Bacon Rodeo

This is not OK

2026-01-27T18:11:00.008-06:00

I am from Minneapolis.

I lived a few blocks away from where Alex Pretti was killed. For somewhere around 12 years. It was so long that I’m even a bit fuzzy around exact dates. Like, I think I moved there in 1994 and moved out in 2006? So let's say it was a dozen years.

I have stood right where Alex Pretti stood.

I have been to every business on the 2600 block of Nicollet Avenue many times.

Glam Doll Donuts, my favorite donut shop in the whole world, wasn’t there when I lived nearby. It opened later, in 2013. But even after I moved away, I made a point to stop there when I came back. Every time I was in Minneapolis, I tried to get coffee and a donut at Glam Doll at least once per visit. Every time, I thought to myself, geez, I wish this had been here when I lived in the neighborhood!

A perfect weekend morning for me on more than one trip was coffee + donut at Glam Doll, followed by record shopping at Cheapo Records. With friends, or by myself. The picture above was taken by me on a 2023 visit to Glam Doll.

That section of Nicollet Avenue is called “Eat Street” because it holds some of the best restaurants in the Twin Cities. I’ve been to many of them. Some have closed since my time there, but many remain: Quang, Pho 79/Caravelle, Black Forest Inn, Rainbow Restaurant, and others. Little Tijuana was a famously dive-y Mexican Restaurant right around the corner, on 26th Street.

I used to be nervous to walk around that neighborhood when I first moved there in the 1990s. It took me a while to get comfortable with it. I learned to love walking to the corner store, to the hardware store, to the restaurants, to the coffee shop that used to be on the corner of Nicollet and Franklin, and then southward down to all the great restaurants of Eat Street.

I used to stop at Caravelle to pick up Chinese food on the way home from my job in the suburbs.

I used to love a good Paulaner Weissbier at the Black Forest Inn.

That neighborhood was home. It still holds a special place in my heart.

I am sad and angry for what happened to Alex Pretti on 26th and Nicollet.

I am sad for the fine people behind Glam Doll Donuts. I want the world to know about them, but because their donuts are fantastic and everybody there is always friendly … not because of this. This is not why their storefront should be on the national news.

What the government is doing is damaging Minneapolis. Hurting my onetime home. Hurting my friends. Hurting good people.

It must stop.

One-pot Instant Pot beef and pasta

2025-11-22T13:08:00.001-06:00

I love my electric pressure cooker. My off brand not quite an "Instant Pot" is my go-to device for cooking an easy and simple dinner. I've been writing these up as recipes lately, so I can easily find them later, and today, I'll share with you this one: How to make pasta and ground meat in the instant pot.

You'll need:

One pound fresh ground beef, chicken or turkey. I often use ground chicken, because it's often on sale where I live, as low as $3.99 a pound. Sometimes even less.
A jar of pasta sauce, typical size is 24 ounces.
Dried noodles. Nothing special here, I just buy whatever medium-sized pasta is on sale, usually rotini or penne. I usually use about 8 ounces, or about half a typical box.
1.5 cups of broth or water. I mostly use water and tend to save broth for soups and stews.

First, sauté the meat in the instant pot. Brown the meat, it's easy. Chunk it up as you go. I have what I call the "meat asterisk," a meat masher or ground meat chopper. You should get one, they're cheap. I got mine at Aldi for $3, but Dollar Tree has even cheaper ones. It is perfect for breaking up the fresh ground meat block into little blobs.

(If you want to get fancy, you can add italian spices at this point, or even a bit of diced onion. I keep diced onion in the freezer so that I can grab a handful of it in a pinch and add it to whatever I'm making.)

Next, turn off sauté mode and pour in the water. Add the pasta noodles and gently push them so they're mostly in the water. Add the sauce over the top. Try to cover it all with sauce. Don't stir anything at all.

Set the pressure cooker to cook for five minutes on high. Which really means, it'll take 15-20 minutes to come up to pressure, then it will pressure cook for 5 minutes, then it will take 15-25 minutes to come back down from pressure and then you can eat dinner. So I try to set the cooker up an hour before I want to have dinner, and after it's done cooking, it goes into "keep warm" mode automatically, so dinner will be warm and ready whenever I happen to wander back into the kitchen after it's done.

That's all there is to it. Just the maybe 10 minutes of prep, if you're browning ground beef (chicken or turkey browns faster), and that's it. It's more than enough food for two people, with ample leftovers for tomorrow's lunch. Or you could portion it up into zip bags or containers to freeze some of it for later re-heating.

The pasta will be soft, but that's okay with me.

Enjoy!

Bag Storage at Denver Union Station

2024-09-04T10:58:00.003-05:00

Denver's Union Station has no place to check bags, at least as of August, 2024. They used to. The station has a very nice hotel called the Crawford, which used to check bags for a fee. They no longer do. The station also services Amtrak, and Amtrak used to have lockers, but they no longer do. I have no idea why, but it's easy to guess.

I had checked out of my hotel in Boulder, taken the (very nice) Flatiron Flyer bus back to Denver, and now I had time to kill before my evening train back to Chicago. Where could I park my bags, so I could walk around and explore, unfettered? I asked at the front desk of the Crawford Hotel and the nice lady there gave me a card for LUGDEN. LUGDEN is....a van. A van parked on Wynkoop Street, by 17th, right across from Union Station. They'll let you check luggage for a fee (at the time of writing, $3/hour or $10/day). I was able to check both of my bags successfully, head to Meow Wolf, followed by lunch and wandering, then swing back and pick up my bags in time to grab a pre-train cocktail at the Terminal Bar.

So, I'm sharing this here for those who, like me, searched online and found information lacking. You'll find old message board posts that suggest that Amtrak and the Crawford will check bags for a fee, but then neither Amtrak or the Crawford's website say this any more, and when I asked at the hotel, they weren't storing bags for non-guests. So, anything you see online suggesting otherwise is probably out of date.

Need to store luggage at Denver's Union Station? You'll want to look for LUGDEN. Find their website here, get a card from the front desk of the Crawford Hotel, or look for them on Wynkoop Street.

While it may seem to be a bit of an odd setup, everything worked fine, the process was easy, the person manning the van was professional, and they do take credit cards. I had no issues at all and would recommend them to others.

The 1981 Lake Harriet / Har Mar tornadoes in Minneapolis

2024-07-18T10:25:00.004-05:00

The other night here in Chicago we had a crazy walloping of 11+ confirmed tornadoes during very bad storms. After surviving that, coworkers were sharing their opinions with me about what's scarier, hurricanes or tornadoes? I've had to get out of town to avoid a hurricane before, and I guess I've been lucky that I've always been able to make use of fair warning -- we tend to see the hurricanes coming, though their path can change and their intensity, too.

But what of tornadoes? I definitely am not a fan of tornadoes, going all the way back to when I was a child, growing up in Minneapolis. In 1986 there was a storm in Fridley (a suburb of Minneapolis) that spawned a huge tornado that a TV station caught on video and was famously shared around the world.

But even prior to that, back in 1981, a tornado ripped across the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and went right through the neighborhood of Linden Hills, where I was growing up. I was wondering about that tornado, asking myself how correct my recollection of it was, and it turns out that local television station KARE-TV recapped that June 14, 1981 tornado a few years ago, and so I share that with you below. Enjoy!

(They've also recapped the famous July 1986 tornado as well.)

Like Grandma's basement

2024-01-08T16:04:00.004-06:00

Sometimes I order an old record from eBay, sight unseen. Or seen via photo. But not smelled. I have no idea how it's going to smell until it arrives. I guess that's how I ended up with this album, which smells like grandma's basement. I guess that this is proof that it really is an original pressing from 1963.

The album: Crash! Kenny Burrell with the Brother Jack McDuff Quartet.

Great album. I've already listened to it half a dozen times in less than a month.

Growing Spam Resource

2024-01-04T13:54:00.006-06:00

My deliverability blog Spam Resource got about 398,000 visits in 2023. Is that good or bad? It feels good. It's been fun blogging about email, deliverability, mailbox providers, marketing best practices, and all that kind of stuff. Near the end of 2021, I slowly started to overhaul the blog with the hope of increasing visibility and traffic.

First, I added images to every post. There were more than a thousand posts on the blog, and I went back through every one and added an image, stock photo, or graphic of some sort to it. That took a while, and at first, I wasn't very good at it. Slow load times due to big files, and generic stock photos (and a hefty stock photo licensing fee), and a struggle to find graphics to fit particular topics. Deliverability isn't photogenic or visually inspiring. But I got through it all, and ever since then, every single new blog post gets a graphic -- which I now usually create myself, either from scratch, or starting with royalty-free imagery of some kind.

Next, I revamped the blog template to make the site look a bit like a news site, with sections and groupings of different topics. The intent there is to expose more content on the main page, and make the blog look more like a resource than just a linear sharing of somebody's brain dump. If you visit the main page of the blog, you'll now see that there's a lot of content there just ripe for the browsing, versus the old days when the front page just showed the last 5-10 posts and nothing else.

All of that, plus email newsletter automation that will compile a week's worth of posts into an email newsletter for me, even if I don't have time to do it myself, have resulted in a blog that seems to be growing. Traffic is up, people actually link to my blog posts, and the newsletter gives me another avenue to connect with and network within this industry.

Blogging doesn't seem to be as cool or as hip as it once was. But it seems to be working well for me!

Quick and Incomplete Notes on Low Salt Food

2021-06-22T12:02:00.006-05:00

I've had to change my diet recently after learning that I have a heart condition. It's not possible to completely eliminate salt (unless I want to only eat rocks), so I'm not going to be able to get to a zero sodium diet, but I have decided to eliminate sodium from my diet wherever I can. Here's a few of my notes on what I look for when buying food.

Sandwiches: Sandwiches are mostly out as lunchmeat is high in sodium. And bread and cheese are not much better. But I've found a solution that works for me, and that is this: Plainville Farms no salt turkey breast from Whole Foods, Ezekiel Low Sodium "Food for Life" bread, and thinly sliced Swiss cheese. The turkey breast comes sliced from the Whole Foods deli counter, and it's great. It tastes like carved turkey. The bread comes frozen, which is odd, but it actually contains no sodium, if you get the low sodium version. It toasts up nicely and is whole grain. And the sliced cheese that has the lowest sodium is always Swiss cheese. And going for a thin slice limits sodium even more.

Soda: I really should avoid diet sodas overall, for multiple reasons. But I'm only human, and I love the taste of Diet Coke. Diet Coke, and most diet soda, is NOT free of sodium, however. Instead, I buy Zevia diet soda, which is sodium free. For the diet cola, note that Zevia makes versions both with caffeine and without. It seems as though the caffeine free version might be available only at Whole Foods.

Frozen meals: At first, I thought, I'm not really on a low calorie diet, and I love things that are spicy, including things with buffalo sauce. But have you looked at the nutrition info on any spicy or "power" TV dinner? Some of them have more than a thousand milligrams of sodium, which is nuts. If I'm going to have a sodium bomb, I'm going to get a pizza, not some microwave frozen dinner.

So, I started reading labels and I've noticed that Healthy Choice has a series of frozen dinners, most of which under the "Cafe Steamers" sub-brand. A lot of them have less than 500 or 600 milligrams of sodium, which is relatively good, considering that it is prepared food. The other thing about them is that they seem to taste better than most other healthier frozen meals. They come in a special tray that keeps the sauce in the bottom while the meat and vegetables steam above them. That means that the meal comes out of the microwave in much better shape than you'd expect. I always put the meat and vegetables into a new bowl then pour the sauce from the original bowl over the food. The sauce, and the way you heat this up, really helps you end up with something that taste good, and it's not a mushy blob. And some of the flavors are ones you wouldn't normally find in a "healthy" frozen dinner, like beef chimichurri, which has an actually spicy sauce, and the barbecue seasoned steak with red potatoes, which has a nice barbecue sauce. The portion of steak, especially in the barbecue one, is tiny. But that's OK. It's only a 9.5 ounce meal, so it's not going to be 8 ounces of steak. And it's nice that some of these have beef instead of just the more common chicken.

Most days, I'll have a Cafe Steamer bowl for lunch. I've been really happy with them.

Tortilla chips: No salt tortilla chips are easy to find at Whole Foods, less easy to find elsewhere. But paring them with pre-made salsa is a lost cause, even "low sodium" salsa is high in sodium. If you're not going to make your own salsa (which we've done a few times, but it's hard to find the time), you've got to find a plan B. For me, I've started buying little six packs of individual cups of guacamole. It's not reduced sodium, but since they're tiny little individual cups, I prevent a sodium overload via portion control. Chips + guac = a good snack when I'm starving.

Frozen french fries: Did you know that Whole Foods sells frozen fries that are unsalted? They air fry up nicely, and your partner can always choose to salt their portion. I put a little bit of fake salt on mine.

Canned veggies and beans: Read labels. Most canned veggies are high in sodium. Some of them don't have low/no sodium variants. Switch to frozen veggies when possible. Those rarely have much sodium. Whole Foods does have some good low/no salt variants, though, for some things. Like, canned (or Tetra packed) beans. Yes, you can buy dried beans and they're sodium free, but if you're lazy and don't want to cook from dried beans, you can have some choices for low/no sodium canned beans.

I'm sure I'm forgetting some things. I'll try to update this as I think of more things to share.

Hang in there. We need you.

2020-07-26T11:47:00.001-05:00

It's a shitty time. Depression falls from the sky more easily than the rain lately.

Please remember that your family needs you, your friends need you, your pets need you. The world needs you (even if you don't realize it). Depression can and will grab at you. Try hard not to let it eat you up whole. Get up out of bed in the morning, walk your dog, shower, brush your teeth, no matter what. Survive and try to even thrive, so that you can help others through this time.

Please don't fall into the trap of thinking the world just became bad now. I don't mean excuse Trump for all his shit. He's human garbage and responsible for so many bad things. I'll never forget that and neither will you. But what I mean that you need to remember that there were bad people doing bad things before Trump too, and you were maybe just luckier that those bad things personally impacted you less. Black people were getting shot by police when Obama was president, too. And remember how quickly we've stopped talking about W's war crimes. I DO NOT mean that this evens everything out, that we shouldn't be mad, that we shouldn't work to improve our country and our world. We should. We must. I'm not saying accept the current state of affairs. But don't become immobilized over what just happened NOW. Survive it so that you can help others survive it. This is important!

And please don't get sucked into doom scrolling. It drives anxiety. Be aware of the news. Keep up with the news. Don't consume it non-stop. Don't consume only the news. It uses up time that you could be spending helping others.

Use the news to inform how you can help. If you can't directly help those affected by the bad shit in the news, look closer to home. In your city/state/neighborhood, there are people that need help. Help them. Volunteer. Deliver. Donate. It can help you feel better and isn't it worth trying to fill your insides with feeling good about helping, to take away from the space being used for the anxiety you're suffering through because of that shitty state of the world.

I know that not everybody has the same ability to survive and/or thrive. Do what you can and keep yourself as powered up as you are able to, so you can help others.

Help somebody today. It'll make two people feel good, you and the person you're helping. That improves the world.

It's poorly written, and I'm sure it doesn't work for everyone, but that's my take.

Please wear a mask

2020-06-22T09:48:00.008-05:00

Please. Wear a mask when you are outdoors and around others.

Yes, wearing masks helps. Here's why. Maria Godoy, Minnesota Public Radio, June 21, 2020.

More.

Even more:

No, face masks don't lower oxygen intake or put you at risk of carbon dioxide poisoning.

Updated: July 20, 2020.

But what of antifa?

2020-06-02T18:48:00.008-05:00

What IS antifa? I don't know much about them, and I suspect you don't either, so maybe start with Wikipeda. Jezebel's Harron Walker has a good and quick take for you as well. See "Area Fascist Still Doesn't Know What Antifa Is." (Jezebel, May 31, 2020.)

Beyond that, a greater understanding of "what is antifa" is too much for me to tackle. Instead, I'm just taking a few notes here based on my concern around the president labeling antifa a terrorist group. I decided to do a bit of googling and reading around the news to try to answer one question for myself: Is "antifa" actually behind all the rioting and looting going on in the US these past days? If so, maybe some level of outrage is warranted. If not, it's fair to question what's actually going on here.

Let's start with this guy. This goober from downstate Illinois (Matthew Lee Rupert) went to Minnesota to hand out bombs and start fires. He was arrested in Chicago while likely engaging in similar behavior. The only reference to this guy being "in antifa" is from some untrustworthy source on Twitter that I can't even find a link to right now. Story of his arrest: "‘Let’s start a riot’: Galesburg man hit with federal charge related to rioting in Chicago." (Chicago Sun Times, June 1, 2020.)

Next: This goober from Pennsylvania (Brian Jordan Bartels) was arrested for "having “kicked off” the escalation in Pittsburgh" and similarly there's no clear connection between this guy and antifa. "A former friend of Bartels who corresponded with him for several years before they had a falling out in May said Bartels never once mentioned antifa." Story of his arrest: "White instigators to blame for mayhem in some protests, local officials say." (Washington Post, June 1, 2020.)

Next: Evidence that bad guys online are pretending to be antifa. One assumes it's an attempt to hide any true affiliation the bad guys have and also to misdirect blame. See: "White supremacists pose as Antifa online, call for violence." (CNN, June 2, 2020.)

Next: More 'not antifa.' "3 self-proclaimed members of the far-right 'boogaloo' movement were arrested on domestic terrorism charges for trying to spark violence during protests." (Business Insider, June 4, 2020.)

And "FBI 'has no intelligence' indicating antifa was linked to weekend violence in the George Floyd protests, despite Trump and Republicans' claims." (Business Insider, June 2, 2020.)

Whether or not you "believe" in antifa, you ought to be concerned about the president labeling them a terrorist group. From"Op-Ed: Why Trump’s tweet about labeling ‘antifa’ a terrorist group is so dangerous" (Jonathan Turley, Los Angeles Times, June 1, 2020.):

This terrorist designation would raise chilling implications for free speech in the United States.

The administration could also move to bar travel and entry of those associated with the movement, including foreign associates. Most worrisome, such a designation can allow a broader crackdown, and even criminal charges, for those deemed to offer “material support” to the movement.

If the government can designate a terrorist organization based on the conduct of some members, the criminalization of political speech could be virtually unlimited.

I also find it reminiscent of Nixon's enemies list.

And on what legal basis? Betsy Woodruff Swan, Politico: President Donald Trump tweeted on Sunday that the U.S. government would be “designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.”

There were just two problems with that. First, he doesn’t appear to have the legal authority to do so. And second, it’s by no means clear the loosely defined group of radical activists is an organization at all.

From "Trump says he's naming antifa a 'Terrorist Organization.' Can he do that?" (May 31, 2020.)

So, yeah, lots of questions. No clear answers. No obvious antifa-led attempt to burn the country down. No clear legal basis to designate antifa anything at all, and no clear evidence that they're actually leading the rioting. I might not be Snopes, but I feel confident in saying that this just doesn't add up.

Black Lives Matter

2020-06-02T17:34:00.007-05:00

Other people can explain this better than I can, so I'm going to quote and link quite a bit here.

Black Lives Matter. Doesn't "All Lives Matter" mean the same thing / mean a good thing, too?

No. German Lopez from VOX explains Why you should stop saying “all lives matter,” explained in 9 different ways . (July 11, 2016.)

It’s a common conversation these days: One person says, “Black lives matter.” Then another responds, “No, all lives matter.”

It’s also a complete misunderstanding of what the phrase “black lives matter” means. The person on the receiving end interprets the phrase as “black lives matter more than any other lives.”

But the point of Black Lives Matter isn't to suggest that black lives should be or are more important than all other lives. Instead, it’s simply pointing out that black people's lives are relatively undervalued in the US — and more likely to be ended by police — and the country needs to recognize that inequity to bring an end to it.

But aren't more white people killed by police than black people?

From "Aren’t more white people than black people killed by police? Yes, but no." (Wesley Lowery, Washington Post, July 11, 2016.)

In 2015, The Washington Post launched a real-time database to track fatal police shootings, and the project continues this year. As of Sunday, 1,502 people have been shot and killed by on-duty police officers since Jan. 1, 2015. Of them, 732 were white, and 381 were black (and 382 were of another or unknown race).

But as data scientists and policing experts often note, comparing how many or how often white people are killed by police to how many or how often black people are killed by the police is statistically dubious unless you first adjust for population.

According to the most recent census data, there are nearly 160 million more white people in America than there are black people. White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers.

Chart from " Black Americans 2.5X More Likely Than Whites to Be Killed By Police" (Statista, June 2, 2020.)

But isn't this just reflective of the fact that black people are responsible for more crime than white people?

No, because that's not actually true. It's based on something called racial profiling, and it's bad science. When you start to break down the numbers, it's clear that black people are arrested and incarcerated at higher rates per capita compared to white people. Meaning if a black person and a white person commit the same crime, the black person is more likely to get arrested and go to jail for it. I've blogged more about that here.

Back to Black Lives Matter. I'm a christian and I find that message offensive.

I dunno, maybe read more of the bible? Here's one example I found on Facebook that seems to make it simple and understandable, even to my addled atheist brain.

Originally from @manny_arteaga on Twitter (May 31, 2020).

My Coronavirus Notes & FAQ

2020-05-24T13:55:00.059-05:00

Here I'm pulling together a few different bits of information on dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic that I believe to be correct. I've linked to sources and included publication dates to help with identification and trust.

Starting with: Should you wear a mask when out and about?

Yes. See this post from Daring Fireball's John Gruber. "We’re waiting for peer-reviewed studies. In the meantime, early studies and anecdotal evidence from countries with established mask-wearing social norms suggest quite strongly that mask wearing is effective." (May 21, 2020.)
See also "HAMSTER RESEARCH SHOWS MASKS EFFECTIVE IN PREVENTING COVID-19 TRANSMISSION" linked to and summarized by John Gruber. (May 21, 2020.)

John's not some conspiracy theorist. He's a respected tech blogger linking to various respectable sources of information.

Note that disposable surgical masks should always be worn with the colored side out. (USA Today, April 15, 2020.)

It's my understanding that a mask is not required or even recommended if you are outdoors and not in immediate distance of others. Is that correct?

Our local alderperson, Maria Hadden, representing the 49th Ward of Chicago, provided clarification on Facebook. Find her comments below. In summary, she recommends erring on the side of caution and always be wearing a mask when you're out and walking around, because if you pass somebody on the sidewalk, as you're quite likely to be within six feet of them. Though this guidance is specific to Chicago, it's wise and should apply in any city where you're going to be walking around near and past other people. Wear a mask, please.

Maria Hadden, 49th Ward Alderperson, Chicago (May 30, 2020): "Here are the facts: All Illinois residents over age 2 must wear a face mask when they can’t maintain a 6-foot social distance in public. In a densely populated neighborhood like ours, you can't pass someone on the sidewalk and leave 6-feet of distance. You're going to have to use your best judgement about when you wear your mask and I'd recommend erring on the side of caution. It's not going to harm you to wear one and worst case scenario, you wear your mask while out for a walk and end up not needing it. No harm, no foul. The alternative is not developing the habit of wearing one and putting your neighbors at risk or causing stress and anxiety for yourself and others if you find yourself unmasked and unprepared for an unplanned social interaction.

Also, here's a little graphic on how to wear your mask."

I think this guidance makes sense considering some doctors and scientists are saying that COVID-19 may be spreading through aerosol transmission. (WebMD, May 27, 2020.)

But I read that surgical masks don't help, as they clearly don't filter out COVID-19 particles.

Multiple sources explain why you should wear a surgical mask when out and about. Here's one: Nicole Hernandez from KREM-TV (May 19, 2020): "a surgical mask can protect surrounding people from the respiratory emissions of the person who wears it. [...] So even if the mask doesn't actually protect the person wearing it from coronavirus, it does help keep that person's droplets from their mouth and nose out of the air. Since that's how COVID-19 can spread, it is ultimately helping reduce the spread."

Johns Hopkins Department of Environmental Health and Engineering Faculty expert Ana Rule said on April 24 that "[surgical] mask[s] will stop those larger particles from depositing on surfaces and potentially being picked up by the next person that touches that surface, for example at the supermarket."

The implication here is that surgical mask may be an imperfect blocker, but that research is ongoing, and that some research is showing that it does help, and that even before that research, a lot of smart folks suggested it might help and cannot hurt. The data on the upside is growing and the downside is minimal.

But I read CDC guidance that said you shouldn't wear a mask!

Guidance evolves over time, for multiple reasons. One of those primary reasons is that this is how science works. CDC initially did not suggest masks, but that guidance changed and now they do recommend masks. Why? "But as Ranney pointed out in an interview with CNBC, it’s “part of the process” that leading public health authorities would adapt their thinking based on new information." Christina Farr, CNBC. (May 23, 2020.)

More from that same CNBC article: "In our culture, we often hold politicians, corporate executives and other leaders accountable for the consistency of their positions. In political debates, candidates will often point out on the debate stage that a rival swung to the left or right over a controversial issue. It suggests a lack of authenticity, or even careerism, and indicates that they can’t be trusted to do what’s right for their constituents.

"[But,] In the scientific world, it’s expected that even the highest-ranking academics will evolve their thinking — and many have done so during this Covid-19 pandemic."

Making me wear a mask is discrimination and I have freedoms and rights! The ADA says you have to accommodate me!

It's been sad to see some people misuse the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to try to argue that they don't have to wear masks and see them claim that the ADA requires that they be let into stores anyway. The law clearly does not say or allow for what they claim. Insider: Anti-mask protesters are trying to commandeer US disability laws to get into stores without face coverings. (May 19, 2020.)

Snopes: Can People Without Disabilities Use an ADA ‘Mask Loophole’ in Stores? No. "For the record, Americans without disabilities are not protected by the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)."

Epstein Becker Green is a "national law firm with a primary focus on health care and life sciences; employment, labor, and workforce management; and litigation and business disputes." On legal content site JD Supra, they published "No Mask, No Service? ADA Considerations for Business Owners Requiring Face Masks in Retail Stores" on May 14, 2020. They explain that a reasonable accommodation under the ADA can be made without letting the person into the store:

"In limited circumstances, there could be a situation in which a customer cannot wear a face mask due to a legitimate health reason (e.g., a person with a respiratory condition who cannot have their breathing restricted). In this case, pursuant to the considerations detailed above, a business may not need to alter their face-mask required policy, but in any event should attempt to accommodate that customer in an alternative manner that would continue to protect the store’s employees and other customers while also providing service to the customer (e.g., providing curb-side pick-up; no contact delivery; or assistance via online store services)."

Should you take hydroxychloroquine?

Probably not. It may increase death risk, and COVID-19 benefits are not clear. (Reuters via Yahoo, Mary 22, 2020.)

I have friends who take hydroxychloroquine it for lupus, and it's serious stuff. They don't do so lightly, so please don't cause a run on this drug so that it becomes harder to get for people for whom it has actually been prescribed.

There was study data published by the Lancet that suggested hydroxychloroquine could increase the risk of death for COVID-19 patients. That study was later questioned and essentially retracted, but even so, health officials are not convinced that the drug is safe or should be recommended for this purpose. (BBC News, June 5, 2020)

"But the president is taking it for COVID-19 prevention" (the president has actually stopped taking it, USA Today, May 24, 2020) as an argument falls down for too many reasons to cover here. Do better.

"But Hannity says..." Watching Sean Hannity is dangerous and puts you at risk. I am not kidding. Vox: A disturbing new study suggests Sean Hannity’s show helped spread the coronavirus. (Apr 22, 2020.)

Is it safe to go back to bars and restaurants?

That depends. Do you want to be part of the problem and get sick or transmit the disease to somebody else who could die from it, assuming you yourself don't die from it? No? Then stay home. Why? Because this thing is not under control yet. Washington Post: Study estimates 24 states still have uncontrolled coronavirus spread. (May 22, 2020.)

Restaurants are not safe. National Public Radio: From Camping To Dining Out: Here's How Experts Rate The Risks Of 14 Summer Activities. (May 23, 2020.) "Indoor dining 'is still amongst the riskier things you can do,'" according to Dr. Emily Landon, a hospital epidemiologist and infectious diseases specialist at University of Chicago Medicine.

Remember that whether or not your state is "open for business," this does not mean that restaurants are safe for dining in. This does not mean that bars are safe places to congregate. The data suggests otherwise.

What things are risky / not risky to do outside of the home right now?

Andy Larsen from the Salt Lake Tribune excellently summarizes available data. (H/T Megan Carpentier)
I'm going to share the bullet points from the SLT article, but please click through and read the whole thing. These are all direct quotes from the SLT article:

Bars and clubs

Dance floors are probably incompatible with social distancing.
High-capacity bars and clubs are going to be potential locations of superspreading events.

Buffets

Self-serve buffets probably create an unmanageable amount of viral spread.

Buses

In closed, small environments, virus transmission can occur throughout a room.
Keeping outside ventilation high on buses seems to be a worthwhile goal.=

Choirs

Singing appears to significantly raise the likelihood of transmission.

Church

Churches can be the site of community-changing superspreading events.
High-risk activities like singing and buffets may make church gatherings more dangerous.

Family gatherings

Avoid hugging and sharing food, especially while sick.

Grocery stores

Constant movement in spacious buildings probably helps prevent exposure to coronavirus droplets.

Gyms

Gyms can quickly spread the coronavirus, especially when instructors become infected.
High-intensity workouts may be more dangerous than low-intensity workouts, though that’s unclear.

Malls

Thanks to high traffic numbers, one mall or large store can infect many people, even though the likelihood of any individual customer being infected is low.

Offices

The most dangerous method of transmission in an office is spending a long time near an infected person.
Using shared facilities like restrooms with an infected person appears to be less dangerous.
Spending a short amount of time with an infected person, like on an elevator ride, is not especially dangerous.
Jobs with frequent talking, like call centers, do appear to have elevated risk for superspreading.

Planes

Don’t go on a plane with a cough. Everyone should wear a mask.
If there is someone with a cough, those viral particles can likely travel more than 6 feet, but probably not throughout the plane.
The odds of an outbreak on any individual plane trip are low.

Polling places

In-person voting either has a small or neutral impact on coronavirus spread when precautions are taken.

Schools

Schools are a significant source of spread for other diseases like influenza, but so far, not the coronavirus. We don’t know why.
A individual who has contact with an infected child in a school is unlikely to be infected.

Sports venues and stadiums

Getting thousands or tens of thousands of people together in one building can result in community-changing “biological bombs."
Sports celebrations (singing, hugging, cheering) could potentially mean more spread.

Here's more on what's safe and not safe as compiled by National Public Radio on May 23rd:

A BYOB backyard gathering with one other household: low to medium risk (avoid sharing food, drinks or utensils)
Eating indoors at a restaurant: medium to high risk
Attending a religious service indoors: high risk
Spending the day at a popular beach or pool: low risk (Watch out for crowds at entry points and bathrooms. Maintain social distance both on land and in the water.)
An outdoor celebration such as a wedding with more than 10 guests: medium to high risk
Using a public restroom: low to medium risk (risk depends on the number of local COVID-19 cases and how clean the bathroom is)
Letting a friend use your bathroom: low risk
Going to a vacation house with another family: low risk
Staying at a hotel: low to medium risk
Getting a haircut: medium to high risk
Going shopping at a mall: risk varies
Going to a nightclub: high risk
Going camping: low risk
Exercising outdoors: low risk

But most people who died from COVID-19 had other medical complications that contributed to their death, so those people were going to die anyway.

I find that awfully callous to say those other people were just going to die so OK let them die then. And that stance is probably based on bad science. Business Insider: A new analysis of COVID-19 deaths estimates the patients might otherwise have lived much longer — regardless of underlying condition. (May 10, 2020.)

And for those of you saying "but some people didn't really die of COVID, they're over counting!" Reality suggests otherwise. Washington Post: U.S. reports 66,000 more deaths than expected so far this year. (April 29, 2020) That means that by the end of April, 66,000 more people have died this year than expected. That's not accounting for cause of death, and it's not accounting for May. That means that if you look at year-over-year death numbers, a bunch more people died this year compared to last year. On April 27th, The Washington Post reported that from March 1 to April 4, the United States saw 15,400 excess deaths -- nearly double the total attributed to COVID-19 for that thirty-four day period. Again, same thing. More deaths than expected for the stated time frame, and it provides a strong implication that at some point COVID-19 was under reported as cause of death.

>Here's more data and analysis that suggests that COVID-19 deaths are actually being under reported. From Forbes: "There's also the case of excess deaths in many countries. The Times reported that the overall average number of deaths in many countries—not just including coronavirus cases—has been higher than normal, illustrating that potentially tens of thousands of fatalities are not being counted in the coronavirus death toll due to lack of information." (May 10, 2020.) The New York Times report that Forbes mentioned can be found here. The NY Times data analysis as of May 25th clearly shows a higher-than-average death rate in 2020 in many places in the world.

Isn't this just like the flu, isn't all the concern here overblown?

Healthline: Here’s Why COVID-19 Is Much Worse Than the Flu, (May, 2020): "Faust concludes that COVID-19 deaths are actually anywhere from 10 times to 44 times the number of influenza fatalities."
OK, what if that's not true? It isn't false, but setting it aside, Google for examples of peoples' experiences. Shortness of breath, so tired they can't move for days, having to sleep on their stomach, fever, headache, vomiting, and more. Pretend that's flu if you want, but it's the worst flu you've ever gotten. Do you really want to experience something that's like the flu dialed up to 11? And then add back in that increased mortality rate when compared to the flu.

And then there's a chance that COVID-19 will cause lasting heart damage. The Harvard Gazette's Ekaterina Pesheva wrote on April 14th that "heart damage has recently emerged as yet another grim outcome in the virus's repertoire of possible complications." Also from the article: "'[COVID-19 is] like one big stress test for the heart,' said [Paul] Ridker, the Eugene Braunwald Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital."

And then there's Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C), something that COVID-19 can seemingly trigger in the young. The CDC explains: "[MIS-C] is a condition where different body parts can become inflamed, including the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin, eyes, or gastrointestinal organs. We do not yet know what causes MIS-C. However, we know that many children with MIS-C had the virus that causes COVID-19, or had been around someone with COVID-19." (Page reviewed by me on May 25, 2020.)
Dr. Cynthia Wachtell wrote about MIS-C in an op-ed for the New York Times on May 21, 2020: "MIS-C is thought to be a delayed overreaction of the immune system to Covid-19 that can cause a deadly heart inflammation and a kind of toxic shock." She goes on to explain that her son was afflicted with MIS-C long after recovering from COVID-19. "Eight weeks after he was exposed to someone with Covid-19, he was hospitalized. During his first day in the hospital, we received a steady stream of reassuring news. Then on the second evening, his blood pressure suddenly began to drop." This is a mild case. MIS-C can kill.

But the protests and discussion on chatter make it clear: Americans overwhelmingly want America to reopen NOW.

Some reports would make you think there's a strong grassroots movement around this, but when you dig into it, it seems as though this may not really be the case.

First: Nearly half of Twitter accounts pushing to reopen America may be bots, according to Carnegie Mellon researchers. (MIT Technology Review, May 21, 2020.) Here's a quick summary of that from John Gruber of Daring Fireball from May 23rd.

Next, respected security researcher Brian Krebs traced a number of “Operation Gridlock” protest organization websites to a right wing group "so extreme in their stance they make the National Rifle Association look like a liberal group by comparison." They seem to be behind top "reopen" Facebook groups, too. (NBC News, April 20, 2020.)

The right-wing DeVos family (you may know of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary) seem to have some connection to this as well. From the Guardian: Why the DeVos family's backing of the Michigan protests is no surprise. (April 26, 2020.)

In short, this isn't a grassroots, organic upswell of people who really believe that the shutdown is bad. These are opportunistic very far-right extremists and a big money group looking to stir the shit. That's called astroturfing. You're being played.

And you're putting yourself at risk. Aat least 72 people in Madison, Wisconsin recently caught COVID-19 after being at a "large event." The state Department of Health Services didn't track which event, but there was just the one big one recently -- the April 24th "operation Gridlock" protest. Meaning that there's a good chance that a bunch of people who attended the "anti-lockdown" rally caught COVID-19 for their efforts. (Channel 3000/Associated Press, May 8, 2020.)

As far as what people actually think, data is available. Washington Post: Americans widely oppose reopening most businesses, despite easing of restrictions in some states, Post-U. Md. poll finds. (May 5, 2020.)

You're crazy. We live in a small town and it's not like the big city. Everything here is fine.

I live in Chicago and my wife and I have many friends who live in New York. What's happening in NY I surely would not wish on anyone. It's serious business here in Chicago, too. But people in rural areas not taking this thing seriously means that it will affect them eventually. See: Washington post: A deadly ‘checkerboard’: Covid-19’s new surge across rural America. (May 24, 2020.)

I hope none of y'all small town folks know anybody who works in a meat packing plant: Wired: Why Meatpacking Plants Have Become Covid-19 Hot Spots. (May 7, 2020.) Hopefully you don't share any of the same stores, churches, bars, restaurants or hair salons with any of them either.

This is all overblown and I'm going to start having dinner parties again.

I truly hope you're smarter than that. But if not, I hope I don't end up reading about you on the "Coronavirus Regret" subredditfront page of the NY Times

. Where can Illinoisans get tested for COVID-19?

See State Announces Community-Based Testing Sites Now Open to All (Illinois Department of Health, June 4, 2020.) and Illinois expands COVID-19 testing to all and urges those who participated in protests to get tested. (Chicago Tribune, June 4, 2020.)

I claim no copyright on this post and encourage others to quote and/or copy-and-paste content from it to share with others. Do note that anything directly quoted above may be covered by copyright by the author of those comments and/or whatever publication may have published them.

On the subject of voting

2020-04-15T15:24:00.001-05:00

“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."

"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"

"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."

"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."

"I did," said Ford. "It is."

"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"

"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."

"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"

"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."

"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"

"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"

"What?"

"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?"

"I'll look. Tell me about the lizards."

Ford shrugged again.

"Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it."

"But that's terrible," said Arthur.

"Listen, bud," said Ford, "if I had one Altairian dollar for every time I heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the Universe and say 'That's terrible' I wouldn't be sitting here like a lemon looking for a gin.”

― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Al Iverson

Greetings from NOLA!

2019-11-17T22:53:00.002-06:00

Greetings from New Orleans! My wife and I are down here for a bit, dog and house sitting for a friend. So far we've seen some great music (Snug Harbor might be my new favorite jazz club), and had fantastic food and drink at too many places to mention, both in the French Quarter and around the Bywater neighborhood we're we are staying.

Pictured above is St. Roch Market, a New Orleans landmark. It's a food hall in a historic building that was long used as a public market.

Hard to say if we'd ever want to live in New Orleans. The service economy here is something else. It's a booze, food and music town. That's a plus. But if you poke a bit beneath the surface, you see the infrastructure problems (and Chicago has some of those as well), and the worry about sea level rise and hurricanes. I loved living in Miami, but sea level rise and hurricanes are a big part of why we don't still live in Miami. So I'm not sure New Orleans is a long term place for us. But the people here are friendly and there's so much great stuff to do. So never say never.

It beats the shit out of Ithaca, that's for sure.

SONOS on a budget? IKEA Symfonisk!

2019-08-13T12:13:00.004-05:00

Looking to expand your SONOS home audio system? Or want to get into the wifi zoned audio game on a budget? Check out IKEA's new Symfonisk speakers! Created in collaboration with SONOS, they are fully compatible with other SONOS speakers. I've got three SONOS speakers already (two Play:3 and one Connect:Amp), and it was a breeze to add this new Symfonisk speaker so that we could listen to music while preparing dinner in the kitchen.

Here are pictures of the white Symfonisk bookshelf speaker I picked up at IKEA a few days ago. With the cover off you can see the tweeter, mid-woofer and what must be a sound channel meant to increase volume and bass response.

Above, you can see the mounting bracket ($20 extra) and speaker mounted to my kitchen wall. Installation was easy. I was able to stuff excess power cord into the indent on the back of the speaker, the area around the power cord connection.

Below, you'll find a short video clip of the speaker in action. (This took a couple of tries to find a recording that I actually produced, to prevent the copyright police from taking action to block the video or sound. Please enjoy this snippet from 2004's "This is Organ Night" featuring Billy Holloman on the Hammond B-3.)

The verdict: Considering this is only $99, it feels like a good value to me. I'm happy with the sound quality and the price can't be beat. You could buy two of them and make them a stereo pair for under $200. Add a SONOS subwoofer if you think you need more bass. Or do like I did, and buy a single speaker just to extend the reach of your zoned audio system. We're very happy with the sound quality and it's great to be able to listen to our music while in the kitchen.

Love it or leave it? No. Improve it.

2019-07-20T13:09:00.002-05:00

This "love it or leave it" garbage is not new. Fifty years ago people were pointing out how stupid it is. Here's proof.

From the July 21, 1969 Chicago Tribune: On the op-ed page, Sydney J. Harris wrote a piece headlined, “The ‘love it or leave it’ nonsense.”

“One of the most ignorant and hateful statements that a person can make to another is, ‘If you don’t like it here, why don’t you leave?’” Harris wrote. “Most people who want to change conditions do like it here: they love it here. They love it so much they cannot stand to see it suffer from its imperfections, and want it to live up to its ideals. It is the people who placidly accept the corruptions and perversions and inequities in our society who do not love America.”

From the Chicago Tribune.

Our new apartment!

2019-07-05T10:42:00.003-05:00

I never planned to become a home owner -- it just sort of happened. But it's good to live indoors, and rents are going to keep going up.

Here's two walkthrough videos of our wonderful new space in Chicago. First, right after closing, and next, about a month later after we've gotten some furniture in place.

We've still got some work to do. Since that video we've replaced the bathroom sink, replaced most of the lighting, added more sconce lights to the living room and some other stuff. We've got plenty of more stuff to do, money permitting. We probably will next be replacing the old and beat up window blinds.

Goodbye, Croslene Kettle

2019-06-26T11:31:00.000-05:00

Very sad to hear of our neighbor and friend Kettle's passing yesterday.

Here's what happened, courtesy of Block Club Chicago.

My wife wrote something up about him for her newsletter.

Our alderperson Maria Hadden shared this as well.

And finally, Jonathan Ballew of Block Club Chicago wrote this wonderful article that helps to explain what Kettle meant to us in Rogers Park (and vice versa).

Chicago: Rogers Park Viaduct Clearances Map

2019-05-27T18:51:00.001-05:00

I just moved back to the Windy City, and I'm about to have some furniture delivered. Delivery of big items here can be tricky, with the "L" tracks overhead. Some movers even sort of try to B.S. you and say their trucks can't make it to a certain part of town. Which isn't true, if they check bridge clearances-- and this map helps you do that. This map used to be found on the prior alderman's website, which is now deleted. So I'm linking to it here. Hope people find it useful.

Here is a direct link to that Google map.

Here you will find a list of all viaduct clearances in the City of Chicago.

Impossible Sliders: Try 'em!

2018-08-02T11:50:00.001-05:00

My wife and I are road tripping around the country with our dog. I am so tired of driving and ready to be back home, but that's another story for another time.

Anyway, this week we find ourselves in Chicago. And what does Chicago have? White Castle! And what does White Castle have? Impossible Sliders!

So let's talk about Impossible Burger! I've been wanting to try these for a while now. A hotel near our home in Miami sells them, and my wife has had one. But I didn't get the chance -- whenever I've tried to go, we end up eating somewhere else because the weather won't cooperate or because the place is too busy.

I stopped into the nearest White Castle and picked up a sack of Impossible Sliders yesterday and brought them home. With cheese (smoked cheddar) for me, without for my wife. Verdict: These things are good! They don't taste like White Castles -- you're not going to have horrible onion burps after.

They sort of taste like meat. It's very close. I can taste the iron in it. It's almost a forward note flavor more so than in a real hamburger. Or maybe some people can taste that in a real hamburger and perhaps I just don't notice it.

They look very much like meat. They look perhaps a bit more dry than your average hamburger patty.

And the flavor verdict is: pretty darn good. It scratches the itch. It tastes less veggie than any other veggie burger I've had (and I've had many). We would definitely order these again.

I believe the meat is actually sold loose or in blobs, like ground beef, and that it's up to restaurants to form them into patties. So that makes me want to try an Impossible Burger at a fancier sit down restaurant, to see if any difference in preparation makes for a difference in flavor.

But if you're curious, and you want a try these out cheaply, White Castle is the way to go!

How to telnet from OS X

2018-06-24T13:44:00.002-05:00

Why in the heck does Apple's High Sierra version of OS X lack a telnet client? It smells like they removed it for "security" reasons but without it, how am I supposed to poke at an SMTP server to manually test mail server things in my life as an email geek?

Thankfully, there's "nc" to the rescue. nc (or netcat) has a very fine man page that suggests it can do more than telnet does and that it's easily scriptable. I don't know if I care about that, but I do care about this:

$ nc s1.xnnd.com 25
220 happydance.xnnd.com ESMTP Postfix (Ubuntu)
HELO homeserver.com
250 happydance.xnnd.com
QUIT
221 2.0.0 Bye

Smells like a good enough replacement for telnet as far as I'm concerned!

Amazon Prime: Is it worth it?

2018-04-29T12:17:00.001-05:00

Amazon just announced that the price for a yearly subscription to Amazon Prime is being raised to $120. With that in mind, I decided to do some rough math to see if Prime was still worth it for my wife and I.

We do order quite a bit of stuff from Amazon, on things like "dog stuff" (food, treats, bedding, etc.), consumer electronics and accessories (iPhone/iPad cases, Chromebooks, headphones), clothes, and even coffee.

First consideration: I don't consider Prime Video much of a benefit. Maybe I should reconsider that, but that's where I am at today. A friend says she uses Prime Video in lieu of Netflix. But, Netflix has all the Marvel TV shows and I'm really into those. Amazon doesn't have those. In fact, all I've really been excited about on Amazon Prime video is Bosch, the cop show based on the books of Michael Connelly. It's quite good, but it alone might not be enough to make me pay $120/year.

Second consideration: Two-day shipping is nice, but if I could save money, I'd settle for slower shipping. Even without Prime, any purchase of $25+ gets you free shipping. Just not two-day shipping. (And sometimes the two day shipping really means three or four day shipping. And a number of smaller products are "add-ons" which means you can't buy them unless your order as a minimum of $25 in non-"add-on" things first. Both of these poke holes in the myth of "get anything delivered in two days.")

Third consideration: We've signed up for the Amazon Store Credit Card. Since we have Amazon Prime, that gets us 5% off all (or most?) purchases. So the question becomes, do we still end up net ahead even after it comes time for us to pay $120 for the next year of Amazon Prime?

I reviewed the last twelve months of Amazon store card statements to see how much we've spent. That totals up to about $4793. Let's assume that is after the 5% savings, so for calculation's sake, let's bump that up to $5046. Five percent back on that would be about $252. We've paid $100 for the year of Prime, so that means that we've saved about $152. If we had paid $120 for a year of Amazon Prime, that would have reduced our savings to $132. Either way, for now, that's still money ahead.

Verdict: We're keeping Amazon Prime. Even with the price hike, it's still advantageous for my wife and I to continue to pay for and utilize Amazon Prime, assuming our purchasing patterns stay the same, or if we increase our Amazon spend. If our Amazon spend is going to decrease, it may not be worth it. We would basically have to spend $2400 on Amazon in a year to make Prime "pay for itself" in this way, and we'd have to spend more than that to get more than $120 back in a year.

Assuming I got the math right. I could be off by a hair, if the Prime card doesn't get you 5% off of every single thing. I try not to buy from non-Amazon vendors through their platform, so that might minimize the chances of that.

Pay your bill: If you don't pay your Amazon Store Credit Card bill off in full every month, all bets are off. This card has a 27% Annual Percentage Rate (APR) which is crazy high. This would eat up any 5% savings you'd be getting. If you need to buy things on credit from Amazon, use your lowest interest rate regular credit card.

HOWTO: Play Roku TV Audio through Apple AirPods

2018-04-05T10:02:00.002-05:00

We have a cheapo 55" 4K Roku TV that I think we bought for $398 at Wally World last year. It works well. I'm happy with it. It gets the job done. It is cheap enough, though, that the remote does not have a headphone jack, like other Roku TVs or streaming boxes have, nor does it seem to have Bluetooth support. But I found out that even without that, you can use an iPhone to stream sound from the TV to headphones connected to the iPhone. In my case, fancy new Apple AirPods that I just bought.

Here's how to stream audio from the TV to a headset:

Connect (or pair) the headset to your iPhone.
Make sure your iPhone and TV are both on the same wifi network.
Install the "Roku" app on your iPhone.
Launch the Roku app and use it to connect to your Roku TV.
Click on the "private listening" button (it looks like a headset).
The TV's audio will now play through your phone. Which will now play through the headset you connected in step one.

The audio might be a few milliseconds delayed, but I got over that after a few minutes. This came in very handy as a workaround for my Roku not having Bluetooth support!

It also worked much better than pairing my AirPods directly to my Apple TV. The audio dropped periodically when I tried watching TV that way. Not sure why -- my Apple TV might not be the latest model, or it's possibly just a hair too far away for the AirPods to stay connected reliably.

That's the only issue I've had with the Apple AirPods. They work great otherwise, and they are miles ahead of any other bluetooth headsets or earbuds I've tried. So much easier to pair, charge and use.

HOWTO: Cook shrimp in an air fryer

2018-03-10T13:36:00.001-06:00

We recently got a cool new toy, something that I've wanted for a very long time: An air fryer!

What does an air fryer do? It doesn't actually fry. It is a convection oven that uses forced hot air to cook things quickly. These "air fryers" are meant to be used sort of like deep fryers; they're good for things like fries, potatoes, chicken wings, breaded shrimp, and other snacky things that you would cook in a deep fryer, if you had one. Well, I don't want a real deep fryer, because all that oil is bad for you, and it makes your home smell like a Burger King. So I've been wanting one of these things for a while. When I first started looking these up a couple years ago, I saw that that Philips was selling them for $200 -- just too expensive for me. I started looking again recently and saw that there are now some other well-reviewed ones from other brands for under $100. I ended up buying this GoWISE USA GW22639 3.7-Quart Programmable Air Fryer on Amazon for about $62. It was list price for somewhere around $70 or $80, so I ended up buying a used one (a returned one, I think) for $65, then I got an extra five percent off thanks to our Amazon card.

We've had lots of success with our GoWISE USA GW22639 3.7-Quart Programmable Air Fryer! Timing (and temps) on different foods can take some trial and error; the manual isn't very detailed, and online instructions vary greatly. But still, our first attempts at cooking food in this thing have gone very well. We did a "test case" of frozen french fries (that happened to be Dollar Tree) and they came out perfectly on the "chips" (fries) setting. We've since cooked chickpeas, chicken wings, shrimp and more in it.

Here's a short video I made showing how easy it is to make frozen shrimp.

All you do is take the frozen breaded shrimp and throw it in the pot. Make sure it evenly covers the bottom, and try to have only one layer of shrimp, if possible. The "shrimp" preset setting cooked the shrimp for 15 minutes at 330 degrees. I've also done it on the "fish" setting, which is 20 minutes at 400. That was a bit too long, and yet when done on the shrimp setting, they could have perhaps gone for a minute longer. So next time, I'll go somewhere in between.

Also, now I know how to use iMovie.

Note: The air fryer is likely not suitable for cooking either crab claws or cocaine. You have been warned.

Guns are too easy to get, thanks to the modern NRA

2018-02-23T12:14:00.003-06:00

Karl Frederick, NRA President in 1934, during congressional hearings on the National Firearms Act (which the NRA supported) testified "I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I seldom carry one. [...] I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses."

The NRA also supported the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA), which together created a system to federally license gun dealers and established restrictions on particular categories and classes of firearms.

Something changed in the 1970s. From Politico in 2014:

From 1888, when law review articles first were indexed, through 1959, every single one on the Second Amendment concluded it did not guarantee an individual right to a gun. The first to argue otherwise, written by a William and Mary law student named Stuart R. Hays, appeared in 1960. He began by citing an article in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine and argued that the amendment enforced a “right of revolution,” of which the Southern states availed themselves during what the author called “The War Between the States.”

At first, only a few articles echoed that view. Then, starting in the late 1970s, a squad of attorneys and professors began to churn out law review submissions, dozens of them, at a prodigious rate. Funds — much of them from the NRA — flowed freely. An essay contest, grants to write book reviews, the creation of “Academics for the Second Amendment,” all followed. In 2003, the NRA Foundation provided $1 million to endow the Patrick Henry professorship in constitutional law and the Second Amendment at George Mason University Law School.

This fusillade of scholarship and pseudo-scholarship insisted that the traditional view — shared by courts and historians — was wrong. There had been a colossal constitutional mistake. Two centuries of legal consensus, they argued, must be overturned.

It's time for something to change.

Chicago highlights why gun control doesn't work? No.

I lived in Chicago for just under ten years. I love the city, and I consider it my adoptive home town. One thing I heard over and over, usually from people that didn't live there, was that Chicago was the perfect example of how gun control doesn't work. Guns are banned, but gun crime happens. Often. What it actually tells us is that gun control requires a comprehensive, nationwide policy or it will not work. This pro-gun blogger points out data that says that the majority of traceable guns used in crime in Chicago came from straw purchases. He's right that we do need to prosecute straw purchases better -- but we also need to better prevent those purchases to begin with. The process is just too easy today, and there are too many idiots who will buy guns and give them to other idiots. Including my now-deceased father, who wanted me to buy a particular gun for him, after he was denied its purchase due to having a restraining order against him (if I recall correctly).

Indiana and Wisconsin are an easy drive from Chicago. Friends today in Chicago drive to Indiana just to buy cheaper cigarettes. Of course people are going to do the same to avoid a localized attempt at gun control. It's too easy to get around the rules.

No, the real problem with Chicago and guns is "all those young urban thugs."

False. All the mass school shootings and mass workplace shootings that I know about seem to have been perpetrated by white people, not people of color.

The real problem for somebody in Texas who complains about "urban thuggery in Chicago" isn't worth unpacking here. Let's instead focus on the problem of crime in the poor inner city. This is driven by poverty in the inner cities caused by racism and inequality of opportunity and inequality of infrastructure. Bad schools and no other options. Born into poverty means you're likely to live your life in poverty. Here's one example of how providing access to better schooling and social programs can help to break that cycle.

Let's stop school shootings by arming teachers!

There are a million reasons why this is a dumb, but here's one reason I've rarely heard anything about: Some of those teachers will be people of color, and cops today aren't necessarily all that kind to people of color who carry firearms legally. Just ask Philando Castile. Teachers who are people of color would be scared shitless (and rightly so) if they ever got pulled over for anything at all by the police, while traveling to and from school with their (legal or perhaps even legally mandated) guns. What could go wrong?

Why not call out the car manufacturers for making these killing machines?

Inevitably the argument turns to cars and how they kill more than guns. Even though the numbers are roughly equal, people say that it's fair to pull out numbers for suicide-by-gun, "and it would appear that traffic fatalities, in sheer number, are a much greater blight upon America than non-suicide gun deaths."

Except that we, as a nation, have vastly improved automobile safety over the last fifty years. This article shows some of the highlights. We've tried very hard to make cars safer, and we require training and licensing (and re-licensing!) for anyone who wants to drive a car. We restrict car usage, making it illegal to use without a license or while under the influence of alcohol.

OK, we've called out cars to try to make them safer. Now let's do the same with guns.