Snush!

Snow rain slush mix.  Lovely.  Alex and Kelly have decided to stay one more day rather than risk the snow on the passes on the way to Pittsburgh.

West Virginia Tries To Avoid Snakehead Confusion

DNR produces graphic to help aid anglers in identifying fish

Relax, anglers. If you catch a fish in West Virginia and think it might be one of those nasty northern snakeheads you've heard about, chances are it's not.

It's almost certainly a bowfin - a species that has prowled the depths of Mountain State waters since before the last Ice Age.

"We've gotten calls from people who think they have caught snakeheads, but really what they had caught were bowfins," said Scott Morrison, a district fisheries biologist for the state Division of Natural Resources. "We've never had a confirmed sighting of a snakehead in West Virginia."

A 2004 search found an established population of snakeheads in the Potomac River between Great Falls and the Chesapeake Bay. Fisheries experts believe the fish are restricted to that single stretch of river by the presence of the falls upstream and the salinity of the bay downstream.

Even so, West Virginia officials have been on the lookout for snakeheads ever since. If the species ever gets established upstream from Great Falls, it could then migrate upstream into West Virginia's Cacapon and South Branch rivers.

As awareness of snakeheads has increased, so have reports from anglers who believe they might have caught them.

Morrison said all those fish turned out to be bowfins. To help fishermen distinguish snakeheads from bowfins, DNR officials had a graphic created, and have posted the graphic on the agency's website.

The graphic can also be use to distinguish snakeheads from  "dogfish", "mudfish", "grindle" (or "grinnel"),"swamp muskie", "black fish", "cottonfish" "swamp bass", "poisson-castor", "Speckled Cat" "beaverfish", "Cypress trout","lawyer""tchoupique" or "choupique"

Merry, Merry, Christmas!

Please Come Home for Christmas

Johnny and Edgar Winter



or maybe the live version...

D.C. Cops Look at David Gregory for Gun Law Violation

Washington D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier has confirmed that the department is looking into allegations that NBC's David Gregory violated D.C.'s gun banning laws during a recent taping of Meet the Press. 

In a discussion about gun control, host David Gregory brandished a 30-round magazine purportedly for an AR-15 or similar "assault rifle." The discussion took place on December 23, during the broadcast of NBC's Sunday morning political talk show.

Washington D.C.’s gun laws, however, state that even possessing such a device is a violation. Meet the Press is filmed at NBC's D.C. studios...

Breitbart contacted the office of the police chief and asked if there were any plans to look into this apparent violation of the District's gun laws. In response, Chief Lanier replied, "Yes, we are investigating the incident to determine if the magazine was in fact real."

We will continue to watch this developing story.

I reported this incident a couple days ago in "When will David Gregory go to jail?", which I regarded as a strictly rhetorical question.  David will no doubt be cleared on the grounds that they can't really be sure from the video evidence that the clip is real. The studio personnel who actually went out and bought the clip (probably in Virginia) and brought it into D.C. will probably not be questioned, and if they are questioned, will probably lie about it, and claim it was produced by a props department.

I'd love to see David and a few other NBC people subjected to some legal harassment on this matter, though.  Good job, Breitbart for continuing to piss off the MSM from the grave.

How Much of What You Know Just Ain't So?

About half...

Dinosaurs were cold-blooded. Increased K-12 spending and lower pupil/teacher ratios boost public school student outcomes. Most of the DNA in the human genome is junk. Saccharin causes cancer and a high fiber diet prevents it. Stars cannot be bigger than 150 solar masses.

In the past half-century, all of the foregoing facts have turned out to be wrong. In the modern world facts change all of the time, according to Samuel Arbesman, author of the new book The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date...

Facts are being manufactured all of the time, and, as Arbesman shows, many of them turn out to be wrong. Checking each one is how the scientific process is supposed to work; experimental results need to be replicated by other researchers. So how many of the findings in 845,175 articles published in 2009 and recorded in PubMed, the free online medical database, were actually replicated? Not all that many. In 2011, a disquieting study in Nature reported that a team of researchers over 10 years was able to reproduce the results of only six out of 53 landmark papers in preclinical cancer research.

Merry Christmas!

That will be all for now.

Best gift:

From my dad, who apparently followed the butterfly posts this year.

Christmas Cuties - Year 3

Wombat-socho links this post at The Other McCain in his Christmas Edition "Rule 5: Come Dancing."

One Reason the Right is Reluctant to Lose Gun Rights

Death Penalty for Global Warming Deniers?

...In this article I am going to suggest that the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for influential GW deniers. But before coming to this surprising conclusion, please allow me to explain where I am coming from.

I have always been opposed to the death penalty in all cases, and I have always supported the clear and consistent stand of Amnesty International on this issue. The death penalty is barbaric, racist, expensive, and is often applied by mistake. Apparently, it does not even act as a deterrent to would-be murderers. Hopefully, the USA and China will come to their senses soon.

Even mass murderers should not be executed, in my opinion. Consider the politically motivated murder of 77 people in Norway in 2011. Of course the murderer does not deserve to live, and there is not the slightest doubt that he is guilty. But if the Norwegian government killed him, that would just increase the number of dead to 78. It would not bring the dead back to life. In fact, it would not achieve anything positive at all. I respect the families and friends of the victims if they feel differently about that. I am simply presenting what seems to me to be a logical argument.

GW deniers fall into a completely different category from Behring Breivik. They are already causing the deaths of hundreds of millions of future people. We could be speaking of billions, but I am making a conservative estimate.

It's bad when people kill people; but it's really bad when people disagree with liberals, actually use facts to refute their arguments, and make them look bad while doing it.

Off with their heads!

This story has been around the internet a couple of times.

Why I Don't Get Paid to Be a Movie Critic

Georgia, Alex, Kelly and I went to see The Hobbit today, in 2D.  I liked it. Lot's of CGI action, some humor, a little "wisdom" tossed in for kids now and then.  Moderately true to the story, with some additions and twists to keep it from being totally predictable to those of us who have read the original book a couple hundred times (I exaggerate, but not too much).

Ace went to see movie recently, and just posted his review of it.  He hated it, and everything he says is true:

And so it is with The Hobbit. We have what should be (and which was, in literary form) a heist story, almost a sword & sorcery romp, but the filmmakers have laid over this an attempt to embiggify the story, to puff it up really, into something like the Lord of the Rings.

It doesn't work. The stakes just aren't the same.

Yes, The Hobbit book was written much more lightly than the LOTR books, with the Hobbit being written first, for children, and LOTR being written second, for teenagers and adults.  I get that.  And yes, Hobbit movie has much the same feel as the LOTR movies.  It doesn't bother me.  The books were written for different audiences, while the move must be directed for a mass audience.

For example, they've inserted a completely made-up character, an orc named Azog the Defiler, to play the same role as the Black Riders from LotR, a scary pursuer who shows up whenever the stopwatch indicates it's time for an action sequence.

I noticed that, and I could have easily done with out it, but it didn't bother me.  The modern movie audience is not the same as the pre-WWII audience that old JRR intended the Hobbit for more modern audiences, who have come to expect the black hat character to run through the movie.

Then, at Rivendell, they make the stop there very similar to the stop featured in Fellowship of the Ring by adding in a meeting of some sort of Grand Council consisting of Elrond, Galadriel (who wasn't in the Hobbit at all), Gandalf, and Saruman (who wasn't in the Hobbit at all). This counsel talks about The Enemy and The Shadow, ideas that were only peripheral and hinted at in The Hobbit. Thus the stay at Rivendell in The Hobbit, which was quite different from the stay in Rivendell in the LotR, comes off as a copycat in the film version.

The Hobbit was written prior to LOTR, and the information this addition is based on was material from the appendices of LOTR.  In the movies, of course, LOTR preceded The Hobbit, so this material was added to help tie the Hobbit to the older LOTR movie, and also, to give PJ an excuse to insert a good looking woman hot elf chick , however goofily dressed.  Again, different?  Yes. Bad?  Meh.

The goblin sequence is ruined simply by virtue of it being so cartoonish, in both conception and actual execution (it's all CGI, all of it).

People falling 60 feet is scary, because we sense the reality of it and fear for their safety. People falling 300 feet, and surviving, is not scary. It's just silly. Peter Jackson just doesn't seem to grasp this, that more is frequently not better. Go too far and the physics fall apart and it all just seems absurd. Just because you can do it on a computer doesn't mean it will play on the screen.

Physics aren't directly applicable to a fantasy world, and PJ did a pretty good job of showing how the dwarves and Gandalf survived the huge fall in the goblin chase, with a number of slowing events.  Besides, dwarves are supposed to be much tougher than humans. Bilbo's fall?  Not shown, so similar mechanisms are assumed.

A few paragraphs ago, you were complaining the books were too adult, and not childlike enough, and now you're complain that they're too cartoonish? A little consistency please?  Also remember that in the beginning, the story is the reminiscences of  Bilbo years after the fact as an old hobbit, and the goblin part was what he had to have been told by the dwarves and Gandalf since he was missing (in "Gollum's lair" for most of it.  So yes, some hyperbole is likely built in.  Hey, it's just an afternoon, not an investment in reality.

Christmas Eve at the Beach

Alex, Kelly and Hendrix came down from Pittsburgh for Christmas yesterday, so after a ton of cookies (Kelly's mom, the goddess of cookies, sent a a box down) , some eggnog and 3 football games yesterday, we, and the dogs, all desperately needed a walk.

It was overcast, about 35 F, and moderately breezy; not the best of days, but not unusual for December, after the official start of astronomical winter. 

Here's something I've never seen before, Turkey Vultures riding the wave in the wind over the top of the trees.

One of those not really sunrise sunrises, with a little help from the saturation slider.

After a couple dozen tangled leashes, Alex and Kelly let the dogs off to burn off some energy.

Not a great day for finding fossils, but it did find this good sized, but moderately worn Snaggletooth.

When Will Dick Gregory Go to Jail?

Dick Gregory violates Washington D.C. Gun Law on Camera

NBC’s David Gregory on Sunday held up a high-capacity magazine for ammunition on national television, a possible violation of Washington, D.C. gun law.

Gregory was asking National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre whether the NRA was willing to cede any ground on new gun legislation following the Dec. 14 elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn.

“Here is a magazine for ammunition that carries 30 bullets,” Gregory said on “Meet the Press,” holding it up. “Now isn’t it possible that if we got rid of these, if we replaced them and said, ‘Well, you could only have a magazine that carries five bullets or ten bullets,’ isn’t it just possible that we could reduce the carnage in a situation like Newtown?”

Strictly a rhetorical question, of course. Liberal jourolisters are allowed to violate the laws in the interest of the agenda.

In other news, despite castigating Wayne LaPierre for proposing armed guards at schools, David Gregory's own children go to the private school, Sidwell Friends, which has armed guards, in addition to the armed Secret Service agents there to protect the President's kids. Having their kids protected by armed guards is clearly intended to be perk for our betters.

Sunday 12/23/12 Beach Report

Today was much nicer at the beach than yesterday, despite being almost 10 F colder; the reason?  No wind to speak of. 

 Skye approves.

The warmer water, and the cold air had a decent Fata Morgana mirage going across the Bay.  Here, James Island floats over an inverted reflection of itself.

 A tiny, yet whole scallop shell.  No, there are no scallops in this part of the Bay.  This is one of our fossils, Chesapectens.  A large one would completely cover my hand.

Fossiling was poor otherwise, only four small shark's teeth.

 A male Buffy and his harem.

It was still cold enough that ice coated parts of the cliff still in the shade.

She Could Have Been More Succinct

But, "None" is a perfectly acceptable answer. Repealing another law would be better.

Wheel of Fortune: Correct Call or Rip Off?

Watch the video and decide if you think this was the right call:

Now, go below the fold for alternate visions of this great controversy:

A Windy Day at the Beach

While it was about 40 F today, the real story was the wind.  It was blowing so hard  from the north (25 kts sustained with gusts to 35), that even with the chin strings cinched up tight, it was hard to keep my hand on.  A pretty heavy collection of fluffy clouds had the sunlight hit and miss. It was a hit in this shot.







In this shot, you can see the sand blowing off the beach and over the north jetty.  Fortunately, it was only around ankle level, and not up at eye (and camera) level.  This is the second of two windstorms this week; Thursday night we had winds up to 35 sustained and 45 gusts.  Fortunately, not much damage as the leaves are mostly out of the trees, and the soil is not saturated.

Guess who doesn't care about wind, cold or flying sand? We couldn't walk too far today; the tide was up, so we couldn't get around the cliff.  But, using the leash, I persuaded Skye to accept the short version.

 Another shot showing the sand blowing down the beach at us.

There were some pretty decent waves, too, at least by our standards.  Looking south across the south jetty to "Old Long Beach"

It must have been hard times at home to have these girls out making calls and listening to music out in the howling wind.  They were the only other people on the beach.

The Buffies aren't impressed by the wind and waves either.

A long shot look at the Gas Docks.  Looking lonely these days, with too much natural gas to bother importing any, and not yet ready (or permitted for that matter) to act as an exporting facility.

If You Only Read One Post About Guns in Schools...

Read this one.  A little slow at first; it wouldn't hurt to skip the first three paragraphs or so.

Rule 5 Saturday - Santa's Little Helpers

Nothing fancy here, just a selection of some of Santa's foxiest elves showing off their toys.

Sounds Like a Bad Episode of CSI

Indicted drug analyst Annie Dookhan’s e-mails reveal her close personal ties to prosecutors

Annie Dookhan was supposed to be an independent witness, a state chemist coolly analyzing drug evidence for the court. But her e-mails over the last nine years, obtained by the Globe, vividly detail her close relationship with prosecutors, including a man to whom she poured her heart out, and her strong desire to put suspects behind bars.

Dookhan, arraigned Thursday on 27 counts of altering drug evidence and obstructing justice, viewed herself as part of the prosecution team, the ­e-mails show. She coached ­assistant district attorneys on trial strategy and told one that her goal was “getting [drug dealers] off the streets.” When Dookhan told a prosecutor that she could not testify in her case, the woman replied with an anguished: “No no no!!! I need you!!!”
...
The collection of more than 1,000 e-mails could raise new questions about the reliability of any of Dookhan’s work in the 34,000 drug cases she handled since 2003 at the state drug lab in Jamaica Plain. Dookhan’s admitted altering of test results and mishandling of evidence has already led to the release from jail of 159 drug case ­defendants, with many more expected to be freed.

As portrayed on TV, the people who work on evidence seem to act as agents of the police, pursuing evidence the police suggest, and even taking a hand in the arrest from time to time.  But in reality, they're supposed to be dispassionately evaluating the evidence to see what the truth is.  But in fact, they're largely in contact with the police and prosecutors, and not the defendants and their lawyers.  It's hard not to see the police and prosecutors as the their friends and the good guys, and the defendants and their lawyers as the bad guys.

Objectivity is hard. Very few people achieve it.

I Knew I Had a Good Excuse

I just didn't know what it was:

Brussels sprouts overdose puts man in hospital