Kabuki

I got to the party late, but I stayed for the whole thing…until the bitter end, as it were (or was). Unbeknownst to me, C-SPAN changed its programming yesterday. C-SPAN made a rather idiotic decision on Monday to run the Petraeus/Crocker hearings on C-SPAN3 — a channel very, very few of us actually get, unless we buy a “premium” package from our cable/satellite vendors. The rationale for Monday’s programming decision was “since the House is in session, we’ll run the Petraeus/Crocker hearings on 3.” So we were treated to live but routine bullsh!t business from the floor of the House on Monday, instead of this year’s MOST important congressional committee hearings. Bad call, that. And apparently C-SPAN recognized the stupidity of the decision, because there was Petraeus and Crocker, live on C-SPAN(1) when I decided to see what was going on there early yesterday afternoon.

I tuned in just as the Senate Foreign Relations committee hearings were ending, sometime in the early afternoon, my time. Strangely enough, the Armed Services committee meeting was scheduled to begin a mere five minutes after the Foreign Relations meeting ended. Senator Levin was generous by delaying the start of his meeting by 20 minutes, giving General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker a few minutes to grab a sandwich or other such sustenance. Then it was on with the show.

As I stated at the beginning: I watched the whole miserable, trying thing. It was interminable, and I say this as a guy who was free to get up and walk around, go to the loo, get a Dr. Pepper out of the fridge, fix a snack, or whatever else struck my fancy. Ambassador Crocker and General Petraeus weren’t as lucky: they got one 20 minute break during the whole ordeal, if memory serves. Only one break in a hearing that lasted at least four hours, not counting the previous day’s inquisition or the previous Foreign Relations hearing? Now that’s cruel and unusual punishment. One Armed Services committee member recognized this fact and opened his questioning with a quip that back-to-back hearings lasting well over eight hours “might not be Geneva Conventions-compliant.” That got a wry smile from Petraeus, and it was one of the very few light moments in the hearing.

For your benefit Gentle Reader, I offer the following “Shorter Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing:”

Petraeus/Crocker: “It’s working. We need more time. We don’t need deadlines. We DO need continued funding.”
Republicans: “Yes, we know it’s working.”
Democrats: “No, it’s NOT.” “The American people…blah, blah, blah.”

I threw away at least six hours of my life yesterday watching that kabuki play. I really should have known better at my age.

One more note. Aside from General Petraeus, the most impressive person in those hearings yesterday was Senator Clinton. You cannot possibly understand how much it pains me to write that, but it’s absolutely true. The woman was calm, cool, organized, and made her points with great precision and gravitas. In a word, she looked …um… “presidential.” It pains me to write that, too.

We Remember

A B-52G named "NYPD"

A B-1B with "Let's Roll" Nose Art

An A-10 with "Let's Roll" Nose Art

Art work by Aviation Structural Mechanic 3rd Class Jeff Jarvis, on F/A-18E Super Hornets embarked on the USS Abraham Lincoln.

Sailors and Marines assembled on the flight deck of the USS Belleau Wood (LHA 3).

Credits: Nose art photos from Talking Proud and official USAF photos. Aircraft carrier image from wtc-terrorattack.com.

Bad Day at El Casa Móvil De Pennington

Bad day, indeed. I didn’t write about it, some things being so trivial as to be undeserving of a post in and of themselves, but I ran out of propane last Wednesday night. Or rather, the internal LED gauge for the propane tank hit “Call Albert.” So that’s exactly what I did Thursday morning. And, somewhat true to form, Cortez Gas’ truck was in the shop down in Roswell. “Not today, I’ll try and get around by your place tomorrow…” came the answer over the phone. Well, OK…not a lot that can be done about this, so I’ll wait.

Friday came and went: no Albert. I went the weekend with no propane at all. No cooking on the stove (no big deal — there’s always the nuker) and no hot water. “No hot water” was a medium-to-large Big Deal, but I survived. This morning Albert came by and filled me up, and the FIRST thing I did was reset the hot water heater in anticipation of a nice hot, long-delayed shower. One small problem: the hot water heater wouldn’t reset. I went through the complete ritual of resetting every frickin’ switch in the house that has anything to do with propane (and some that don’t), including pushing the reset button on the hot water heater outside the house, too. No joy. And no hot water, either.

So now I have a pot of water heating up on the stove in preparation for a stand-up bath, which should be followed in short order by a visit from The RV Doctor, who was called after I’d exhausted my (admittedly meager) repertoire of corrective actions.

It’s ALWAYS sumthin’. It remains to be seen just how much this particular “sumthin’” is gonna cost.

Let us pray.

Update, 9/10/2007 1615 hrs: All fixed - bad thermostat. An interesting coincidence of timing, this. But, Hey! I have hot water now, and will finally get my shower...after the news. And I got a bad valve replaced in my toilet at the same time, so I can retire my ad hoc coffee cup toilet flushing mechanism. Total bill: less than $200.00. Not all that bad, for a house call.

A VLP of the VLA

Today’s Pic: “VLP” stands for “Very Large Photo,” (2.2 MB in this case) if you’re wondering, Gentle Reader. This is one of perhaps three photos I’ve ever created using the “stitch and merge” option in my photo editing software. Stitch and Merge is a process whereby you take two or more photos, three in this case, and instruct the app to blend all of the subject pics into one large panoramic photo. Very useful when you have a large subject, such as the antenna farm at the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope, near Socorro, NM.

This is one pic that you most definitely should “click for larger,” even though the pic itself is downsized to 50% of the original. Well, check that last. I decided to upload the original full-size pic. See if you can tell where the app “stitched” the pics together. It’s pretty danged hard to see, IMHO.

(Added: apparently Blogger resizes VLPs to "fit" some corporate size limit, coz the pic you see when you double-click the photo is but one-third... or less... the size of the original I uploaded. Oh, well. I tried.)

April, 2004.

Back in a bit. Late, late night and all that.

The Rules

I missed this today before I posted, but it would have fit right in with the lead two items in this morning’s post: “Time for the new rules for college football fandom.” Samples:

1. As a fan, you have to pick a school, one school, same as if you were filling out applications to, you know, go to school there. You may not be a fan of a conference, teams from a specific state, "West Coast football" or college football in general. Nobody is a fan of college football in general, not even Lee Corso. Nor may you root for Harvard and Yale, any more than you could matriculate at both places, unless you're really, really smart, in which case you're probably building prototype military surveillance nanobots in your MIT dorm room, and/or devising a computerized ranking system* to shame Jeff Sagarin.

1a. Under extenuating circumstances, however, you may have up to three Division I-A rooting allegiances, so long as the schools meet the following criteria:

(a) Your birthplace/family school – especially if an inheritance is at stake, or if a campus library bears your last name.
(b) Al(most)ma mater – the school you transferred from.
(c) The school that actually handed you a diploma. Or would have, if you hadn't finished three credits short.
(d) Your spouse's school, especially if the program is vastly superior to your own, or your spouse cares waaaay more than you do, in which case: good call on getting married!
(e) You're a bandwagon-jumping, low-self-esteem weenie and scurry from Notre Dame to Miami to Ohio State to USC to Boise State depending on the year, the polls and the amount of water flooding into the ship.

If you can't be true to a school, at least be true to your own weaselly nature.

[…]

4. If you attended a lower-division or NAIA school, you're allowed to pick a D-I school of your choice. But you must consistently root for that school year in and year out, and it's preferred that the school be geographically close to you.

4a. Or you can just root for Appalachian State every week.

4b. Notre Dame? How very original.

[…]

9. You are allowed to root freely against the following schools for no specific reasons: Notre Dame; Notre Dame in their puke-green jerseys; Notre Dame when playing on "Triumph of the Will"-shaming propaganda house organ NBC; USC; any school that plays its fight song approximately 4,387 times per game like USC; Michigan; Miami; Ohio State; any school like Ohio State with a pretentious "the" in front of its name, because otherwise how would we know which Ohio State university they were talking about?; any school coached by Steve Spurrier; any school coached by Nick Saban. (ed: I’d add “any team from Florida” to this list, but that’s a minor quibble.)

You may have noticed that I’m in the 4b fan category. Given that I never went to college, I’m free to root for the school of my choice, under rules Four and 1a (d) above, even if that means I root for my former spouse’s school (The Second Mrs. Pennington is a Notre Dame alumna). And I have been an ND fan for nearly 30 years now and don’t foresee any change in that status on the near or far horizons. It’s way too late to change allegiances at this point in life. While we’re at it, I should mention I’m a fan of, and root for, at least three schools, depending on who’s playing whom: ND, Michigan (the ten year living-in-Detroit connection), and Air Force. For reasons that should be obvious now. The only time I’m torn is when ND plays Air Force…and I well and truly don’t know what to do during that game. Very traumatic, that.

So, to the author of “The Rules,” especially Rule 4b: Put a sock in it. I like ‘em, otherwise.

Sundries

I loves me some late-summer days in September, especially when football season gets well under way. Yesterday was a typical late-summer Saturday (or early Fall, you choose.) at El Casa Móvil De Pennington, which is to say it was an orgy of college football. All day and into the night, as well. Three games (Oregon – UoM, ND – Penn State, and LSU- Virginia Tech), followed by SportsCenter. And then SportsCenter, again. I took time out to nuke some food, get refills from the fridge, and check a blog or two. But other than that? Not much.

I may have mentioned this before, so stop me if you’ve heard this. One of the BEST things about being single at this stage of life is I can be perfectly indolent and watch football and drink beer all damned day if I so choose. And I did so choose yesterday, Gentle Reader. And there was no nagging, no guilt, no looking over my shoulder or dodging pointed little comments from "interested parties" of the female persuasion, such as “Are you going to watch teevee ALL day?” Why, yes, now that you mention it, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. And so I did. Yesterday was “Nothing But Net Football.”

Life is GOOD.

So. I scanned the Detroit papers this morning and the natives are restless after UoM’s loss to Oregon yesterday. Michiganders don’t take losing lightly, especially when it’s Big Blue doing the losing. Lotsa calls for Lloyd Carr’s head, but Mitch Albom isn’t one of those guys. Not that Mitch wasn’t critical; he was:

I hate to put it this way, but there have been Lions games less embarrassing than this.

No, coach Lloyd Carr does not need to be fired -- come on, calm down -- and U-M fans shouldn't throw themselves off a bridge. But let's be honest. The Wolverines are not very good right now. Doesn't matter what they were supposed to be. Doesn't matter what their preseason ranking was or which seniors were returning.

They have played two games now and the defense is apparently still checking into the dorms.

They have played two games and their senior quarterback, Chad Henne, has unhinged the team with uncharacteristic mistakes in key moments, including an opening-drive interception and several momentum-killing sacks Saturday. (To make matters worse, Henne left the game after the first half with a leg injury and is "highly doubtful" for the Notre Dame game, according to Carr. As Woody Allen once joked: "The food here is terrible." "Yeah, and such small portions!")

It's all upside down in Ann Arbor. Right now, this team cannot capitalize on offense. (How's 365 yards and only seven points?) Right now, this team cannot stop anything on defense. (How's six first-half possessions for Oregon, 32 points and no punts?)

Next week’s game against Notre Dame should be a doozy. Not for the quality of play, of course…two programs in deep doo-doo ordinarily would make for a snoozer of a game. But there’s serious drama here. Both Michigan and Notre Dame have a national fan base, and together Michigan and ND have the winningest records in college football, being Numbers One and Two, respectively. You can bet your boots the eyes of America (the college football eyes, anyway) will be on Ann Arbor next weekend. I predict it will be one Helluva game. There’s nothing really on the line in next week’s game except pride. And sometimes pride is everything.

Interesting article on cyber-war in The Times (UK) today…

China’s ambitions extend to crippling an enemy’s financial, military and communications capabilities early in a conflict, according to military documents and generals’ speeches that are being analysed by US intelligence officials. Describing what is in effect a new arms race, a Pentagon assessment states that China’s military regards offensive computer operations as “critical to seize the initiative” in the first stage of a war.

The plan to cripple the US aircraft carrier battle groups was authored by two PLA air force officials, Sun Yiming and Yang Liping. It also emerged this week that the Chinese military hacked into the US Defence Secretary’s computer system in June; have regularly penetrated computers in at least 10 Whitehall departments, including military files, and infiltrated German government systems this year.

[…]

The Pentagon logged more than 79,000 attempted intrusions in 2005. About 1,300 were successful, including the penetration of computers linked to the Army’s 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions and the 4th Infantry Division. In August and September of that year Chinese hackers penetrated US State Department computers in several parts of the world. Hundreds of computers had to be replaced or taken offline for months. Chinese hackers also disrupted the US Naval War College’s network in November, forcing the college to shut down its computer systems for several weeks. The Pentagon uses more than 5 million computers on 100,000 networks in 65 countries.

The interesting thing about all of this hacking and cracking activity is that we just let it go… publicly, anyway. There’s no denying unauthorized access to computer systems or denial of service (DoS) attacks are acts of aggression. But the problem is that no one dies and nothing is physically blown up. Therefore it’s pretty hard, if not impossible, to retaliate under these circumstances. One would hope the CIA and DoD are cooperating in an effort to develop our own offensive cyber-war capabilities, because playing defense just isn’t enough in this arena. A few narrowly-targeted but pointedly specific covert attacks on the PLA’s IT infrastructure on our part (with plausible deniability, of course) just might send a message. And it would be great training for our guys, too.

Also in The Times…the Brits can rest easy; it’s not as bad as they think. In quantifiable areas, anyway. I don’t think there’s a way to measure a nation’s Political Correctness Quotient. The Brits would have serious cause for worry if there was a way to measure that sort of stuff. As would the US of A…

Further from The Times… “Valium Fred, the panacea of the people.” Excerpts:

People like Fred Thompson. So far as I can tell, that is currently the prime rationale for his candidacy for president of the United States. He doesn’t need to launch a media blitz to achieve this level of public fondness. His avuncular, crumpled tower of a personage is well known from many episodes of Law & Order.

In this year’s race, only one other Republican candidate has even minimal charm – the obscure Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, who is obviously (and rather successfully) running for vice-president. Rudy Giuliani is many things, but likable isn’t one of them. Mitt Romney has failed to win over many conservatives despite an impeccable family life and a platform largely dictated by the far-right activist base. The slickness and eagerness to please seem to glide past any political traction. John McCain is too prickly to be cuddled. But good old Fred has the shtick down.

[…]

Thompson is accused of being lazy. So was Ronald Reagan, of course. But there is a key difference between the Reagan of 1979 and the Thompson of 2007. Reagan had spent a lifetime honing arguments, finessing policy, articulating a broad philosophical view, while proposing concrete and radical policy options.

Thompson has a legislative record as a senator from Tennessee that is all but invisible. Yes, he has a solid conservative record on taxes and other people’s spending. But he was a hog for his home-state pork barrel projects. He was, in other words, a popular backbencher – but no more. At times his candidacy feels merely like a rationale for a man who senses that Americans are deeply uneasy about their current leadership, wants to reassure them, but has no idea substantively how.

A thinker he isn’t. He’s rather a conveyor of mood. In a period of less moment, when less is at stake, this might be an aesthetic preference: a calm presence in a storm. But on the substance of war, and foreign policy, the Thompson shtick can seem somewhat detached from the needs of the moment.

Just so. One might think it odd I agree with the opinion of Andrew Freakin’ Sullivan, of all people. And yeah, it IS strange, given I don’t agree with Sullivan on nearly anything. But I think he’s right about Thompson.

I haven’t made up my mind about who I’m going to support as of yet. But Fred ain’t in MY top tier at the moment, for the reasons quoted above and others that are mentioned in the text of the entire article. Fred’s a nice, likable sort of guy. But being likable ain’t exactly the be-all, end-all quality for the leader of the Free World, now, is it? Substance, please.

Today’s Pic: OK, it’s yet another video. This time it’s SN3 motoring around the premises on his plastic motorcycle, which was one of his Christmas presents back in 2000 (making him three years old at Christmas, but four years old when this video was shot). My first attempt at cultivating a "chip off the old block."

Commentary by The Second Mrs. Pennington.

Somewhere in Colorado. April, 2001.

Bad Day at the Big House

Wow. It’s a real bad day in A² — Michigan is down to Oregon by a bunch: 32-7, at the half. This after last week’s shocking loss to Appalachian State... possibly the biggest upset and worst loss in college football, ever.

Big Blue was ranked Number Five in the pre-season polls. Who’d a thunk it?

Can't say I'm not indulging in just a lil bit of schadenfreude. Coz Notre Dame is having (and will continue to have) a bad year, too. Misery loves company.