I’m still on the mailing list for City of Cambridge (Maskachusetts) updates. Every day they send out their dead pool data. From yesterday:
Nobody died yesterday in Cambridge because everyone got the Sacrament of Fauci, right? The Harvard-educated Democrat-voting folks in Cambridge wouldn’t contribute to coronaplague by running around unvaccinated like the Deplorables in the Unspeakable Republican South, certainly. Well…
Only 73 percent fully vaccinated?!!? Now that vaccines are emergency-used authorized for 6-month-old babies, how can this be? And how does this compare to a state in which public health authorities do not promote the idea of injecting children with experimental medicines that are designed to prevent deaths among the elderly? The percentage of Floridians (DeSantis voters!) who are fully vaccinated is currently 68 percent. Maybe the answer for how the intelligent people who live next to MIT and Harvard can have such similar vaccination coverage to the morons of Florida is that the newly approved COVID shots for babies require at least 8 weeks for the baby to be considered “fully vaccinated” and the emergency use authorization for sticking babies was issued only a month ago.
Our 15-year-old daughter is very headstrong. She’s never been in real trouble, but she bristles against rules and authority: curfews, homework, appropriate clothing — you name it! Recently, she exploded when her younger brothers discovered her journal in the family room. Now, she keeps it locked in a heavy black box she found at a secondhand store. The problem: The black box turns out to be a gun safe! (A friend of my husband told us.) We’re not worried that she has a gun; she helped organize a school rally to tighten our state’s gun laws. But she refuses to give up the safe, and we don’t want it in our house. Help!
The Great Trek to Oshkosh begins on Sunday. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is a natural stopping point. This is America’s most-visited national park so I’m hopeful that readers have some brilliant ideas for activities in the Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg area. To refresh your memory:
The coronavirus pandemic decimated Sri Lanka’s tourism earnings, …
The news is not all bad. Thanks to a robust program of lockdowns and quarantine, “In April 2020, Sri Lanka’s response to the pandemic was ranked as the 9th best in the world” (Wikipedia). (On the COVID-19 death rate leaderboard, Sri Lanka ended up with roughly double the death rate of continental neighbor India.)
What other nation shares Sri Lanka’s form of government-by-emergency?
America’s public health emergency plan for COVID-19 will continue for at least another 90 days, the Biden administration announced Wednesday.
The emergency plan has been in effect for over two years, during which time it has made it possible for people who may otherwise have lost health coverage to stay enrolled in Medicaid without the usual paperwork checks that would be required, even if their incomes had risen higher than that allowed, The New York Times reported. The program experienced record levels of enrollment during the pandemic.
A virus that attacks obese people continues to be an emergency. Aside from vaccinating 6-month-old babies against a disease that has killed 80-year-olds, how do our best minds of public health respond? Some snapshots taken at the local CVS on July 6 (“must buy 2”):
Related:
After 2.5 years of the best lockdowns, mask orders, and forced vaccinations that covidcrats can dream up… “The pandemic remains a global health emergency, the W.H.O. says.” (New York Times, July 12): With known coronavirus cases rising significantly across the globe, continued Omicron evolution and increased pressure on public health systems, the World Health Organization on Tuesday said that the pandemic remains a public health emergency. “The virus is running freely and countries are not effectively managing the disease burden based on their capacity, in terms of both hospitalization for acute cases and the expanding number of people with post-Covid-19 condition — often referred to as long Covid,” he said at a news conference in Geneva. … countries like the United States have been throwing out vaccine doses, while not even two-thirds of the world population is fully vaccinated
An obsessive focus on the vaccines that don’t prevent infection has resulted in a failure to apply the vaccines that do prevent infection… “A sharp global drop in childhood vaccinations during the pandemic threatens the lives of millions of children.” (NYT, July 14): Millions of children around the world, most of them in the poorest countries, missed some or all of their childhood vaccinations over the past two years because of a combination of conflicts, climate emergencies, misinformation campaigns, pandemic lockdowns and Covid vaccination efforts that diverted resources, according to a new analysis from Unicef, the United Nations agency that vaccinates half the world’s children, and the World Health Organization. It is the largest backslide in routine immunization in 30 years, the report said. Combined with rapidly rising rates of malnutrition, it has created conditions that could threaten the lives of millions of young children. “This is an emergency for children’s health — we have to think about the immediate stakes, the number of children that are going to die because of this,” said Lily Caprani, head of advocacy for Unicef. “It’s not in a few years’ time; it’s quite soon.”
Everyone hates engineering and loves science. So let’s talk about the James Webb Space Telescope, which cost us about $10 billion (enough to fund the U.S. and Ukrainian militaries for 3 days?) so far. What are your favorite videos explaining the Science? Here’s one that I like:
It contains some explanation of the instruments on board, but I’m still a little confused as to the rationale for looking at nearby objects in the infrared. Light from objects within our own galaxy, such as the Carina Nebula, shouldn’t be dramatically red-shifted. What will we learn about these objects via the JWST that we couldn’t have learned from Hubble?
At a family wedding recently, a cousin-by-marriage, on hearing that we had moved from a State of Virtue (Massachusetts) to a State of Deplorability angrily responded that he hoped we enjoyed living in a “fascist state”. (He is a retired vice president of NPR who used a massive inheritance to settle in an all-white suburb of D.C.)
A younger guy from New Jersey, without expressing any strong personal political beliefs, simply wondered aloud “How did Florida become so Republican?”
Another relative’s experience may provide the answer. He’s a 60-year-old ob-gyn physician who has carefully followed every aspect of Democrat dogma since childhood. The idea of agreeing on any political point with a Republican fills him with horror and he has always chosen to live in Blue states. Yet now he finds himself excommunicated from the Church of Righteousness because he holds the heretical belief that teenagers should not be provided with gender reassignment surgery.
I think that “Dr. Blue”‘s experience might explain what is happening on a broader scale in Florida. The Democrats nationwide have evolved faster than the Floridians who used to vote for Democrats, thus leaving behind Floridians who continue to agree with the Dogma According to Bill Clinton as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. Consider that Bill Clinton’s economic policy reads a lot like today’s Republican stated policy, including cutting taxes on small business (though Republicans in practice, of course, are happy to cooperate with Democrats on massive deficit spending). Bill Clinton never proposed that student loan debt for college graduates be transferred onto the backs of working class Americans who never went to college. Bill Clinton never used the phrase “Latinx”. Bill Clinton never tried to force Americans to accept injection with an experimental drug.
As with any NYT article, the above contains plenty of lies. The biggest lie is graphing the official government inflation data going back to 1965 without noting that the method of calculating the inflation rate has dramatically changed over time (to make it appear lower, e.g., by excluding the purchase price of houses and actual mortgage and property tax costs incurred). The next lie is that the current inflation rate is 9.1 percent. The actual current rate, according to the same government data release purportedly covered by the NYT, is 1.3 percent per month (CNBC), which works out to 16.7 percent per year (1.013 raised to the 12th power).
At the actual current rate of inflation, how long before $400,000 is the price of a Diet Coke? Let’s assume that we’re getting our refreshing sugar-free soda in a restaurant for $5 (including obligatory tip). Within one human’s COVID-19-shortened lifespan of 73 years, therefore, the $400,000 price of a house will become the price of a Diet Coke. From Wolfram Alpha:
NASA has released some beautiful images obtained with the fancy new space telescope. Here’s an example:
Since all of the images are captured in infrared and then presented in false color within the visible-to-humans spectrum (#FakeNews), it should be possible to find a corner of the universe that, with proper adjustments to the (inherently arbitrary) false color algorithm, would include symbology from the Rainbow Flag religion. This would help NASA atone for its past sins against the true faith (see “James Webb image reignites calls to rename telescope amid links to LGBT abuses” (Guardian)) and prove to the skeptics that God is a member of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community.
Maybe we could find part of the universe that resembles the pregnant man emoji as well? That would help us push back against the current tide of hate in which “women” are falsely identified as the only victims of the latest Supreme Junta’s ruling regarding abortion care.
Note that I was against the “James Webb” name from the first time that I heard it. Not because of his/her/zir/their alleged animosity toward the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community, but because Mx. Webb was a bureaucrat rather than a scientist or engineer. (Contrast to the Hubble Space Telescope, named after an observational cosmologist.)
Readers: What would be a better name for the telescope? How about naming it after Jim Peebles? There are other NASA experiments named after living scientists. Or pick one of the technicians who built it and name the machine after a person who does honest work?
Shopping for tickets to take one old person, one very old person, and one young person to Longwood Gardens, a non-profit org near Wilmington, Delaware…
My ticket will be $25. If I had an EBT card (“food stamps”), it would be $2. Paying $60 rather than $6 for our little group won’t change my lifestyle, but I wonder how seeing stuff like this every day makes middle class taxpayers (“the chumps”) feel.
Note that, to prevent COVID-19 in the garden, an elaborate system of timed tickets is in place.
On the way back, we wanted to visit the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Adults are $25. The price for EBT cardholders…. Free.
We ended up not being to get in at all because it was sold out on a Sunday, but an EBT cardholder would, presumably, have been able to go on an uncrowded weekday while all of the taxpayers funding SNAP/EBT were at work.
work versus welfare spending power (2013 analysis; does not include cash income that someone on welfare at an official income of $0 might earn via under-the-table jobs and does not reflect the fact that cultural attractions are discounted)
We’re in the middle of the South Florida season that is analogous to the Northeast’s winter, i.e., a period when it is often more pleasant to be inside rather than out. Thus, it seemed like a good time to try to duplicate, at tremendous expense, the convenient availability of the pool table that we received rolled into our old apartment lease via the landlord’s “clubhouse”. This post is to record what I learned.
First, it seems that there is no standard size for a pool table. There are tournaments in various parts of the country in which people play on 7-foot tables, but you can also find regions where 8-foot tables or 9-foot tables are conventional. Make sure that you have 58 inches from the table (rail edge, not playfield edge) to the walls on all sides so that the butt of the cue doesn’t hit. The cue should clear low furniture, e.g., another game table or a sofa, but you’ll want 50″ all around (from the outer dimension, i.e., the rail edge) to accommodate your posterior when crouched.
There are only a handful of billiards stores in South Florida, perhaps because so many sales of new tables have moved online. The waiting time for a new high-quality American-made table, which could be customized in various ways, was approximately 3 months. Prices would be $6,000-$15,000 depending on the elaborateness of the decoration. Delivery would be another $500. The favored in-production brands seem to be A.E. Schmidt, Connelly, and Olhausen. The most serious players like Diamond (a one-piece slate; super ugly; made in the U.S.) and Brunswick Gold Crown (also ugly; made in Brazil (the rest of the Brunswick line may be made in Indonesia)). Local dealers also sell used tables and it seems that pool tables are so cumbersome to move that the geographical price variations are enormous. A used pool table in South Florida is worth twice as much as one in the Midwest, just as a house in South Florida is worth twice as much. One dealer here quoted $3,500 for a pristine used “American Heritage” Camden table. Plus $500 for delivery and a month of waiting because all of the delivery crews were busy. Of course, “American Heritage” means “made in Malaysia” and the importer says that the list price on the table, brand new, was… $3,500 (the company shut down in mid-2020).
I described the shopping excursion to our next-door neighbor, a mechanical engineer who designs electric vehicle powertrains. “You can always get a pool table for free on Craigslist,” he said, “from someone who needs the space. I got mine from a lady who wanted to use the space for a dining table and she cut the price to $0 on condition that I get it out of there.”
Inspired by the smart neighbor, I found an Olhausen that was perhaps 20 years old in our neighborhood. The guy had sold his house and was moving to Europe so that his teenage son could get elite soccer training (he’s a little too old to play against the U.S. Women’s team). It was only about 10 days before the house needed to be cleared out and he was still asking $900 for the table below:
The Olhausen cushions are supposed to last forever and a good table is supposed to support 4 bounces off the cushions if you throw a ball with your arm on the short dimension, but there were only 3 bounces for this table. The owner had the contact info for Fred Bost, the guy who installed it 10 years previously (the table might have been 10 years old at that point). We called him up and he said that the rails (wood on the sides of the table) were likely loose after years of play and that slowed things down. If the felt and balls weren’t pristine that also slowed things down. The balls were old and yellow and the wisdom of the Web is that billiard balls need to be replaced every few years (example).
What about the damaged finish on the rails? Fred said that he could refinish the rails for about $1,000. The felt was a mess, but could be replaced for $350 at the time of a move and that good-condition felt could be put back on the slates. The cues were also shot on this Olhausen table, e.g., missing tips. Replacing the cues and balls would have cost $400. The owner offered to reduce the price to $600, but I wasn’t sure that the table was a great deal even at $0 given that it looked like it was sitting on Home Depot 8×8 posts.
(What if the slate is cracked? It is possible to get new slate for as little as $400. This makes me wonder why a new table can cost $8,000+ if all of the components are cheap-ish. Maybe the answer is that the exterior cabinet is where all of the cost is.)
A $2,000 Connelly 30 minutes away seemed to have some potential. My main concern was that it had been living in a garage for 4 years. Fred told me not to worry about that and, in fact, that pool tables in semi-outdoor spaces were common in Florida and the heat and humidity did not damage the tables. The owner ran a pizza restaurant with his middle-school sweetheart-turned-wife. They were young and fit and doing well financially because they’d been showered with Federal funds for their restaurant that hadn’t been closed even for one day by the Florida version of coronapanic. The pool table, however, had to go because it wasn’t getting enough use and the wife wanted a gym in the garage. The owner explained to me that he kept the balls in their original Aramith box because leaving them in the pockets causes the leather to sag (a new set of pockets is under $300, but these ones stamped “Connelly” cannot be purchased separate from a new table). He had everyone play with special gloves so that they didn’t need to use “hand chalk” to make the cue slide on the bridge hand. He would put an extra piece of felt down before breaking because the acceleration of the cue ball during a break can leave a burn mark on the felt (Fred Bost later explained that this was true only for some high-end Simonis fabrics (made in Belgium) and not for the less expensive Teflon-coated Championship fabrics (from Mexico) that he prefers; he uses Invitational with Teflon for his customers).
The one-piece “house cues” were in good condition and the balls were only about a year old. It was easy to get 4 bounces out of a hand-launched ball and the table played noticeably well. The owner accepted $1800. Fred Bost had a cancelation the next morning and the table was in our house less than 24 hours after purchase (compare to 3-4 months if we’d bought at retail; this Connelly table seems to list for $9,000 and sells for $7,000 new). Moving cost $500 plus I tipped 100 Bidies for Fred and Freddie’s lunch.
Installation is an impressive operation. Heavy straight edges and levels are used and shims the thickness of a business card may be employed. Connelly is unusual for having four bolts to secure each rail rather than the industry-standard three. It may thus be possible to have longer intervals between tightening.
Here is Fred and his assistant (Freddie!) re-covering the 1.25″ slate with the old felt:
“I’ve installed exactly 1.5 brown felts in 30 years,” Fred said. What was the 0.5? “I was halfway through putting the brown felt on a guy’s table when the wife came out and shook her head.” Fred explained how to rough up the leather cue tips with sandpaper.
I’m glad that we didn’t wait 4 months to spend $8,000 for a pool table. All of the experienced players who have tried this table out say that it is great. I’m also glad that we didn’t get an imported table, much as I love the idea of everything being made in an economically efficient manner. Fred says that the imported tables can be set up to play well, but he doesn’t like any of them.
Our next step was to visit the Professional Billiard Instructors Association web site and find a teacher. Ed Kiess came over and tried to correct decades of bad habits. From him we learned that one of the world’s leading pool cue makers is in Wellington, Florida: Dennis Searing. The average cue sold by Searing is $5,000, but it is possible to go glitzy and spend $40,000. It is a 12-year wait for a Searing cue! Ed was horrified at the idea of using sandpaper to rough up the tips. A specialized tool with pins and a scuffer is the correct device. Every year or so, one should pay $20 to get new tips put on the cues (Triangle is the preferred brand for house cues; Searing’s own multi-layer tip is the best). Ed is a huge fan of Simonis 860 cloth (Belgian), which is supposedly super fast. Fred likes Championship Invitational Teflon (made in Mexico; less expensive).
Perhaps because of an introduction from Ed, we had the honor of getting our crummy house cues tuned up and re-tipped by Dennis Searing himself!
We learned that it takes at least 10 months for Searing to make a cue, mostly because the wood has to age. This is not so that the wood can dry out but so that the “stress” can come out of the wood. Searing is not disdainful of the ignorant and incompetent, as you might expect, but generous about sharing his knowledge and love of craftsmanship. Searing explained to us that if you happened to find a big piece of wood without flaws you could make an excellent one-piece cue. An expert pool player thus might be able to get a very good cue by trying out 25 house cues and picking the best one that just happened to be fabricated from a great piece of wood. The two-piece cues that Searing makes offer some additional options for balance and are easier to transport, but Searing didn’t tell us to throw out the Nick Varner house cues that had come with our table.
August 16, 2022 update: Proving my neighbor correct, Facebook alerts me to a Peter Vitalie pool table that would cost $15,000 new (if the company were still in business). $500 to the person who can arrange same-day removal!
