07:59 – Once again, USPS didn’t bother to show up. Fortunately, I had only one kit sitting waiting for pickup yesterday, so I’ll only have to send one email to apologize for the shipping delay. I will email our congressman tomorrow to complain. That’s seven days so far this year that USPS has skipped our route for no reason. Our local postmaster should be fired.
10:23 – Barbara is out planting potted flowers before the rain arrives. I’m doing laundry, shipping kits, and getting ready to build more.
I also just climbed up on the roof to get rid of the spring accumulation of maple seeds and so on in the troughs. This may be the last year I’ll do that. Having vertigo means I can lose my balance without warning, which isn’t a good thing when I’m standing up on the roof. I don’t want to pull a Max McGee. As Harry Callahan said, a man’s got to know his limitations. Next year, I’ll just do the best I can with a rake while standing at the top of the ladder.
I got email yesterday from Netflix announcing that they’re increasing streaming prices from $8 to $9 per month, but only for new customers or those who change their plans. Others are grandfathered in for two years. I still think that Netflix is being too timid, but I suppose they must know what they’re doing. If it were me, I would have doubled the monthly price and announced that I was doing that so that I could afford to greatly increase the number and quality of streaming titles available. In an era of $150/month cable TV bills, I can’t imagine that many people would drop the service if it increased from $8 to $16/month. More likely, they’d drop some of the cable TV options.
Amazon is now streaming a limited selection of old HBO series. As far as I can see, it’s no big deal. Every HBO series I checked on Amazon is pay-per-view. If you want to watch an HBO series, it’s actually cheaper just to sign up for Netflix DVDs than it is to pay per episode or per season on Amazon.
Speaking of expensive streaming, Barbara and I watched the first five seasons of the Canadian series Murdoch Mysteries on Amazon Prime streaming, all at no additional charge. They also have series six, but the only option is to buy episodes or the entire series. I don’t know who Amazon thinks they’re kidding. They charge $4.99 for each 45-minute episode or $58 for the 13-episode series. Give me a break. For comparison, I recently bought the most recent season of Heartland on DVD from Amazon.ca. Those five discs and 18 episodes cost about $22, including shipping.
07:45 – Colin passed his annual checkup with flying colors. He now weighs 68 pounds (31 kilos), down from 82 pounds (37 kilos) a year ago, when our vet said he was a porker. She said he’s now at the perfect weight. Barbara took Colin by herself, and said he was perfectly behaved in the car. She’s back at work today for a very short workweek before the weekend.
We’ve finished watching The Shield, so we were looking around yesterday for something else to add to our rotation. We decided to give another teen drama a try, this one from 16 years ago. It’s called Dawson’s Creek, and it stars Katie Holmes in her first big role, at age 19.
Last night, I thought about another one-hit wonder from the early 70’s. The group was Gunhill Road and the track was Back When My Hair Was Short. So I headed over to YouTube, searched for the title, and played the first link that came up. It wasn’t at all as I remembered it.
As it turned out, that was the 1973 version, intended for radio play. So I clicked on another link, the one for the original 1972 album version. That’s the one I remembered.
Of course, there are many rock tracks that exist in censored versions with a few words altered for radio play, but this was the first time I’d encountered a censored version that had completely different lyrics. Same group, same track title, same melody, but the lyrics weren’t even close to the original. The original was all about drugs. I’m not sure what the censored version was supposed to be about.
08:21 – Barbara is taking the day off work to take Colin to his annual vet checkup, run errands, and catch up on some stuff at home. I’m still filling bottles, hundreds and hundreds of them, for science kits.
The morning paper reports that the results of the nationwide assessment of 12th graders has only three-eighths of them proficient or better in reading and about a quarter proficient or better in math. Those figures are bad enough, but what goes unmentioned is that the bar for “proficient” is set extremely low. By any reasonable yardstick, the sorry truth is that probably at most 5% to 10% perform at what would historically have been considered a 12th grade level. Is it any wonder that private schools and homeschooling are booming?
On a related note, I see that fast-food employees are planning protests in 150 cities on 15 May to demand an increase in the minimum wage to $15/hour. Give me a break. The vast majority of them aren’t even worth the $9/hour that they currently average.
As the articles always point out, $9/hour is about $18,000/year, which is $4,500/year below the poverty line for a family of four. The articles never point out that if both parents in that family of four flip burgers at McDonalds, the family income is $36,000/year, which is $13,500 above the poverty line. Apparently, we’re supposed to think that Ozzie should be able to support his family flipping burgers while Harriet is a stay-at-home mom.
07:50 – Barbara is on a day-trip today with her friend Bonnie Richardson. Bonnie got here about 7:00, and they left to drive to Greensboro, where they’ll catch the train to Raleigh. They’ll return sometime this evening.
I’m still filling bottles. This weekend we’ll start making up chemical bags for 90 biology kits and 120 chemistry kits.
08:58 – If someone had asked me to name biotechnology companies, Autodesk wouldn’t have been on my list. Thanks to Brian Bilbrey for this link. As it turns out, Autodesk should have been on my list. They just created a synthetic bacteriophage virus.
Although this is a very fast-changing field and the video linked to in the article is nearly three years old, it’s still worth watching.
08:43 – Probably 25 years ago, I settled on my favorite pipe tobacco, Dunhill My Mixture 965. Unfortunately, not long after, Dunhill stopped making the stuff. They apparently subbed out manufacture to other companies, and although the name was the same, the tobacco sold as Dunhill 965 was and is a pale shadow of the original. I’ve since tried several supposed clones of the original, but none of them have come close to matching the original Dunhill 965.
For the last couple years, I’ve been buying a supposed “match” from Pipes & Cigars. It’s a decent tobacco, but not even close to the original. I’m running short on tobacco, so this morning I placed my usual order for five pounds of their 965 “match”. But this time I went a step further. The original blend was heavy on Latakia and Perique. The blend I order has some Latakia, but not enough. And Perique is absent. So I also ordered half a pound each of Latakia and Perique. I’ll add some of those to the base tobacco and see what I can come up with.
09:36 – Barbara finished over at her mom’s apartment yesterday. She gave her keys to Frances, who still has a few things to pick up today.
Barbara and I will watch the final two episodes of The Shield tonight. It’s an excellent series, albeit grim. In tone, it reminds me of Rescue Me, another excellent series. From what I know of inner-city policing, it seems realistic, with one exception. Over and over again, they have cops entering a dark threat environment with pistols drawn and flashlights on. But they all hold the two very close together, with crossed wrists, putting the pistol and flashlight only inches apart and directly in front of the cop’s head and chest. Does LA really teach its cops to do that? If so, that’s nuts. You should keep the flashlight as far from your head and body as possible, held out at arm’s length. If a bad guy shoots, he’s going to shoot at the light nearly every time. Just as the cop will return fire by aiming just below the muzzle flash of the bad guy’s gun.
09:12 – Barbara is off to finish cleaning out her mom’s apartment. We hope she’ll be able to finish today and have done with it. She and Frances have already given away their mom’s clothes and most of the furniture, so what remains is mostly small items.
We’re now in good shape on bottles and caps, but I just realized that I somehow got out of sync on the two. Our vendor sells bottles by the case, but the number of bottles per case varies from 160 to 1,500, depending on the size and type of bottle. The caps, on the other hand, are always sold ten gross per case. As it turns out, I now have many more 15 mL plastic bottles than I have caps for them, so I need to place another order for a case of those bottles and two cases of caps. That’ll bring our total inventory of those bottles and their caps into close agreement.
09:34 – Last month was our worst month for kit sales in more than a year. I’m not too worried. These things fluctuate, and we’re still running something like 160% of last year’s sales through April.
I’m still filling labeled bottles, and I’ve managed to cut the backlog down to less than 2,000, or roughly 60 kits’ worth. Of course, UPS delivered several thousand bottles yesterday, so Barbara will soon be building up that backlog again.
I decided to re-read all of R. Austin Freeman’s mysteries, which I last read about 50 years ago. Many have compared Freeman to Doyle and Christie, but in my opinion Freeman is better. His protagonist, Doctor John Evelyn Thorndyke, is what today would be called a forensic scientist, a fictional close contemporary of the great Sir Bernard Spilsbury.
But, unlike Doyle and Christie, Freeman wrote from direct experience. Thorndyke’s fictional laboratory is a more-or-less exact representation of Freeman’s actual laboratory. When Thorndyke performs forensic test procedures, he is merely reproducing what Freeman actually did in his own lab as he was writing the story. And Freeman “plays fair” with the reader, assuming that the reader has a great deal of arcane forensics knowledge.
I’d started to explore forensic science in detail by the time I was in sixth grade. Our librarian knew my interests, and one day she handed me a book and said she thought I’d really like it. It was Freeman’s The Red Thumb Mark, the first of his novels published under his own name, and she was right. When I returned it the next week, she asked if I’d figured it out. I told her that I had figured it out very early in the book, and that literally one word had given it all away. As soon as I saw that one word, I knew exactly who had done it and how it had been done.
So I read the rest of Freeman’s novels and short stories as fast as the librarian was able to get them for me. I figured most of them out early, because Freeman always told his readers early everything they needed to know to figure out the mystery (or, with his “inverted mysteries”, everything they needed to know to figure out how to do it). To figure things out often required some serious research. We didn’t have Wikipedia back then, so I often found myself delving deep into technical tomes about alkaloid poisons and so on. And what I found always confirmed that what Freeman wrote about forensic procedures was an accurate reflection of the state of forensic science in the early 20th century.
If you want to give Freeman a try, I recommend that you start with The Red Thumb Mark. It, as well as the rest of Freeman’s Thorndyke novels and short stories, are readily available free or at very low cost in e-book form. Amazon’s Kindle store has many of them free or for $0.99.