Recent Comments

1. 1 day ago on Pearls Before Swine

   That depends on the players. It’s possible to make pretty good music on the pipes. OTOH, you might be a Scotsman like some of my ancestors and play the pipes to make English invaders drop their weapons and cover their ears!

2. 2 days ago on The Argyle Sweater

   The Dalmatian hat and coat is in the center, the hat on the left is probably raccoon, but look at the one on the right.

3. 7 days ago on Pearls Before Swine

   Old scriptwriters’ tale!

4. 7 days ago on Pearls Before Swine

   Mussolini and Hitler both took over a socialist party, and they never changed the collectivism. The change was that they didn’t lie as much about their real goals, unlike all those socialist and communist movements that talk about equality, prosperity, and freedom, then end up with a nomenklatura lording it over an impoverished population, with an army of thugs to throw everyone who complains in a concentration camp.

   “Antifa” is a lie. They use the same methods as Mussolini’s Blackshirts and Hitler’s Brownshirts. They are fascist in action, not anti-fascists. The one thing I won’t accuse them of is copying the Blackshirts – instead, Mussolini copied violent Communist mobs, and Antifa inherited that tradition a bit more directly.

5. 7 days ago on Wondermark

   “I did not get you three hundred clocks.”“Aha! How did you know there were three hundred?”

6. 7 days ago on That is Priceless

   He hopes he can get out of it by “forgetting” the lower half of his armor.

   But I think he’s the one on trial. Here’s the evidence he was sleeping on sentry duty – and also half out of uniform.

7. 7 days ago on Diamond Lil

   Now I understand why serious bowlers have their balls engraved. In fact, even though I’m terrible at bowling, if I ever spent $100 for a bowling ball, I’d want my name on it before I let it go out of my sight into a pinspotter. (I once worked on modernizing the electronics for these machines, and the more I learned about them, the less confidence I have in them.)

8. 8 days ago on Diamond Lil

   There was the “Cannot tune klystron” write-up that I finally duplicated – accidentally.

   Part of radar receiver testing in the shop was to apply a very weak radio signal and slowly turn the screw on the klystron tube until the needle on a built-in gauge suddenly flipped from pinned to one side to pinned to the other. Then you turned it back just a little and got the needle centered. We’d just replaced this klystron and it tuned just fine.

   On the flight line, they tune it again. Manufacturing tolerances gave each magnetron transmitter a slightly different frequency – we hoped – because tuning each receiver to a different magnetron is how several planes flew together and their radar sets didn’t interfere. They claimed it was impossible to tune – and the same thing was happening with several new klystrons.

   So I put it on the tester, and 30 seconds later the needle was steady right on center. I let out a breath, and the needle slammed back and forth to the pins on both sides. The new shipment of klystroms were all incredibly over-sensitive to the slightest temperature variation, which could be caused by the slightest to air movement.

   Those poor guys on the flight line would be standing in 90 degrees heat and a 40 knot wind, on tarmac heated by the sun to about 140 degrees, and opening a hatch in the bottom of the airplane to reach the klystron to tune it. No wonder the needles were jumping around! And now, they weren’t getting their radars back until depot added another test to their routine and had more klystrons made. Two or three dozen F-111’s would be grounded by the time we started receiving good klystrons.

   In the meantime, they’d cannibalized those planes for all the other difficult to get parts, and although we’d repaired the bad electronic boxes and sent them to be put back into the airplanes, they’d be working overtime for a month getting all those new and repaired parts to work together, while we re-tested all the ones that maybe gave them trouble.

9. 11 days ago on Pearls Before Swine

   And then you move to Flagstaff, Arizona, altitude nearly 7,000 feet, and many things change with the lower air pressure. Macaroni or potatoes for mashing cook slower because water boils at a lower temperature. One thing I still remember even though I was 4 then and I’m 70 now: The first time my mother opened one of those tubes of Popping Fresh biscuits in Flagstaff, it exploded in shreds of wet dough all over the kitchen.

10. 11 days ago on Pearls Before Swine

    In most baked goods, the proportions of the ingredients should be precise, so measure carefully. But then you get to the water (or milk, beer, whatever.) You need a precise amount, but you can’t measure it because the flour and other ingredients contained varying amounts of water depending on the humidity. So you add some water, stir, and keep on stirring in a little more water until the consistency is right.

    But how do you know when it’s right? I can’t describe it, you just have to know from experience. And what’s right depends on what you are cooking. Bread dough should be wet clear through but not runny at all. Pancake dough needs to be runny so it spreads out when poured on the griddle, but not too runny or the pancakes are too thin. Corn bread dough needs to be more watery than bread, but not nearly as runny as pancakes. With many cookie recipes, oil or fat is an important part of the consistency, but the feel changes with how warm the fat is.