About The Size of It

Saw Walker on the news this morning accusing the unions of dirty tricks. Of course people like him always accuse the other side of doing the bad things that they themselves are doing, like refusing to negotiate, and bait and switch.  He may have the rich assholes on his side, but he lost the people of Wisconsin.

First TV

Sometime after the local TV station (50-60 miles away) came on the air, my dad bought a used TV. It was a Zenith with a round picture tube like the one below.  Don't remember what happened to it, probably got killed by lightning.

It's amazing what you can find on the intratubes.  It only took me a little while (10 minutes or so) to find a picture of this old TV.  A lot depends on what you type into Google.  Started off with Zenith round and Google suggested "Zenith roundie TV", after looking at the results for that awhile, came across Zenith porthole TVs which I put in the search and after that I found this picture.  It's a 1950 model Zenith Porthole TV.  This looks very similar to the one I remember us having when I was a kid.

Quite the contrast between this TV and the present one.

New TV

For the better part of last year we talked about getting a new flat screen TV.  We wanted a flat screen TV so we could hang it on the wall in the cabin UP on the Tundra.  The place is small and by hanging the TV on the wall it would take up less space than the old style TV.  I was all set to wait until we went back UP on the Tundra around Memorial Day, but before Xmas The Old Lady started talking about us getting a new TV after the beginning of the year.  So I decided if we are going to get one here, I may as well get one in time for something worth watching on a widescreen HDTV(32" isn't really widescreen, but both the apartment here and the cabin are small), I got one the day before the Super Bowl.

While setting it up, I noticed something, it came with a hole in the base and a screw to fasten it to what it was sitting on to keep it from falling over because the tall skinny TV if not all that stable.

At first it looked a little better than the old 20" TV, but not the spectacular picture all the HDTV ads promised.  The picture was a little sharper and could see all of the picture without the sides being cut off (16x9 picture size vs 4x3).  Then the other week while wandering around on my daily walk, I saw a good deal on a HDMI cable.  I've read in the paper and seen stuff on-line about having to get new cables for the new HDTVs, but I thought why do you need the new cables when you already have the RF (coax) hookups??  After hooking up the HDMI cable from the cable box to the TV, I found out there is a difference.  The cable box puts out different signals, the coax signal is only 480i, the same whether on the regular channels or the HD channels.  With the HDMI cable the signal for HD channels is 720p and that makes a big difference in picture quality.  Live and learn!!

Just for the hell of it, a couple weeks ago I hooked up a set of rabbit ears to the new TV.  The channel search found over 60 channels, a handful of duplicates (a half dozen or so broadcasting the same stuff on two different channels) and a couple with a signal but no programming.  Some of the over-the-air channels are broadcasting in 1080i.  When I tried a channel search with a converter box the other year, I only found about a dozen channels and half of those were BibleBangers.  It may be there have been more channels added since then or the tuner in the new TV is more sensitive than the one in the converter box.  I'm looking forward to taking the new TV UP on the Tundra and see if it works better than the boxes.  There is one channel that I wasn't able to get with the converter box and I would like to be able to get it for their local news & weather.

Infographic

Here is a graphic from Center for American Progress comparing the budget cuts to tax breaks for the rich.

So, how's that trickle down working for you.  Saw where some are saying we should call it "Piddle Down" to remind people what really happens.

A Sioux Named Boy

Heard the song "A Boy Named Sue" on the radio earlier today and thought I'd look for the song "A Sioux Named Boy". Heard it last year and thought it was an interesting switch on the Johnny Cash song.

51st State of Superior

My last post was not a serious post.  While people have been talking about splitting the Upper Peninsula off from the Mitten for decades, there is no serious action going on, and doubt if there ever will be.  Kinda like Northern California wanting to separate from SoCal.  It may be fun to talk about, but in reality it'll probably never happen.  I ran across a link to the article when I was looking at the article on Baja Arizona and thought I'd throw it up.

A 51st State In...Michigan?

From Mother Jones

Iron Range: An ore dock sit empty in downtown Marquette. In its heyday, trains would ride the rails to the top, then dump their iron ore into the barges waiting below. (Photo: Tim Murphy).

Right off the bat this guy fucked up.  They used to load ore boats at this ore dock.  The big several hundred feet long boats (e.g., the Edmund Fitzgerald) that hauled iron ore down to the steel mills in Cleveland and Gary.

With everyone I talk to, the second-class sentiment is a constant. "We're lower Michigan's playground," says Mike Delke, the woodcarver. "They'd be happy if when they crossed the Mackinaw Bridge, this was all woods."
This part he got right, except he misspelled Mackinac.

You can drive for 40 minutes without seeing a house let alone a town, and because the virgin White Pine forests of the UP (as it's known) were basically clear-cut over the last century-and-a-half, the younger trees look, at least from the road, as if someone has gone into Photoshop and scaled them down but left the sky as is. In other words, you feel higher up, not only in relation to the Mitten of lower Michigan, but relative to the ground itself. 
But there's a cultural element, too. For most of its existence, the UP has been isolated from the rest of the state, bordered by three of the Great Lakes plus Wisconsin, and accessible to the rest of Michigan only by boat until the late 1950s when someone finally built a bridge (and Yoopers, as natives of the UP are known, immediately began talking about blowing it up).
This part is right too.

One example would be if you jump on I-75 and drive over the Mackinaw Bridge to Toledo, and see how many rest areas you see. They're everywhere."
"And then take route 2 from Ironwood to Menominee—" He takes off his hat, emblazoned with the outline of the UP, and traces the route. "If you go from here to here on US-2, which is our equivalent to 75, you'll find one restroom.
"They probably feel that because we're Yoopers, we don't need modern restrooms. We can just use trees."
I tried to find a song by Da Yoopers called "Dear Mr. Governor", but was unable to find a video.  In the song it says, "Dear Mr. Governor, we asked you for some rest stops and instead you sent us moose".

Baja Arizona

Looks like there are a few same souls in Arizona.  The bumper sticker above and the excerpt below are from the Tucson Citizen.

AJA ARIZONA–AMERICA’S 51st STATE ?
An enormous mistake was made on December 30, 1853 when the Gadsden Treaty was signed between the United States and Mexico. The northern part of the Mexican state of Sonora, an area located south of the Gila River, was purchased by the United States, and tacked into what became the State of Arizona.The people of the Gadsden Purchase have increasingly chafed under the domination of an enormous population in an around Phoenix (Maricopa County). In order to end the domination of Phoenix, the people of the Gadsden Purchase are seeking statehood. Proclaiming themselves as Baja Arizona, a “state of mind” is acknowledged to exist.
The primary differences between Baja Arizona and the remainder of Arizona are of attitude and tolerance. The people of Baja Arizona are known throughout the southwest for their enlightened view of the world. This is obviously not the case with the passage of SB 1070 making it illegal to be an illegal in Arizona.

Newt