Category Archives: Real Life

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I voted!

The rural counties of the Bluegrass State used to be solidly Democratic. Kentucky has had only a few Republican governors in recent memory, and up until the 2016 elections, the state House of Representatives was controlled by the Democrats, the one of the last legislative chambers in the South — I was tempted to write “in the Confederacy,” but Kentucky never seceded or joined the CSA — controlled by the Democrats.

Since then, the Bluegrass State has been solidly Republican. Donald Trump carried Kentucky in both 2016 and 2020, by huge margins.

How have things changed? I noted a sample ballot on the walls, and all of the candidates for the city council of the city of Irvine — where I do not vote — were listed as Republicans. Not a single one was a Democrat, which means that no Democrat even entered the May primary.

The races in which I could vote? Other than the presidential race, only the contest for Kentucky’s sixth congressional district were even contested. All but one had a Republican nominee, with no Democratic opponent, while one, for Commonwealth’s Attorney, had a Democratic nominee, but no Republican opponent. Naturally, I voted for all Republicans, but left the vote for Commonwealth’s Attorney blank.

The line was much longer than I had anticipated; there were well over fifty people who were in line when I was. And yes, the Commonwealth required a positive ID to be able to vote.

At least in our county, we had paper ballots, which we marked, and then fed into a machine reader. This way, if there is a recount necessary, the paper ballots have been retained for recount. This is the way elections should be held.

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Passenger rail in France

I see a lot of stuff on Twitter — I absolutely refuse to call it 𝕏 — from advocates of a high-speed passenger rail service in the United States. My position is simple: if one of the private railroad companies wishes to build that high-speed passenger railroad, I absolutely support their right to spend their own money to do so. But the federal and state governments should stay out of it.

A lady — or so I judge her to be by her Twitter bio pic — styling herself “Hunter” from the United Kingdom posted the tweet to the left concerning a proposal for high speed rail (HSR) service in the United States, and I thought that I should document my experiences with HSR in France.

It was Saturday, September 7th, when we took the train from Toulouse to Ville de Nice. The travel time is 7 hours and 31 minutes on average, more than twice as long as flying. Driving distance is 560.6 kilometers, or 348.3 miles.

How fast does the train run? At the points in which the rail line ran parallel with the highway, I could see that the train was moving faster than the cars on the road, and French highways have speed limits of 110 KPH (68.35 MPH) or 130 KPH (80.78 MPH), but I cannot say for certain what the speed limits were on the roads I saw. Doing the math, covering 560 kilometers in 7½ hours gives an average speed of 74.67 KPH, no faster than driving. In driving, you have your vehicle door-to-door, and are not left station-to-station.

The reason is obvious: like “Hunter’s” map above, the train between Toulouse and Ville de Nice had several stops along the route. I didn’t actually count them, but it seemed to have been around eight stops.

We took a HSR train from Firenze (Florence) to Venezia (Venice) in July of 2016. Unlike the train in France, which had older cars, the one in Italy was new, and had a speed indicator in the passenger cars. The highest I remember seeing was 225 KPH (139.81 MPH), which is a pretty good clip, but that train as well had stops along the route.

The HSR advocates are nice enough people, but let’s tell the truth here: they are all urbanites, with the concerns and cultures of densely populated urban areas. That the United States is physically different from Europe doesn’t seem to make much of an impact on their thinking, but we have vast, vast areas of land with very few people in it. Population densities west of the Mississippi River drop off dramatically until you get to the left coast, and even east of our great river, densities are not that high until you get close to the east coast. Here in the Bluegrass State, our third largest city, Bowling Green, has a population far below 100,000, estimated to be 76,212 in 2023. Eastern Kentucky, in the Appalachian Mountains, is populated by small farms and tiny towns. The high speed rail systems the advocate want, the systems they liked in Europe, are mostly inappropriate for a country which is as spread out as the United States.

 

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My thanks to William Teach!

Ville de Nice, France (8:49 AM local time) — He kept this site going while my family and I are in France, and I appreciate it. Monday is our last full day here, and Tuesday will be the long, long flight back to the United States.

Our last day here, and the sun is shining and the birds are singing; we’ll be headed to the beach!

 

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Vacationating!

My good friend William Teach, the great(x 6) grandson of the infamous pirate Edward Teach, more famous as Blackbeard, proprietor of The Pirate’s Cove, will be pinch hitting for me on this poor site for the next two weeks, as our family are off to visit our English forebears for three days, and then it will be through the Chunnel to France! Here’s hoping that my American version of Freedom of Speech doesn’t get me thrown in an English gaol!

La Marseillaise below the fold. Continue reading →

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How wealthy New Englanders fight #ClimateChange The well-to-do sure love their gas appliances!

This article title, “How wealthy New Englanders fight #ClimateChange” is one we have used thrice previously. In the first, we noted the PBS television series This Old House and its renovation of the Seaside Victorian Cottage, in Narragansett, Rhode Island. Those wealthy New Englanders didn’t choose electric heat pumps, but warm, dependable gas heating for the cold, Rhode Island winters. Their HVAC system appears to allow the large, new exterior condensers to be used for heating as well, but the gas furnace is new and in place. The homeowners had a new, fairly sizable gas fireplace installed, an oversized Wolf gas range, and three gas-fired instant hot water heaters. More, they had a gas fireplace installed outside, on their backyard patio. The series was filmed following the panicdemic[1]This is not a typographical error, but spelled exactly as I saw the whole thing, an exercise in pure, unreasoning panic. restrictions of 2020. Continue reading →

References

References
↑1 This is not a typographical error, but spelled exactly as I saw the whole thing, an exercise in pure, unreasoning panic.
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It was -4.1º Fahrenheit on the farm this morning.

When I arose, at 7:05 this morning, it was -4.1º Fahrenheit outside. No wind is showing, but there’s a possibility that the anemometer is frozen in place; I’ll tap it loose when I go outside.

I have previously noted that we have backup heat here on the farm, with a propane fireplace, something we installed during our 2018 remodeling project, because our primary heat is an electric heat pump. The thermostat for the fireplace was set at 64º F, so that it would come on if the primary heat failed overnight, but shouldn’t come on as long as the heat pump was engaged. Guess what: even though the primary heat was on and working, the fireplace still came on, which tells me that the heat pump was unable to keep up! Heat pumps work by extracting heat from the atmosphere around the outside condenser, but when there’s not a lot of heat to extract, they lose efficiency. Continue reading →

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Philadelphia: nickel-and-diming people

After fifteen years in the Keystone State, my wife and I retired back to our home in Kentucky. Pennsylvania has an individual income tax rate of 3.07%, which is a fairly low rate among those states which have income taxes. Kentucky had an individual income tax rate of 5.0%, but this has been lowered to 4.5% for tax year 2023, and again to 4.0% for 2024.

But, unlike Pennsylvania, the Bluegrass State doesn’t try to nickel-and-dime people to death for every little thing. And thus we come to this, in The Philadelphia Inquirer:

A paper bag fee, new protections for building workers, and a send-off for Council President Darrell L. Clarke | Council roundup

The final meeting of Council’s four-year term included a flurry of legislation and speeches praising outgoing Council President Darrell L. Clarke.

by Sean Collins Walsh | Thursday, December 14, 2023 | 3:42 PM EST

Philadelphia City Council on Thursday approved a new 15-cent fee for consumers who need paper bags at retail stores.

Continue reading →

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The most important news this Saturday Yes, Liz Magill is gone, but Army beat Navy to win the Commander-in-Chief's Trophy.

I wrote, in a comment on one of Robert Stacy McCain’s articles, “The over/under on Dr Magill’s resignation date is Monday, December 11th. There’s a meeting of the Board of Trustees set for Sunday, Sunday! afternoon.” Well, the lovely Dr Magill didn’t make it to Sunday, resigning on Saturday.

Breaking: Penn’s Magil Resigns.

by Robert Stacy McCain | Saturday, December 9, 2023

Mere hours after I blogged about this (“‘Context Dependent’: Ivy League President Belatedly Realizes Maybe She Answered That Question About Genocide Wrong”), now the University of Pennsylvania’s embattled President Liz Magill has resigned:

University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill has resigned as president of the university in the wake of intense backlash over her failure during a recent congressional hearing on Capitol Hill to say whether advocating for the genocide of Jews is permissible on campus.

“Dear members of the Penn community,” the university began in its announcement. “I write to share that President Liz Magill has voluntarily tendered her resignation as President of the University of Pennsylvania.” Continue reading →

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This is what’s wrong with Cracker Barrel!

Laying in bed this morning, I saw this story on my iPad news reader:

‘The over-65 group is particularly value-conscious’: Older Americans are losing their appetite for restaurants such as Cracker Barrel and Olive Garden — here’s what’s keeping them away

by Serah Louis | Thursday, October 12, 2023 | 8:00 AM EDT

Several fast-casual restaurant chains have reported declining foot traffic and sales following the COVID-19 pandemic — especially among their older clientele.

Company representatives at Cracker Barrel CBRL: (%) and Darden Restaurants — owner of Olive Garden and Longhorn Steakhouse — have pointed to increased prices and ongoing health concerns alienating some of their over-65 customers.

“We just have not yet recovered the visits with that group [over 65 years old] to the extent we thought we would, really, since the pandemic,” Cracker Barrel CEO Sandra Cochran said during a September earnings call.

But while some of these eateries have taken these changes in spending in stride by appealing to different demographics, it’s possible that others are being held back by their original consumer base.

Well, Sandra Cochran, net worth $51 million, you need to pay attention to that last quoted paragraph. From further down in the article:

When the chain introduced plant-based breakfast sausage last year in an effort to accommodate more consumers, there was a mix of praise and backlash on social media.

“Stop pushing this woke garbage,” wrote one outraged user in response to a Cracker Barrel Facebook post promoting the new product. “We go to Cracker Barrel for Traditional Values and Traditional Country Cooking… If you want to serve Lefty food, open an alternative store.”

You know, I really don’t care if Cracker Barrel has a “plant-based breakfast sausage,” as long as they have their real breakfast sausage available as well. The far bigger problem is their biscuits and gravy. Southern-style biscuits and gravy uses a sausage gravy, but the restaurant replaced that with their “sawmill” gravy years ago, and it really should be named sawdust gravy, because they removed the sausage and replaced it with some combination of spices which they somehow believed would taste the same.

Well, it doesn’t taste the same, and doesn’t taste even remotely close. Sawdust gravy would be a far more accurate name for the stuff. That’s what you need to fix first! If you want the older customers, the ones you’ve lost since the panicdemic, to return, the best way is through returning to better food!