container is over the 3.4 oz size, yet they all must fit in a one-quart bag. If you can carry a whole quart of explosives (or the far more deadly shampoo), what’s the point of the 3.4 ounce size restriction? Who cares if your liquids are in small bottles if they can all total one quart? Why not just say you’re limited to a total of one quart of explosive shampoo and be done with it?

Sheesh. It’s times like these I wonder if the TSA is nothing more than Bush’s jobs creation program.

Go, Jim Webb!

What I would’ve given to be a fly on the wall during this exchange! Senator-elect Jim Webb mixed it up with President Bush today during an informal meeting between new senators and the President. Check out this exchange:

At a private reception held at the White House with newly elected lawmakers shortly after the election, Bush asked Webb how his son, a Marine lance corporal serving in Iraq, was doing.

Webb responded that he really wanted to see his son brought back home, said a person who heard about the exchange from Webb.

“I didn’t ask you that, I asked how he’s doing,� Bush retorted, according to the source.

Webb confessed that he was so angered by this that he was tempted to slug the commander-in-chief, reported the source, but of course didn’t. It’s safe to say, however, that Bush and Webb won’t be taking any overseas trips together anytime soon.

I’ve admired Webb after reading about him in The Nightingale’s Song. I’m glad he’s not backing down from the President. People like Jim Webb are just what Dubya needs – someone to wake him up from the fantasy world he’s been living in the past six years.

Going Ape Over Older Females

I was amused to read today’s story (ok, actually last week’s story but the News and Observer either didn’t see it until now or is too cheap to pay for Washington Post material when its fresh) that male chimpanzees prefer older females to younger ones. Most versions of this wire story start off saying how different chimps are from human males, since human males clearly prefer younger women (the USA Today version is the exception). Read the version that ran in the N & O:

Chimpanzees may be our closest biological relatives, but male chimps appear to differ from male humans in one striking way — they clearly prefer older females, according to new research.

And the USA Today version has this to say:

Human males, of course, generally dig younger women, as the Internet-clicking hordes of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan fans demonstrate.

Um, what kind of idiot human males are they talking to? Only idiots prefer younger women.

It’s no contest. Britney Spears? Lindsay Lohan? The “Tart Twins?” You’ve gotta be kidding me. Anyone “clicking” on these two bimbos are either the same age as the girls or younger, and hopefully one day they’ll grow up and know better.

I’ve ranted before about the concentration-camp look models sport today and how horrible I think it is. The Huffington Post commented today about the recent death of Yet Another Anoxexic Model. Sure its sad when people die, but it’s sad to think that the starving look is anywhere near attractive. Beauty doesn’t always mean thin and young, though.

As Prince sang in Kiss, “women, not girls rule my world.” That’s the case with me, too. I like women with beauty, curves, and brains. If they’ve got wisdom and the sexiest thing of all, self-confidence, then they’re absolutely irresistable. Youth? Not so much.

You don’t have to be young to be beautiful. Look at Priscilla Presley, Joan Collins, Sharon Stone, Julianne Moore, or Susan Sarandon. Decades after becoming a phenomenon, Christie Brinkley still looks fantastic. These women have that spark that only comes with age. They age like fine wine.

I doubt the young girls that are being paraded before us will be around long from now. If all you’ve got is youth, ladies, you’re fighting a losing battle.

Those chimps know what they’re doing.

Who Killed The Electric Car?

Kelly and I enjoyed watching the movie Who Killed The Electric Car? [warning: flash] two nights ago. I was fascinated by the story it told of the incredible GM EV1 car and how GM couldn’t wait to pull it off the streets. The EV1 seemed like the perfect electric vehicle: fast, sexy, and decent range. In spite of enthusiastic demand, GM took posession of every car at the end of its 3 year lease and sent it off to the crusher.

I thought the movie was surprisingly fair in this controversy. GM looks like the bad guy – clearly appearing to be threatened by the success the EV1 was starting to show. Had the electric car caught on, it would have instantly exposed cars with internal combustion engines as the dinosaurs they truly are.

While I was in South Bend two weeks ago, I took a moment to tour the excellent Studebaker museum, showcasing the beautiful automotive creations of this now-defunct car company. Like all car manufacturers of the early 1900s, Studebaker’s first cars were electric, with a range of 60-70 miles and speed of 25 MPH: plenty fast for the unimproved roads on which they drove. Their huge advantage at the time was that their competition – the internal combustion engine – was unreliable, loud, and smelly. Since carriages were largely open-air, these last two drawbacks made electric cars seem to be the clear choice. Its been 100 years since electric cars debuted in America and I’m still waiting for mine.

The movie openly mocked the car manufacturer’s research into hydrogen-powered vehicles, and for good reason. Hydrogen fuel-cell cars cost more than $1 million. Hydrogen is the lightest element in the universe, thus its the least-dense gas. It provides poor energy density per volume, making any hydrogen-powered vehicles need highly-pressurized tanks to provide any range. In the movie Joseph J. Romm, author of The Hype About Hydrogen, takes apart the auto industry’s hype about hydrogen, pointing out that by the time any hydrogen infrastructure get put in place other technologies will have left hydrogen in the dust.

I read today that Ford is unveiling their first hydrogen vehicle this week. Its hydrogen tank is pressurized to 10,000 pounds per square inch, twice the pressure of other hydrogen cars. Can you imagine what that would look like in a collision?

The movie made me pine for the past when electric cars ruled the roads. Perhaps someday they will again once people realize there’s a better way to travel.

Opossum Redux

Well, I spoke too soon when I said I rid the house of the opossum the other night. Kelly came to get me around 9 PM last night, saying she heard it scratching under the office floor. Tough little bugger, I thought. Since it didn’t get out the night before its been at least a week since it left the house.

I had to do something different this time. I remember during my weekend research that a good trick to know if an opossum has come or gone is to sprinkle flour at the entrances. If the critter makes tracks, you know its been there.

So that’s what I did. I opened a vent cover on the far side of the house and sprinkled flour on the opening. For good measure, I went to the opossum’s preferred doorway (the original hole it dug under the house), parted the brick pavers I placed above it, and gave it the flour treatment, too.

An hour later I was ready for bed but decided to check for opossum tracks before retiring. Sure enough, the one by the hole had been hit! There was flour not only on the pavers where I placed it, but flour pushed off the paver and onto the ground. Finally, proof that the critter was out!

I closed up the vent and hole again and went to bed. This morning there are no signs it tried to get back into the crawlspace – a place that might have easily been its tomb. Now to clean up the after effects and seal things up where this doesn’t happen again.

The Post-Amato Period

The writing’s been on the wall for a while now, but yesterday N.C. State lowered the boom on football coach Chuck Amato and sent him walking. State’s turned in a couple of losing seasons and could not turn it around – with no relief on the horizon. You can’t come in firing people up about national championships and then expect them to be happy with a 3-9 season. Especially when you can’t beat an otherwise completely pathetic Tar Heels team.

Chuck couldn’t keep his assistant coaches for one reason or another. I think that really hurt the Pack more than anything. Now the question is … what do we do now?

Call Me A Critter Gitter

For the past few weeks, we’ve been hearing scratches and bumps coming from under the house near the kitchen. My first thought was that our mice were back again, so based on that I placed a non-lethal trap in the kitchen near the noise and waited. When a week went by and no mouse took me up on the tasty crunchy peanut butter (it’s gotta be crunchy: the smooth stuff is poison to mice), I began to wonder what I was dealing with.

Around the time the noise started, we realized the wood damange to the front of our garage wasn’t simple rot but in fact termites. The damage they did was minimal and the site seems to have been dormant for a while but just for some peace of mind we called in an exterminator to set some termite traps. When the sales guy finished checking the crawlspace he had a curious comment.

“Is this the cat that’s been wandering around under the house? Bad kitty!” he joked as he dusted himself off.

“Excuse me?” I replied, perplexed.

“Oh I found some cat droppings under the house. Looks like something’s nesting down there, down by the kitchen area from the looks of the insulation.”

Hmm. We keep our crawlspace closed. How could anything get in there, I wondered.

Another week went by and I was planting bushes on the south side of the house. I noticed what appeared to be fresh cat droppings near the flowerbed I was digging, but something wasn’t quite right: cats bury their droppings and this was out in the open. I put it out of my mind and continued on with the other things I had to do.

Two weeks ago I cleaned up our garden area behind the house. To my astonishment, a cat-sized hole had been dug under the air duct leading into the house. Fresh claw marks were clearly visible in the mud.

Aha! The door of our uninvited house guest! Thinking I’d close the hole and deal with the consequences later, I piled the hole full of nearby, golf-ball-sized rocks and covered it with a brick step. That should do it, I thought.

The next morning I was even more astonished to find that every single rock had vanished! What’s more, a neat little tunnel had been dug from the existing hole to the other side of the brick step. A pile of leaves cleverly hid the entrance of the new tunnel.

I’m dealing with a worthy adversary, I thought to myself. I piled even more bricks on top of the new tunnel and considered it closed again. We went on Thanksgiving vacation with the hole sealed.

When we got back the scratching and bumps were still there, only they took on a more desperate sound. Yesterday offered me a chance to go under the house and investigate. Droppings were present around the corners of the house. Insulation was pulled down in places, often with leaves piled on top: nests! The metal screen of a vent opening had been shredded with the metal pulled inside – an effort to escape. I shook the leaves out of the insulation and carefully tucked it back into place, moving around the whole crawlspace in about an hour. Satisfied with my work and seeing no critters, I dusted myself off and went back inside.

Last night Kelly and I were watching a movie when the scratching returned. I leapt off the couch, grabbed the flashlight and ran outside, shining the light around the foot of the house. Two beady eyes glowed at me from behind a vent opening under the kitchen. Our mystery guest turned out to be an opossum.

As he wandered off the ledge of the vent and back into the depths of the crawlspace, I devised a plan to free him. A removed vent cover on the far side of the house was balanced so that it was easy to open from the inside and would indicate when it was used as a door. At the end of our movie, I walked outside to find it lying on the ground: the opossum was out! I replaced the vent cover and went to bed with the hope that the critter was gone for good. I’m not crossing my fingers, though.

From what I’ve read yesterday, !opossums are non-destructive critters who move slowly and are not at all aggressive. I suppose if we had to have something crawl into the house, its better that its an opossum than a raccoon or skunk. The challenge now is to keep the crawlspace secure through the upcoming mating season in January.

Ah, the joys of living on the edge of town!

Home

We’re home now after a fun few days with Kelly’s family. The travel wasn’t bad, either, as we avoided I-95 like the plague it is. Kids are in bed now, most of the things are unpacked, and I’ve got a good book waiting for me on the bedside table. Not a bad way to close out the day.

Happy Thanksgiving

We spent the day driving through this miserable weather to spend the holiday with Kellly’s parents in Virginia. As we were driving up Creedmoor road near Falls Lake, I saw the truck ahead of us startle a large bird by the roadside. The large flapping wings had me thinking it was a Great Blue Heron but as we got closer I was amused to find I was wrong. It was a big, honkin’ wild turkey! One lucky enough not to be joining its brethren on the kitchen table tomorrow. I’d have thought he would’ve been lying low this time of year.

Have a good Turkey Day, wherever you are.